Roosevelt (103 page)

“I hope that you will pardon me for an unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say,” the President began, “but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.” Then he added lightly and quickly: “First of all, I want to say, it is good to be home.”

“It has been a long journey. I hope you will also agree that it has been, so far, a fruitful one.”

Slightly stooped over the table, the President was talking in a flat tone, sometimes slurring his words and stumbling a bit over his text, which he followed with his forefinger. Occasionally he raised his voice for emphasis, but the ringing rhetoric of old was gone. His voice had lost its timbre, Acheson felt; it was an invalid’s voice. Friend and foe noted his lean, set face, his trembling hand as he reached for a glass of water.

“Speaking in all frankness, the question of whether it is entirely fruitful or not lies to a great extent in your hands. For unless you here in the halls of the American Congress—with the support of the American people—concur in the general conclusions reached at a
place called Yalta, and give them your active support, the meeting will not have produced lasting results.”

It was a long rambling speech, with little that was new to his listeners. He had not been ill for a second, he said, until he arrived back in Washington and heard all the rumors that had spread in his absence. He talked at length about plans for Germany, reiterating that unconditional surrender would not mean the destruction or enslavement of the German people, describing the four occupation zones, and promising the destruction of the Nazi party, militarism, and the German General Staff, “which has so often shattered the peace of the world.”

The President ad libbed over and over again, to Rosenman’s despair; his voice almost gave way at one point; and throughout there was a repeated tiny faltering in his emphasis, as though his mind could not sustain its grip on the speech. But toward the end his flagging voice took on an edge of desperate conviction.

“The Conference in the Crimea was a turning point—I hope in our history and therefore in the history of the world. There will soon be presented to the Senate of the United States and to the American people a great decision that will determine the fate of the United States—and of the world—for generations to come….

“No plan is perfect. Whatever is adopted at San Francisco will doubtless have to be amended time and time again over the years, just as our own Constitution has been….

“Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive again.

“The Crimea Conference…ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.

“We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join….”

Victory—and an end to power politics. It was a time for hope. Allied forces were converging on the Rhine; Cologne was under direct attack; to the south American troops pushed into Trier. The whole German defense structure west of the Rhine was crumbling. On the Eastern Front the Red Army was streaming across the Oder hardly fifty miles from Berlin; other troops had turned north toward the Baltic to cut off Danzig.

Peace would break out soon; could it be secured? A conference had been called to meet at San Francisco on April 25 to frame the charter for the United Nations Organization. The President had chosen a bipartisan delegation, including Vandenberg and Stassen, to represent the United States. He looked forward to going there as host, he told reporters, just to say “howdy do.” The general response to the Yalta Conference seemed favorable, though Senator Wheeler called it a “great victory for Stalin and Russian imperialism” and the old isolationist press charged a sellout of the Atlantic Charter. Cantril reported that the conference had raised hopes for a long-time peace and that Americans were impressed both by Big Three co-operation and by the way the administration was handling American interests abroad. Even the Polish arrangements were accepted. Cantril did report colossal public ignorance about the actual decisions at Yalta, but the more informed seemed the more satisfied.

Then, in just one month, while Roosevelt looked on dismayed and almost helpless, everything seemed to come unhinged.

Again Poland was the engine of conflict, just as it had been in 1939 and before. The three leaders had agreed at Yalta that Molotov, Harriman, and Kerr would serve as a commission in Moscow to supervise the reorganization and broadening of the provisional Polish government. Crucial matters were left to the commission, such as what Poles should be initially consulted, whether the Lublin (now the Warsaw) Poles should constitute the core of the new government, with the other elements serving as window dressing, or whether the provisional government should be totally reorganized into a broad-based, coalition, antifascist regime. The underlying question was whether Moscow would control Poland.

Churchill knew the line that the Russians would take if he pressed them. Stalin would remind him that Moscow had not intervened in Greece; why should the British interfere in eastern Europe? Hence Churchill had to pitch the issue at a higher level and to do this he needed Roosevelt’s support. But the President seemed at first curiously unresponsive to elaborate British formulas to protect the non-Communist Polish elements; Churchill felt that he was not getting through to him. Time was running short, he saw, for every day the Kremlin and the Warsaw Poles seemed to be fastening their grip on the country. On March 13 Churchill cabled to Roosevelt:

“…Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom?…I do not wish to reveal a divergence between the British and the United States Government, but it would certainly be necessary for me to make it clear that we are in presence of a great failure and an utter breakdown of what we settled at Yalta….”

Stalin seemed so rigid about Poland that Washington and London observers speculated that the Politburo was forcing a strong line on him. But the Marshal had not shifted ground. He had agreed to the Polish formula at Yalta because Churchill and Roosevelt were always talking about public opinion and he was willing to help them appease it with a formula. If Western public opinion was not satisfied with the formula, it should be re-educated. The blood of Soviet soldiers had been shed prodigiously to liberate Poland. Did Churchill and Roosevelt really think he would allow in Warsaw a bourgeois-dominated government that would threaten the Red Army’s rear today and Soviet frontiers tomorrow?

All through March the President had been putting off Churchill’s proposal that the two of them join in a stiff note to Stalin. Finally he decided to move on his own. On March 29 he cabled to Stalin that the high hopes and expectations raised by Yalta among the peoples of the world were in danger of being crushed. “Having understood each other so well at Yalta I am convinced that the three of us can and will clear away any obstacles which have developed since then.” He could not understand the Russian insistence on preserving the Warsaw government. “I must make it quite plain to you that any such solution which would result in a thinly disguised continuation of the present Warsaw regime would be unacceptable….”

Roosevelt was suffering from another bitter disappointment when he sent this letter. He had learned from the State Department that Ambassador Gromyko would head the Soviet delegation to the San Francisco conference—Molotov would not attend. For a second-rank official to represent Russia at the founding conference, on which Roosevelt had set his hopes, struck him as a veiled attack on the nascent organization. He appealed to Stalin to let Molotov come for at least the vital opening sessions; he warned of world reaction otherwise. Stalin was adamant; public reaction, he said, could not decide such matters.

The President had a public-opinion problem of his own at this point. After conceding the Soviet Union two extra Assembly votes at Yalta and winning Churchill’s and Stalin’s consent to two extra for the United States, Roosevelt abandoned the latter notion but kept the extra Soviet votes secret, possibly because he hoped he could talk Stalin out of them before San Francisco. Inevitably the story leaked out. An outburst of anger followed on Capitol Hill, and the President was left on the defensive.

Physically, Roosevelt seemed at a low ebb. He had again begun to work late into the evening. He complained of not being able to taste his food. But once again Bruenn found his basic condition unchanged: his heart size was unchanged, there were no cardiac symptoms, the systolic murmur had not changed. For the moment
even the blood pressure values were somewhat lower. But few around him, medical or lay, could doubt that the election and then Yalta and now the crisis over Poland were taking their toll of his strength and vitality.

At the grand climax of coalition warfare, with German resistance buckling, everything seemed to be deteriorating politically: Russia and the West were at odds; even Churchill and Roosevelt exchanged some stiff messages as they groped for a way to deal with the Bear; the San Francisco Conference itself seemed flawed by power politics and compromise. “My God, what a mess Europe is in!” Eden said to Harold Nicolson. “What a mess!”

Observers were asking what had gone wrong. Internal tensions in the Kremlin? Anti-Soviet attitudes in the West? Stalin’s paranoia? Churchill’s old anti-Communism? Roosevelt’s fatigue, or his utopianism? Or simply the utter hopelessness of such ancient problems as Poland?

Few saw the main source of friction—the internal dynamics of a coalition in the process of losing the enemy that had united ideologically diverse partners—until an obscure event set off an illuminating blaze of fear and suspicion.

Early in March General Karl Wolff, SS commander in Italy, secretly met in Zurich with Allen Dulles, OSS chief in Switzerland, to explore the possibilities of some kind of German surrender in Italy. Eleven days later there was a second exploratory meeting. Churchill realized that the Kremlin might be suspicious of a separate military surrender in the south, which would enable the Anglo-American armies, he admitted later, to advance against lessened opposition as far as Vienna and beyond, or even toward Berlin or the Elbe, so he ordered that Moscow be informed. Molotov already knew of the “negotiation” and demanded to be told why the Russians had not been invited to take part. He suspected not just a misunderstanding, “but something worse.”

The answer lay partly with the Combined Chiefs. They did not want the Russians to be part of the early stages of the parley. The meetings, they contended, were preliminary, mainly about mechanics; no political matters would be discussed; if the Russians took part the meetings would be protracted, a great opportunity might be lost, more Allied soldiers would die.

He had to support officers in the field, Roosevelt told Stalin, when there was a possibility of forcing the surrender of enemy troops. As a military man the Marshal would understand this, he added. “There can be in such a surrender of enemy forces in the field no violation of our agreed principles of unconditional surrender and no political implication whatsoever.”

Stalin’s answer reflected all the fears and suspicions that were
gripping the strategists in the Kremlin. Talks with the enemy, he said, were permissible only if they did not give the Germans opportunity to use the negotiations to cause German troops to be switched to other sectors—above all, to the Soviet sector. That was why he wanted Russians present at even the preliminary negotiations. The Germans had already taken advantage of the talks to shift three divisions from northern Italy to the Soviet front. What had happened to the agreement at Yalta to hold the enemy on the spot and to prevent him from maneuvering? The Red Army was living up to this, he said, but Alexander was not. The Red Army was encircling Germans and exterminating them. Were the Germans in the west opening their front to the Anglo-Americans?

Indignantly Roosevelt denied all these charges. There had been no general negotiations. Lack of Allied offensive operations in Italy was due mainly to transfer of Allied forces to the Western Front. The shift of German troops antedated all the surrender talks. The trouble, he concluded bitterly, was due to Germans trying to sow suspicion between the Russians and the West. Why let them succeed?

Instead of placating Stalin, Roosevelt’s message—and his continued protestation of innocence—brought to a pitch the pent-up distrust felt by the men in the Kremlin. Why were the Allies insisting on the Swiss talks in the face of Soviet objections? What were they trying to hide? Was it simply a stratagem to permit Hitler to transfer even more troops to the east? Were the Anglo-Americans maneuvering to subdue the Communists and leftist elements in northern Italy, as they had in Greece? Were they still aspiring to get to Trieste—or even Vienna—before the Russians? Would they engulf whole sectors of Germany while the Nazis held back the Red Army? Or were there even more diabolical plans on foot? All these suspicions spilled over into Stalin’s reply to Roosevelt.

“You affirm that so far no negotiations have been entered into. Apparently you are not fully informed.” His military colleagues had information that negotiations did take place whereby Germany would open the front to the Anglo-American troops and let them move east, in exchange for easier armistice terms. This was why those troops were advancing into the heart of Germany almost without resistance. He saw the advantage for the Anglo-Americans, but why conceal this from the Russians?

“And so what we have at the moment is that the Germans on the Western Front have in fact ceased the war against Britain and America. At the same time they continue the war against Russia, the ally of Britain and the U.S.A.”