On May 5, the president suggested a personal meeting with Stalin in Alaska. Stalin responded with demands for more aid and the establishment of a second front in France. He declared that his role as commander in chief of the Red Army and need to visit the front (which he seems never to have done) required his presence in the USSR.2
A week after receiving Roosevelt’s overture, Stalin recalled to Moscow Maxim Litvinov, his ambassador to the United States and a consistent advocate of close relations with the United States and Britain. In June, he would recall Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to Britain, and A. Y. Bogomolov, ambassador to the Allied governments-in-exile based in London. At the end of the month, Churchill noted with some trepidation that a Soviet offensive on the eastern front seemed to have halted. “There was now an atmosphere alarmingly reminiscent of that which had preceded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August, 1939, and the fears of a separate Russo-German Armistice were revived,” Robert Sherwood wrote after the war. “It was fortunate that Hitler did not know how bad the relations were between the Allies at that moment, how close they were to the disruption which was his only hope of survival.”3
Sherwood’s account reflected fairly widespread fears, but Stalin was likely just sending a message of dissatisfaction. The underlying reality was that Germany and the USSR shared the existential condition of a scorpion and a tarantula imprisoned in a bottle. A fight to the death was inevitable. This was far from obvious, however, to statesmen in America and Britain.4
Roosevelt’s push for a Big Two meeting with Stalin exemplified both his grasp of power realities and his naive, but very American, belief that he could transfer to foreign relations the domestic political assets that had served him so well: his personal charm and his skill at transactional politics. There was a certain irony in a patrician president valuing an understanding with a plebian mass murderer over a partnership with the aristocratic Churchill, but the quest had a coherent rationale. Roosevelt understood early on that the United States and the Soviet Union would be the two dominant world powers at the end of the war. Stalin was a ruthless dictator, but dictators were everywhere on the world scene and a fact of life. Ruthlessness was a virtue in waging a remorseless war. (Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill displayed qualms about their murderous bombing offensive against Germany. Roosevelt, in authorizing the Manhattan Project, probably did not fully understand the enormity of its implications but undoubtedly knew he had signed off on development of an unprecedented weapon of mass slaughter.)
The president made the fundamental miscalculation that Stalin was the leader of a traditional power open to pragmatic bargaining with a liberal-capitalist state. To this, he, like many American liberals, seems to have added a conviction that Soviet communism, despite its totalitarian social engineering and the ideological and moral shabbiness of its American Communist Party affiliate, was a progressive force in the world. Stalin, for his part, clearly saw both Roosevelt and Churchill as allies of convenience and future enemies. No matter that Roosevelt did not have Churchill’s long and open history of opposition to Bolshevism. The revolutionary Marxist ideology that determined Stalin’s view of the world told him that both leaders and their liberal nations were inevitable antagonists. “Churchill is the kind of man who will pick your pocket for a kopeck,” he would tell Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas in early 1945. “Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hand only for bigger coins.”5
In June, the president told Averell Harriman, who was preparing to leave his position as a “special envoy” in Britain and become US ambassador to the Soviet Union, to float with Churchill the idea of a Roosevelt-Stalin meeting. On June 24, the prime minister wrote to Roosevelt that the world expected the allies to meet and act together. “If this is lost, much is lost.”6
The president took four days to respond: “I did not suggest to UJ [Uncle Joe] that we meet alone but he told Davies that he assumed (a) that we would meet alone and (b) that he agreed that we should not bring staffs.” There would be no military planning, no demands upon the Russians, and an opportunity for a frank exchange of views. “I would want to cover much the same field with him as did [Foreign Secretary Anthony] Eden for you a year ago.” At best, one can characterize this response as misleading. Roosevelt’s effort at a one-on-one with Stalin signaled how Britain had become the junior partner in the alliance.7
Rather than meeting with Stalin, Roosevelt instead had another one-on-one meeting with Churchill, this time at Quebec in August 1943. The prime minister argued for enlarged operations in Italy, the eastern Mediterranean, and ultimately the Balkans, which he misleadingly described as the soft underbelly of Europe. He got only pleasant visits, before and after the meeting, at Hyde Park. Ultimately, the British had to agree that the next major Western military campaign in Europe would be OVERLORD, for which the conference established detailed planning mechanisms and a target date of May 1, 1944. The naming of a supreme commander, everyone understood, would be left to Roosevelt.
At Quebec, Roosevelt and Churchill decided against a declaration on the future of the British mandate in Palestine. Their discussion reflected interest in the vast oil reserves of the Arab world, reactions to indications that Nazi Germany was pursuing a policy of extermination against European Jews, and concern about an increasing infiltration of militant Zionists bent on transforming Palestine into a Jewish state.
British and American oil companies had already secured drilling rights in the recently established kingdom of Saudi Arabia, ruled by its founding absolute monarch King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, a warrior who considered himself the region’s protector of Islam and who seemed the Middle East’s most important source of stability. British and American diplomats felt an understandable interest in good relations with him.
In 1917, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, speaking for the cabinet, had recognized Palestine as a “national home for the ‘Jewish people,’” thereby aligning Britain with a relatively small but deeply dedicated Zionist movement. From the beginning, most Arabs were hostile to what they considered an imperial venture. As Nazi power and influence expanded in the 1930s, the numbers of Jewish immigrants to Palestine grew. By the eve of World War II, the mandate was a land of Arabs and Jews, each with distinct communities and their own armed militias. In 1936, Arab anger had erupted into a full-scale revolt, which the British harshly repressed but never fully quashed. When World War II broke out in 1939, Britain, hoping to keep a lid on a difficult situation, forbade further Jewish immigration.
Desperate Jews nonetheless continued to make their way into Palestine, formed armed groups, and engaged in what they considered a war for survival against Arab hostility and British oppression. Their goal was an independent Jewish state. German propagandists appealed to Arabs throughout the Middle East, promising them liberation from Anglo-American-Zionist imperialism. Increasingly, Palestine became a tinderbox in which the British saw themselves resented and attacked by both sides and increasingly viewed the Jewish cause as a noxious distraction.8
The strategic significance of the Middle East and the importance of Jews in his political coalition made it impossible for Roosevelt to remain aloof from the situation. Conferring with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann on June 12, 1943, he was noncommittal but sympathetic and surely aware that he could not summarily dismiss Weizmann’s aspirations. Aiming toward strong postwar American influence in the region, he attempted to cultivate Ibn Saud through economic aid and the dispatch of a personal emissary, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Hoskins, an Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern specialist. The king and Hoskins held discussions that coincided with the Quebec conference. The monarch was unyielding in his hostility to a Jewish state and his personal loathing of Weizmann.9
Meeting with Hoskins on September 27, Roosevelt floated vaporous hopes that European Jews would be able to return to their homes safely after the war, that those who did not wish to do so could settle in remote portions of South America, and that Palestine might be reorg
anized as a tri-faith Holy Land under Moslem-Christian-Jewish trusteeship. Only in the turbulence of total war could the last idea have seemed possible.10
By late 1943, the difficult issue of Palestine was merging with the grim revelation that German forces were engaging not simply in episodic massacres of Jewish civilians—comprehensible as a by-product of war—but in a systematic effort to eradicate the Jewish population of Europe. The news was mind-numbing both at a rational level—the Nazis committed enormous resources to the project even as they were losing battles on the eastern front—and, in its ghastliness, at an emotional level. On July 28, 1943, Polish emissary Jan Karski briefed Roosevelt himself on what would become known as the Holocaust; he met also with other Washington officials and leading Jews. Some simply could not take in the news. When Karski, accompanied by the Polish ambassador, met with Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice declared, “I am unable to believe you.” The ambassador, a good friend of Frankfurter, objected. The justice replied, “Mr. Ambassador, I did not say that this young man is lying. I said that I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.”11
If the fact of the Holocaust gained acceptance, the problem of what to do about it remained a quandary. The death camps were located in areas largely beyond the reach of American military power. Roosevelt also had to know about an ugly undercurrent running through the domestic opposition to the war: the assertion that the administration was waging it primarily for the benefit of Jews, often typed as notorious draft dodgers. There was no effective way of striking back at such slanders; an effort to refute them would simply increase their salience.
Did Roosevelt himself have a streak of anti-Semitism? On one occasion, discussing with Alien Property Administrator Leo Crowley a dispute between Crowley and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, he seems to have said, “This is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here on sufferance. . . . It is up to both of you to go along with anything I want.” Crowley told Morgenthau of the conversation. Both men found the remark upsetting, but it was more likely a bad joke than evidence of deep-seated bigotry.12
The best the administration could do was provide whatever it could devise in the way of an escape route for those Jews not yet in the clutches of the Nazis. Here the Department of State was a hindrance. Its top-level officials saw the problem as a matter of neither national interest nor humanitarian necessity. Some, including Roosevelt’s old friend from the Wilson administration, Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long, appear to have acted out of anti-Semitism. Before and during the war, Long misled the president by exaggerating the number of Jews for whom the department had facilitated refuge.13
The problem went far beyond a few troublesome functionaries or even a larger public opinion that viewed Jews with scant sympathy. Global total war, producing victims on an unprecedented scale, had a desensitizing impact. The number of Chinese slaughtered, for example, was almost incalculable; Japanese reprisals against those who had sheltered the Doolittle raiders alone were estimated at 250,000 killed. In Europe, the US-British bombing campaign took a large civilian toll at random and without regret. The death camps to which the Nazis transported Jews were in Poland, on the eastern front, a large area of mass slaughter that historian Timothy Snyder has aptly characterized as “bloodlands.” It was not that the Allies, who after all were fighting back after an attack, were morally equivalent to the Nazis. The war had its own inexorable logic, chewing up soldiers and civilians in such great numbers that it was easy to lose sight of Hitler’s Final Solution.14
The leading member of the administration in addressing the Nazi war on the Jews was Morgenthau, whose awareness of his own ethnoreligious identity awakened with the revelations of Nazi genocide. Throughout 1943, he pressed the State Department for action and made Treasury funds available for transportation and bribes to officials in German-occupied Europe. Frustrated by persistent State Department foot-dragging, he pushed for the establishment of a War Refugee Board.15
Roosevelt complied on January 22, 1944. The board managed to extricate some thousands of Jews from occupied Europe, albeit against a backdrop of mass murder by the millions. A few of those saved made it to an army internment camp outside Oswego, New York, but public opinion clearly opposed acceptance of large numbers of refugees, Jewish or otherwise, into the United States. The pressure for a national home in Palestine steadily increased.
By mid-1944, Auschwitz in southern Poland had been identified as the major Nazi death camp. A number of Jewish advocates inside and outside the administration called for a bombing attack on it. Some apparently thought it would be possible to make surgical strikes against the gas chambers or the rail lines that fed victims to the camp. The Department of War rejected the proposal. Its arguments were compelling: Auschwitz was in a Soviet area of operations and at the outer limit of American bomber range; identifying the gas chambers from the air would be next to impossible; many prisoners would be killed; rail lines could be quickly repaired; surgical strikes were a fantasy. Many years later, at the age of ninety-one, Assistant Secretary John J. McCloy asserted that Roosevelt had agreed, but the extent to which FDR engaged with the proposal is unclear.16
If McCloy’s memory was correct, Roosevelt had a firm grasp of military reality. The bombing of Auschwitz, had it occurred, would likely have been condemned by some of the same historians who later advocated it. They would have seen it as a ham-fisted, unintentional contribution to the Nazi war against the Jews. The only way to end the Holocaust was to destroy Nazism. Roosevelt presided over a war effort that was surging toward that goal. Morgenthau doubtless took some solace in the achievements of the War Refugee Board. He also began to think seriously of retribution against the Germans.
By the last half of 1943, Roosevelt had developed a vision of the postwar world that combined the liberal idealism of Woodrow Wilson with the power-oriented realism of Theodore Roosevelt. From time to time he laid out his ideas to influentials from whom he hoped to garner support or at least acquiescence.
On September 2 and 3, 1943, he met with Archbishop (later Cardinal) Francis Spellman of New York, a prelate of great influence and a conduit to the Vatican. The four great powers—he probably used the phrase “Four Policemen”—would, he told the archbishop, be the controlling force in a new world order. Each would be dominant in its own geographical sphere: China in the Far East; the United States in the Pacific (and presumably the Western Hemisphere); Britain and Russia in Europe and Africa. (The Middle East does not appear to have made its way into his scenario.) There would be a successor organization to the League of Nations, but only the Four Policemen would have decision-making powers. All the rest—a group that would include not simply “small nations” but those of considerable size and resources—would be admitted to a “consultative assembly” with no real power or authority. Germany would be divided into several states and disarmed so thoroughly for forty years that no German would be allowed to learn to fly an aircraft. Yugoslavia would be broken up into its constituent ethnic nations. Russia would keep eastern Poland, with the Polish state receiving territorial compensation from Germany.17
To a Catholic prelate, the Soviet Union was the enormous specter in the room. Here, Roosevelt was frank. He believed first of all that he could come to an understanding with Stalin and was better suited to do so than Churchill. The prime minister was an idealist; he was a realist, and so was Stalin. He hoped he could persuade Stalin to settle for predominant influence in Finland, the Baltic states, eastern Poland, and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Russia had the power to take these anyway; it was best to concede them gracefully. Soviet influence could extend farther, to Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and possibly as far as France, where, wholly misunderstanding the appeal of Charles de Gaulle, FDR thought an independent left-wing Popular Front government might be the best one could expect.
Russia, he said, was an all but unstoppable force on the European continent. The United States and B
ritain could not fight it. The Soviet capacity for military production was enormous. One could only hope for the development of an enduring friendship and a mellowing of the USSR into a more mixed socialist-capitalist regime. Europe could only accept the inevitable. Spellman paraphrased him as saying, “The European people will simply have to endure the Russian domination.” Perhaps in ten or twenty years, the Russians would become less barbarian.
Spellman’s summary surely presented a substantially accurate rendition of Roosevelt’s thoughts. Given the state of the war in the late summer of 1943, the president’s calculations were understandable. He may have discounted the importance of America’s vital Lend-Lease aid, which had done so much to enable the mobility with which the Red Army was rolling back the Germans. Nonetheless the Soviets were undeniably moving impressively along an unimaginably broad front, while British and American forces were still pecking at the periphery. Accurately recalling the American isolationist tradition that rejected European involvement at the end of World War I, Roosevelt had reason to doubt that the nation would accept an active US presence on the continent after the end of World War II.
At bottom, despite invoking the phrase “Four Policemen,” Roosevelt surely understood that only two nations, the United States and the Soviet Union, would come out of the war with preponderant power. China would remain a disorganized nation, little more than a geographical expression. His thoughts about some balance of American and Soviet influence there remain unknown. Britain would be much diminished, and so would France, a country for which he displayed scant regard. Germany would literally be destroyed. In personal terms, that meant he and Stalin would control the future.
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 52