Roosevelt (95 page)

Politically, the victory concealed some weaknesses. The
Republicans had been defeated, but not the two congressional parties; the “unholy” coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans would still largely control Congress, at least on domestic affairs. Roosevelt’s popular-vote margin of 3.6 million votes out of 48 million cast was the narrowest since Wilson’s hairline victory over Hughes in 1916. In retrospect it would seem remarkable that a forty-two-year-old governor with experience in neither war nor diplomacy could come so close to toppling a world leader at the height of a global war. Most important, events in eastern Europe were threatening to erode the very premises on which Roosevelt had won the election and made solemn commitments to the American people.

Europe was trembling with hope and fear, change and convulsion. As the Germans were driven out of France and Greece and the vast areas overrun by the Red Army, tormenting political problems flared up in their wake. Roosevelt had hoped to postpone politics until after the war was won, but political problems would not wait—especially those of eastern Europe.

For months now, Poland had linked war and politics, ancient quarrels and future hopes, Chicago ward bosses and Kremlin strategists. On the prompting of Roosevelt and others, Stalin saw Mikolajczyk in Moscow early in August, only to urge the “émigré group” to come to terms with the Committee of National Liberation, the Lublin Poles. The two Polish groups met and failed to agree. By this time Roosevelt was facing heightened election pressure from Polish-American groups at home. In Washington and on his campaign trip to Chicago he promised representatives of the Polish-American Congress that the principles of the Atlantic Charter in general and the integrity of Poland in particular would be protected.

The torment of Warsaw foreshadowed future calamity. When Soviet troops neared the Polish capital at the end of August, underground forces mainly loyal to the London Poles struck at the Germans from houses, factories, and sewers. In moments the city was engulfed in a bitter street-to-street battle. In the next few days, as the fighting became more and more desperate, the Warsaw Poles begged for help from Churchill, who persuaded Roosevelt to send with him a joint message to the Marshal.

“We are thinking of world opinion if the anti-Nazis in Warsaw are in effect abandoned. We believe that all three of us should do the utmost to save as many of the patriots there as possible. We hope that you will drop immediate supplies and munitions to the
patriot Poles of Warsaw, or will you agree to help our planes in doing it very quickly? We hope you will approve. The time element is of extreme importance.”

A shocking reply came from Stalin:

“Sooner or later the truth about the handful of power-seeking criminals who launched the Warsaw adventure will out. Those elements, playing on the credulity of the inhabitants of Warsaw, exposed practically unarmed people to German guns, armour and aircraft. The result is a situation in which every day is used, not by the Poles for freeing Warsaw, but by the Hitlerites, who are cruelly exterminating the civil population….” Stalin promised, however, that his troops would try to repulse German counterattacks and renew their offensive near Warsaw.

Stalin’s mounting temper stemmed partly from frustration. His troops had in fact been forced back from Warsaw by savage German counterattacks. The Warsaw Poles had not co-ordinated their plans with him; he suspected they were trying to force his hand. He did not want American and British airmen poking around his rear bases, especially at the very time his forces were pulling back. But he was moved by colder calculations. By now he was fully sponsoring the Lublin Poles. He did not propose to help liberate Warsaw from the Nazis only to leave it in the hands of bourgeois Poles who were the pawns of London and Washington. Better to let the Warsaw elements destroy themselves by their foolhardy action.

In a last try Churchill asked Roosevelt to agree to a joint message that implored Stalin to allow Allied aircraft to land behind the Russian front after dropping war supply to the beleaguered Poles; privately Churchill suggested to Roosevelt that if Stalin did not reply they ought to send the planes and “see what happens.” Roosevelt would not go along on this. Distressed though he was by Stalin’s attitude toward the Warsaw tragedy, he feared that pressure on Moscow would jeopardize more important long-range military co-operation with Russia, especially in the Far East. In mid-September Stalin finally relented and allowed bombers to drop some supplies. But it was too late; resistance was nearing an end.

A quarter of a million Warsaw Poles were dead; most of the city was in ruins. Somehow Roosevelt managed to resist Churchill’s and Mikolajczyk’s importunities about Warsaw at the same time he was holding his own with Polish-Americans in the election campaign. He even asked Churchill to hush up any controversial announcement about Poland until after Election Day. Two weeks after the election, when former envoy Arthur Bliss Lane urged him to demand of Moscow that the independence of Poland be maintained, and added that if the country was not strong when it had the biggest Army, Navy, and Air Force in the world it never
would be, the President asked sharply, “Do you want me to go to war with Russia?”

In despair Mikolajczyk appealed directly to Roosevelt. He was being pressed to accept the Curzon Line without any reservations, he cabled. The Poles would feel terribly deceived and wronged if after all their efforts and sacrifices they were faced with the loss of nearly one-half their territory. “I retain in vivid and grateful memory your assurances given me in the course of our conversations of June, last, in Washington, pertaining particularly to Lwow and the adjacent territories.” For the last six hundred years Lwow had been a Polish city no less than Cracow and Warsaw. Would the President not throw his decisive influence into the scales by appealing to Stalin?

The President sent Mikolajczyk an evasive reply, adding that Harriman would discuss the question of Lwow with the Polish leader privately. A few days later, caught between the Allies’ caution and his associates’ militancy, but with his warm feeling for Roosevelt evidently undiminished, Mikolajczyk resigned. This left Roosevelt and Churchill with no leader of the London Poles who could serve as a bridge to Moscow and the Lublin Poles. Playing for time, Roosevelt in mid-December appealed to Stalin not to recognize the Lublin group before the three leaders met in January.

The Marshal was unbending. The polish
émigré
government, he said, was a screen for criminal and terrorist elements who were murdering officers and men of the Red Army in Poland. Meantime the Polish National Committee—the Lublin group—was strengthening and expanding the Polish government and Army and carrying out agrarian reform in favor of the peasants. The Soviet Union, he went on, was a border state to Poland and was carrying the main brunt of the battle for its liberation. The Red Army had to have a peaceful and trustworthy Poland to its rear as it fought into Germany. If the Lublin Poles transformed themselves into a provisional government, the Soviet government would have no reason not to recognize them.

He was disturbed and deeply disappointed by this message, Roosevelt responded to Stalin. “I must tell you with a frankness equal to your own that I see no prospect of this Government’s following suit and transferring its recognition from the Government in London to the Lublin Committee in its present form. This is in no sense due to any special ties or feeling for the London government.” There was simply no evidence that the Lublin Committee represented the people of Poland. “I cannot ignore the fact that up to the present only a small fraction of Poland proper west of the Curzon Line has been liberated from German tyranny, and it is therefore an unquestioned truth that the people of Poland have had no opportunity to express themselves in regard to the Lublin
Committee….” Would Stalin not wait for the three of them to meet?

Stalin’s reply was terse. The London Poles were disorganizing things and thus aiding the Germans. Roosevelt’s suggestion to postpone was “perfectly understandable to me” but he—Stalin—was powerless. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had already notified the Lublin Poles that it intended to recognize the provisional government of Poland as soon as it was formed.

It was interesting to see, Churchill scornfully cabled to Roosevelt, that the “Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR” had now been brought up into the line.

During these months of fall 1944 Roosevelt and Churchill were only superficially united in their attitude toward Stalin. At the climax of the coalition effort the two Western leaders were divided over strategy for dealing with Russia, with Communism in general, and indeed with all the forces of change erupting in the wake of the Nazi armies.

Churchill was trying to play a close game of
Realpolitik
with the Marshal. Journeying to Moscow early in October, he and Eden had hardly sat down with the Russians in the Kremlin when he decided on a quick gambit. Stating that London and Moscow must not get at cross-purposes in the Balkans, he pushed across the table to Stalin a half-sheet of paper with a simple, stark list giving Russia 90 per cent predominance in Rumania and 75 per cent in Bulgaria, Britain 90 per cent in Greece, and dividing Yugoslavia and Hungary fifty-fifty between Russia and the West. Stalin had paused only a moment, then with his blue pencil made a large tick on the paper and passed it back to Churchill.

There had been a long silence. The paper lay in the middle of the table. Then Churchill said: “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?” He proposed to burn the paper. “No, you keep it,” said Stalin.

This was precisely the kind of high-level trading over spheres of interest that had worried Roosevelt about a Churchill-Stalin meeting. He had had Harriman attend the meetings, but his Ambassador to Russia had no power to commit the President. So the crucial matters—the veto, Poland, Germany, Far Eastern strategy—were put off until the three leaders could meet.

If
Realpolitik
united Churchill and Stalin, it divided Churchill and Roosevelt. An acrimonious dispute flared over Italy between Washington and London early in December when the British informed Premier Ivanoe Bonomi that the appointment of Count Sforza, a symbol of antifascism to many liberals and leftists, would be unacceptable. Winant was instructed to inform the Foreign
Office that Washington regretted this intervention in an internal Italian political crisis, especially without prior consultation. Incensed, Churchill made it known to Washington that he considered Sforza a dishonorable intriguer and mischief-maker and that he felt entitled to tell the Italians this “because we have been accorded command in the Mediterranean, as the Americans have command in France, and therefore we have a certain special position and responsibility.” He had an added grievance: he felt that he had done his best to ease the Italian situation for the President, especially before the presidential election.

When the State Department put out a critical press release about British policy in Italy, Churchill went into a towering rage. He dispatched a cable to Roosevelt that Sherwood later described as the most violent outburst in all their correspondence. He reminded Roosevelt of all his past support on the Darlan affair and other issues. Roosevelt, who was at Warm Springs at the time and feeling rather detached from the rumpus, deplored any offense that the press release might have given but firmly reminded the Prime Minister that Italy was still “an area of combined Anglo-American responsibility” and that the British had acted on their own in blocking Sforza.

One reason for Churchill’s anger was the obvious implication for Greece of Washington’s failure to support him in Italy. Armed with Stalin’s agreement that he could control this sphere and with Roosevelt’s acquiescence in temporary British predominance, Churchill was determined that his nation’s ancient ally in the eastern Mediterranean would not become a political void and hence prey to E.L.A.S., the strong Communist and guerrilla movement there. After the Germans pulled out, E.L.A.S. had made a bid for power in Athens, only to become locked in a struggle with British troops quickly sent in by London. Liberal and leftist groups in Britain and the United States flared up at what seemed a British ploy to enthrone reaction and to kill those who had fought the Nazis most zealously.

Intent on his mission of saving Greece from Communism, Churchill was bitter over the lack of sympathy in Washington. It almost seemed to him that outside the War Cabinet his only solid supporter was Stalin, who was saying nothing about Greece. Churchill was furious when a message in which he instructed the British general in Greece not to hesitate to shoot rebels if necessary leaked out in the American press, evidently through the State Department. At this juncture Roosevelt sent him a long, almost benevolent letter stating that he was sorry about Churchill’s difficulties in Greece but he could not stand with his old friend there. “Even an attempt to do so would bring only temporary value to you, and would in the long run do injury to our basic
relationships.” Roosevelt made a number of specific suggestions—including, promise a regency instead of the return of the King—that Churchill found utterly useless. For the Prime Minister the only recourse was more troops, which eventually did put down E.L.A.S.

More troops. In Greece and Poland and elsewhere troops were becoming the arbiters of strategy. Were they to shape the new world as they had the old?

Harriman’s answer was yes—at least before he sat in on Churchill’s conference with Stalin. In mid-September he had informed the White House that relations with the Russians had taken a startling turn in the last two months. On issue after issue they were silent or indifferent or obstinate. Their attitude seemed to be that it is “our obligation” to help Russia and accept its policies because “she had won the war for us.” Unless Washington took issue with this policy, Harriman warned, Russia would become a world bully.