Introduction

There is no longer any doubt that Warld War II led to conse quences so at variance with the purpose of the war as proclaimed by President Rooseveltthat some explanation must be produced and made plausible to multitudes of baffied and disillusioned people, for it will be remembered that Roosevelt sold the war, or at least American participation in it and his own indispensa bility·for conducting it, with the avidity and cocksureness of a huckster.

x ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA The explanation can he realistic or it can he fanciful. The demagogue, of course, is tempted to offer one which will meet the empiric test of mass acceptability; the sentimentalist will embrace the one which is least disturbing to his memories, which, in turn, have been shaped and colored by his emotions; the participant, in his memoirs, strains to shield his own repu tation and that of those with whom he has been linked. It re mains for the historian, or rather many historians, each in his own way, to cull the truth from a melange of fact, fancy, and propaganda. To do this, he must, of course, be unawed by the ephemeral glamour of popular heroes and undismayed by the disparity between the words and the deeds of men, for he will know that the guises of guile are many and that the words used by men of power are often chosen to conceal rather than to re.. veal the truth.

It is "the secret motives," wrote Elie Faure, "which, in men's intentions, determine historical events and by that fact make history half unintelligible to us." The same thought impelled Napoleon, in the wane of his brilliant career, to complain that historical truth "is too often merely a phrase ... a story that has been agreed to tell." Perhaps psychoanalysiswill rewrite history. It will, eventually, predicts Dr. Raynl0nd de Saussure in his contribution to Geza R6heim's symposium under the title Psychoanalysisand the So.. cial Sciences.While the task is an enormous one and methods of investigation will need to be greatly improved, psychoanalytic understanding of the motives that spur men to action will throw new light on events whose cause and meaning have otherwise been obscure. It is banal to say that only a psychoanalytical ap proach can explain Hider's appeal to the German people. Is it not as likely that the roots of Franklin D. Roosevelt's curious relations with· the Soviet Russians abroad and their minions in this country will be reached through similar psychological exINTRODUCTION xi plorations? Of Roosevelt, Harold Ickes once said that it was "impossible to come to grips with him." Indeed, his mind was a perfect exemplification of the "feeling" and "intuitive" types of extroversion described by Tung and van der Hoop, so his ana...

lyst will not expect to find logical consistency as he follows the threads of motivation through a tortuous course of behavior that is at once masterly and preposterous. In the case of the intimate assistant and confidant, Harry Hopkins, a more transparent man and one whose brooding antipathies and wanton enthusiasms were as passionate as they were often fatuous, the psychopathol... ogy is already dimly visible to the observant layman.* Later generations of savants, far removed from the political considera tions which now discourage such projects and aided by the testi mony of secrets yet untold, will undoubtedly write of these "cases" in books which men now living will never have an opportunity to read. Randolph Bourne's simile of the wild elephant will not do. The story of Warid War II and its aftermath is a drama of human will. The denouement, so full of irony, was not fortu itous. It is too easily forgotten that conscious, deliberate choices between specific alternatives were made time after time. While armies were clashing all over the world, important men met and made decisions and compacts. In varying degrees, these men were either clothed with legal authority to do what they did or they arrogated the.power to themselves. The lives and fortunes of millions of living human beings and the futures of those yet unborn were admittedly to be affected by what these high per sonages decided to do or not to do. The legality of their actions *General John R. Deane, head of the United States Military Mis..

sion in Moscow during the war, writes that Harry Hopkins carried out the Russian aid program "with a zeal which approached fanati.. cism." Hopkins' "enthusiasm became so ingrained that it could not be tempered." (John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance [Viking, 1947], go) xii ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA under national and international law is perhaps now academic; the results are not. The travail and violence that must inevitably be faced in order to undo much that these men did remain the burden of the present and the future. In August, 1941, while war was raging in Europe but before the United States formally became a belligerent, President Rooseveltmet with Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a bat tleship off the coast of Canada. The Atlantic Charter was pro nounced at the end of this conference. Later, when the United States was at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan, Roosevelt left American soil to engage in conferences with Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, Stalin, and others at Quebec, Casablanca, Cairo, Teheran, and Yalta. The finesse of master politicians in dramatizing their movements, the subtle art of press-agentry, and the natural susceptibilityof most human beings to the appeal of the spectacular all united to glamorize these parleys. Roose velt's treks across the world led him closer, ever closer, to Rus sia until finally, at Yalta, Stalin received him on Russian soil.

Stalin received much at Yalta besides the effusivecompany of a still garrulous, though ill, American Presidentas the world was later to learn. Harry Hopkins was, of course, in Roosevelt's entourage when the President met with the Soviet dictator in the winter palace of the Czars on the shores·of the Black Sea; he busied himself passing little notes to Roosevelt"prompting him. Also there was Alger Hiss, as a special adviser from the State Department ..One can imagine his inner jubilation. After each conference, communiques were issued. They sel dom told the story fully. It would be presumptuous, indeed, for this volume to purport to do that. Fragments yet unsuspected are undoubtedly locked in the memories or files of persons still alive, or may be written down in papers hidden in the vaults of the heirs of men now dead, not to be brought forth until still later generations have come upon the scene. The political party ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA xiii of Franklin D. Roosevelt remained in control of the State De partment and its files for seven years after his death. Much mate rial that found its way to Hyde Park during the Roosevelt and Truman regimes has been seen only by a few trusted eyes, and its disclosure has been stubbornly refused. The line that must be drawn between private papers of a President, on the one hand, and papers of public interest which come into a President's possessionbut which in good faith belong to the nation, on the other, is a tenuous one at best, and it is not to be expected that a family as politically minded as that of thelate war President will always draw such a line in a manner to please inquisitive his torians.

As a result, many details concerning Roosevelt's foreign con ferences have never seen the light of day. This volume will have served its purpose if it can marshal, in some clear form, the tangled mass of facts which have already become known and if it can help to dissipate the fog with which propaganda has shrouded these important historical events. Enough has come to light to warrant some inescapable conclusions. It is a sad, at times a sordid story. The United States had no Talleyrand-Iearned, philosophical, combining adroitness with a passionate patriotism for his country-to send to Cairo, Tehe ran, Yalta. Or if it had a Talleyrand, it did not send him. Nor was there a Woodrow Wilson to blush with shame at the mass dislocations of helpless populations, the sugar-coated acquies cence in slave lahar, the secret agreements, the hypocritical com muniques; nor a Theodore Rooseveltever to call a spade a spade, in talking to Stalin or in talking to the American people..

Writing of the cause of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides said: "The real cause I consider to be the one which was for", mally most kept out of sight." Obliquity on the part of rulers of nations is not a lost art two and a half millennia later. That Franklin D. Roosevelt was a master of it, his champions even xiv INTRODUCTION boast. To them it was simply his clever way of outflanking polit.. ical opposition. One is struck by the nonchalance with which Professor Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford University, in his book The Man in the Street, a generally sympathetic work, writes that "Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor," going on to say that "if he came out unequivocally for intervention, he would be defeated in 1940."1 Perhaps in the view of the good professor this would have been a terrible calamity. In a.ny event, if a bit of skillful duplicity was needed, Roosevelt was equal to it, both before and after Pearl Harbor.** ** Professor Bailey's assertions that "Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor" and that if he had not done so he would have been defeated in 1940 drew no dissent, even from that ardent biographer of Roosevelt, Harvard Pro fessor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who reviewed the Bailey book for the New York Times. Said he, with approval: "If he [Roosevelt] was going to induce the people to move at all, Professor Bailey con cludes, he had no choice but to trick them into acting for what he conceived to be their best interests." (New York Titnes Book Re view, May 9, 1948) He also used this review to scold Charles Austin Beard for having laid Roosevelt's deceptions out on the table for all to see, grumbling that this was "in the manner of a prosecuting at torney."

.It was frightening to observe that the pretension of omniscience and the usurpation, by "trickery," of the power of making vital deci sions by the chief executive of a democratic country aroused no moral indignation in many educators in the United States, for this reflected a widespread, basic contempt for the democratic concept in academic circles; and, as Beard had pointed out, it was a symptom of the intel lectual chaos of the times that self-styled"liberals" were so often found to have this fundamentally reactionary bent. In subsequent national political campaigns in which Professor Schlesinger co-worked with Mrs. Roosevelt and in which he served as a top adviser and ghost writer for the candidates, the subject was dropped. A study of his later writings finds no indication that he would accord to all Presidents the prerogative of perpetuating them selves in office and moving the country into war by "tric~ing" the ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA xv Whatever we may think of the ethics of this tacticin a democ...

racy, at the least it precludes the historian from ever taking Roosevelt's public attitudes at face valuee In the perspective of time, we know now that his words and his deeds often galloped off in opposite directions. An editor of the SaturJay Evening Post was once moved to remark that when listening to Roose velt's speeches,he was reminded of two people going through a revolving door in opposite directions without touching. For a man of Roosevelt's mental habits, semantics is more than just an interesting branch of the science of philology; it is the arsenal from which the practical politician procures his sharpest weapons. For this reason, a broad view and an uninhibited inquisitive ness are necessarywhen one approaches the foreign conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt. They cannot be understood if sealed off from the stream of history, and they are utterly incompre hensible if one overlooks at any point in the narrative the psy chological characteristics, in particular the inordinate political ambitions, of this man who ran successfullyfor the Presidency of the United States four times.

Accordingly, Part One of this book will touch upon some of the more general aspectsof the subject. These, it is felt,are essen tialin preparingus to see in truer proportionand to integratethe details of the conferences when they are examined individually. It may prove helpful to look at the canvas as a whole before studying the brush strokes. One more word as prelude.... It will be said, in a critical vein, that this is an unfriendly,opinionatedbook. The author does not pretend that his researches have hatched no convictions. Nor people. As the record now stands, one could do no more than to infer that Profes$or Schlesinger accords the prerogative to Presidents whose re-election Professor Schlesinger would favor and with respect to wars which Professor Schlesinger would wish the United States to enter.

xvi INTRODUCTION would he deem it a literary virtue to be insensitive to hypocrisy and misprision when they are uncovered in the search.for facts. Truth is always the first casualty in war. In later years, there are always those who stubbornly resist its resurrection. Among them are the hero-worshipers, intellectually supine or sentimen.. tal, but many have a gnawing senseof guilt, for they either par ticipated in the thought manipulation of the war period or were its dupes. People who scrambled onto the propaganda band wagon like jack rabbits do not enjoy having their own folly shown up, even to themselves. Let anyone seek to correct the historical record, by dredging up what William James called "the irreducible brute facts," and they will quickly brand him as "one-sided" or "biased" or "extreme." They have a vested interest in the delusions of the past. In the post-World War II period, this phenomenon has, in some academic and literary circles, approached the level of Or wellian farce. Squirming in a dilemma, these people resort to a characteristically twentieth-century device with which to extri cate themselves: semantics. Impervious to revealed facts which they cannot controvert, retreating not an inch, they arrogantly and in chorus-appropriate to themselves a word to use as a shield. This word is the adjective"impartial." They-they would have it known-"see both sides." They wish to hear no more.

Obviously,the truth does not flourish in such a climate. World War IIis not exempt from the impulse of inquisitive researchers to probe and to set the record straight; nor is Franklin D. Roose.. velt, unless we have already been catapulted into the forced con· formity of George Orwell's 1984 or the nightmarish scientific dictatorship of Aldous Huxley's BraveNew Wor/d. Revisionism has been going on ever since Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) ex posed the forged Donation of Constantine. But the job is never done by those genial purveyors of the pleasantly orthodox, who ROO$EVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA xvii write histories and biographies with one eye on the currently fashionable sourcesand the other on the book of etiquette. Oscar Wilde strained for his epigram when he wrote: "A man who, sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all." But he had a point. The man who sees nothing at all is, with perverse frequency, the man who prides himself on seeing both sides of a question. In history-writing, impartial ity is sometimes·a pose, sometimes a cover for obtuseness. If a reader wishes really to dig into a subject, he must Beware the middle mind That purrs and never shows a tooth.

Who are they who lay such pompous claim to impartiality? Actually, we should suspect them. This has never been better said than by Gaetano Salvemini, who, while teaching at Har vard in 1954,published a book entitled Preludeto World War II, which he dedicated to his colleagues and students. It dared to challenge some of the pithless platitudes which had been pass ing as "objective" history in those hallowed halls. Anticipating, no doubt, a charge of bias, he wrote in the Preface: There are certain historians and critics sincerely convinced that they are unbiased, impartial, "scientific," who reject as "biased" any opin ion that clashes with their own bias: they are fools endowed with a God Almighty complex. A second group consider themselves "un biased" because they understand all principles and have none them selves; opportunism is no more admirable in historiography than in daily life. Then there are the wolves in sheep's clothing-the propa ganda agents who boast of their lack of bias. Finally, there are those who frankly admit their bias, but do their utmost to avoid being blinded or side-tracked by it. Impartiality is either a delusion of the simple-minded, a banner of the opportunist, or the boast of the dis honest. Nobody is permitted to be unbiased toward truth or false hood.

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 PART ONE Two Men and a Secret ... for that nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise. SIR FRANCIS BACON Chapter1 tt •••AND BY ME.Jt LoRD ACTON'S famous dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely may have come to the minds of many Americans as they sat before their radios on March I, 1945.Presi dent Rooseveltwas addressing Congress, reporting on his trip to Yalta. Poland had been partitioned, and the Lublin Committee, the coterie of Polish Communist puppets, coached by Stalin, had in effect been made masters of the remnants of that unhappy country. To veil this outrage, Rooseveltpretended that what had occurred was a harmless compromise by men of good will. But in expressing this thought, he gave his listeners a glimpse into the workings of his mind by means of a peculiar choice of words, carelessly ad-libbed (and later expurgated from the au thorized Roosevelt Public Papers). The solution to the Polish question, said he, had been "agreed to by Russia,by Britainand by me." Explaining further, he added that "we couldn't go as far as Britain wanted to go in certain areas, as far as Russia wanted in certain areas, and as far as I wanted in certain areas.,,1 L'etat c'est moil Had a creeping megalomania eaten into the mind of this failing man, who was now in his thirteenth year as President of the world's mightiest nation and who had been giddily consorting with kings, potentates, and dictators? Had I 2 TWO MEN AND A SECRET the plenitude of power which had been entrusted to him to dis tribute vast American resources throughout the world led him gradually to identify himself personally as the source of this lar gesse and to project this conception to the whole field of foreign affairs? Or was he trying to be meticulously Constitutional, be ing aware that treaties may be entered into by the sovereign United Statesonly with the consent of the Senate?