Fear Itself (56 page)

VII.

T
HESE DILEMMAS
underpinned discussions at Yalta in early February 1945, when President Roosevelt, two months before his death at Warm Springs, traveled 4,883 miles by sea and 1,275 by air to the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine to confer with Winston Churchill and summit host Josef Stalin. Like vast areas of the Soviet Union, the Crimea bore palpable signs of war. Its scarred green hills and Black Sea beaches had witnessed the mass murder of Jews and Gypsies. The Crimea had undergone extensive physical destruction, and, after liberation by the Red Army, had become party to the mass deportation of the indigenous Tatar population, an ethnic cleansing of nearly 200,000, to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other distant destinations, an action that was justified as a response to instances of local collaboration with Nazi Germany.
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Protected from such unpleasantness in the restored grand ballroom of the white-stoned Livadia Palace, which had been built by Czar Nicholas II in 1910, the three leaders charted a course for the world war’s uncertain aftermath.
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“We had the world at our feet,” Churchill recalled, “twenty-five million men marching at our orders by land and sea.”
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As partners in a common cause, he added, “we seemed to be friends.”
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Marked by a spirit of give-and-take, the strange bedfellows appeared ready to guide future global relations. Expectations ran high. Writing in 1943, at the height of World War II, Walter Lippmann identified America’s “primary interest” as that of ensuring that “no European power should emerge which is capable of aggression outside of the European continent. Therefore,” he concluded, “our two natural and permanent allies have been and are Britain and Russia.” He counseled that “combined action by America, Britain, and Russia is the irreducible minimum guarantee of the security of each of them, and the only condition under which it is possible even to begin to establish any wider order of security.”
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The war, it seemed, had been less a fight against dictatorship or totalitarianism than against a particular kind of repression, and its end would focus on finding a durable framework for global peace, not dwelling on past behavior.

Yalta concluded with a host of signed agreements. Some concerned how to “destroy German militarism and Nazism,” defeat Japan, and exchange prisoners of war. Looking ahead, the Allies demarcated future European and Asian borders, designated zones of occupation to govern postwar Germany, and organized the troop movements that, in fact, would determine patterns of Soviet and Western control in Europe. They also came to an understanding about how to build the United Nations. The February 11 communiqué was nothing if not optimistic. Using the language of mutual understanding and cooperation, it argued that “victory in this war and establishment of the proposed international organization will provide the greatest opportunity in all history to create in the years to come the essential conditions of such a peace.”
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Even with their divergent ideologies and values, and mutual suspicions about motives, Britain, the United States, and the USSR left the summit with a shared sense that prospects for future cooperation based on good-spirited compromises about territory, military affairs, and international governance had been secured. “I am profoundly impressed with the friendly attitude of Stalin and Molotov,” Churchill cabled to the deputy prime minister of his coalition government, the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee. “It is a different Russian world to any I have seen hitherto.”
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Likewise, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Union’s minister of foreign affairs, telegrammed his country’s embassies that “the general atmosphere at the conference was of a friendly nature, and one could feel an effort to come to an agreement on contested questions.” Harry Hopkins, FDR’s closest long-term adviser, chimed in accordingly, reporting to Robert Sherwood, his biographer, how “we really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for and talking about for so many years.” The atmosphere, said Roosevelt at a mid-summit dinner, “was as that of a family.”
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To be sure, each leader was most pleased by different, distinct outcomes.
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Looking forward to a peace based on collective security, Roosevelt delighted in Stalin’s agreement to embrace the UN project with a Security Council of the great powers as its core. He welcomed the USSR’s decision to join the fight against Japan three months after victory over Germany. FDR was persuaded that the existence of the United Nations would make it impossible for the United States to return to an isolationist stance, and believed that it was imperative to integrate the Soviet Union into a stable postwar order.
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He also thought Stalin to be a reasonable interlocutor, driven less by ideological passion than by traditional Russian interests, and thus willing to subordinate its ideological objectives to build an acceptable peace.
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Even the more skeptical Churchill was confident that durable spheres of influence had been obtained through statecraft, with the Soviets, as a key example, conceding British power in Greece and promising to compromise the interests of that country’s Communist comrades in exchange for a free hand in Bulgaria and Romania.
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In this way, he was convinced, a mix of tacit and explicit understandings for a concert of power would fill the vacuum caused by a Nazi collapse.
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Stalin, in turn, gained recognition for new borders of the USSR: The Soviet-Polish boundary was moved between one hundred and two hundred miles farther west than before the war, though not quite to the western limits of czarist Russia.
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He also secured the annexation of the Baltic states, Western Ukraine, and Western Belarus. He also understood that within the scope of what was agreed at Yalta, the Soviet Union’s overwhelming military presence in much of Germany and Eastern Europe would guarantee Communist domination, most notably in Poland, which had already been conquered from Germany by the Red Army. With ideological gains and a favorable security structure established for the Soviet Union, good relations with the country’s wartime allies could be maintained.

The parties thus emerged from Yalta convinced that future stability was at hand. After all, the line that would soon come to separate Eastern Europe from Western Europe was already established by troop positions on the ground. They also could take satisfaction that Hitler had failed in his persistent attempts to divide the Allies during the war by playing on their inherent tension and wariness.
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The balance between principles and the realities of global power the Big Three had found at the summit seemed, at the time, to confirm a position that had been advanced a year earlier, in 1944, by a leading international relations specialist, William T. R. Fox. Coining the term
superpower
to take account of the massive differences in power between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, on the one side, and the rest of the world, on the other, Fox looked forward to “the high politics of the postwar world.” He counseled policymakers to identify “a definition of the national interest of each in such terms that each will find it possible to collaborate with the others to maintain a stable and just postwar world.” This goal could be achieved, he thought, despite the yawning ideological gap because the USSR’s demand for new territory was unlikely to be extreme, and because, as he rightly predicted, “the British and American governments will not make war on the Soviet Union to prevent the creation of a near-communist vassal Poland.”
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“This was,” McGeorge Bundy wrote in 1949, “the high tide of the Grand Alliance.” Unlike those of earlier wartime summits, Yalta’s results were less “a council of war than . . . a clear harbinger of peacetime cooperation.”
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For participants and informed observers alike, it seemed almost inconceivable in early 1945 that within a short period the United States would move decisively away from Yalta’s foreign policy orientation to the Soviet Union. Before Yalta, even the hardheaded Walter Lippmann was foretelling that “Russia’s distrust of the Western Powers, which is the counterpart of their distrust of Russia, can be finally overcome by our support of a peace settlement which ends conclusively the German and Japanese threat to Russian security.” He declared that “the fact is that Marshal Stalin has repeatedly affirmed the democratic principle in respect to his dealings with his neighbors within the Russian Orbit.”
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Public opinion also backed U.S efforts to find a common basis of cooperation with this wartime ally.
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At Yalta’s conclusion, none of the participants or informed observers projected how the Grand Alliance would give way to the Cold War, how quickly Soviet and Communist control of Eastern Europe would become absolute, or how ambiguities about whether liberal democracies or Soviet-dominated regimes would define the contours of liberated Europe would quickly underpin Manichean conflicts. None anticipated the retrospective malign assessments of Yalta’s significance that later became common, especially in the United States. None could know whether the United States would maintain a long-term involvement in European and Asian affairs. And none fully comprehended the ways in which World War II would produce a legacy of perpetual fear.
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Yalta’s agreements were inherently unstable because they combined two radically different impulses. First was a set of principled guidelines consistent with liberal political values, including self-determination and national independence, democratic rights, and multilateral global governance of the kind that been embraced as Anglo-American values in the Atlantic Charter of 1941. Second was the impulse of international-relations realism based on might, power, and interests. Looking back, Summer Welles, who had served as undersecretary of state from 1937 to 1943, argued that because the wartime decision to create the United Nations had not been accompanied by a decision to settle outstanding territorial problems when the Soviet Union was still being pressed by the Wehrmacht, the ambitions of collective global security had been dangerously compromised.
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As it turned out, countervailing qualities did more than create zones of suspicion and discord in world politics. It became clear within weeks that the USSR would not permit Poland to be governed by a coalition of Communist and non-Communist parties, or allow Romania to have anything but a Communist regime. By late spring 1945, with Roosevelt now dead, the comity of Yalta had begun to dissolve. With the Soviet Union violating the broad principles it had signed on to, the United States, now led by the erstwhile Missouri haberdasher, senator, and vice president Harry Truman, began to insist that Yalta had not given Moscow a blank check to proceed as it wished within its zone of influence. By the time the Big Three next met at Potsdam’s Cecilienhof Palace from mid-July to early August, each, now “both friends and enemies,” had become more rigid, though still ready to negotiate in ways that ratified Europe’s divisions.
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James Byrnes, who played a key role in the negotiations, thought Potsdam “would provide a basis for the early restoration of stability in Europe,” and concurrently observed that the American delegation returning from conquered Germany “probably was less sanguine than the one that had departed from Yalta.”
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Though there was no immediate confrontation, and though Truman still hoped for decent, if not warm, relations with the Soviet Union, Cold War clouds loomed.
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Within a year, the landscape was transformed. Flash points of conflict in Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Iran roiled the Middle East. The consolidation of Communist power in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, as well as revelations about Soviet atomic spying during the Manhattan Project, produced a baleful climate of conflict.
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Soviet power, once viewed as analgesic, came to seem a potent threat to the West’s democracies. By March 5, 1946, when Winston Churchill was announcing, in Harry Truman’s Missouri, that “an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent,” it was clear that Stalin would not risk the possibility of non-Communist governments in the East for fear that they would almost inevitably gravitate toward the West.
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Four months later, on July 1 and July 25, the United States conducted atomic weapons tests at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, events that were witnessed not only by journalists and members of Congress but also by observers from the USSR. The fierce atomic capacity possessed by the United States was on public display.
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By August, relations with the Soviet Union seemed too fraught to proceed with the third planned test. With its cancellation, the Joint Task Force in Washington held a farewell party, at the end of which an angel food cake in the form of an eighteen-inch-high mock-up of a bomb’s mushroom cloud was wheeled out for all to view.
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VIII.

W
ITH
Y
ALTA
already a failed relic of World War II diplomacy, and with the shift from anti-Communism, a new set of concerns appeared on America’s political horizon. It was clear that the United States had decisively supplanted Britain as the West’s global leader, and so, after the war, it fell primarily to Americans to manage a set of difficult problems and paradoxes. How should friends and enemies be adjudged? What degree of force ought to be mobilized to secure liberty? How might a national security state be organized within a liberal democracy? The questions, many reflecting grave concerns, mounted quickly. Which weapons and what strategies should the United States employ? When, and to what extent, could surveillance be conducted and secrecy permitted despite commitments to individual rights and the open procedures of democratic politics? At what point would a concern with subversion and espionage stray from a legitimate worry to a distorted patriotism, an excessive fear of conspiracy, and the inflation of popular anxieties?
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