Yet Roosevelt was in no rush to make an appointment. Wallace, deeply concerned by the president’s physical deterioration and lack of focus in personal and cabinet meetings, was likely the source of leaks to newspapers that Roosevelt had promised the Commerce Department to him. In the meantime, the president accepted the resignation of “old dear” Cordell Hull, who was in failing health, without offering the post to Wallace. Instead he named Undersecretary Edward R. Stettinius Jr., former chairman of US Steel and far from a stellar choice in the eyes of the liberals. The president and Wallace met again on December 20. Roosevelt confirmed his promise, approved Wallace’s ideas for reorganizing the Commerce Department, wandered off into a discussion of astrological predictions that the war would last into 1947, and floated the theory that tropical native workers were healthiest when naked.6
On the afternoon of January 19, Roosevelt assured Wallace that he would act after the inauguration. He also mentioned that he would commence a long trip on January 22—he did not tell Wallace he was going to Yalta to meet with Stalin and Churchill—but was certain that Senate confirmation would be routine. In fact, he probably postponed the appointment until the last moment because he knew that the aftermath would be difficult and unpleasant.
On the afternoon of January 20, FDR dictated a communication to be hand-delivered to Jones. Composing the letter was very difficult, he said, “because of our long friendship and splendid relations during all these years and also because of your splendid services to the Government.” It was nonetheless necessary to reward Henry Wallace for his own contributions and for his “utmost devotion” in the recent political campaign, a not-so-subtle dig at Jones’s own silence about the party revolt in Texas. “There are several ambassadorships. . . . I hope you will have a chance, if you think well of it, to speak to Ed Stettinius.” The letter closed with the assurance, “I am very proud of all that you have done during these past years.”7
The patronizing communication outraged Jones, who had silently endured rumors that he would be dumped. His reply was civil but firm. He thanked Roosevelt for his praise but commented, “It is difficult to reconcile these encomiums with your avowed purpose to replace me.” He accepted the president’s decision but could not agree that Wallace, “a man inexperienced in business and finance,” was qualified to run the Commerce Department or manage the lending agencies. He released both Roosevelt’s letter and his response to the press. Many newspapers reprinted them verbatim.8
Wallace now faced a major Senate confirmation struggle. On the night of January 22, Roosevelt and the presidential party slipped out of Washington, bound for Yalta, leaving the secretary of commerce designate to fight alone for his political life. A conspiracy theorist might argue that the president intended to rid the administration of both Jones and Wallace. The events more likely revealed the diminished capacity of a sick and distracted chief executive.
As Roosevelt made his way across the Atlantic, the Senate Commerce Committee held sharply contested hearings on the Wallace nomination, listening to testimony from both Jones and Wallace. It became clear that opposition from conservative Democrats and Republicans would defeat the nominee unless Congress separated the lending agencies from the Commerce Department. Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley and Vice President Truman got a bill through the Senate to accomplish that objective; Sam Rayburn pushed it through the House. It is uncertain whether Roosevelt was either fully informed of these developments or much interested in them. Wallace’s confirmation for a much diminished post would come only on March 1, just after Roosevelt’s return to the United States.9
The president’s concerns lay elsewhere. The inexorable march toward victory in Europe was leaving increasingly urgent problems in its wake. Most of these grew out of the conflict between the Atlantic Charter, with its affirmation of the grand ideal of self-determination, and the realities of armed conquest. The Red Army rolled through eastern Europe leaving a Soviet-dominated sphere of influence in its wake.
Poland was a critical focal point. The Russians had established their own Polish Committee of National Liberation, based in the eastern city of Lublin, and successfully pressured the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to recognize it. The London Poles, still recognized by Great Britain and the United States, resisted Soviet dominance and insisted on Poland’s prewar boundaries. Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to the Curzon Line as Poland’s eastern border, effectively conceding to the Soviet Union half of Poland’s prewar territory, populated mostly by Ukrainians but including the heavily Polish city of Lwow.
The conflict had no practical solution. In November 1944, during a monthlong return to the United States, Averell Harriman had discussed the Polish territorial dispute with Roosevelt. The president suggested with apparent seriousness that Lwow could be made a free city, governed by an international committee, and that Ukrainian peasants would find it a profitable market for their produce. “I tried to tell him that it was impossible,” Harriman wrote in his notes of the conversation. “I carried it as far as I could until he became annoyed that I was unwilling to dream with him.” The idea, he thought, was of a piece with other Rooseveltian fantasies about personally arbitrating Soviet boundary disputes with Poland and Finland. By then a seasoned observer of Moscow’s totalitarian atmosphere, Harriman knew that Soviet leaders would take what they wanted without regard to American qualms. So surely did Roosevelt in soberer moments, but he never gave up hope that he could somehow persuade Stalin to yield to the norms of democratic tolerance and compromise.10
Britain, in the meantime, had consolidated its dominance in the Mediterranean. The British gave quiet promises of support to Turkey against possible Soviet efforts to gain control of the Dardanelles. Their armed intervention beat down a Communist insurgency in Greece, from which German forces had withdrawn in the fall of 1944. The use of troops supported by British warships to shell Communist-held working-class areas of Athens drew strong denunciations from American liberals, who demonstrated considerably less concern with Soviet tactics in eastern Europe. Both Harry Hopkins and Roosevelt communicated their qualms to Churchill. For a time in November and December, the US-British alliance seemed on the verge of a crisis, but by the end of the year, the British had put down the Communist bid for power, and Washington was as eager as London to move on to other issues.11
Roosevelt’s State of the Union message had openly expressed his uneasiness with the situations in Poland and Greece. Calling for a “peoples’ peace,” it had restated the principles of the Atlantic Charter while also declaring that the United States could not demand 100 percent perfection in their realization. The caution was salutary but less than frank, given Roosevelt’s own understanding that the eastern European nations, with the probable exception of Greece, would inevitably fall under Soviet dominance. Few Americans, of Greek descent or otherwise, would strongly object to a British-imposed regime in Greece. A Soviet sphere of influence that extended from Poland and eastern Germany in the north to Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria in the south would offend most Americans, motivated either by ethnicity or by a simple hatred of communism. Roosevelt surely understood all this, sought to finesse it as best he could, and hoped to convince Stalin of the virtues of restraint in managing his new sphere of influence.
On the morning of January 23, Roosevelt and his party boarded the new heavy cruiser USS Quincy, which promptly departed on a ten-day voyage to Malta. There Roosevelt would meet with Churchill, then fly to Yalta. His immediate party, the group that dined with him, included Anna, Admiral William D. Leahy, Dr. McIntire, naval aide Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, Appointments Secretary General Pa Watson, Steve Early, James Byrnes, and Ed Flynn. (FDR brought along Byrnes, whose name had been floated for secretary of state after Hull’s resignation, and Flynn in recognition of their influence with key Democratic Party constituencies that would need to sign on to any agreements reached at Yalta.) The total American party at the conference itself—diplomats, military leade
rs, functionaries, and support staff—numbered around 350.
The January crossing of the North Atlantic was about as good as could be hoped. One imagines that the meals were pleasant and the conversation lively. Each night, the president and his party viewed a first-run Hollywood feature film. There is no record of preparatory meetings for the conference. It appears that Roosevelt used the time to rest up for what would surely be a strenuous experience. The extent to which he cracked the briefing books prepared for him is unknown. On February 2, the Quincy arrived at Malta, where a conference of the US and British military chiefs was concluding. Harry Hopkins, who had flown across the Atlantic to meet with Churchill, was there waiting, as was the prime minister.12
Roosevelt acknowledged cheering crowds and salutes from British warships in Valletta Harbor. A photo later cleared for release to the press shows him sitting across from Churchill in business suit and flat driving cap, appearing firm-jawed and dominant. In reality, those who met him close up were shocked. Charles Bohlen, who had gone ahead with Hopkins, summed it up: “He was not only frail and desperately tired, he looked ill. I never saw Roosevelt look as bad as he did then.” Out of exhaustion, a determination to avoid the appearance of “ganging-up on Stalin,” and a sense that American interests diverged from those of Britain, the president rebuffed Churchill’s plea to develop a common negotiating strategy.13
Sometime after 11:00 p.m., he and his party boarded the first aircraft ever designed for use by the president of the United States. A converted C-54 transport plane equipped with an elevator for Roosevelt’s convenience and containing a conference room, it was powerful and luxurious. The president had given it a whimsical name, Sacred Cow. Roosevelt retired immediately. The plane took off at 3:30 a.m. on February 3. Seven hours and 1,375 miles later, it landed at Saki in Crimea, where Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov greeted the American and British parties. After lunch and brief ceremonies, the visitors transferred to a fleet of Lend-Lease Packards for an arduous drive to Yalta through a frozen, war-devastated landscape. The motorcade crept at twenty miles per hour along roads lined with Soviet troops, mostly female, who saluted smartly as it passed. The exhausting journey took nearly five hours.14
The Russians put the Americans up at Livadia Palace, a former czarist retreat built in the early twentieth century; it also served as the venue for the plenary meetings. The British lodged about twelve miles away at Vorontsov Palace, an imposing mid-nineteenth-century structure. The Russians themselves stayed about halfway between at Yusupov Palace, built in 1909 for a Russian prince. All three buildings had accommodated German army officers and been systematically looted as the invaders retreated. All also reflected a sensibility that interpreted the phrase “sanitary plumbing” as “chamber pot.” The few bathrooms with running water were reserved for senior statesmen. Four-star generals and admirals stood in line for more elemental facilities. Bedbugs seemingly immune to DDT and other pesticides also infested the palaces. Still, the Russians had performed a Herculean task in making them habitable.15
As at Teheran, listening devices expertly placed by Sergo Beria picked up every word uttered by guests, who, widely suspecting the bugs’ presence, had no alternative but to carry on as if they did not exist.
Never a strong detail man, Roosevelt came to the conference with a few overriding objectives and a keen sense of his limited bargaining power. He clearly understood that eastern Europe would come under Soviet control and knew he could only hope that the Russians would exercise their dominance lightly. Like many American liberals, he probably thought that Communist regimes, whatever their restrictions on personal liberties, would distribute social benefits equitably and be an improvement over the right-wing dictatorships that had characterized much of the area before the war. As he had been neither willing nor able to block Churchill’s moves in Greece, he realized that he could not veto Stalin’s dominance of areas occupied by the Red Army. He knew also that, once the war was over, there would be an irresistible clamor for demobilization in the United States and a sharp decline in the military power that a president could employ.
His most urgent need was to nail down Soviet participation in the Pacific war. Development of the super bomb under way at Los Alamos was still speculative. An invasion of the Japanese home islands could become a long, costly bloodbath. Here, above all, Roosevelt was prepared to concede whatever it took to bring the fighting to an early conclusion. Tens of thousands of American casualties seemingly hung in the balance.
Clearly no starry-eyed idealist in the pursuit of these goals, neither was he as hard-headed as he probably thought. When in human history had three world powers with divergent cultures and ambitions achieved unity of policy and objectives over the long run? Britain and Churchill, sharing a common language and similar traditions with the United States and dependent upon American economic support, could be brought along. The Soviet Union under Stalin was a sworn enemy of bourgeois capitalism and the liberal-democratic institutions that came with it. Its overriding goal of revolution depended on single-minded pursuit of the interests of the Soviet state. Personalities were unimportant; friendship was a bourgeois affectation.
Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill fully grasped this yawning gap in perspectives. Both understood practically that much of the world was authoritarian and that one had to deal with dictators, but neither quite apprehended the distinction between run-of-the-mill dictatorships and ideologically driven totalitarian societies. Roosevelt believed the Soviet ruler was amenable to charm and reason. The president and many other policy makers thought that when Stalin was difficult, he was acting under pressure from the Soviet Politburo, whose members actually lived in mortal fear of him. Churchill was more realistic but not without his own illusions. He once told Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, “If only I could dine with Stalin once a week, there would be no trouble at all.”16
Much of the work of the conference was done in second-echelon meetings. American, British, and Soviet military leaders developed the outlines of a planned joint Soviet-US offensive against Japan. The Big Three foreign ministers—Stettinius, Anthony Eden, and Molotov—debated a wide range of issues, many of which they then referred to their superiors, who conferred in eight plenary sessions held from February 4 to 11.
Convening in late afternoon for the first seven plenaries and late morning for a rushed final session, the three leaders sat at a round table, each with two aides on either side and others behind them. Roosevelt usually had Admiral Leahy and Secretary Stettinius to his right. On his immediate left was Bohlen, who served primarily as translator and compiler of a summary of each meeting. The occupant of the fourth seat varied. Averell Harriman was always close to the president, along with Harry Hopkins, who, despite wretched health, attended all but the first plenary. State Department officials H. Freeman Matthews and Alger Hiss (a covert Soviet agent) were also present but exercised little apparent influence.17
Each delegation hosted one plenary dinner, a social occasion characterized by groaning-board menus, abundant wine, and a multitude of vodka-fueled toasts. The presence of three special guests, “the girls”—Averell Harriman’s daughter, Kathleen; Churchill’s daughter, Sarah Oliver; and Roosevelt’s daughter, Anna—graced these evenings. At Stalin’s dinner on February 8, Sergo Beria’s father, Lavrenty Beria, chief of the dreaded secret police, a known killer, rapist, and sexual sadist, attended as a nondiplomatic participant. Stalin sardonically introduced him as “Our Himmler,” the Soviet counterpart of the Nazi Gestapo chieftain. Beria seems to have enjoyed chatting up the girls in encounters that provided a revealing contrast of depravity and innocence. Sarah Oliver recounted a conversation in which she recited to him one of the five Russian sentences she had memorized: “Can I have a hot water bottle, please?” He replied, “I cannot believe that you need one! Surely there is enough fire in you!” Kathleen Harriman described him as “little and fat with thick lenses, which give him a sinister look, but quite
genial.”18
At the plenary meetings, Stalin was clearly the dominant figure. He was presiding over a parley on his own turf and commanded an overwhelming military offensive surging into central Europe. He remained much the same man Harry Hopkins had met in 1941: calm, self-possessed, impressive in debate, and confident in the strength of his position. When, in discussion of the new eastern Polish boundary, Churchill argued for a deviation from the Curzon Line in favor of the Polish claim to Lwow, Stalin responded that Lord Curzon, an Englishman, and Georges Clemenceau, a Frenchman, had agreed on the line after World War I. Should he be less Russian than they?19
Churchill displayed the rhetorical talents of an English parliamentarian but could not command the power to be taken seriously. Roosevelt presided over impressive power but was anxious to bring the Russians into the fight against Japan and valued preservation of the alliance as the key to lasting peace. Following the example he had established at Teheran, he played the role of mediator between the Old Tory and the Old Bolshevik.
The conference addressed some relatively trivial problems, such as the list of invitees to the conference that would found the new United Nations Organization (UNO) and the wording of the invitation. Others were moderately important—among them, the disputed Yugoslavian boundary with Italy and Austria and the Soviet interest in making Yugoslavia (led by then compliant Communist Josip Broz Tito) the linchpin of a Balkan federation oriented toward Moscow. One oddity involved UNO representation. Roosevelt had great hopes for the new world security body. He understood it had to be backed by Big Three unity. So long as the great powers, perhaps expanded to include France and China, controlled the organization and agreed on the issues it faced, the UNO could become a powerful force in managing a stable world. Perceiving that Soviet buy-in was essential, he wanted to pin down a commitment at Yalta.
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 57