Roosevelt (100 page)

“We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust—or with fear. We can gain it only if we proceed with the understanding and the confidence and the courage which flow from conviction….”

Just two weeks later, as its fighter escort circled overhead, the “Sacred Cow” touched down on the icy runway of the Soviet airport of Saki in the Crimea. Molotov, Stettinius, and Harriman climbed aboard to greet the President and his party. When Churchill landed in his plane a little later, Mike Reilly helped his boss into a jeep. With the Prime Minister plodding along at his side and a crowd of service cameramen walking backward as they shot their pictures, the President moved slowly in his jeep to a guard of honor. The soldiers stood frozen to attention, their commander holding his sword in front of him like a great icicle. The band played the “Star-Spangled Banner,” “God Save the King,” and the “Internationale.”

To Churchill’s physician the President looked old and thin and shrunken in his big cape as he stared at the guard, his face drawn and his mouth open. But once he was transferred to a limousine, with Anna at his side, and moving toward Yalta, ninety miles distant, Roosevelt watched everything with lively interest—the endless line of guards, many of them young girls with Tommy guns; the gutted buildings and burned-out tanks; and later the snow-covered mountains through which the caravan threaded its way before descending to the coast of the Black Sea. Soon the President was installed in Livadia Palace, a fifty-room summer place of the czars overlooking gardens filled with cypress, cedar, and yew trees.

From the terrace of the palace the President could look north to a striking panorama of mountains overlooking the shore line. One of these mountains resembled a huge bear hunched over with its mouth in the sea. A Crimean legend had it that this was the king of the bears and that years ago a beautiful young girl had been abandoned on the shore and had been adopted by the king and brought up by the bears. Then a prince had sailed from across the sea and had fallen in love with the girl and had taken her away in his ship. Desperately the king had put his mouth down to drink the sea dry and rescue the girl from the stranded boat, and he had drunk and drunk….

Many of his countrymen felt, when Roosevelt arrived in Yalta early in February 1945, that the Russian bear was gorging itself on neighboring lands and waters in a ferocious quest for security and power. The President shared this fear. He did not arrive in Yalta with any misapprehension of the appetite or the ambitions of the bear. He made the trip as a supreme act of faith in his own capacity to evoke the best in a friend and ally, to reach agreement on immediate issues, to build a new world order that would assign the old ways of international relations—spheres of influence and balances of power and war itself—to the scrap heap.

“I am inclined to think that at the meeting with Marshal Stalin and the Prime Minister I can put things on a somewhat higher level than they have been for the past two or three months,” he had written to Harold Laski a few days before leaving.

He was staking everything on the face-to-face encounter with Stalin; he knew that the trip itself would be an ordeal. He had begged the Marshal to meet with him in Scotland, and later in Malta or Athens or Cyprus or anywhere else in the quiet Mediterranean, but Stalin pleaded illness this time and was as obdurate as ever about leaving his homeland. After crossing the Atlantic on the
Quincy,
he had spent a day at Malta, where he lunched with Churchill, Eden, and Stettinius and conferred with the Joint Chiefs and the Combined Chiefs, and then had flown overnight to Saki. All the reports of Yalta were unfavorable—the buildings had been left empty of everything but lice, the nearest airfield was more than an hour away, Allied communications ships could not go there because of mines and had to be stationed in Sevastopol—but nothing could deflect Roosevelt from his aim to meet with Stalin.

The time seemed ripe for great achievements around the peace table, and so did the company that gathered at Yalta. Victory over Germany was clearly in sight. By the end of January the Russians had invested Budapest, captured Warsaw, overrun East Prussia, and fanned out toward Stettin, Danzig, and the lower reaches of the Oder; the Allies had recovered from the Battle of the Bulge and were mobilizing for a great push eastward, meanwhile maintaining heavy air attacks despite bad weather. In the Far East American troops were closing in on Manila. To Yalta had come the politicians who had forged the grand coalition and the soldiers who were executing the destruction of Nazi Germany. In Roosevelt’s party were the old hands, including Hopkins, Leahy, and Marshall, and also some faces new to Big Three conferences—Stettinius, Byrnes, the State Department’s Alger Hiss, a specialist in international organization, Admiral Land, General Somervell, and even Boss Ed Flynn of the Bronx. With Churchill were Eden and Clark Kerr, Britain’s Ambassador to Russia, and the usual big assemblage of soldiers and sailors, and the gifted permanent officials Sir Alexander Cadogan and Sir Edward Bridges. With Stalin were Molotov, Vishinsky, Maisky, and Gromyko.

The discussions would range across the globe, remake a good part of the map, and reshape the structure of world power. But Roosevelt, for all his wide interests and darting intelligence, was focusing on three questions on the eve of Yalta: Poland, Soviet participation in the Pacific war, and the new United Nations organization. Each of these in turn would embody the harshest choices and dilemmas for his statecraft: the relation of foreign
policy to domestic politics, of immediate military needs to long-time political considerations, of opportunistic compromise to lofty hopes for the postwar comity of nations.

For Roosevelt the new international organization was by far the most important issue on the Yalta conference table. There was no question about an organization being established; the question was how much power it would have and how that power would be organized. Early in December Roosevelt had urged on Stalin that the great powers exercise moral leadership by agreeing that on procedural matters all parties to a dispute should abstain from voting, but Stalin had flatly insisted on the principle of great-power unanimity. Harriman cabled an explanation of why the Soviets were demanding the right to veto consideration by the proposed council of all matters, even peaceful procedures. The main reason, he said, was simply their suspicion of other nations.

It was this kind of pervasive suspicion the President was determined to overcome in private, face-to-face meetings with the Soviet leaders. Stalin and Mototov had hardly arrived at Livadia Palace in their big black Packard on the opening day of the conference, February 4, and sat down in the former Czar’s dark-paneled study when the President was telling them how struck he was by the extent of German destruction in the Crimea. He was more bloodthirsty toward the Germans than he had been a year ago, he said, and he hoped that the Marshal would again propose a toast to the execution of 50,000 officers of the German Army. Everyone was more bloodthirsty than a year ago, Stalin said. After discussing military developments, Roosevelt asked about Stalin’s meeting with de Gaulle; Stalin seemed mainly impressed by France’s military weakness. Roosevelt told his old yarn about how de Gaulle had compared himself to Joan of Arc and Clemenceau.

He would now tell the Marshal something indiscreet, the President went on, since he would not wish to say it in front of the Prime Minister, namely that the British for two years had had the idea of artificially building up France into a strong power that could maintain troops on the eastern border to hold the line long enough for Britain to assemble an army. The British were a peculiar people, he said, and wished to have their cake and eat it. Stalin did not disagree. The mildly anti-British exchanges must have seemed to Roosevelt an auspicious start to his effort to establish personal rapport with Stalin.

Roosevelt and the two Russians proceeded directly to the first plenary meeting, which was devoted wholly to a military review by the generals and admirals. At a small dinner given by the President in the evening, Stalin was in good humor, as was Churchill, who even toasted the proletarian masses of the world.
But as Stalin drank his vodka, covertly mixing it with water, and rose to dozens of toasts, he spoke in favor of great-power supremacy so vehemently that to Eden his attitude seemed grim, almost sinister. Nor was the Marshal to be disarmed by pleasantries. When Roosevelt, at the height of the conviviality, mentioned to him that he and Churchill called him Uncle Joe, Stalin flared up in anger. Molotov smoothed things over. Later, after Roosevelt and Stalin left, the others discussed the unanimity problem in the new world organization. Churchill was inclining to the Russian view, he said, and promptly fell into a stiff argument with Eden, who feared the reaction of the smaller nations.

It was an ill-boding start for Roosevelt’s supreme aim at Yalta. To make things worse, the Soviet leaders were still requesting sixteen votes in the proposed Assembly. When Stettinius presented the detailed American proposals for the new organization at the third plenary session, Stalin was at his most surly and suspicious. He baited Churchill over the possibility that Egypt in the Assembly might demand the return of the Suez Canal. He implied broadly that the Anglo-Americans were ganging up on him. He said that his colleagues in Moscow could not forget how at the instigation of the French and British the League of Nations during the war with Finland had expelled the Soviet Union and isolated it and crusaded against it. Roosevelt sat through all this patiently, intervening only to insist that Big Three unity was the keystone to an international system.

The next day Molotov suddenly shifted and declared Roosevelt’s voting proposals acceptable. Then almost in the same breath he mentioned the request at Dumbarton Oaks for sixteen seats for the Soviet republics. He would now be satisfied with the admission of three or even two of the republics—Ukrainian, White Russian, and Lithuanian. They had borne the greatest sacrifices of the war.

Even while expressing his pleasure at the shift, Roosevelt recognized the dilemma he faced. “This is not so good!” he wrote on a chit to Stettinius. He had come to Yalta planning to reject the sixteen-seat request, a proposal that would offend both the idealists and the cynics at home. Now the Russians were reducing this to two extra votes, and accepting his voting plan for the world organization. It was the moment for a gesture on his part, but he feared accepting the two extra votes. For a while he kept talking in order to delay a showdown, until Hopkins noticed Stalin’s impatience—or was it annoyance?—at Roosevelt’s failure to reciprocate.

During the next twenty-four hours Roosevelt was under heavy pressure from outside—and perhaps from inside himself—to endorse the two extra seats for the Soviet Union. The British, with an eye to their own empire and dominions, were siding with the Russians.
Stettinius seemed sympathetic to the idea. Clearly any further delay or division might imperil the whole dream of a United Nations. If he moved now he might get the whole conference held by late April in the United States. At the next plenary meeting he endorsed the two extra votes, but only on the understanding that later the United Nations conference itself would grant the votes, with Big Three support.

© Low, world copyright reserved, reprinted by permission of the Trustees of Sir David Low’s Estate and Lady Madeline Low

Roosevelt’s concession disturbed Byrnes and Leahy. The war mobilizer reminded his chief how the opponents of the League of Nations had contended that London, because of the dominions, would have five votes in the League Assembly to Washington’s one. He and Flynn later persuaded the President to request British and Russian support for an extra two votes for the United States if needed. Churchill and Stalin both said they would agree to the request if made.

The three leaders were in a mood of self-congratulation when they dined at Stalin’s Yusupov Palace a few hours after the initial agreement on extra seats. Stalin toasted Churchill as the bravest governmental figure in the world, as the leader of a nation that had stood alone against Germany at a time when the rest of the world was falling flat on its face before Hitler. Churchill saluted Stalin as the leader of the nation that had broken the back of the
German war machine. Stalin then toasted Roosevelt as a man whose country had not been seriously threatened but who had had perhaps a better concept of national interest than any other leader, especially in supplying war aid. Roosevelt, in replying, said he felt the atmosphere of the dinner was that of a family, as were the relations among the three countries.

Stalin was in an expansive, almost philosophical, mood. He was talking too much, like an old man, he said. “But I want to drink to our alliance.” It must not lose its character of intimacy and frankness.

“In an alliance the allies should not deceive each other,” Stalin continued. “Perhaps that is naïve? Experienced diplomatists may say, ‘Why should I not deceive my ally?’ But I as a naïve man think it best not to deceive my ally even if he is a fool. Possibly our alliance is so firm just because we do not deceive each other; or is it because it is not so easy to deceive each other…?