The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (8 page)

He fingers the red folder. Another cable from Winston. He undoes the string bow and slides his reading glasses from his shirt pocket.

Churchill wants another private meeting, this time on the island of Malta, a British territory in the Mediterranean. It’s on the way to the upcoming conference with Uncle Joe at Yalta in the Crimea. Roosevelt reads:

if you do not want to spend more than one day at malta, it could surely be arranged that both our chiefs of staffs should arrive there say a couple of days before us and have their preliminary discussions. we could then proceed by air. . . .

Roosevelt doesn’t want to convene with Churchill before sitting down with him and Stalin at Yalta. Uncle Joe is always suspicious, he’ll take the notion that, with the end of the war in sight, Roosevelt is showing his true colors, that he prefers the British to the Russians. Roosevelt doesn’t. This is something the President has tried to make crystal clear to Stalin from the beginning of the war: the postwar stage will be American and Russian. The British will have good seats.

“Grace,” he calls out, “get Harry here.”

Roosevelt hears her answer. He adds, “And call the Marine.”

In seconds, a large corporal in full dress uniform enters the Oval Office, pushing the President’s wheelchair. The soldier is neat, pleated and tucked. The President rises on the man’s arm. His legs without the metal muscle of the ten-pound braces burn even from this little effort of standing from the sofa to fall back into the wheelchair. If they’re going to be this damned useless, he thinks, they could at least be numb. The braces hurt too when he wears them, can’t they make them so they don’t cut into your legs? But no, pain comes with the humiliation and disappointment. The pain never lets you forget, you never get used to it. That’s good, he thinks. Never want to get used to it.

Being helped from the sofa by the soldier, Roosevelt is conscious of his own heft. He thinks he has got to lose even more weight. He is one hundred seventy pounds, down from the one ninety his “ticker” doctor didn’t like at all. He enjoys his new thinness, brags to daughter Anna of his “flat tummy” All his body weight is in his abdomen and shoulders; his legs and hips atrophied years ago.

When he is moved to his wheelchair and maneuvered to his desk, the soldier leaves, never speaking. Roosevelt says, “Thank you,” and the soldier snaps to at the words and salutes. Roosevelt jiggles the cigarette still clamped in his mouth, waves the starched Marine out the door with it.

In minutes Harry Hopkins ambles in. He slides into the room, being of almost too slight a build to make much impression with his steps on the floor. Hopkins is the President’s closest adviser, has been since the thirties with the WPA and as secretary of commerce. One night in the spring of 1940, Harry sat down for dinner at the White House and stayed for three and a half years, moving into the family quarters with his young daughter, moving out in December of ‘43 only at the insistence of his new wife. Harry is the President’s alter ego, envoy, and his most trusted sounding board. He knows when to talk around Roosevelt, when to tell a joke, and when to clam up. Now that a wife has come between him and the President, their relationship has changed, as it must. But no one has the sensitivity to Roosevelt’s moods like Hopkins, and no one else, not even Eleanor, has such authority to speak for the President.

Harry’s health has been poor for several years, he’s been in and out of hospitals. His body cannot absorb fats and proteins. Roosevelt watches Harry arrange himself in a chair, thinks of a bag of coat hangers. Look at Harry. He’s given up on his appearance. Baggy suit, fingers nicotined from chain smoking. His damn eye sockets are like coal mines, for God’s sake. In 1939 Harry was told he had four weeks to live. Roosevelt took control of the situation personally, flying in a team of medical experts, who gave

Harry an experimental plasma transfusion. The procedure staved off the man’s decline. Still ...

“Harry, you look like shit.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.” Harry cracks a grin, an old friend. ”I’d forgotten.”

Roosevelt spins the red top-secret folder through the air to Hopkins.

“Winston again.”

Harry scans the thin telegraph sheet. He says, “Still on this Malta business.”

“He keeps telling me he wants to meet before the Big Three.”

Hopkins thins his lips, disapproving of Churchill’s nagging. “Remember what he said last week? ‘I do not see any other way of realizing our hopes about world organization in five or six days. Even the Almighty took seven.’”

Roosevelt nods agreement. He knows Winston’s insistence too well.

Harry shakes his head. “And what was that bullshit he wrote you on New Year’s Day?”

Roosevelt lifts a finger to claim the right: Let me do this one.

“ ‘No more let us falter! From Malta to Yalta! Let nobody alter!’”

“Good grief.” Harry chuckles. “Jesus Christ, that guy.”

Roosevelt enjoys the laughter with Hopkins. He says, “Look, Harry, I don’t want it. I’ll have dinner in Malta, a few drinks, whatever, but no powwow. The Chiefs of Staff can meet, military is fine but nothing political. And not me and Winston, not officially. Uncle Joe won’t like it. Handle this for me.”

“I’ll write the response.”

“Good.”

Hopkins takes a cigarette pack from his coat pocket. He shakes one straight into his mouth. Matches are already in his hand.

“He doesn’t get it, Harry.” Roosevelt feels the urge to push himself back from the desk, stand and pace, it never goes away, wanting that freedom. Instead he claps a hand on the desk, settles for this. “It’s not the seventeenth century anymore. England is done with that. Europe is done with that.Two world wars have been fought, in consecutive generations. Everything’s changed. The whole world.”

Hopkins says, “Winston’s just an old-style imperialist. He’s even said so. What was it? ‘I have not become the King’s Prime Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’”

Roosevelt slaps the table again. “Tell me one thing, Harry. Name one thing British imperialism has done in four hundred years for their colonial peoples.”

“Not damned much.”

“I won’t have it, Harry. We fought World War I to make the world safe for democracy and all we did was make it safe for imperialism. That is not going to be the new world order after this war. That’s not what the United Nations is all about. You know, if England wants us to help them stay a first-class power, they’re going to have to stop this oppressive imperialism. England’s going to have to reckon with us, Harry. That’s not something they’re used to yet. But they will be, soon as we finish this war for them.”

Hopkins scribbles notes on a pad. Without looking up he elevates his free hand, lifts the thumb. That’s right.

Roosevelt says into the room, “Don’t get me wrong, I love Winston. He’s one of the greatest men of this century, no doubt about it. But he wants to continue old-fashioned balance-of-power politics. I’ve got news for him, balance-of-power is why we’re in this war in the first place. All it does is hang on to the same tensions and alliances that made peace impossible after World War I. And we get sucked into two foreign wars this century. Those politics are ancient. What can you do?”

Harry’s cigarette goes to his mouth. Still writing, the cigarette dangling on the dampness of his lips, he says, “England’s ancient, Mr. President. What can you do?”

Roosevelt nods. “The United Nations. America. Britain. China and Russia. Got to have Russia in or it won’t work.”

Hopkins finishes and raises his head. He looks like a starved, neglected pooch.

“Your boy Stalin. That’s a bastard.”

“Oh, Joe’s all right, Harry. He’s get-at-able.”

“He’s a totalitarian.”

“And he’s killed eight out of ten Germans in this war. Damn it, when this is over they’ve got a right to be at the head table more than we do, certainly more than England or France.”

“He’s tricky, Mr. President.”

“He knows what he wants, that’s all. He’s political to a fault. Ever since Stalingrad he’s gotten the idea he can kick the Germans’ ass without us if he has to. The key to Joe is to let him know you like him, you like Russia, and you want to work with them. They’ll go turtle in a minute if you let them, but we’re going to keep them in this alliance after the war, Harry. I don’t care if Winston screams bloody murder all the way to Moscow and back, we’re keeping the United Nations alive and the Reds are in it. That’s my dream, Harry. That’s my legacy. A lasting peace in the world after two world wars. No power politics. No bullies.”

Roosevelt nods at his own words. He wants Harry to leave now, he’s tuckered. Hopkins spots this and rises.

“I’ll have the cable for you in half an hour.”

“Great. Happy hour?”

“Grace has already cleared my schedule.”

Hopkins departs. The Oval Office alone with Roosevelt now reverberates with the notions and actions of presidents before him who made the weightiest decisions here. Stalin, a bastard. A totalitarian. Roosevelt knows this. Ambassador Harriman and others never let him forget it. But what all the official naysayers don’t reckon on is America’s influence. With a powerful America as a partner and counterbalance, we can show the Red leadership how to make their country prosperous and modern without brutalizing their own people along the way. Russia can be tamed. Roosevelt’s mentor Wilson, who was President during the Russian Revolution, knew this. Like Wilson, Roosevelt admires the will of the Russian people, their ability to sacrifice, suffer, and survive. They boggle the imagination.

Roosevelt regrets that Stalin is a tyrant. But communism is essentially an egalitarian form of government, isn’t it? Communism wants to share resources, empower all its classes from the bottom up, build a classless society. Not too different, Roosevelt thinks, from his own New Deal. History will see the similarities if some of the currently living don’t. Without the repressive tactics, you could view Stalin as another progressive liberal. A socialist. America’s full of socialists. Push the analogy a little further and you get Churchill the Republican, pledged to status quo, business as usual.

So what if Uncle Joe wants to expand his reach into eastern Europe? Russia’s got a right to protect its borders, how many times have invaders waltzed in through Poland? It’s unfortunate but eastern Europe may be the meal the rest of us serve the Russian bear after the war. Small price, Roosevelt thinks, for a world at peace. The United Nations will just have to work hard to contain Russian expansionism the same way we’ll unravel British imperialism.

There’s going to be a power vacuum in western Europe after the war. Germany and France are shot to hell. England’s on the ropes. If Russia fills the gap, it won’t be such a bad thing. If we can make Soviet-American cooperation a reality, we might together do a far better job running European and world affairs than the old Great Powers have done.

Something big will come out of this war. A new heaven, a new earth.

But Churchill just aggravates Stalin. In March of’42, just three months after the U.S. entered the war, Roosevelt had to write Churchill:

i know you will not mind my being brutally frank when i tell you that i think i can personally handle stalin better than either your foreign office or my state department. stalin hates the guts of all your top people. he thinks he likes me better, and i hope he will continue to.

Roosevelt met Stalin for the first time in November of ’43 at Teheran. That was the farthest from Moscow Stalin was willing to travel. It was the only airplane trip the Marshal had ever taken, and he assured Roosevelt it was his last. Roosevelt ignored Churchill’s plea to stay with the Prime Minister at the British Embassy. Instead, the President accepted Uncle Joe’s invitation to take quarters at the Russian compound in Teheran.

At the Teheran meeting, Roosevelt did everything he could to establish warm relations with Stalin on this, their first face-to-face encounter. Initially, the little Marshal in his unadorned mustard-colored uniform with great shoulder boards like shelves was detached and stiff, exposing little humanity where Roosevelt could attach his charm. Three times the President met with Stalin, all the while refusing Churchill’s requests for just one private lunch. The full plenary sessions were argumentative but little more than rubber stamps for what the President and Stalin had discussed in Churchill’s absence. The nightly state dinners were tense affairs, with Stalin and Churchill exchanging barbed blandishments. Stalin was not going to forget how twenty-four years earlier Churchill railed in Parliament against the Red Revolution, supporting the intervention of British troops and money on the side of the czar against Lenin’s forces. Roosevelt enjoyed the bald enmity between the two, hoping it would reinforce Stalin’s preference for America. But he could not chip the grimace from Stalin’s face until he turned on Churchill himself.