Penguin History of the United States of America (109 page)

Then there were the French. President Roosevelt and the leader of Free France, General de Gaulle, were temperamentally quite incompatible, and de Gaulle’s total intractability – necessary, he thought, if France was to
regain her place among the nations – infuriated the Americans almost beyond reason. There are few funnier photographs in political history than those of the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, which show the Allied leaders trying to appear united after Roosevelt had knocked some French heads together. FDR looks furious, de Gaulle looks majestically aloof and Churchill looks as deeply miserable as anyone must have been who was a genuine friend of both sides. Then, the Chinese: it was clearer and clearer that the Kuomintang was a most dangerous associate, being corrupt, incompetent and bottomlessly selfish; but dared America try to collaborate with the communists? Were they really just the agrarian reformers that some alleged? In any case there would be the devil to pay with certain elements in the United States if Washington ditched Chiang in favour of Mao. Even if all these questions were settled satisfactorily, the question of Germany and Japan would remain. What on earth was to be done with them after victory? Henry Morgenthau put forward the suggestion that Germany should be de-industrialized; but this would have been so palpably a disaster for the whole European economy that the idea, tempting though it was to haters of the Hun, was quietly dropped. As for Japan, Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference had called for the unconditional surrender of all the Axis powers: but did this really mean that the Japanese would not be allowed to surrender if they insisted on keeping their Emperor? Nobody knew.

Then, the United States was stoutly anti-colonial. Winston Churchill repeatedly spoke, acted and wrote in the spirit of his famous remark that he was not going to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. This disquieted the Americans more than was necessary, for Churchill’s imperial views were far from representative of his countrymen’s; but it was hard to be sure of that while the old man bulked so large in the world’s affairs. All too many American policy-makers, including at times the President, were inclined to suspect foul imperialist calculations behind every strategic proposal that the British put forward: for the long tradition of Anglophobia survived the war. But even if, as proved to be the case, the British were willing to give up their Empire and their armaments there was no reason to suppose that Stalin would give up his.

There it was: the central problem of American foreign relations had become the question of how to live with the Soviet Union. Secretive, suspicious, tricky, the Russians had been made almost besottedly anxious about the security of their frontiers by the dreadful trauma of invasion in 1941. They did not pretend to believe in collective security
à la
Wilson: it had proved too elusive and unhelpful in the thirties. Instead they wanted to consolidate their power by traditional means: rectified frontiers, annexations, client states. If the West would accept these ambitions, so much the better. If not, too bad. In this spirit the Russians had seized the Baltic states in the days of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, had annexed part of Finland after the Russo-Finnish War of 1939–40, and now proposed to give Poland a large
chunk of eastern Germany in compensation for the loss of an equally large piece of territory to the Soviet Union. Many were the voices raised in the West to say that Stalin should instead be compelled to disgorge. He should be forced to accept the new world order, the
pax americana
, and set up Western-style democracies in Eastern Europe.

This was not Roosevelt’s way. He knew that it was mere sentimentalism, given the actual balance of forces, to talk as if the United States could or would impose its policies on the USSR in matters of vital interest to the latter. He said repeatedly that America would never fight Russia just for the liberties of Eastern Europeans (one seems to hear distant echoes of Neville Chamberlain’s remark about Czechoslovakia: ‘a far-off country of which we know nothing’). Instead he favoured friendly persuasion. He hoped, by constantly exhibiting frank, warm and honest collaboration to the Russians, to induce them to modify the full rigour of their policy and to persuade the Poles, Lithuanians and others to accept the fact of Russian hegemony. In this way the Eastern European question would be settled amicably and satisfactorily to American opinion, and then what would there be left to quarrel about? Surely not Germany. FDR’s attitude to this last topic was so cavalier that Washington still lacked an agreed German policy in April 1945, weeks only before the end of the war in Europe.

Unfortunately certain realities made the Rooseveltian view of Russo-American relations ultimately untenable. First, the United States had several objects in view – the defeat of Japan, universal democracy, a new international organization, free trade, Soviet-American friendship, for example – while the Russians had only one, or one, at any rate, which took precedence of everything else: national security. Roosevelt, trained in the give-and-take politics of American democracy and believing too fondly in the possibility of establishing comradely relationships with ‘Joe’, thought that there was great scope for flexibility and compromise in East-West dealings. The Russians did not. Nothing which touched on the defence of their frontiers was open to negotiation, and unfortunately, as tends to be the case in such matters, almost everything came to be seen as touching that defence. Besides, they did not trust the West: even as late as March 1945, Stalin accused England and America of planning a separate peace with Hitler. There is no particular sense in looking for rational explanations of this distrust. Advanced paranoia is by definition morbidly sensitive. Stalin, a monster of practised treachery, who had killed so many of his closest associates and therefore lived in an atmosphere of perpetual suspicion and fear, was quite incapable of believing that the leaders of the West meant to act honourably by him. (For the same reason there could be no question of allowing the peoples of Eastern Europe to settle their own destiny, or of allowing any freedom to the Russians themselves.) Instead he put the worst construction on every blunder. Roosevelt, for instance, very unwisely promised him a second front, that is to say a landing of Anglo-American troops in occupied Europe, in 1942 – a landing which, if successful, would take some of the
pressure off the Soviet armies. D-Day was in the event postponed for two years. Stalin was mightily annoyed. Yet the military reasons for the delay were compelling. In 1942 an Allied landing in France would almost certainly have failed even to establish a bridgehead and great numbers of British lives would have been sacrificed uselessly. A premature attempt in 1943 might have been equally unsuccessful, and as costly to the Americans as to the British. Unsuccessful attempts would hardly have given any serious relief to the Russians. Stalin, therefore, was in effect demanding a useless holocaust, like the ones he offered up himself, of kulaks, old Bolsheviks and soldiers in the Second World War. The Western high command is not to be blamed for refusing his demands. Yet the refusal did nothing for Allied relations.

At bottom, however, the difficulty transcended personalities – even Stalin’s. As a matter of fact, the dictator did from time to time show himself ready to make concessions to the American point of view and to behave with personal graciousness. Presumably he set a certain value on the possibility of post-war co-operation with America, if only because he might thereby get aid in rebuilding his shattered country. But the price that the Americans set on their friendship was in the last analysis higher than he was prepared to pay, and there was very little that any American President could do to lower it.

No one has ever plausibly accused the American people of doing things by halves. The emergence of Hitler as a national enemy and his attack on the Soviet Union had changed attitudes to the Russians to a staggering and unhealthy degree. American volatility was displayed flagrantly. Whereas, as late as 1939, most citizens (if opinion polls may be believed) would, if forced to choose, have picked fascism rather than communism, since communism waged war on private property, by 1942 the majority found no words too kind for Stalin and his system. The switch was made easier by the comfortable delusion, assiduously propagated, that the USSR had abandoned communism. ‘Marxian thinking in Soviet Russia,’ said the
New York Times
in April 1944, ‘is out. The capitalist system, better described as the competitive system, is back.’ That granted, the architect of the Gulag archipelago, many of whose crimes had long been public knowledge, could be eulogized as ‘the man who saved the civilized world’. ‘A child,’ it was said, ‘would like to sit in his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.’ The NKVD was ‘a national police similar to the FBI’ and the Russians, ‘one hell of a people’, were remarkably like the Americans. Communism was like Christianity, being based on the brotherhood of man; and as Douglas Mac Arthur commented (quite accurately) from Corregidor in 1942, ‘The hopes of civilization rest on the worthy banners of the courageous Red Army.’ Hollywood leaped onto the bandwagon by issuing a tedious, fellow-travelling movie,
Mission to Moscow
, which one day would get its makers into a lot of trouble.

So Roosevelt had reason to think that a permanent alignment between
Moscow and Washington would be popular and, therefore, practicable. But the very vivacity of pro-Russian feeling carried a warning: the pendulum might swing just as fast in the opposite direction. And there were plenty of people willing to push it. The Russian experts in the State Department were anti-Soviet to a man. The Catholic church and the Polish-Americans both had good reasons for deeply distrusting Stalin. Formerly isolationist Senators were now ready to agree, however reluctantly, that Woodrow Wilson had been right all along; this meant that they now upheld his policies with the rigidity and obstinacy with which they had formerly opposed them. They accepted the Atlantic Charter programme; they supported the proposed United Nations Organization; and they were ready to support all the other military and economic arrangements which might tend to the defeat of Germany and Japan. These were large and genuine concessions. Unfortunately, they were not large enough to cover Stalin’s Eastern European policies; and conservatives still had a deep distrust of FDR. They eyed him suspiciously. So did Stalin. Between the two sides, his policy began to collapse.

The risk had always been there. In March 1943, as he held forth on the post-war world, he had seemed to a witness, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, to be ‘a conjuror, skilfully juggling with balls of dynamite’. Perhaps he could have continued to juggle. Certainly the peoples of the West thought so. Everything seemed to be going so well in the spring of 1945. As the Russian armies closed in on Berlin, the British and the Americans crossed the Rhine (7 March). Iwo Jima was declared secure on 16 March. The Yalta Conference had been a great success, reaffirming the Atlantic Charter and promising Poland a broadly based democratic government. Soon a general conference of the United Nations would meet in San Francisco to set up the successor to the League of Nations. It seemed that victory and a just settlement were at hand. Then in mid-April, that fated period in American history (13 April, Fort Sumter; 15 April, Lincoln’s death; 19 April, Lexington), on the twelfth, Franklin Roosevelt suddenly died.

The shock to the world was immense. Signs of his collapsing health had been visible since before the 1944 election, but few had realized what they portended, and nobody expected his disappearance so soon. American soldiers in China wept like children. In beleaguered Berlin Goebbels and Hitler superstitiously hoped that the event was a heavenly sign that the tide had turned in their favour. Elsewhere the world mourned, and wondered anxiously what the future held without the strong man’s guiding hand. In the United States it was above all the poor who lamented their friend’s passing. As the funeral train passed through Georgia, where the death occurred, black women fell on their knees in sorrowful reverence, acting for their country.

Tributes poured in. Roosevelt’s services in peace and war had been gigantic. He had given his country a modern governmental structure, taught
it to take up its international responsibilities and led it to universal triumph. He had palpable faults and committed frequent blunders, but probably no other man of his time could have performed as well, let alone better.

The ill-effects of his going made themselves felt at once. In the long run it was perhaps a good thing that power now passed to a younger, more vigorous man, and Roosevelt had chosen the right successor. Henry Wallace had impressed only his most faithful followers as Vice-President during the third term, so he was put aside in favour of Harry Truman when in 1944 Roosevelt, believing that his continuance in office was still necessary for his country, ran yet again (and won yet again). The energy and intelligence of the man from Missouri made themselves felt from the moment he became President, but he came totally unprepared, either by training or knowledge, for the conduct of foreign relations, which were then at a crucial turn. The result was that for more than a year American foreign policy was wavering, inconsistent, unpredictable; and the chance of a permanent understanding with Russia was thrown away.

Probably it had never been a real chance. Probably, whatever the West did, said or thought, Stalin would have been satisfied only with establishing satellite communist tyrannies throughout Eastern Europe, in the name of national security; and there was no way in which such an outcome of their efforts for the liberation of Europe could have been made acceptable to Americans, to those, at any rate, who concerned themselves with foreign affairs. To suggest that there was room for compromise on the point was to risk being denounced as an appeaser: the memory of Munich was repeatedly going to distort Western policy in the next thirty years. Besides, the Soviet view that American democratic affirmations merely expressed a will to dominate the world was not altogether groundless: as the British discovered at Bretton Woods, the Americans were unalterably convinced that what was good for American capitalism was good for the world. Some Americans were as enthusiastically ideological and missionary-minded as the Russians. Americanism is a crusading faith, anxious to liberate the peoples, to expose and confound their enemies, and forestall any ideology or revolution which threatens the continuance, or even just the convenience, of the liberal, capitalist, individualist system. Americans regarded all communists and communist states as subversive of peace and freedom: they did not accept that Marxist communism did not necessarily entail an aggressive foreign policy – communist rulers being free, in principle, to wait passively (or fairly so) while the fruit of revolution ripened spontaneously on the capitalist tree. They attributed to the Soviet leaders something of their own energy, conviction and determination. In return, Stalin may have attributed to the Americans something of his own implacable distrustfulness, and neither he nor his successors could see the world except in terms of an irrepressible conflict between capitalism and communism. All in all, these were not attitudes that made for peaceful partnership.