It made sense that he would have more leverage with Stalin than Churchill. Roosevelt, after all, did not have Churchill’s anti-Bolshevik baggage and commanded a much greater aggregation of power. Still, he displayed remarkable confidence in his personal presence and in his mistaken sense that Stalin would view personal relationships as transcending ideology.
Could a face-to-face meeting potentially override both Stalin’s Marxist theology and his propensity toward totalitarian absolutism? On November 11, Roosevelt, accompanied by Harry Hopkins, Admiral William D. Leahy, and Dr. Ross McIntire, slipped out of Washington for a rendezvous with the new sixteen-inch-gun battleship Iowa. His military chiefs—Generals George C. Marshall and Henry (“Hap”) Arnold and Admiral Ernest J. King—awaited them. Their first destination was Cairo, where the president would confer with Churchill and Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. From there, they would go to Teheran for the long-awaited personal encounter with Stalin, then back to Cairo for further US-British discussions.18
The journey was an impressive demonstration of American naval supremacy. The North Atlantic, a death trap for Allied shipping at the beginning of the year, was now clear of the enemy. Three destroyers, twice relieved by three others at prearranged points, escorted the great ship across the ocean. The voyage was tranquil, save for an incident in which one of the destroyers in the midst of an exercise accidentally launched a torpedo in the direction of the Iowa. Forewarned, the battleship easily evaded it. Admiral King, reacting volcanically, placed the entire destroyer crew under arrest and planned to court-martial its skipper. The president intervened with a decree of leniency.
On November 17, as the Iowa neared Europe, aircraft from an escort carrier close by patrolled the skies. Three British destroyers and a US light cruiser joined the ship two days later as it approached Gibraltar. Transiting the strait, it docked at Oran, Algeria, on the morning of November 20. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, accompanied by Franklin Jr. and Elliott, met the president. The party flew to Tunis, where its members viewed the ruins of ancient Carthage.
That night, after dinner, Roosevelt had a long conversation with Eisenhower. He let the general know that soon he would name a supreme commander for the invasion of western Europe. Surely Eisenhower already knew that the choice was between him and Marshall. If Marshall were chosen, Eisenhower likely would be brought back to Washington as army chief of staff. It was a shame, Roosevelt said, that no one remembered who had been chief of staff of the army during the Civil War. The next evening, after a tour of the recent battle areas and dinner, the president and his party emplaned for Cairo, arriving there at 9:35 a.m. on November 22.19
Roosevelt had little time to rest. Churchill quickly called on him to make the case for the British Mediterranean strategy. After Churchill’s departure, he met with Chinese Nationalist leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, accompanied by Madame Chiang. That evening, FDR presided over a working dinner during which Churchill and Lord Louis Mountbatten pitched plans for South Asia operations. Next came a preliminary meeting of US civilian and military officials that lasted until 11:10 p.m. The day foreshadowed the grueling pace the president would endure over the next three weeks.
The Cairo meetings had two key objectives. The first was to settle conclusively the major strategic dispute between the Americans, convinced that the path to victory ran through France, and the British, who remained wedded to further operations in the Mediterranean. The second was to arrive at a strategy against Japan in South Asia and to formulate some sense of what to expect from the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek.
Churchill eloquently advanced once again the importance of the Mediterranean front. His military chief of staff, Sir Alan Brooke, was equally devoted to it. Both were convinced that Germany, forced back by the Soviet onslaught, would not attempt a defense of the Balkan Peninsula. The Combined Chiefs of Staff met on November 24. The Americans gnashed their teeth as they once again heard Churchill proclaim his undying commitment to the cross-channel operation, then assert that the diversion of two or three divisions to the capture of Rhodes would be inconsequential and would likely bring Turkey into the war. One could be forgiven for wondering just how much the Turks could or would contribute after four years of cautious neutrality. One might suspect that Churchill’s real purpose was to restore British influence in the eastern Mediterranean. Churchill would press the enterprise once again at Teheran and then at the second Cairo conference.20
The other major problem to address at Cairo was that of China and Chiang Kai-shek, whose Nationalist regime the United States had long recognized as that nation’s legitimate government. Here Roosevelt had to confront the hard realization that his long-run vision of China’s emergence was valid enough, but the short-run prospects were far more speculative. Despite generous American aid, Chiang’s government had been driven to Chungking in China’s southern interior, where it held out against the overstretched Japanese. A Communist regime headquartered to the north at Yenan and led by Mao Tse-tung challenged its legitimacy. Chiang himself, although billed as a visionary democratic leader by his backers, was actually best understood as a traditional Chinese warlord who ruled by force, was wary of ambitious lieutenants, and tended to appoint generals more conspicuous for passivity than aggressiveness. Americans who dealt directly with him and his government frequently came away disillusioned with the authoritarian, inefficient, and kleptocratic rule they encountered.
American contacts with Mao’s sector were limited. Those with Chiang’s were intensive and provided plenty of cause for dissatisfaction. To the frustration of his American military adviser, General Joseph (“Vinegar Joe”) Stilwell, who privately referred to him as “Peanut,” the Generalissimo displayed little interest in offensives against the Japanese. Those Americans who had some contact with Mao’s regime, including some US Foreign Service officials, generally found it preferable to Chiang’s and more effective in fighting the Japanese. They seldom stopped to consider that Chiang’s area of control was much more strategically important to the invaders and thus under greater pressure from the Japanese. They also tended to give credence to the assertion that Mao’s regime, which broadly tolerated free markets during the war, was not really Communist at all and was dedicated to “agrarian reform.” The bottom line, not fully perceived by Roosevelt and the other American principals at Cairo, was that both Mao and Chiang sensed that the Japanese had reached their limit and would be gone someday, leaving the fight for China to the two of them. Both husbanded their forces for that eventuality.21
Chiang himself was a remote figure to Americans. Not so his wife, Soong May-ling, known to the world as Madame Chiang. Born to a wealthy Christian Chinese family and educated in the United States, Madame Chiang spoke perfect English, was photogenic, and had a forceful personality. Championed along with her husband by Henry Luce’s Time magazine, a speaker before Congress during long wartime visits to the United States, and a frequent guest at the White House, she was to most Americans the face of the Nationalist regime. Eleanor Roosevelt recalled her as petite and delicate in appearance, eloquent in her invocation of democratic ideals when speaking in the United States, and “as hard as steel.” Franklin, surely acquainted with rumors that she had seduced Wendell Willkie (or vice versa), understood that. At a White House dinner party during one of her stays, he took an opportunity to ask her, “What would you do in China with a labor leader like John Lewis?” Eleanor described the response: “She never said a word, but the beautiful, small hand came up very quietly and slid across her throat.”22
At Cairo, Madame Chiang attended sessions with her husband, who spoke no English. She listened to his translator, then invariably spoke up to say that the gentleman had done an excellent job but had nevertheless failed to capture the Generalissimo’s precise meaning, which she then conveyed to the group. The effect was to leave the audience wondering whether they were listening to Chiang’s opinions or hers. The only woman in a room of mostly middle-ag
ed men, assertive, trim, and shapely at the age of forty-five, she was the center of attention at every such meeting. Years later, General Brooke recalled her as not conventionally beautiful but “determined to bring into action all the charms nature had blessed her with”: “At one critical moment her closely clinging dress of black satin with yellow chrysanthemums displayed a slit which extended to her hip bone and exposed one of the most shapely of legs. This caused a rustle amongst those attending the conference and I even thought I heard a suppressed neigh come from a group of some of the younger members.”23
Chiang’s generals were far less fascinating. The Americans and the British had come with plans for a major offensive in the Bay of Bengal/Burma theater. They discovered that their Chinese counterparts were ciphers, unwilling to make suggestions or ask questions and clearly not empowered to make commitments. Direct talks between Roosevelt and Chiang were no more satisfactory. Lord Mountbatten, designated supreme Allied commander for the South Asian theater, commented that Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff were “driven absolutely mad” by their discussions with the Chinese. Over the next year, primarily British and imperial forces would accomplish the conquest of Burma.24
The conferees issued a Cairo Declaration that reaffirmed their military collaboration and established as their war objective the elimination of all Japanese conquests since Japan’s emergence as a Pacific power in the late nineteenth century, including Formosa (Taiwan), Korea, Manchuria, and numerous Pacific islands. Press coverage of the conference inevitably trumpeted the participation of Chiang and inflated his staunchness as an ally. Roosevelt himself was still convinced that China would become a great power at some point after the war. But he had to be less certain about its immediate future and perhaps more open to the expectation that the United States might have to share influence in China with the Soviet Union.25
The president moved on to his long-awaited meeting with Stalin. The Soviet leader had stood firm on his insistence that he could not leave his sphere of control, rejecting at least ten proposed locations from Fairbanks to Baghdad. He would settle only for Teheran, firmly in the grip of a Soviet occupation. His allies would have to come to him. Roosevelt had objected vigorously and persistently, arguing that Teheran, nestled among mountains, presented formidable difficulties of transportation and communications. He likely also protested on the advice of Dr. McIntire, who remained worried about him flying at high altitude. His original schedule called for a flight from Cairo to Basra, on the Persian Gulf, where he would take a train to the Iranian capital. But word of the meeting at Cairo and the likelihood he would go on to Teheran leaked to the press. A land trip was risky and unreliable.26
On November 27, Roosevelt arose in the middle of the night for a flight to Teheran. Arriving in mid-afternoon, he was whisked into an armored convoy that delivered him and his party to the American legation near the center of the city. He spent most of the rest of the day meeting with advisers. The following morning, he received a message from Stalin, informing him of reports that Nazi assassins were in the city. Warning that the American compound was dangerously exposed, Stalin offered him quarters at the Soviet compound, closer to the edge of the city and safely located next to the British embassy. Since the Iranian government—and the Soviet occupiers—had failed to provide adequate security for either him or Churchill on the road from the airport, Roosevelt quickly agreed.27
He surely realized that the site was probably bugged, and it was indeed riddled with listening devices expertly planted by Sergo Beria, the son of Stalin’s feared secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria. What better way to demonstrate trust and confidence in his Soviet partner? And what in any case would they make of comments that the Americans might have made purposely for their ears? On the afternoon of November 28, Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Admiral Leahy, and FDR’s son-in-law, Major John Boettiger, moved to their new quarters.28
The scene was set for an encounter that both leaders had eagerly anticipated. Roosevelt at last had the opportunity to unleash the power of his personality and convince Stalin of his reliability as a partner. One of Stalin’s interpreters at Teheran, Valentin Berezhkov, recalled many years later that Stalin, equally intent upon establishing a rapport, had selected the room where they would first meet, had the lighting modulated to minimize the smallpox scars that pitted his face, and wore elevated shoes to make himself appear taller. The two met at 3:00 p.m., one hour before the start of the first conference session, accompanied only by their interpreters, Charles (“Chip”) Bohlen for Roosevelt and V. N. Pavlov for Stalin.29
Roosevelt spoke first and set the tone of the meeting: “I am glad to see you. I have tried for a long time to bring this about.” Stalin responded with similar pleasantries. A brief discussion of the military situation followed, with Stalin emphasizing recent tactical reverses and Roosevelt assuring him of the American desire to divert thirty to forty German divisions to the west. The president followed this with the hope that after the war, a portion of the American-British merchant fleet could be delivered to the Soviet Union with the goal of facilitating mutually beneficial trade relations. He then briefly touched on the meeting with the Chinese at Cairo and made no protest when Stalin remarked that China was very badly led.
Much of the rest of the conversation centered on the future of France, a nation for which neither leader displayed much sympathy. De Gaulle, Stalin asserted, was out of touch with reality. Roosevelt declared that de Gaulle’s primary rival, Henri Giraud, had no administrative or political sense. He added that no Frenchman who had taken part in the Vichy government should be allowed to participate in postwar politics. The French ruling classes in general, Stalin declared, were decadent and collaborationist. Roosevelt expressed his disagreement with Churchill that France could quickly return to its status as a major power. They agreed that the time had come to dismantle the French Empire, focusing especially on Indochina. Stalin, with an eye on the Middle East as well as Southeast Asia, brought up Lebanon.
Roosevelt was motivated by liberal principle, Stalin by the prospect of tactical gain. The Soviet leader’s concentration on France doubtless stemmed from the fact that it was the only continental European nation that might be capable of raising a first-class army after the war. Roosevelt saw the end of Western imperialism as a good in itself and one that might provide some trade benefits to the United States. More intriguingly to Stalin, the president went out of his way to indicate disagreement with his capitalist partner Britain and all but invited the exploration of wedges that might be driven between the two nations.
Roosevelt had come to Teheran with no very fixed agenda beyond a meeting of the minds with Stalin. Despite the fact that the encounter came on the heels of an Allied foreign ministers conference that had brought Secretary of State Cordell Hull to Moscow, Hull had been sent back to Washington. Bohlen, the one Department of State official involved in the discussions, was there only as an interpreter. He quickly discerned that the president wanted to practice personal diplomacy, “preferred to act by improvisation rather than by plan,” and had made no provision for a record of the conference. Bohlen took it upon himself to construct detailed minutes of the meetings at which he was present.30
Roosevelt, who probably would have been happy with no written record, may not have been aware of Bohlen’s actions. In any event, he made no objection. Aside from the attack that Dr. McIntire represented as indigestion at dinner on the first evening, the president was in fine form. Bohlen, who remembered him as a pleasant and considerate chief, thought him “the dominating figure at the conference.”31
Stalin was much the same man Harry Hopkins had met in 1941. He wore a grander uniform, having assumed the rank of marshal of the Soviet Union. He was, as always, firm in stating Soviet interests, calm and deliberate in demeanor, and commanding in presence. He showed himself to be a shrewd military tactician with a grasp of reality that rivaled and perhaps exceeded that of Roosevelt or Churchill. A
s a negotiator, he maintained a fine line between blunt toughness and hostility.
To the extent that the conference had a goal, it was to nail down the final plans for the defeat of Germany and to arrive at a working outline for the shape of the postwar world. The delegations sat at a large round table, each principal with a translator and two other advisers: Roosevelt, Bohlen, Hopkins, and Harriman; Churchill, Major John Birse (translator), Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and General Hastings Ismay; Stalin, Pavlov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov.
Churchill, as at Cairo, pressed his plans for further operations in the Mediterranean and the benefits of bringing Turkey into the war. The Americans indicated their skepticism and intention to undertake OVERLORD in the spring. They insisted that the only action in the Mediterranean should be a landing in southeastern France. Stalin demanded the naming of a supreme commander and the setting of a specific date for the invasion. During the second day of the conference, Stalin asked what he called “an indiscreet question”: Did the British really believe in OVERLORD? There followed a series of cutting exchanges, with Roosevelt joining in the needling of Churchill. Hopkins later privately visited Churchill and relayed the president’s strong belief that the time had come to finalize both the date and the command for the operation. The British gave in, agreeing to a target date of May 1 and the quick appointment of a supreme commander.
Roosevelt met privately with Stalin on November 29 to outline his plan for a new world organization: an assembly, in which all nations would have membership, that could make nonbinding recommendations; an executive committee that would attempt to resolve disputes; and an enforcement mechanism controlled by the Four Policemen. Stalin indicated some skepticism but appeared ready to bring the Soviet Union into any world body that might emerge from the war, especially if he would be in a position to block any action unfavorable to the USSR.
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 53