by Paul Kengor
Heilbrunn is quite right about the primary goal of Yalta. That said, postwar boundaries and peace are not exactly minor concerns, as had been learned two-and-a-half decades earlier at Versailles. In fact, the post–World War I Treaty of Versailles was on many minds at the end of the Second World War, especially with the German surrender only months away. One can work on more than one priority. Leaders have staffs who work around the clock on such things.
There remain other issues of contention from Yalta.
A lingering, harsh criticism is that Alger Hiss, the infamous Soviet agent inside the State Department, was at Yalta and purportedly helped mislead the president, allowing Stalin to seize control of Eastern Europe. This is a common charge from the political Right, but some historians dispute it. Conrad Black, for example, claims that “Hiss had no influence whatever on Roosevelt or American policy at Yalta.”60 (On the same page, however, Black argues that Hiss made a positive contribution in constructing a “sensibly reasoned argument” against giving the USSR three votes at the United Nations.)61
But even if Hiss did not mislead Roosevelt, it is difficult to argue that certain advisers did not dupe, or at least poorly advise, the president.62 The affirmation of Harry Hopkins alone would seem to bear witness to this.
Hopkins was pretty darned satisfied with Yalta, saying that both he and the president left the conference in a “mood of supreme exultation.” “We really believed in our hearts,” he later told his sympathetic biographer, Robert E. Sherwood, “that this was the dawn of the new day we all had been praying for and talking about for so many years. We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of the peace—and by ‘we’ I mean all of us.” That “we” most certainly included the president he served as right-hand man.63
Hopkins once again had been deeply impressed by Stalin and comrades. He was positively euphoric: “The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and farseeing and there wasn't any doubt in the minds of the president or any of us that we could live with them and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine.”64 It was, Hopkins judged, perhaps a heavenly reward for which they had all been praying.65
One can surmise that Stalin, though not praying, also exulted in this great victory. Hopkins thought so. He said that Uncle Joe, too, was pleased with the results at Yalta, as was the whole of the Soviet delegation.
With some help from their American friends, Stalin's henchmen had pulled off quite a coup at Yalta. But the conference did not represent, as many FDR critics have maintained, a single moment of capitulation.66 Rather, it was another stop—albeit the last and most important stop—on Roosevelt's potholed road of cooperation with Stalin. FDR had long misjudged the despot's slave state and the tyrant himself as a good-natured, constructive partner. That misperception would dramatically affect the postwar world.
There is an even more surreal postscript to all of this: President Roosevelt may have done the unthinkable by knowingly walking into Soviet surveillance traps—not once but twice, at Tehran and Yalta. At both conferences, FDR stayed in Soviet quarters and, according to historian Gary Kern, “was bugged like no other American president in history.” Worse than that, Kern claims that Rooosevelt was aware of the trap.67
Kern, a translator, researcher, and author, painstakingly documents this in a scholarly paper so credible that it is posted at the official website of the CIA. He lays out FDR's acquaintance with bugs, the Soviet sources that confirm the surveillance, the eyewitnesses and “ear-witnesses,” Soviet archives, interviews, and primary sources that include Russian memoirs never translated into English.
If accurate, this would be another mystifying, bracing component of a sad saga. The degree to which FDR seems to have deluded himself on Stalin and the Soviets is shocking.
Yalta Regrets—Sort Of
In a cabinet meeting shortly upon his return from Yalta, FDR waxed philosophical, even spiritual, as he groped for a richer understanding of the Bolshevik bandit's magnificence. There was, the president pondered aloud to his cabinet secretaries, “something else” he had detected in Stalin, something “besides this revolutionist Bolshevist thing.” What might it have been?
The Episcopalian vestryman from Hyde Park looked upward for an answer: perhaps it had been the dictator's youthful training for the “priesthood.”68
Never mind that Stalin, a militant atheist, had been expelled from seminary en route to his merciless destruction of religion in the Soviet Union. No, FDR mused to his cabinet secretaries, perhaps this seminary influence had communicated something to Stalin about the “way in which a Christian gentleman should behave.”69
Christian gentleman, indeed. Even Conrad Black could not help but describe this FDR meditation as a rather odd reflection, though he immediately dismissed it by saying there was “not a shred of evidence that Roosevelt thought Christian decency predominated in Stalin's character.”70 Here again, FDR's owns words are not to be taken as evidence of his beliefs—at least when the words conflict with the process of constructing a saintly image of the man.
Soon, however, Roosevelt admitted having regrets about what he signed at Yalta. He realized the agreement had been far from perfect.
Among the modern FDR historians, Black shows this convincingly, marshaling two important quotations. First, the president told Adolf Berle, the State Department hand and learned adviser on things Soviet, “I didn't say the result [at Yalta] was good. I said it was the best I could do.” Second, FDR agreed with criticisms that Admiral Bill Leahy leveled against the agreement on Poland. Admiral Leahy complained, “Mr. President, this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without technically breaking it.” Roosevelt replied: “Bill, I know it. But it's the best I can do for Poland at this time.”71
Then, on March 23, 1945, FDR confided to Anna Rosenberg, a well-known businesswoman and public official during the war: “Averell [Harriman] is right. We can't do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.”72
Yes, Stalin had broken them right away. That FDR assessment came only a month after Yalta. The Soviet leader had snapped the olive branch that quickly.
It took FDR only a few weeks to deduce that he may have failed postwar Eastern Europe at Yalta. He learned quickly, but only after the conference. He had been president for twelve years prior to Yalta—during which time the Soviet tyrant was murdering tens of millions of his own citizens for his classless “utopia”—but still he had not figured out Stalin's monstrous character. This was an odd learning curve, and a fatal one.
Those who defend FDR's actions at Yalta would do well to remember that FDR criticized himself on Yalta. Roosevelt's regrets were so heartfelt that he expressed them directly to the madman in Moscow. On April 1, 1945, the president wrote to Stalin, “I cannot conceal from you the concern with which I view the development of events of mutual interest since our fruitful meeting at Yalta.”73 FDR was particularly concerned about the fate of Poland. He must have had a sickening feeling.
Stalin surely laughed at the letter.
In any case, it was too late—too late for Poland, too late for Eastern Europe, and too late for FDR, who died only days after this note to “UJ.” The whole rotten mess was now the problem of a former farmer and haberdasher from Missouri named Harry Truman.
Good Luck, Harry
This chapter on FDR cannot end with FDR. For Roosevelt's mistakes hounded his successor.
As has been well-documented, Roosevelt had told his vice president nothing about his private discussions with Churchill and Stalin, about Yalta, about the conduct of the war, about the atomic bomb, or about anything else of substance regarding the nation's security. Truman barely even saw FDR—at best a handful of times during his short stint as vice president.74 Later, General Harry Vaughan, a Truman confidant who became White House chief of staff, remembered the daunting challenges this presented to Truman when he assumed the presidenc
y under emergency conditions:
[Truman] talked to everybody that had been to Yalta; everybody that had been to Tehran and everybody that had been to Casablanca, to any of those conferences; he talked to Mrs. Roosevelt and even talked to Anna Roosevelt, the president's daughter, because she had accompanied the president. I'm sure she wasn't in any of the conferences but he thought she might have overheard some casual conversation that might give him some pointers. It was a terrific job to try to prepare himself because the Potsdam Conference was scheduled.75
Vaughan recoiled at the sight of Stalin telling Truman, “Now the president [FDR] promised me that he would.…” Stalin was not shy about filling in his own blank. Said Vaughan, “Everybody within the sound of his [Stalin's] voice suspected it was a lie from start to finish but how could you prove it?”76 (Vaughan's statement suggests that most others aside from FDR distrusted Stalin.)
With Roosevelt fully cognizant of his rapidly declining health, it is inexcusable that he did so little to prepare the president-in-waiting. Indeed, it was one of the most irresponsible things that FDR did. Truman, as president, would take legislative steps to ensure it never again happened to another vice president.
But that was later. For now, the Potsdam Conference, the final Big Three summit of World War II, was only weeks away. The end of the war and the fate of the postwar world hung in the balance. Where could Harry Truman turn? To whom could he turn?
Truman had to rely on anyone he could. As Vaughan indicated, he went to many people. Naturally, he figured the man to trust was Harry Hopkins, FDR's confidant, who had been a central player at Yalta. So Truman dispatched Hopkins to Moscow to meet with Stalin in May 1945, shortly after FDR's death. This means that FDR ill-served Harry Truman twice over, leaving the vice-president-turned-president ignorant and also in the nurturing hands of Hopkins.
Hopkins arrived in Moscow on May 25, 1945, and met with Stalin on May 26 and 27. Hopkins's representation of America in this instance is complex and hard to pin down. Some suspect him of nefarious motives, whereas others view him sympathetically, believing that Stalin, a man he had heretofore greatly admired, burned him.
On May 26 Hopkins insisted to Stalin that American “public opinion” toward Russia had been adversely affected by the “inability to carry into effect the Yalta agreement on Poland.” Stalin, in turn, blamed that failure on the British, saying that they were building up a “cordon” along the Soviet border, presumably to keep the Red Army in check. According to Robert Sherwood and other historians, Hopkins responded by saying that the United States did not support a British perimeter, but instead was happy to see “friendly countries” placed along the Soviet border.77
For Stalin, of course, “friendly countries” were totalitarian Communist regimes, Soviet puppet governments, throughout Eastern and Central Europe. Stalin greeted this with a sudden cheerfulness, saying that if such were the case, they could “easily come to terms” on Poland.78
According to historians sympathetic to Hopkins—such as Sherwood, who is favorable to the point of being obsequious—this misstep by Hopkins allowed Stalin to roll over him the next day, even as Hopkins made an allegedly impassioned appeal to the Soviets to allow American-style democratic “freedoms” in the newly occupied territories. Even historian Laurence Rees, who is more skeptical of Hopkins and FDR, argues that a well-intentioned Hopkins was subject to the Soviet despot's “bruising performance” and was “genuinely hurt by Stalin's insults.” Stalin “almost toy[ed] with the new president's emissary.”79
If this was the case, then Harry Hopkins was not a clandestine agent—“Agent 19”—helping Moscow. Instead he was a fool, a dupe, one who, for whatever absurd reason, had nearly adored Stalin all along, only to finally learn—too late—that Uncle Joe was not exactly avuncular.
There is, however, another interpretation of the meetings. For that, one can look to actual witnesses, such as Assistant Secretary of State Charles “Chip” Bohlen.
Bohlen was there, and took minutes on the meeting. According to Bohlen's record, Hopkins did not forcefully represent the American position, which was to push for free and fair elections in Poland—what FDR had expected to come from Yalta. Rather, he informed Stalin “that the United States would desire a Poland friendly to the Soviet Union, and in fact desired to see friendly countries all along the Soviet borders.” Hopkins spoke of a Soviet-“friendly” Poland in particular. Stalin, said Bohlen, responded (no doubt with a giant grin), “If that be so, we can easily come to terms in regard to Poland.”80
Bohlen added a very important insight regarding the context of these times. He said that by May 1945, the dominant view of Harry Hopkins, as well as the State Department generally, was that Stalin was trustworthy and that any post-Yalta problems were the doings of some shadowy figures behind the scenes at the Kremlin—certain generic “Red Army Marshals,” in the words of Averell Harriman, the ambassador to the Soviet Union. Hopkins was not alone when he asserted, “We felt sure we could count on him [Stalin] to be reasonable and sensible and understanding.”81
Whether Hopkins had been unwittingly duped or had deliberately sought to assist Stalin, the fate of Eastern Europe was sealed regardless. An increasingly ailing Harry Hopkins could ready for his exit into the next world. He would die only eight months later, leaving another guy named Harry—Harry Truman—with a Cold War, and leaving the people of Eastern Europe in the calloused hands of Uncle Joe.
“What He Did Not Understand”
Perhaps the most learned observer of all this theater was Chip Bohlen. Bohlen was there as the Communist movement, both at home and abroad, maneuvered throughout the war period, from the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, to the Nazi assault on Britain in 1940, to the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, to FDR's dealings with Stalin after December 1941, and on through Yalta in February 1945.
Bohlen was a renowned diplomat, admired by both Democrats and Republicans.82 He was an insider at some of the great events of the twentieth century. One of FDR's top aides, he attended the wartime conferences from Tehran to Yalta. After Roosevelt's death he continued to meet with Stalin, along with Harry Hopkins, under the leadership of President Truman.
Bohlen had the warmest respect and affection for FDR. Thus his abiding regret over the president's handling of the Soviets carries real credibility. He later recorded: “As far as the Soviets were concerned, I do not think that Roosevelt had any real comprehension of the great gulf that separated the thinking of a Bolshevik from a non-Bolshevik, and particularly from an American.” Somewhat sheepishly, Bohlen continued: “He [FDR] felt that Stalin viewed the world somewhat in the same light as he did, and that Stalin's hostility and distrust, which were evident in the wartime conferences, were due to the neglect that Soviet Russia had suffered at the hands of other countries for years after the [Bolshevik] Revolution.”83
Those “other countries” included America. Under Woodrow Wilson, of course, the United States had sent thousands of troops to battle the Bolsheviks in the 1918–21 Russian Civil War. Also the Republican administrations of the 1920s had refused to recognize the Soviet Union. Stalin's Russia, FDR judged, had been misunderstood and unfairly maligned—a common view among American progressives at the time. But that view was badly misguided, as Bohlen explained: “What he [FDR] did not understand was that Stalin's enmity was based on profound ideological convictions.”84
In other words, Stalin was an aggressive, mass-murdering, conquest-driven, ideological Marxist-Leninist. Uncle Joe and Uncle Sam had nothing in common. FDR didn't get that one quite right. And from the start to the finish of his administration, the great New Dealer was greatly trashed, hated, and duped by Communists at home and abroad, both far away and all too close.
10
THE HOLLYWOOD FRONT
It wasn't only politics, presidents, and Washington that the Communists aimed to disrupt. There was also culture, movies, and Hollywood. MGM was a target of opportunity every bit as much as FDR.
Vladimir Len
in said that “of all the arts, for us the most important is cinema.”1 Grigori Zinoviev, Lenin's head of the Comintern, declared that motion pictures “can and must become a mighty weapon of Communist propaganda and for the enlightening of the widest working masses.”2 The Soviet sense of the significance of film was made unmistakably clear in March 1928 at the first Party Conference on Cinema.3
The Soviets realized, of course, that nowhere was the movie industry as prolific, advanced, and influential as in the United States of America, especially in Hollywood's Golden Age: the 1930s and 1940s. Hollywood's stars and starlets were revered by adoring masses. Inevitably, then, Communists from Moscow to New York set their sights on Tinseltown; their penetration became much deeper and more pervasive than liberals dare acknowledge.
Taking a leadership role were Communist union heads and screenwriters, with the latter poised to provide indoctrination via their crafting of scripts. In 1946 Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo declared that “every screenwriter worth his salt wages the battle in his own way—a kind of literary guerrilla warfare.”4