by Kai Bird
Stimson thought it a “fairly good paper,” while Morgenthau told members of his staff that the March 23 document represented “the first step toward a kind of peace which I think will last. . . .” He was actually ecstatic at his victory over the State Department crowd, whom he called “Fascists at heart.”11
He considered McCloy a loyal ally in this bureaucratic warfare, but McCloy’s efforts had produced a document so flexible that it could sanction almost any kind of policy. In fact, a few weeks later, McCloy came back from an inspection trip of Allied-occupied Europe convinced that key elements of the German economy had to be rebuilt just to maintain law and order.
Before leaving for Europe, he was called to the White House for an unscheduled meeting with the president. When he entered the Oval Office, Roosevelt greeted him with a raised, straight-arm Hitler salute: “Heil McCloy—Hochkommissar für Deutschland.” He explained to a startled McCloy that he was offering him the job of high commissioner of occupied Germany. McCloy responded that placing a civilian in such a job immediately after the conclusion of hostilities might be a serious mistake. He said the problems facing a war-ruined Germany could only properly be dealt with by a military general, preferably one with logistical training. When he suggested General Lucius Clay, who had won widespread admiration for his handling of the Pentagon’s logistical problems, a suddenly weary Roosevelt replied, “Oh, McCloy, I’m too tired to argue with you.”12
On his fiftieth birthday, March 31, 1945, McCloy boarded a C-47 military-transport plane bound for Paris. Eisenhower’s armies were rapidly closing in on the heartland of the German state, and the civilian leadership in the War Department felt they needed some firsthand reporting on conditions inside occupied Germany. Over the next few weeks, he visited Rheims, Luxembourg, Brunen, Cologne, Frankfurt, and eventually London before leaving for Washington on April 18. He managed to see Generals Eisenhower, Omar N. Bradley, Leonard T. Gerow, George S. Patton, and dozens of other commanders on the rapidly advancing front lines.
McCloy felt overwhelmed by the devastation he saw; entire German towns were being systematically obliterated as the Allied armies advanced into Germany. When he saw the supreme commander on April 5 in Rheims, he warned Eisenhower against any unnecessary destruction of German infrastructure. Eisenhower’s troops were then wrapping up a battle against 150,000 German troops trapped in the Ruhr Valley, and, from McCloy’s perspective, the war was won. He was already worried about occupying and governing a defeated enemy.
Soon afterward, he caught up to the Sixth Army on the Southern front just as its commander, General Jacob Devers, readied an artillery bombardment of Rothenburg, one of Germany’s most beautiful medieval walled towns. McCloy had visited Rothenburg in the 1920s, and he remembered that when he was a child his mother, Anna, had shown him etchings of the town’s spired skyline. In addition, his own children’s nursemaid originally came from Rothenburg.13 When Devers happened to show McCloy the bombardment targets for the following morning, McCloy said, “Jakie, the war is so far along, do you have to bomb this town?” Devers agreed not to, and soon thereafter he managed to persuade the German commander to surrender the city.14
Between April 6 and 9, three American armies, including Patton’s Third Army, advanced fifty miles a day. McCloy had to move quickly to catch up with Patton’s army on April 7. When Patton expressed the hope that as soon as the war in Europe was over he would be transferred to the Pacific front, McCloy confided in him that the United States was developing an atomic bomb, which, he said, might make an invasion of the Japanese home islands unnecessary.15 Patton was disappointed, since he did not look forward to playing the politically delicate role of an American proconsul in occupied Germany. A few days after McCloy moved on, Patton wrote him, “Yesterday I saw the most horrible sight I have ever seen. It was a German slave camp. . . . We took all the soldiers we could to see it, as I believe it is one of the best arguments against fraternization that I know.”16
McCloy returned to Paris on April 12, 1945, and late that evening he was roused from his bed in a VIP house at Versailles and told that Franklin Roosevelt had died. He scribbled in his diary, “It is absolutely impossible to think of its implications. . . . The press of current and impending events leaves no time to speculate on his position in history.”17
The evening before his death, Roosevelt had been talking of McCloy with Henry Morgenthau. The Treasury secretary had reminded Roosevelt, “McCloy is away you know.”
“McCloy is all right now,” replied Roosevelt, “but he was all wrong about de Gaulle, but I explained things to him and now he has been loyal to me.”
“I am glad you feel that way,” Morgenthau said. He noted in his diary that evening, “I was glad to hear the President say that because I think some people around town have been trying to poison him against McCloy. . . .”
Before Morgenthau left his old friend for the last time, he gave him another lecture about the importance of ensuring a weak Germany in the postwar period. “A weak economy for Germany means that she will be weak politically, and she won’t be able to make another war. . . . I have been strong for winning the war, and I want to help win the peace.”
“Henry,” said the president, “I am with you 100 percent.”18
About the same time, in Paris, McCloy had a long talk with General de Gaulle at a small dinner party hosted by the French general and his wife. They too discussed the fate of Germany, but came to rather different conclusions. Far from destroying German industry, de Gaulle agreed with Monnet. He said he wished to see the Ruhr Valley under international control so that its industries could produce “for the benefit of all Western European countries.” He also indicated that France would need the entire production output from the Saar coal mines, and some coal from the Ruhr as well. Germany, they agreed, should be dismembered, but its economy would have to be rebuilt, if only to aid in the reconstruction of war-torn Europe.19
Moving on to London, McCloy attended a memorial service for Roosevelt in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, where he stood near Churchill and King George VI. The boys’ choir sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—too slowly, McCloy thought. He was amused to see Churchill do a little jig with his feet upon hearing the words “Oh be swift, my soul, to answer Him, be jubilant, my feet.” As McCloy was leaving the church, he looked back and saw the prime minister standing bare-headed, his figure framed between two columns. A shaft of sunlight fell on his face, and McCloy could see that he was sobbing.20
Ellen greeted McCloy at the airport upon his arrival back in Washington on the afternoon of April 19, 1945. Despite the long air journey, he drove straight to the Pentagon. There Stimson took him aside in his private study and listened to his firsthand observations of the situation in Germany. He spoke of “near anarchy” and said it was “something that is worse than anything probably that ever happened in the world.” He painted a “picture of a country that has been filled up with slaves drawn from the surrounding nations, over whom the Germans have sat on as slave-drivers and have been working to death . . . and the slaves in turn are running riot through the country.”21
Soon afterward, he held a press conference in which he stated that “one cannot exaggerate” the complete destruction of the entire European industrial base. Local food supplies would run out completely within a month or two. Referring to German war atrocities, he said that the machinery for punishing the “lower elements” of German war criminals was already being set in motion, while the Allies were still debating how to punish the top-ranking hierarchy of the Nazi regime.22
One subject he did not discuss at his press conference was his growing doubts about the future of U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. With Europe in such disarray, he privately wondered how the United States would deal with the reality of Soviet military might. On the Monday following his return to Washington, he and Stimson were rehearsing McCloy’s briefing of the new president, Harry S. Truman, when Stimson was suddenly called to an emergency meeting at the White
House. Truman wanted to know how to deal with V. M. Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, who had just arrived in Washington. In an initial encounter with the new president, Molotov had tried to convey the absolute strategic importance to the Soviet Union of a friendly regime in Poland.
Molotov thought he was on firm ground, since at Yalta Roosevelt had agreed that no anti-Soviet government would be allowed to take power in states bordering on the Soviet Union. In return, the Soviets had agreed that “the Provisional Government which is now functioning in Poland [i.e., the Lublin government, dominated by the communists] should therefore be reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad.” Though there was a vague reference to free elections, Roosevelt had specifically dropped any language calling for supervised elections. Roosevelt himself, in a subsequent letter to Churchill, called the agreement on Poland a “compromise” in which it was understood that the Lublin government would form the basis for a broadened coalition government.23 (This did occur in June 1945, when the Lublin Poles brought into their Cabinet five prominent noncommunist Poles.) Molotov thought his government had every right to expect the Lublin Poles to be seated at the upcoming San Francisco conference on the United Nations. Truman, however, had not been briefed on the subtleties of what had been agreed to at Yalta, and it was now his instinct to stand up to the Russians. He suggested to his assembled advisers that perhaps Molotov should be told with brutal frankness that they had to abide by their agreements, that Yalta was a two-way street.
Stimson, however, urged caution. He told Truman that “the Russians perhaps were being more realistic than we were in regard to their own security.” He reminded the new president that the Soviet Union had always “kept its word” on “big military matters,” and, indeed, “had often done better than they had promised.”24 Stimson was leery of coming to an impasse with Russia “on an issue which in my opinion is very dangerous and one which she is not likely to yield on in substance.”25
Stimson was disturbed by the tone of the meeting, but he returned from it to tell McCloy that he thought his words of caution had persuaded Truman to deal with Molotov’s demands in a realistic vein. Later that evening, however, Truman did just the opposite, telling Molotov in the bluntest language possible that he expected the Soviet Union to carry out its agreements regarding free elections in Poland. Molotov protested, “I have never been talked to like that in my life.” Truman snapped back, “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.”26 With this undiplomatic exchange, the meeting was over.
The following evening, Truman received a cable from Stalin himself. The Soviet dictator made it clear that he felt that Yalta had recognized his right to establish in Poland a government friendly toward the Soviet Union. “Besides everything else,” warned Stalin, “this is demanded by the blood of the Soviet people abundantly shed on the fields of Poland in the name of the liberation of Poland.” Neither Britain nor the United States, he pointed out, bordered on Poland. He then reminded Truman that the Soviets had not been consulted in the formation of governments for Belgium or Greece, precisely because the Kremlin recognized the “importance of Belgium and Greece for the security of Great Britain.”27 Clearly, if Soviet interests in Poland were to be challenged, then the West could expect the same in countries they considered within their sphere of influence.
On the same day he read Stalin’s angry note, Truman received an oral briefing from McCloy, who emphasized that the United States had to find a way to work with the Russians. Truman was impressed enough to ask McCloy for a quick written report. This McCloy had on Truman’s desk by the evening of April 26, and its message was sobering. McCloy told the president, “There is complete economic, social and political collapse going on in Central Europe, the extent of which is unparalleled in history unless one goes back to the collapse of the Roman Empire, and even that may not have been as great an economic upheaval.. . . In this atmosphere of disturbance and collapse, atrocities and disarrangement, we are going to have to work out a practical relationship with the Russians. It will require the highest talents, tolerance and wisdom in order to accomplish our aims.”28
Though tensions were rising between the United States and the Soviet Union, McCloy, Stimson, and many others still believed that, with a lot of hard work, a “practical relationship” with the Russians was both possible and desirable. Truman, however, was not a man to see these things in any but black-and-white terms. From the very first days of his presidency, he had decided that in dealing with the Russians he would have to “lay it on the line.”29
And now there was the factor of the bomb. The day before McCloy delivered his report to Truman, Stimson gave the president a forty-five-minute briefing on the political ramifications of the atomic bomb. “Within four months,” Stimson wrote, “we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb which could destroy a whole city.” Moreover, he warned, the United States could not expect to maintain a monopoly over this awesome power. The Soviet Union would inevitably develop the same technology “within a few years.” Stimson suggested that international control of the weapon would be difficult; nevertheless, “the question of sharing it with other nations, and if shared, upon what terms, becomes a primary question of our foreign relations.”30 Truman stoically read through Stimson’s entire memo in his presence, asked no questions, and agreed to Stimson’s request that an ad hoc Interim Committee be established to advise him on the use of the bomb. Stimson came away from the meeting pleased. His carefully prepared memo had made the point: this was a weapon the Russians could someday acquire on their own, and its destructive power was such that the two powers would someday have to cooperate with each other in regulating its use. But for Truman, fresh from his confrontation with Molotov, the real news was the simple fact that the United States was about to acquire a revolutionary weapon the Soviets did not have.
None of these men, including McCloy, had a fully developed view of how to deal with the Soviet Union. Of them all, Truman was the most insecure. He easily took personal offense at Stalin’s or Molotov’s language, and responded impetuously. Stimson, characteristically, could see many sides to the same argument, and over the next few months he agonized over his doubts; he ended up voicing, at one time or another, every nuance of the issue. McCloy’s views, by contrast, were neither extreme nor erratic. At the end of April, as he headed for the San Francisco meetings on the United Nations Charter, where many in the administration feared a complete breakdown in U.S.-Soviet relations would take place, he summed up his own mood in a diary entry: “It is little wonder that as they [the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.] emerge in their own and the eyes of everyone else as the two greatest powers that they should walk stiff-legged around the ring a bit.”
Clearly, he felt much more sanguine than Truman. Things might naturally get a little rough, but with time and hard work a “sound working base” could be established with the Russians.31 This was his instinctive judgment, and he would return to it again and again in the years to come.
By the time McCloy arrived in San Francisco, the delegates had already spent a full week debating the ground rules for the United Nations, a new international organization designed to keep the peace in the postwar period. A number of petty issues had been resolved, though with considerable rancor. Now the delegates faced a central question: would the United Nations tolerate the formation of regional security blocs, and, specifically, would the new international organization recognize the legitimacy of unilateral intervention by the great powers within their respective security blocs? On this point, McCloy had quite definite views: nothing in the U.N. Charter should invalidate the Monroe Doctrine, which for more than a hundred years had sanctioned U.S. intervention against European or other outside influences in the Western Hemisphere. The logic of this position, of course, would sanction similar unilateral interventions by the Soviets in their sphere of influence. While M
cCloy was willing to go quite far toward recognizing the reality of the Soviet military presence in Eastern Europe, he wished also to retain some kind of limited, but defined, American access to countries like Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia. Even more important, America’s right to intervene promptly in Western Europe could not be delegated to an international body. A telephone conversation he had with Stimson on May 8, 1945, underscores the dilemma:
MCCLOY:
I’ve been taking the position that we ought to have our cake and eat it too; that we ought to be free to operate under this regional arrangement in South America, at the same time intervene promptly in Europe; that we oughtn’t to give away either asset. . . .
STIMSON:
I think so, decidedly, because in the Monroe Doctrine . . . we’ve gotten something that we’ve developed over the decades. . . .