Difficulties emerged quickly. Membership on a UNO Security Council would give the great powers a veto on action resolutions. The Russians demanded a veto on issues to be debated but finally relented. Mindful that the United States would have strong influence over the votes of the Western Hemisphere nations and that Britain would usually be able to muster a bloc vote from the self-governing members of its empire, the Soviet Union renewed the demand made at Dumbarton Oaks for sixteen votes, one for each “independent” Soviet republic. Eventually, Stalin settled for three, one for the USSR as a whole and one each for the Belorussian and Ukrainian republics, which had borne the brunt of the German military offensive. The Soviet dictator even agreed to voting privileges for two US states, an idea dropped after strong negative reaction from leading members of Congress.
Other issues critical in defining the shape of the postwar world included the fate of Poland and the rest of Soviet-occupied eastern Europe, the future of Germany, and the need to bring the USSR into the war against Japan. Poland remained critical to Britain, which had gone to war in response to the German attack upon that nation in 1939, and to the United States, where, as Roosevelt once again reminded Stalin, Polish Americans constituted an important voting bloc. It was also the most prominent test case for implementation of the principles of the Atlantic Charter throughout eastern Europe. Pressed by Roosevelt and Churchill, Stalin promised free elections in which Stanislaw Mikolajczyk’s Peasant Party and other democratic forces could participate. Roosevelt declared, “I want this election in Poland to be . . . like Caesar’s wife. I did not know her but they said she was pure.” Stalin’s response was telling: “They said that about her but in fact she had her sins.” It was amply clear that Stalin, in full control of the situation on the ground, intended to maintain his grip on the Lublin Poles. The Soviet leader nonetheless consented to a statement that the Polish government would be “reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad.” He issued a similar pledge for Yugoslavia.20
The conference communiqué included a general “Declaration on Liberated Europe,” citing the Atlantic Charter and promising representative democracy in all the nations freed from Nazi rule. It also made the first formal announcement that Poland would lose its territory east of the Curzon Line (including Lwow) and be compensated with portions of eastern Germany. The democratic generalities glittered impressively, but realists understood that rhetorical gemstones had little value. The hard-nosed Admiral Leahy told Roosevelt, “Mr. President, this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it.” According to Leahy, FDR responded, “Bill, I know it, but it’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.” He must have privately continued to expect, as he had confided to Archbishop Francis Spellman in September 1943, that the rest of eastern Europe, Greece excepted, would experience the same fate.21
The Big Three talked of perhaps a tripartite division of Germany into a primarily Prussian North, a South that fused Bavaria with Austria, and a Ruhr-centered western industrial state. The conference established a committee to explore the question. The public communiqué declared, “Nazi Germany is doomed,” but avoided any mention of dismemberment. It did, however, promise an indefinite military occupation, for which the zones had already been drawn, and pledged the destruction of both the Nazi Party and German militarism. Germany, it declared, would have to pay reparations for the damage it had inflicted on the Allies, but no sum was stated. (Stalin had floated the then astounding figure of $20 billion, half of which would go to the Soviet Union. Churchill, citing the post–World War I experience, doubted the Allies could extract one-tenth of that amount.)22
Germany, in fact, would be “dismembered.” An eastern portion would go to Poland in compensation for that country’s involuntary cession to the USSR; a Soviet zone of occupation would eventually become an East German state; and the US-British-French zones of occupation would become a West German state. The reparations extracted from a destroyed economy would be slim for all the conquerors. Germany’s eventual reunification as the quasi-pacifist economic powerhouse of Europe was beyond imagination.
No objective at Yalta was more critical for Roosevelt than pinning down Soviet participation in the war against Japan. He had worked through Averell Harriman to seal a deal with Stalin two months earlier. Stalin had demanded control of the Japanese-held southern half of Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands, long-term leases on the Manchurian ports of Port Arthur and Dairen, and another long-term lease on the eastern Manchurian railway link to the Soviet Union. He expected dominance over the sea lanes east of Vladivostok and hegemony in Manchuria.23
The Manchurian concessions were technically at the disposal of Chiang Kai-shek, but Roosevelt had no compunction about granting them. Stalin in turn pledged that twenty-five divisions would be transferred to the Manchurian border and ready to attack the Japanese three months after the end of the European war. Critics would later call this a betrayal of Chiang. It was more accurately a recognition that Chiang had, a decade and a half earlier, lost whatever control he might claim over Manchuria and could not stop the Red Army from occupying it. A Roosevelt with a proven atomic bomb at his disposal might have decided Soviet participation in the war against Japan was unnecessary and skipped the whole deal, or he still might have thought the Russians worth mollifying. As it was, he could legitimately feel that he had struck a good bargain and averted American casualties potentially running into the hundreds of thousands. His military leaders agreed. Admiral Leahy said the agreement made the trip worthwhile. Admiral Ernest J. King declared it would save 2 million American lives.24
The conference concluded on February 11 in a general mood of amity and optimism. Although the least satisfied of the Big Three, Churchill was far from believing he had participated in a debacle. At the dinner on February 8, Stalin had toasted him as “the bravest governmental figure in the world” for his solitary resistance to Hitler in 1940. Churchill had responded with a tribute to Stalin as “the mighty leader of a mighty country.” Roosevelt had called for their continued unity in the objective of giving “every man, woman, and child on this earth the possibility of security and well being.”25
“We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we all had been praying for and talking about for so many years,” Harry Hopkins told Robert Sherwood. “The Russians had proved they could be reasonable and farseeing.” He worried only that something might happen to Stalin. “We could never be sure who or what might be in back of him there in the Kremlin.”26
In the short run, Yalta sealed certain victory in a terrible war. It also revealed contradictions in a foreign policy that stemmed less from Roosevelt’s character than from the American mind itself. FDR had inspired the nation by justifying the war with the high-minded ideals of the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter. No less than Woodrow Wilson, he had identified victory with the end of a sordid era of power politics. Yet, in order to defeat the totalitarian threat of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, he had to strike an alliance with the totalitarian Soviet Union and could do nothing to prevent its dominance over the unfortunate peoples of eastern Europe. Yalta was his final attempt to come to grips with the cunning of a history beyond his control.
After the final plenary session and luncheon on February 11, Roosevelt and his party motored eighty miles over winding mountain roads to Sevastopol to board the USS Catoctin, a naval communications vessel moored at the Soviet base there. Averell Harriman recalled the trip as tedious and tiring, the vessel as hot and uncomfortable. The visit, he believed, had succeeded in raising the morale of the crew at the expense of the president’s health.27
After a difficult night, Roosevelt arose early for a relatively short drive to the Saki airport, where he boarded the Sacred Cow for a flight to Egypt. There, aboard the Quincy, anchored in the Great Bitter Lake of the S
uez Canal, he met with Egyptian king Farouk, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, and King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia. His purpose: to continue pursuit of an American presence in a traditional area of British influence. Churchill, informed only at the last minute, was miffed.
The most important audience was with Abdul Aziz, who had the power to grant oil concessions to American companies and the standing to ease the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East. On February 14, the American destroyer Murphy transported the king from Jeddah to the Quincy. The monarch, playing the role of Arab warrior-king to the hilt, was seated on the Murphy’s deck in a large gilt armchair, flanked by barefoot Nubian soldiers with drawn sabers. He boarded the Quincy accompanied by the royal astrologer, a food taster, a coffee server, and a retinue of slaves, cooks, porters, and scullions. They found much of the cruiser’s foredeck covered with oriental carpets upon which had been erected a large tent. The Arabs slaughtered and cooked a sheep on the fantail.
When Roosevelt brought up the subject of Jewish settlement in Palestine, he encountered a cold, stone wall. So far as the king was concerned, the Zionists were European imperialists, and the Arabs had no obligation to atone for the sins of the Nazis. The president, unwilling to damage the larger US-Saudi relationship, backed off. As the king departed, Roosevelt, who in deference to Muslim doctrine had refrained from smoking, took a cigarette from his pocket. When someone suggested that Abdul Aziz might look back and take offense, he said, “Show’s over!” or words to that effect. He wrote to Daisy Suckley that the “whole party was a scream.” Subsequently, he told a press conference that he had learned more about Palestine at that meeting than he had absorbed in a lifetime. Harry Hopkins privately commented that the remark displayed an utter incomprehension of the problem.28
The Quincy moved back north to Alexandria, where Churchill, en route to his own meetings with Abdul Aziz, met briefly with the president for a pleasant lunch. Then the ship got under way for a stop at Algiers, where it docked on February 18. There, Hopkins, exhausted and in precarious health, informed the president that he would have to debark, rest a few days, and fly back to the United States for medical treatment. Roosevelt was greatly annoyed; the farewell, Hopkins later told Robert Sherwood, was not pleasant. It added to Roosevelt’s distress that his great friend and valued aide, Pa Watson, died from a cerebral hemorrhage as the Quincy made its way across the Atlantic.29
Churchill, writing several years later of his rendezvous with Roosevelt at Alexandria, described the president as “placid and frail”: “I felt that he had a slender contact with life.” Sam Rosenman, who boarded the Quincy a few days later at Algiers to help write Roosevelt’s speech to Congress on the conference, found his chief “listless and apparently uninterested in conversation—he was all burnt out.” Not until the day before the ship docked at Newport News did the two men get to work on what was planned as one of the most important speeches of the Roosevelt presidency.30
Roosevelt delivered the address on March 1, just a day after he had returned to the White House from his long journey. The occasion revealed his sharp physical decline. He could no longer stand up with the assistance of braces and had to deliver the talk seated in the well of the House of Representatives. “I hope you will pardon me for this unusual posture,” he began, “but I know you will realize it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.” The legislators responded with applause, but many of them surely realized that he had never before mentioned his handicap in public.31
His delivery was unquestionably the worst of his presidency. Whether due to fatigue or some neurological problem, he had trouble following the prepared text, stumbling and ad-libbing so frequently that news reports could not ignore his difficulty. Rosenman, sitting in the gallery, was “dismayed.” Still, the president’s struggle did not obscure the messages he hoped to get across: the end of the war in Europe was near, the Big Three alliance was strong and durable, any disputes were transient and resolvable, and the new world security organization would preserve and protect an international order based on the Atlantic Charter.32
Over the next three weeks, Roosevelt, with the exception of a much needed four-day respite at Hyde Park, worked on a variety of domestic and war issues while maintaining a heavy correspondence with Churchill and Stalin. On Saturday, March 17, he did not get to bed until 1:00 a.m. He seems to have had some assistance from Harry Hopkins, who was in Washington for a time between stays at the Mayo Clinic. (On March 15, Roosevelt, displaying incomprehension of Hopkins’s dire health problems, wrote to Churchill, “Harry is getting along well. There is nothing seriously wrong with him and he is getting a good rest.”)33
FDR took especial interest in State Department planning for the conference to establish the United Nations Organization, scheduled to begin in San Francisco on April 25. Slated to give the opening address, he clearly expected to be the dominating personality there, achieving the mission Woodrow Wilson had botched at Versailles. Yet he displayed a strange detachment about this and other vital matters, including day-to-day reports on the progress of the war and the impending victory in Europe. Some of his aides characterized him as “bored,” but surely he was actually displaying symptoms of exhaustion.34
When Eleanor was away, he found time to relax with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, whom he saw at least five times in March. On March 24, he managed to get away for another four days at Hyde Park. At the beginning of the month, just after his speech to Congress, he had told Vice President Truman (whom he never put in the loop on Yalta or other foreign policy issues), “As soon as I can, I will go to Warm Springs for a rest. I can be in trim again if I can stay there for two or three weeks.” Returning to the White House from Hyde Park on March 29, he met with Stettinius, Chip Bohlen, and other diplomats, then left in late afternoon for the Georgia destination that meant so much to him.35
Roosevelt took with him to Warm Springs a small group of White House staffers, among them Grace Tully, Bill Hassett, and Dr. Howard Bruenn. Reporters representing the three major press services were, as usual, in the party, although forbidden from divulging the president’s whereabouts or transmitting any news without clearance. His companions also included Daisy Suckley and Laura Delano. He had told Eleanor they would be with him but did not mention two other guests: Lucy and Madame Elizabeth Shoumatoff, an artist Lucy had commissioned to paint his portrait.
Warm Springs and the Little White House provided a respite. Roosevelt got a lot of sleep, was driven around the countryside—he no longer drove himself—and enjoyed the company and adoration of the ladies. But there was no escape from the routine duties of the presidency, the ongoing war, and continuing friction within the Big Three alliance. A packet came down from Washington by air daily. The president managed to hold his work down to two or three hours a day but never regained his strength. On the day the party arrived at Warm Springs, Hassett took Dr. Bruenn aside and told him despairingly, “He is slipping away from us and no earthly power can save him.” Bruenn refused to give up hope but said his patient would have to cut back his schedule even further.36
The war news was momentous. American troops had crossed the Rhine, and German resistance in the West was collapsing. In the Pacific, on April 1, American forces landed on Okinawa to begin the last island campaign before the expected invasion of Japan. Final victory in the greatest conflict ever waged was assured.
Nonetheless, the alliance had once again grown precarious. Throughout the month of March, problems piled up, revealing a growing conflict of interests and perspectives between Russia and the West as the impending collapse of Nazism obviated the need for unity. The USSR neglected and mistreated American prisoners of war liberated from German POW camps in Poland. (Neither Roosevelt nor other members of the administration understood that the Soviet government considered its own POWs to be deserters
or turncoats.) Stalin refused to admit American military teams behind his lines to assist the Americans and denied the existence of the problem. The president rejected Harriman’s urgings for firmer protests.37
It became apparent that the Russians had no intention of establishing a more representative Polish government. They refused to find a position for Mikolajczyk or other independent leaders and arrested numerous non-Communists. The same pattern was taking shape throughout eastern Europe.
Near the end of March, Stalin, citing Molotov’s need to attend the annual meeting of the Supreme Soviet, notified Roosevelt that the foreign minister would not represent the USSR at the San Francisco conference. Instead, Ambassador Andrei Gromyko would head the Russian delegation. This indication of the low priority the Soviets gave to the new world body came as a shock.
Most astonishingly, Stalin accused his British and American allies of betrayal when they attempted to open negotiations in Bern, Switzerland, for the surrender of the remaining German forces on the Italian front. They aimed, he declared, to achieve a separate peace that would allow Germany to concentrate on its fight with the USSR: “The Germans on the Western front in fact have ceased the war against England and the United States. At the same time, the Germans continue the war with Russia.”38
Roosevelt’s April 4 response, drafted, it seems, primarily by General George C. Marshall in Washington, avoided debate but expressed indignation:
It is astonishing that a belief seems to have reached the Soviet Government that I have entered into an agreement with the enemy without first obtaining your full agreement.
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 58