by FDR
As work on the atomic bomb progressed, American officials charged with the bomb’s development grew reluctant to share secrets with the British. Churchill raised the matter with FDR at the TRIDENT conference in May 1943, and Roosevelt once more agreed that the enterprise was a joint one “to which both countries would contribute their best endeavors.”39 The president instructed Vannevar Bush to be fully forthcoming with the British, but evidently there was sand in the gearbox. British scientists continued to believe the Americans were holding back. To resolve the problem, Churchill asked FDR for a written commitment, to which the president quickly agreed. The final version, typed out on stationery from the Quebec Citadel, where both were staying, promised to share the results of the Manhattan Project, keep it secret, and not use the weapon against each other, or against anyone else without mutual consent.40
On the day before they signed the atomic accord, Roosevelt and Churchill cabled Stalin a joint invitation for a personal meeting sometime later in Alaska, where they could “survey the whole scene in common” at this “crucial point in the war.”41 Roosevelt had not met Stalin and was eager to negotiate postwar matters, preferably one on one, but with Churchill if necessary. Stalin sidestepped the invitation—he neither accepted nor rejected it—and suggested that the foreign ministers of the three nations meet to discuss matters. FDR and Churchill embraced the idea, and on September 4, 1943—the day after Italy surrendered—the president again wrote Stalin to suggest they get together, perhaps in Cairo. Four days later, with U.S. and British troops pouring ashore in Italy, Stalin agreed. The Soviet leader said that because of his command responsibilities he could not travel as far as North Africa, but he recommended Teheran sometime in November or December. As a preliminary, Stalin suggested the foreign ministers meet in Moscow in October. FDR agreed. “I really feel that the three of us are making real headway,” he told Stalin. Churchill was equally pleased. “On this meeting may depend not only the best and shortest method for finishing the war, but also those good arrangements for the future of the world which will enable the British and American and Russian nations to render a lasting service to humanity.”42
It was during the Quebec conference that the feud between Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles at the State Department reached a climax. Hull had chafed for years that FDR often dealt directly with Welles; that he bypassed Hull and excluded him from major foreign policy decisions. It was Welles, not Hull, who attended wartime conferences with Churchill, who carried the mail for the president on special missions abroad, and with whom foreign ambassadors preferred to deal after paying routine courtesy calls on the secretary. Yet Hull knew Welles was vulnerable. His homosexual advances to Pullman car porters at the time of Speaker William Bankhead’s Alabama funeral in 1940 were a matter of record.
Roosevelt chose to ignore the incident, believing it was a momentary lapse triggered by alcohol and fatigue, and felt confident the episode would soon be forgotten.43 Hull was less forgiving and over the years amassed evidence pertaining to the encounter. When J. Edgar Hoover and the Department of Justice declined to provide Hull access to Welles’s file, he sought out FDR’s former confidant William Bullitt, who had been the original source of the information. With Bullitt’s aid Hull leaked the story to Maine’s Republican junior senator, Owen Brewster (who later made headlines pursuing Howard Hughes).* When Brewster threatened a Senate probe, Hull had what he wanted. Lunching with FDR on August 15, 1943, he demanded Welles’s scalp. Either Welles went or he would resign, said Hull.44
Roosevelt had no choice. A Senate investigation of the incident, particularly as to why the president had kept Welles on the job for almost three years afterward, would deal a blow to Democratic chances in 1944. Of more immediate concern, Roosevelt needed Hull to ensure continued support in Congress—where his majority (at least in the House) was paper thin. Many Southern Democrats idolized Hull, and Roosevelt could not afford to cut him loose. Shortly after meeting with Hull on August 15, FDR sent for Welles and requested his resignation. To soften the blow, he offered Welles a roving ambassadorship to Latin America, which Welles refused. Roosevelt may have hoped he could find a way to retain Welles, because he did not announce his resignation until September 25. The press suggested that differences with Hull were the cause. No mention was made of Welles’s sexual preference.
Roosevelt took the loss bitterly. When Bullitt called at the White House soon afterward and asked to be appointed undersecretary in Welles’s place, the president exploded. “I remember coming back to the White House one day and finding Franklin shaking with anger,” said Eleanor. “He was white with wrath.” According to ER, the president told Bullitt:
Bill, if I were St. Peter and you and Sumner came before me, I would say to Sumner, “No matter what you have done, you have hurt no one but yourself. I recognize human frailties. Come in.” But to you I would say, “You have not only hurt another human being, you have deprived your country of the services of a good citizen; and for that you can go straight to Hell.”45
FDR was bitter not only at Bullitt. After Welles’s departure the State Department found itself shunted into diplomatic limbo. Hull attended the Moscow conference of foreign ministers in October, but after that the diplomats were relegated to the sidelines. Except for providing interpreters and note takers, no one from Hull’s State Department attended a major wartime conference, and the correspondence that passed between FDR and Churchill and Stalin was rarely seen in Foggy Bottom.
With the tide of battle shifting in favor of the Allies, Roosevelt turned briefly to the domestic scene. Mobilization brought unprecedented prosperity to America, and FDR looked to the future. Speaking to the nation in a fireside chat in late summer, the president addressed the problem of reconversion. “While concentrating on military victory,” said Roosevelt, we must not neglect planning for things to come, particularly “the return to civilian life of our gallant men and women in the armed forces. They must not be demobilized into an environment of inflation and unemployment, to a place on a bread line, or on a corner selling apples.”46
That autumn, in a domestic initiative such as the United States had not seen since the hundred days, Roosevelt asked Congress for a massive program of education and training for returning servicemen—soon to be known as the G.I. Bill of Rights. Ever since his early visits to Warm Springs, Georgia, in the 1920s, FDR had been disturbed by the poor quality of education in many parts of the country. As Sam Rosenman noted, “he often made it clear in private conversation that he felt strongly that there was no reason why a child born in some county too poor to sustain a good school system should have to start life in competition with children from sections of the country that had fine schools.”47 Roosevelt saw the returning veterans as a way to level the playing field—a means of introducing a federal aid to education that was politically irresistible.
The president’s message to Congress requested federal support for college and vocational training for every returning veteran for up to four years, with increased stipends for those who were married and had dependents. “Lack of money,” said Roosevelt, “should not prevent any veteran of this war from equipping himself for the most useful employment for which his aptitudes and willingness qualify him.… I believe the Nation is morally obligated to provide this training and education and the necessary financial assistance by which they can be secured.”48
In the months that followed Roosevelt tapped into the support of veterans’ and patriotic organizations to expand benefits for returning servicemen: generous unemployment insurance, job counseling, and enhanced medical care, as well as guaranteed low-cost loans for buying homes and farms and covering business costs. Despite the anti–New Deal complexion of the Seventy-eighth Congress, the G.I. Bill of Rights passed both Houses unanimously. Roosevelt signed it into law June 22, 1944. “While further study and experience may suggest some changes and improvements, Congress is to be congratulated on the prompt action it has taken.”49
The G.I. Bill changed
the face of America. Not only did it make colleges and universities accessible, it overturned the states’ rights taboo against federal funding for education. Until World War II, less than 5 percent of the nation’s college-age population attended universities. The cost of a year in college was roughly equal to the average annual wage, and there were few scholarships. Higher education was a privileged enclave for the children of the well-to-do. Under the G.I. Bill more than a million former servicemen and women attended universities at government expense in the immediate postwar years.50 In the peak year of 1947, veterans accounted for 49 percent of total college enrollment. And of the 15 million who served in the armed forces during World War II, more than half took advantage of the schooling opportunities provided by the G.I. Bill.51 The educational level of the nation rose dramatically. So did the country’s self-esteem. As Stanford historian David Kennedy observed, FDR’s veterans legislation “aimed not at restructuring the economy but at empowering individuals. It roared on after 1945 as a kind of afterburner to the engines of social change and upward mobility that the war had ignited, propelling an entire generation along an ascending curve of achievement and affluence that their parents could not have dreamed.”52
On the evening of Armistice Day, Saturday, November 11, 1943, Roosevelt and his immediate White House staff—Hopkins, Admiral Leahy, Doc McIntire, and Pa Watson—drove to the Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia, where they boarded the presidential yacht Potomac on the first leg of the journey to Teheran. The departure was nothing out of the ordinary—another weekend fishing trip like so many in the past. Sunday morning, just off Cherry Point, Virginia, at the confluence of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, the presidential craft pulled alongside the USS Iowa, the latest of a new class of battleships, for the long ocean crossing.53 “Everything is very comfortable,” Franklin wrote Eleanor. “Weather good and warm enough to sit with only a sweater over an old pair of trousers and a fishing shirt.… It is a relief to have no newspapers.”54
In addition to Hopkins and the president’s personal staff, the Iowa’s passengers included General Marshall, Admiral King, General Arnold, and a full complement of military planners. Notably absent was any senior official from the State Department. The long voyage across the Atlantic allowed Roosevelt time to discuss major strategic issues with his military advisers before meeting Churchill and Stalin. The subject of postwar Europe was considered in detail. When General Marshall asked about zones of occupation, FDR reached for a National Geographic Society map of Germany and penciled in demarcation lines. “There is going to be a race for Berlin,” said the president, “and the United States should have Berlin.”55
In Roosevelt’s sketch the American and Russian occupation zones met at Berlin. The large American Zone comprised northwest Germany, including the ports of Hamburg, Bremerhaven, Lübeck, and Rostock; the Russians would hold a smaller zone in the East, and the British were relegated to Bavaria and the Black Forest. The president told Marshall that perhaps a million U.S. troops would remain in Germany “for at least one year and possibly two.”56 General Marshall assumed the occupation of Germany was a military problem. The commander in chief had provided definitive guidance, and insofar as Marshall was concerned the matter was closed. Roosevelt’s map was filed away, and the meeting adjourned.57*
Steaming at twenty-five knots and Condition of Readiness Three, which required one third of her crew at battle stations at all times, the Iowa arrived at the port city of Oran in French Algeria the morning of November 20, eight days after leaving Chesapeake Bay. Waiting for Roosevelt when he came ashore were General Eisenhower and the president’s sons Elliott and Franklin, Jr., who were stationed nearby. “The sea voyage had done father good,” Elliott recalled. “He looked fit and he was filled with excited anticipation of the days ahead.”58 The president inspected the ruins at Carthage and that evening dined with Ike, Kay Summersby, Admiral Leahy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Elliott, and Franklin, Jr., at Eisenhower’s villa overlooking the Gulf of Tunis.59
From Tunis Roosevelt flew to Cairo, where he met with Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek. Churchill insisted on meeting the president before they saw Stalin, but FDR was reluctant to appear to be caucusing. He agreed to the meeting only if China were invited and spent much of his time in Cairo with Chiang and his wife. Roosevelt was concerned about China’s postwar role in the Pacific. “I really feel that it is a triumph to have got the four hundred and twenty-five million Chinese in on the Allied side,” he wrote. “This will be very useful 25 or 50 years hence, even though China cannot contribute much military or naval support for the moment.”60 Churchill took a more jaundiced view. “Our talks,” he said, “were sadly distracted by the Chinese story, which was lengthy, complicated, and minor.”61
The high point of the four days in Cairo was Thanksgiving dinner at the residence of the American minister on November 25. “Let’s make it a family affair,” said FDR as he carved two enormous turkeys for the nineteen British and American guests. “This took a long time,” Churchill remembered, “and those of us who were helped first had finished before the President had cut anything for himself. As I watched the huge platefuls he distributed I feared that he might be left with nothing at all. But he had calculated to a nicety, and I was relieved when at last the two skeletons were removed to see him set about his own share.”62
After dinner Hopkins unearthed an ancient gramophone and began to play dance music. Churchill’s actress daughter Sarah was the only woman present and was in great demand. Never one to be outdone, the prime minister asked Pa Watson, the president’s big, jovial military aide to dance, much to the amusement of FDR, who roared with laughter as the two fox-trotted to the tunes of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Harry James. “For a couple of hours we cast care aside,” wrote Churchill. “I had never seen the President more gay.”63
Roosevelt landed in Teheran Saturday afternoon, November 27, 1943, following a six-and-a-half-hour, 1,300-mile flight from Cairo. Initially the president planned to stay at the American legation, but the distance between the legation and the British and Soviet embassies was such that after one night he accepted Marshal Stalin’s invitation to stay at the guest house in the Russian compound. Driving through the narrow, crowded streets of Teheran posed a security risk for each of the Big Three, and by staying close to one another the need to do so was eliminated.
Roosevelt was eager to meet Stalin. The president had come to Teheran determined to strike up a working relationship with the Soviet leader, and as Hopkins told Lord Moran, “he is not going to allow anything to interfere with that purpose. After all,” said Hopkins, “he has spent his life managing men, and Stalin at bottom could not be so very different from other people.” To FDR, Stalin was “Uncle Joe” (“U.J.” in his cables to Churchill), and he was confident that even if he could not convert him into a good democrat, he could at least establish a personal bond.64
Nevertheless, Roosevelt did not know quite what to expect. Churchill told him that Stalin was remarkably astute, with a startling capacity for “swift and complete mastery of a problem hitherto novel to him.”65 Averell Harriman, FDR’s ambassador in Moscow, considered the Soviet dictator “the most inscrutable and contradictory character I have ever known—a baffling man of high intelligence and fantastic grasp of detail.” Later Harriman wrote that Stalin was “better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, and in some ways the most effective of the war leaders. At the same time he was, of course, a murderous tyrant.”66 Hopkins warned Stalin was strictly business. “He does not repeat himself. There is no waste of word, gesture, or mannerism.… He’s built close to the ground, like a football coach’s dream of a tackle. His hands are huge, as hard as his mind. His voice is harsh [Stalin, like Roosevelt, was a chain-smoker], but ever under control. What he says is all the accent and inflection his words need.”67
Roosevelt was not burdened at Teheran by briefing books and position papers. The issues he wanted to discuss with Stalin were politi
cal, and the president steered his own course. “He did not like any rules or regulations to bind him,” remembered Charles Bohlen, who as a young foreign service officer served as FDR’s interpreter.* “He preferred to act by improvisation rather than by plan.”68
Scarcely had the president settled into his quarters in the Soviet compound than Marshal Stalin walked over to meet him. “Stalin sort of ambled across the room toward Roosevelt grinning,” Mike Reilly of the Secret Service recalled.69 He wore a simple khaki tunic with the star of the Order of Lenin on his chest. As Roosevelt and Stalin shook hands, the president said, “I am glad to see you. I have tried for a long time to bring this about.” Stalin, after expressing his pleasure, accepted blame for the delay because he had been “very occupied with military matters.”70 The two chatted informally for almost an hour—half an hour, actually, because of the translation required. When Roosevelt spoke, Bohlen translated; when Stalin spoke, the duty fell to Vladimir Pavlov. To ease translation, each spoke for short periods, allowing the interpreter to intervene before continuing. According to Bohlen, Roosevelt and Stalin were very good at this. “Churchill was much too carried away by his own eloquence to pay much attention.”71 Each of the Big Three spoke through his own interpreter. Presumably that person would better understand what his leader was trying to say and would be more familiar with the country’s idiom.
The first formal conference of the Big Three convened at 4 P.M. Sunday in the conference room of the Soviet Embassy, which had been especially fitted with a large round table to preempt any question of who would sit at the head. Each country had four seats. Ambassador Harriman sat to FDR’s right, Bohlen at his left, and Hopkins next to Bohlen. With Stalin were Molotov, Pavlov, and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, an old sidekick of Stalin’s from the Revolution. Churchill brought Anthony Eden, Lord Ismay, and his interpreter, Major Arthur Birse. Soviet secret police stood guard. As the only head of state, Roosevelt was asked to preside at the first session, and at FDR’s insistence there was no formal agenda. In fact, there was no agenda for any of the plenary sessions.72