The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  Perhaps not surprisingly, the most vociferous critics of the Soviet Union shared a similar class background that inclined them to mistrust the Soviets’ motives and intentions and revile anything that smacked of socialism. Harriman, the son of a railroad millionaire, had founded Brown Brothers Harriman. Forrestal had made a fortune on Wall Street. And Stettinius had been chairman of the board of U.S. Steel, the nation’s largest corporation. They would join with other wealthy international bankers, Wall Street and Washington lawyers, and corporate executives, who had also inherited or made their fortunes during the interwar years, to shape postwar U.S. policy. These men included Dean Acheson of Covington and Burling; Robert Lovett of Brown Brothers Harriman; John McCloy of Cravath, Swain and Moore; Allen and John Foster Dulles of Sullivan and Cromwell; oil and banking magnate Nelson Rockefeller; Paul Nitze of Dillon, Read; Ferdinand Eberstadt of Dillon, Read and F. Eberstadt and Co.; and General Motors President Charles E. Wilson, who, in 1944, as the director of the War Production Board, told the Army Ordnance Board that in order to prevent a return to the Depression, the United States needed “a permanent war economy.”107 Although these people also served in the Roosevelt administration, they had exerted much less influence on Roosevelt, who acted largely as his own secretary of state.

  In his meeting with Molotov later that day, Truman put on his tough-guy act and wasted little time accusing the Soviets of having broken the Yalta Agreement, particularly in Poland. When Molotov tried to explain that Poland, being on the Soviet Union’s border, was a vital security issue for the Soviets and that the agreement called for including friendly Poles, not the London group that was virulently hostile to the Lublin government, Truman rudely dismissed his clarifications. When Molotov tried to raise other issues, Truman snapped, “That will be all, Mr. Molotov. I would appreciate it if you would transmit my views to Marshal Stalin.”108 Molotov replied, “I’ve never been talked to like that in my life.” Truman fired back, “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.”109 Molotov, indignant at such treatment, stormed out of the room. Years later, Molotov remembered Truman’s “imperious tone” and “rather stupid” effort to show “who was boss.”110

  Truman soon thereafter boasted to Joseph Davies, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, “I gave it to him straight. I let him have it. It was the straight one-two to the jaw.”111

  Stalin wasted no time in responding to Truman’s undiplomatic dressing down of Molotov. Having been invaded by Germany twice in twenty-five years through Poland and Eastern Europe, he insisted on having friendly governments to his west and especially on his border. He cabled Truman the following day, outlining what had actually occurred at Yalta. He contended that Roosevelt had agreed that the Lublin government would form the kernel of the new Polish government. Because “Poland borders on the Soviet Union,” the Soviets had the right to a friendly government there. He said he didn’t know if the governments of Belgium or Greece were really democratic, but he wouldn’t make a stink because they were vital to British security. He wrote, “I am ready to fulfill your request and do everything possible to reach a harmonious solution. But you demand too much of me . . . you demand that I renounce the interests of security of the Soviet Union, but I cannot turn against my country.”112

  Stalin believed that he and Roosevelt had reached an understanding about Poland that respected the Soviet Union’s security needs. In fact, when Harriman wanted to make an issue of Poland at the Foreign Ministers Conference in Moscow in October 1943, Secretary of State Hull rebuked him and reminded him of the United States’ real priorities, commenting, “I don’t want to deal with these piddling little things. We must deal with the main issues.”113 But under Truman the anti-Soviet hard-liners were driving policy. Stalin felt betrayed.

  The opening of the United Nations in San Francisco on April 25 should have been an occasion to celebrate a new era in international peace and reconciliation. Instead, the early sessions were marred by tension between the principal wartime allies. On the opening day, Harriman met with members of the U.S. delegation to make sure, he said, that “everyone understands that the Soviets . . . were not going to live up to their postwar agreements.” They would, he insisted, use any devious means at their disposal to dominate Eastern Europe. When Harriman repeated the charges in off-the-record press conferences, several reporters walked out and accused him of being a “warmonger.”114 The U.S. delegates showed no such skepticism. Molotov’s request to have the Lublin government seated to represent Poland was rejected. But the United States rallied Latin American representatives to support seating the Argentine government despite its Nazi sympathies.

  Realizing that his get-tough tactics with the Soviet Union had not produced the desired results, Truman met twice with Joseph Davies to seek his counsel. As ambassador to the Soviet Union, Davies, a conservative corporate attorney, had surprised liberal critics by sympathizing with the Soviet experiment. Truman confessed to Davies that after his tirade, Molotov “was visibly shaken, blanched and went pale.” He concluded that “the tough method” clearly worked because the Soviets backed down at San Francisco and didn’t demand recognition of the Lublin government. But after that, relations had deteriorated rapidly. “What do you think,” he asked. “Did I do right?”

  Davies explained that Molotov had come to see him before his April 23 meeting with Truman and asked if Truman knew all the facts about Yalta. He said that Roosevelt’s death had been “a great tragedy” to them because “Stalin and Roosevelt understood each other.” Davies explained to Truman that the Soviets had always been “sticklers for reciprocity . . . between allies.” So they accepted British-imposed governments in Africa, Italy, and Greece, even though they didn’t represent the antifascist forces in those countries, because they understood that they were “vital interests” to the United States and Great Britain. They expected similar consideration for their vital security interests in Poland. Davies reminded Truman that while the United States and Great Britain were planning global strategy, the Soviet Union was doing all the fighting. Truman was surprised to learn that the Soviets had even agreed not to press their territorial claims with Churchill “out of consideration for Roosevelt.” Truman promised he would “clean out” the people in the State Department who were so anti-Soviet that they’d been misleading him. Davies noted how fundamentally the relationship had changed in the last six weeks, with the British acting as instigators.

  Davies warned Truman that if the Soviets decided that the United States and Great Britain were “ganging up on them,” they would respond by out-toughing the West, as they had in concluding the pact with Hitler when it became clear that the West would not help them stop the Nazis. But he assured Truman that “when approached with generosity and friendliness, the Soviets respond with even greater generosity. The ‘tough’ approach induces a quick and sharp rejoinder that ‘out toughs’ anyone they consider hostile.” Davies agreed to set up a meeting between Truman and Stalin. Truman admitted that he was in over his head and had mishandled things. Davies recorded Truman’s self-deprecating comments in his diary: “It’s no wonder that I’m concerned over this matter. It is a terrible responsibility and I am the last man fitted to handle it and it happened to me. But I’ll do my best.” “Here lies Joe Williams, he did his best./Man can do no more./But he was too slow on the draw,” Truman quipped revealingly.115

  Another former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Admiral William H. Standley, who had served in 1942 and 1943, spoke out publicly to counter those who believed Stalin was up to no good. Writing in Collier’s, Standley insisted that Stalin genuinely desired to cooperate with the United States to establish a durable world peace. The Soviet Union not only “desperately” needed a stable peace, he believed, “but I am certain that [Stalin] desires it sincerely and fervently.” “The world,” he added, “simply cannot stand another war.”116

  Things had been going well on the battlefield in Europe. On April 26, U.S. and Soviet soldiers met o
n the Elbe River near Torgau, 4,500 miles from the shores of the United States and 1,400 bloody miles from the ruins of Stalingrad. The occasion was joyous. Food abounded, and liquor flowed—champagne, vodka, cognac, wine, beer, scotch. Private First Class Leo Kasinsky called it “the best time I ever had in my life. . . . [The Soviets] gave us a wonderful meal and we had about sixty toasts.” “Boy,” he added, “they don’t even drink like that in Brooklyn.”117 The New York Times reported “toasts and songs and expressions of hope for the future in which America, Russia and Britain would stand together for enduring peace.”118

  On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered. Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide in their bunker a week earlier. A U.S. diplomat wrote that the Soviet people’s joy was “indescribable.” Crowds gathered in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and shouted, “Hurrah for Roosevelt!”119 Stalin addressed 2 to 3 million people in Red Square.

  Americans returned that feeling of goodwill toward the Soviets, acknowledging the immensity of their sacrifice and suffering. In June, C. L. Sulzberger wrote in the New York Times that their losses strained the imagination: “In terms of misery and suffering, of malady and disaster, of wasted man hours in a land where work is glorified, the loss is incalculable. It cannot be gauged by the scarcely touched peoples of America. It cannot be measured by the sadly battered people of England. It perhaps cannot be fully realized even by the masses of Russian people themselves.” Sulzberger understood that such devastation would have enduring consequences: “this terrible suffering and unprecedented destruction” will “leave its marks not only upon the people and lands of the U.S.S.R. but upon future decisions and policies as well as psychological attitudes.” This meant that the Soviets would demand “allies of the surest sort” in Eastern Europe, the permanent debilitation of German military power, and the forging of friendly relations with the nations of Central Asia and the Far East that bordered the Soviet Union. He predicted that Soviet citizens, despite the fact that they were eager for “the better things of life,” would patiently sacrifice material comforts for a return to the sense of security that had been shattered by the war years.120

  Charitable efforts to ease Soviet deprivation proliferated throughout the year. On New Year’s Day, the editors of the Washington Post urged Americans to remember Russian children as they celebrated their holiday and “send them a tithe of our good fortune,” commemorating “the sense of community we have come to feel toward the Russian people.”121 Even First Lady Bess Truman lent a hand. In July, she became honorary chairman of the English Classics Collection of Books for Russian War Relief, which commenced a nationwide drive to collect a million books to replace those destroyed by the Nazis. Each donated volume would bear the flags of the two nations along with a frontispiece inscription, reading “To the heroic people of the Soviet Union from the people of America.”122

  Numerous stories circulated about the bravery and generosity of Soviet soldiers and average citizens. The Washington Post detailed the story of Captain Ernest M. Gruenberg, a paratroop surgeon, on D-Day. Upon escaping from a POW camp, Gruenberg and two other U.S. officers made the journey to Moscow in just fourteen days. Gruenberg recounted, “We hardly ever walked. Always there was a truck or train to haul us and no one ever asked for money or tickets. We were Americans and nothing, apparently, was too good for us. Everywhere people took us in. We rode in trucks and box cars but we made a grand entry into Moscow in the car reserved for Russian officers—free, of course.” The Soviets and Poles were so willing to share their meager food supplies that Gruenberg believed he gained back the twenty-five pounds he had lost in prison.123

  The comradely feelings toward the Soviet people translated into optimism about postwar comity between the two nations. A March Gallup Poll revealed that 55 percent of Americans believed that the Soviet Union could be trusted to cooperate with the United States after the war.124

  Although many of Truman’s advisors assumed that Stalin would set up Communist regimes throughout the territories occupied by the Red Army, Stalin was in no rush to institute revolutionary change. He recognized that the Communists represented a minority element in most of these nations, though they had often played a leading role in anti-Nazi resistance movements. He had once remarked that communism fit Poland like a saddle fit a cow.125

  And Soviet soldiers did little to ingratiate themselves with the German people. Seeking revenge for the havoc, devastation, and humiliation that German soldiers had wreaked on the Soviet Union, they behaved brutally toward the vanquished Germans. German women paid an especially high price for Germany’s crimes. In just a few weeks, over 100,000 sought medical care for rape.

  Led by the Russian War Relief, Americans gave generously to their struggling Soviet allies.

  Although such behavior was unconscionable and inexcusable, it can be understood as more than simply the “barbarian invasion” alleged by Harriman. Soviet troops had not only witnessed German atrocities inside the Soviet Union; their rage had been fueled by what they had seen while liberating concentration camps, including Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz, en route to Berlin. As the war correspondent Alexander Werth described it, “As the Red Army advanced to the west, it heard these daily stories of terror, and humiliation and deportation; it saw the destroyed cities; it saw the mass-graves of Russian war prisoners, murdered or starved to death . . . in the Russian soldiers’ mind, the real truth on Nazi Germany, with its Hitler and Himmler and its Untermensch philosophy and its unspeakable sadism became hideously tangible.”126 Soldiers described the horrors they had witnessed. V. Letnikov wrote to his wife in 1945:

  Yesterday we examined a death camp for 120,000 prisoners. Posts two meters high with electric fencing enclose the camp. In addition, the Germans mined everything. Watchtowers for armed guards and machineguns stand fifty meters apart. Not far away from the death barracks is the crematorium. Can you imagine how many people the Germans have burned there? Next to this exploded crematorium, there are bones, bones, and piles of shoes several meters high. There are children’s shoes in the pile. Total horror, impossible to describe.127

  Soviet newspapers, including those read by the soldiers, went out of their way to publish grisly accounts of the atrocities. By the time they reached German soil, Soviet troops’ anger could barely be contained. Stalin, neither condoning nor condemning such behavior, did nothing to stop it.

  Far from initially imposing Communist regimes, Stalin tried to restrain those seeking revolutionary change in both Western and Eastern Europe, urging them to establish broader democratic coalitions. More of a nationalist than an international revolutionary, he thought first about what was in the interests of the Soviet Union. He expected the United States’ support for postwar reconstruction, and he needed the Allies’ cooperation to guarantee against the restoration of German power, which he still saw as the primary threat to the Soviet Union. He told his Communist allies not to follow the Bolshevik model but to move toward socialism under other “political systems—for example by a democracy, a parliamentary republic and even by a constitutional monarchy.”128 He wanted nothing to disrupt his alliance with the United States and Britain. Hence, the governments he set up in Soviet-liberated Eastern and Central Europe were friendly to the Soviet Union but not Communist-dominated.

  Truman was also feeling more conciliatory. After his meetings with Davies and conversations with Harry Hopkins and Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace, he made an effort to improve relations with the Soviets. He and his military leaders resisted Churchill’s pressure to maintain troops in their advanced positions until they had wrested concessions from the Soviets. Truman gradually discovered that Stalin’s interpretation of the Yalta Agreement conformed more closely to the truth than his own. Byrnes admitted that he had left Yalta before the final agreement was concluded and that he had not participated in many of the critical meetings. Truman also learned that Roosevelt had indeed acceded to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and that there were no ground
s for demanding a new government in Poland. He sent Harry Hopkins to meet with Stalin in late May, and they worked out an agreement on Poland that was similar to the formula established for Yugoslavia. The reorganized cabinet would include former Prime Minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk as deputy prime minister and three other non-Communists, along with the seventeen posts accorded to the Communists and their allies. Truman told journalists that this represented a “very pleasant yielding” on the part of Stalin, which augured well for future cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union.129

  As Truman left for Potsdam in July, there was a much greater basis for optimism regarding the postwar alliance than there had been only two months earlier. But some raised a cautionary note. Life magazine in July 1945—just two years after it had put Stalin on the cover as a hero—cautioned that “Russia is the No. 1 problem for America because it is the only country in the world with the dynamic power to challenge our own conceptions of truth, justice and the good life.”130

  The Potsdam meeting, though amicable on the surface, would prove a setback to long-term cooperation. News of the successful atomic bomb test convinced Truman that the United States could get along just fine without catering to Soviet concerns, and his behavior toward Stalin conveyed that message. On his way back from Potsdam on the USS Augusta, he told a group of officers that it didn’t matter if the Soviets were obstinate “because the United States now had developed an entirely new weapon of such force and nature that we did not need the Russians—or any other nation.”131