Dupes

  38. Border troops inside the USSR were alerted as early as 00:30 Moscow time on June 22, 1941, which would have been late afternoon June 21 in Washington. German pilots were bombing Soviet cities by 3:00 a.m. Moscow time on June 22.

  39. Henry Winston, “Our Tasks Today,” report to the national committee of the Young Communist League, July 19, 1941. The text was published in Clarity, the self-described “Theoretical Organ of the Young Communist League, U.S.A.,” Summer 1941, vol. 2, no. 2, 30–40.

  40. The emergency meeting would be held July 19–20, 1941.

  41. I cited this same document earlier. It is from Wilkins in a November 22, 1949, letter to Communist William L. Patterson, who headed the front group the Civil Rights Congress. Wilkins and the NAACP made it available to the media in a November 23, 1949, press release.

  Chapter 9: Duping FDR: “Uncle Joe” and “Buddies”

  1. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 262.

  2. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York: Harvest Books, 2002), 114.

  3. Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, 642–44. Hopkins sent the cable to FDR from the U.S. embassy in Moscow on August 1.

  4. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, 340.

  5. Among others directly citing this quote, see Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, 340; John T. Flynn, While You Slept (New York: Devin-Adair, 1951), 38; Frazier Hunt, The Untold Story of Douglas MacArthur (New York: Devin-Adair, 1954), 191; and Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (New York: Penguin, 2008), 204. On Hopkins and Stalin's “nationalism,” see also Donald W. Treadgold and Herbert J. Ellison, Twentieth-Century Russia, ninth edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 296.

  6. Jan Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory (New York: Doubleday, 1947), 231; and Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, 340–41.

  7. John R. Deane, Strange Alliance (New York: Viking, 1947), 43.

  8. The harshest critics of Stalin's vicious idiocy were the Soviets themselves, including Stalin's eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev.

  9. Some of the best recent work in this area has been done by Ronald Radosh. See, for instance Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

  10. Romerstein and Breindel, The Venona Secrets, 210–11.

  11. A copy of the receipt is published in ibid., 210–11, 468.

  12. Ibid., 210–11.

  13. FDR said this on January 8, 1934, in his welcome of the Soviet ambassador. The full quote reads: “I trust that you will inform His Excellency, the President of the Central Executive Committee, the Governments , and the people of the Soviet Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics that their kind messages of good-will are deeply appreciated and that I send in return sincere wishes for their peaceful progress and happiness.” Source: The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 3, 24–25.

  14. The quote attributed to FDR (in an alleged statement to Joe Davies, of all people) is: “I can't take communism, nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil.” See, among others, John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6; John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2006), 93; and Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 38n. Conrad Black records that “Roosevelt was much more cautious” than Churchill about supporting the Communists after they were attacked by Nazi Germany. Black cautions that FDR “was no admirer of the Soviet regime, as he had often made clear.” Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 640.

  15. A case where FDR was openly critical of the Soviet system, referring not to Stalin (by name) but to the “dictatorship” of “Russia,” was his February 10, 1940, address to delegates from the American Youth Congress in Washington, DC.

  16. Published in Warren Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, vol. I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 421.

  17. Jan Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory (New York: Doubleday, 1947), 231; and Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, 340–41.

  18. Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 52.

  19. Will Brownell and Richard N. Billings, So Close to Greatness: A Biography of William C. Bullitt (New York: Macmillan, 1987); and Francis Sempa, “William C. Bullitt: Diplomat and Prophet,” American Diplomacy, February 2003.

  20. Brownell and Billings, So Close to Greatness, 278.

  21. The quote has been published in a number of sources. Bullitt's original August 10, 1943, memo, as well as his accounting of FDR's response, is published in Orville H. Bullitt, ed., For the President—Personal and Secret: Correspondence Between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 595–99. It is also published in William C. Bullitt, “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” Life, August 30, 1948, 94.

  22. Bullitt made the comments on “factual evidence” and “wishful thinking” in a memo to FDR earlier in the year, on January 29, 1943.

  23. I first encountered the Hopkins portion in a book by conservative author Thomas Woods, and was simply shocked by it. Source: Thomas E. Woods Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004), 184. It took me time to track down the original quotation, but I found that Woods had it right. Wilson Miscamble includes the Hopkins portion in his account, From Roosevelt to Truman (page 52). A book by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, two fair historians, does not include it, inserting, instead, an ellipsis. See Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000), 261. Historian Martin McCauley uses part of the quote, but leaves out the Hopkins portion. See Martin McCauley, The Soviet Union: 1917–1991 (London: Longman, 1993), 170. The worst offender is Conrad Black, who not only breaks up the quote, eliminating the Harry Hopkins portion, but then maligns William Bullitt's credibility, writing: “It is inconceivable that Roosevelt would have said anything so foolish as Bullitt claims.” Black writes: “William Bullitt became more erratic than ever following his loss of influence after forcing Sumner Welles out of government. He fathered the claim that Roosevelt had a hunch that if he gave Stalin ’everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return … he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.’” Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1076 –77. Additional examples of Roosevelt biographies that do not include the Bullitt quote, either in part or full (with or without Hopkins), include: Nathan Miller, F.D.R.: An Intimate History (New York: William Morrow, 1992); and Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Little Brown, 1990). An acclaimed and extremely sympathetic biographer of Roosevelt who does not cite the quote is William Leuchtenburg. See William Edward Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and William Edward Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

  24. These numbers are easy to find today. For a fairly contemporary and very widely read analysis that includes precisely these numbers, see Fulton Sheen, Communism and the Conscience of the West (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1948).

  25. Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Tide Turns 1943, vol. 12 (New York: Random House, 1950), 558.

  26. FDR used this term of endearment, for instance, in an August 26, 1944, note to Churchill. For the full text, see Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, vol. 3.

  27. As relayed by FDR to Frances Perkins. See Perkins's full account: Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: The Viking Press, 1946), 83–85.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid., 85.

  31. Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 882.

  32. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 83.

 
33. For the record, I was one of the sixty-five presidential scholars included in C-SPAN's survey of the presidents published for Presidents’ Day 2009. Although I did lower my score on FDR in the category of foreign policy because of his dealings with Stalin and the USSR, overall I ranked him very high, among the top four or five of presidents. So what I've described here is not a reflection of my overall evaluation of Roosevelt and his presidency.

  34. Published in Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, vol. 3.

  35. FDR referring to Stalin as “UJ” in correspondence dated June 28, 1943, which is the earliest existing reference, to my knowledge. See Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, vol. 2.

  36. As an example, Biddle noted of FDR: “He said that for a year and a half he had been trying to persuade ‘Winnie’—as he always calls Churchill—to agree to return Hong Kong to the Chinese after the war. Winnie's response had always been a grunt.” Quoted, among others, in Freidel, 493. Freidel cites Biddle's notes from December 17, 1943, held at the Library of Congress. Freidel also cites Harold Ickes's diary notes from December 19, 1943, also held at the Library of Congress. See also John M. Blum, ed., The Price of Vision: Diary of Henry A. Wallace 1942–1946 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 279–84.

  37. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 83.

  38. Ibid., 83–84.

  39. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman, 53.

  40. Among others, see Benjamin B. Fischer, “The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field,” Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1999–2000, available online at the CIA website, www.cia.gov; and Laurence Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis, and the West (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 52–55.

  41. There are several sources on the Earle episode, including Fischer, “The Katyn Controversy”; Allen Paul, Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin's Polish Massacre (New York: MacMillan, 1991), 314–15; and Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors, 247–50. The most interesting recent account is the 2009 PBS documentary to which Rees's book was a companion volume, both by the same name. The documentary includes filmed footage of interviews with Earle's son. Earle himself died in 1974. The Earle account was first publicly exposed when Congress held hearings on Katyn in 1951 and 1952, though FDR's hagiographers were quick to let it drop.

  42. See Evans, Blacklisted by History, 87–93.

  43. Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism, 281–83.

  44. Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory, 30–32; and Remarks of Congressman John Lesinski, Congressional Record, June 17, 1943, 6000. See also Evans, Blacklisted by History, 90–91.

  45. Romerstein and Breindel, The Venona Secrets, 403.

  46. Corliss and Margaret Lamont, Russia Day by Day, 249.

  47. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on the Katyn Forest Massacre. The Katyn Forest Massacre: Hearings Before the Select Committee on Conduct and Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, 82nd Congress, 1st and 2nd Session, 1951–1952 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1952), 2197.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid., 2204–7; Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors, 248–49; and Rees's PBS documentary, part 2 of a three-part series.

  50. The Katyn Forest Massacre: Hearings Before the Select Committee on Conduct and Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, 2204–7; Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors, 248–49; and Rees's PBS documentary, part 2 of a three-part series.

  51. Eugen Kovacs, “East Poland Reported Starving Because Russia Is Taking Food: Refugees Say Many Have Been Deported to Interior of Soviet Union,” New York Times, April 15, 1940, A5.

  52. The Katyn Forest Massacre: Hearings Before the Select Committee on Conduct and Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, 2204–7; Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors, 248–49; and Rees's PBS documentary, part 2 of a three-part series.

  53. The Katyn Forest Massacre: Hearings Before the Select Committee on Conduct and Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, 2204–7; Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors, 248–49; and Rees's PBS documentary, part 2 of a three-part series.

  54. Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors, 249, 423n; and Rees's PBS documentary, part 2 of a three-part series. Rees cites a facsimile of the March 24, 1945, letter published by George Earle in his article “FDR's Tragic Mistake,” Confidential, August 1958 (vol. 6, no. 3).

  55. Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors, 249–50; and Rees's PBS documentary, part 2 of a three-part series. See also Fischer, “The Katyn Controversy,” which also reports the dispatching to Samoa.

  56. Ibid.

  57. Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors, 38–39.

  58. In a major speech in Latvia in May 2005, Bush condemned Yalta as following in “the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [the Hitler-Stalin Pact].” On Reagan and Yalta, see Kengor, The Crusader, 42–43, 87, 106.

  59. Jacob Heilbrunn, “Once Again, the Big Yalta Lie,” Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2005. Heilbrunn's op-ed piece was in response to Bush's comments on Yalta in Latvia in May 2005. For responses to both, from the Right, see Editorial, “Yalta Regrets,” National Review Online, May 11, 2005; and Arnold Beichman, “FDR's Failure Not Forgotten,” Human Events, May 13, 2005.

  60. Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1080.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Hiss at Yalta is a subject currently receiving attention in the research of M. Stanton Evans and Herb Romerstein, who are investigating the subject, and take a very different view than Black.

  63. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948), 869–70.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Ibid.

  66. Though his language is more restrained than mine here, Wilson Miscamble expresses a similar view. He uses the phrase “single moment of surrender or betrayal.” See Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman, 61.

  67. Gary Kern, “How ‘Uncle Joe’ Bugged FDR: The Lesson of History,” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 47, no. 1, 2003, available online at the CIA website, www.cia.gov.

  68. Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1080.

  69. Ibid.

  70. Ibid.

  71. Ibid., 1081.

  72. Beichman, “FDR's Failure Not Forgotten”; and Susan Butler, ed., My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 27.

  73. Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, The Conferences of Malta and Yalta, 1945 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1960), vol. 5, 194–96.

  74. I detail this at length in Paul Kengor, Wreath Layer or Policy Player? The Vice President's Role in Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), 22–25.

  75. For this and similar quotations, including from Ambassador Robert Murphy, see ibid., 23. The original source for the quote is Vaughan's oral-history testimony at the Truman Library. Many historians, especially scholars of Harry Truman and the vice presidency, have made use of the quotation, the latter particularly including Marie Natoli, who has done excellent work on this subject.

  76. Ibid.

  77. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 851–55.

  78. Ibid.

  79. Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors, 362–66.

  80. Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, The Conference of Berlin, 1945 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1960), vol. 1, 28.

  81. Rees, World War II Behind Closed Doors, 351–52.

  82. Many conservatives, however, did not like Bohlen at all. On this, see Evans, Blacklisted by History, 481–89.

  83. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 211.

  84. Ibid., 211.

  Chapter 10: The Hollywood Front

  1. Other versions of the quote, based on slightly differing translations, have Lenin saying, “O
f all the arts, the motion picture is for us the most important.” That version was widely quoted in the Communist press. To cite one instance, this quotation appears on page 502 of the September 1925 edition of The Workers Monthly. Another commonly quoted variation is: “You must remember that of all the arts, for us the most important is cinema.” For sources on this version, see Anna M. Lawton, The Red Screen (London: Routledge, 2002), 58; and Ian Christie, ed., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939 (London: Routledge, 1994), 56–57.

  2. “Special Magazine Supplement,” Daily Worker, August 15, 1925, 7.

  3. Lawton, The Red Screen, 58

  4. Peter Hanson, Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood Rebel: A Critical Survey and Filmography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 79.