Part On - Two Men and a Secret

Roosevelt did not then, or ever, present the Yalta agreement to the legislative branch of the government as a treaty.2 He ob viously did not care to treat it as such. What was it, then? An "executive act" within any Constitutional area of jurisdiction of the President? It was never made clear what Roosevelt con sidered it to be from the legal standpoint, either under national or international law-if he ever gave the matter a thought. In essence, it was a personal agreement by Roosevelt with the Prime Minister of Great ·Britain and Stalin of Russia changing boundaries of Poland and other nations and determining the nationality of some millions of unconsulted human beings. Manifestly seeing neither the comedy nor the tragedy in such a performance and as unabashed as he would be if announcing a plan for the exchange of some grain and timber, Franklin D. Roosevelthad it within his nature to say to the world that all of this had been agreed to by Russia, by Britain, "and by me."

It was this agreement that Arthur BlissLane, our Ambassador to Poland, branded "a capitulation on the part of the United States." Horrified and saddened, he resigned and wrote·a book entitled 1 Saw Poland Betrayed.3 A secret document concerning the Far East had also been signed "by me" at Yalta. Of it, Wil liam C. Bullitt, who had been American Ambassador to Russia and to France, later wrote: "No more unnecessary, disgraceful and potentially dangerous document has ever been signed by a President of the United States.,,4 The "by me" spirit pervaded all of Franklin D. Roosevelt's u •••AND BY ME." 3 conduct of foreign affairs. With the pushful Harry Hopkins at his side -and with a powerful government war information agency under his thumb, he made foreign policyhis private prov ince. His Secretary of State, the conscientious Cordell Hull, be came a figurehead. Both the President and Hopkins, who saw alike on all important issues,including the desirability of getting Franklin D. Roosevelt reelected ad infinitum, were pertina cious men and were not tolerant of opposition or interference.

When Hull resigned his cabinet post right after the election of 1944 (Roosevelt having persuaded him to stay until the election was over), James F. Byrnes was a possiblechoiceto succeedhim. Hopkins opposed Byrnes on the ground that Roosevelt was go ing to be his own Secretary of State, particularly in direct deal ings with Churchill and Stalin, and Byrnes (who had once told Hopkins to "keep the hell out of my business") was not one to fit himself placidly into the role of a mere mouthpiece. So the obliging Edward R. Stettinius, who already had a perfect record in taking orders from Hopkins as Lend-Lease Administrator and as Under Secretary of State, was selected to be the "mouth piece."5 At the close of World War I, Woodrow Wilson had gone abroad to negotiate a treaty of peace.Franklin D. Roosevelt,both before and during World War II, traveled far and wide as no American President had ever done before. On those trips he made vast commitments of a military and political nature, some of which were long kept secret. The Congress, first on his pre tension that he would keep the country out of war and later on his assurance that his policies would "win the peace," made available to him, for disposal at his almost unlimited discretion, billions upon billions in dollars and resources. No President of the United States ever exercised such enormous powers nor in so autocratic a manner. Therefore, a heavy responsibility must inevitably overshadow his memory. The tragic consequences 4 TWO MEN AND A SECRET which have followed so many of his acts, and so many of his almost incredible omissions, cannot justly be laid at the door of fate or charged alone to the wickedness or intransigence of other men.

It was Roosevelt who impetuously blurted out the "uncondi tional surrender" ultimatum at a press conference in Casablanca, to the·surprise of Winston Churchill, who was sitting at his side and who had no alternative but to nod approva1.6 This ill-con sidered policy has been branded by Hanson W. Baldwin and other sober authorities in this country and in England as one of the blunders that prolonged the war and lost the peace.'lIt was Rooseveltwho, at Quebec, put his initials to the barbaric Morgen thau Plan for the pastoralization of Germany, a scheme which later years were to prove so unfortunate and which had to be abandoned for the good of all Europe before it was ever fully implemented. When Roosevelt returned to Washington from Quebec, he confided to his shocked Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, that "he had evidently done it without much thought."s But. this is not a very convincing disclaimer, for the Morgen thau Plan meshed too well with the rest of the Roosevelt-Hop kins pattern for Europe.

It was Rooseveltwho obstinately blocked Churchill's plan for attacking Germany through the Balkans and insisted instead upon the Russian-favored strategy of the Normandy invasion. This was another decision that had disastrous consequences for the future, delivering eastern Europe to the Communist terror and making another war virtually inevitable.9 It was Roosevelt who would brook no stint in the lavishing of Lend-Lease upon the Russians and who exacted no conditions to safeguard the future security of Russia's neighbors or of this country itself while the power to do so was still in his hands. And it was Roose velt-personally and willfully and with the ominous shadow of the world's next great threat already plain for such as he to seett •••AND BY ME." s who took such men as Harry Hopkins and Alger Hiss with him halfway around the world to the suburbs of Russia, in the year 1945,to talk to Stalin and to bribe the Soviet Union to enter the war with Japan just in time to pluck the fruits of victory.

As the record unfolds and as events come to be seen in the perspective of time, it hecomes more and more difficult to excul pate Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even the men who were of his offi cial family have, in later days, either given up the attempt or have drifted into a morass of mutual contradiction. Stettinius, last Secretary of State, who was at Yalta with the President, felt impelled to produce, four years after Roosevelt'sdeath, a lengthy apologia for the Yalta Conference. Although by that time it had become apparent to all the world that the fruits of Yalta were sour indeed, Stettinius was unabashed to write in his book that it was, "on the whole, a diplomatic triumph for the United States and Great Britain."lo James F. Byrnes, who was also at Yalta and who succeeded Stettinius as Secretary of State under President Truman, chooses·to wash his hands of most of the illfated agree ments made at that conference and takes pains to point out that the secret protocol promising Russia certain Japanese territory and important concessionsin China was signed by Roosevelt the day after Byrnes, thinking the conference was over, had left for home. The impression that Roosevelt, or those who had his ear at the time, did not want Byrnes to know about this deal is irre sistible.It was not until some time after Roosevelt's death that a safe in the White House yielded the astonishing document.

ll General Patrick J. Hurley, Roosevelt's wartime Ambassador to China, .has characterized this secret agreement as a "blueprint for Communist conquest of China." With a lingering loyalty, perhaps, to his old chief, he explained that Roosevelt was "a sick man" at Yalta.12 Farley, Stimson, Hull, and others have said or implied the same thing. Even Robert E. Sherwood, one of the White House ghost writers and certainly never one to tarnish 6 TWO MEN AND A SECRET the memory of his idol, is constrained to say that when Roosevelt agreed to the provisionsconcerningManchuria(which he did in China's total absence from the conference, and clandestinely) he was "tired and anxious to avoid further argument."13 Perhaps thisappeals to Sherwood as a felicitous explanation of what hap pened at Yalta. The moral monstrousness of diplomacy, touching the fate of millions of people, being conducted on such a basis seems not to have occurred to·him.

One tragicomic facet of this illicit bargain was that it would be Russians, not Americans or Chinese, who would accept sur render of Japan's Kwantung Army. That Army's huge stores, the Mukden Arsenal, and the industrial facilities of Manchuria were to be handed on a platter to the Russians, who were to arrive on the scene in American-made jeeps, tanks, and trucks, uniformed, booted, and armed out of the supplies pledged by President Roosevelt at Yalta, to be carried on a hundred Ameri can ships across the Pacific Ocean to Vladivostok. The "blueprint," to use General Hurley's metaphor, served its purpose well. The next five years saw the carrying out of the Communist conquest of China, followed by the embroilment of the United States in war in Korea in a belated and costly move to stem the tide of Russianexpallsionism. When Joseph C. Grew, the prewar Ambassador to Japan, learned about that secret Yalta deal, he wrote a grave memoran ...

dum which the State Department promptly locked up out of sight. Once Russia is in the Japanese war, he predicted, "Mon golia, Manchuria and Korea will gradually slip into Russia's orbit, to be followed in due course by China and eventually Japan."14 Time has not yet run out on that prediction. For Japan, the word was '~eventually." There is no mystery about why, year after year, the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan must bristle with American warships and planes patroling in battle readiness.

u •••AND BY ME." 7 Nor is there any mystery about how the Soviet empire ex panded during and soon after World War II to the point where 800,000,000 people were under its rule instead of the prewar 170,000,000. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, half of Poland, a chunk of Finland, a big sliceof Rumania, piecesof Manchuria, the Jap anese half of Sakhalin, and all of the Kurile Islands were an.. nexed. Mongolia was torn from China and practically incor porated into Russia's Siberian hinterland. Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Czechoslova.kia,East Germany, China, and North Korea became satellite states.Of these gains, the industrial areas of East Germany (Silesia) and Czechoslovakia were the most valuable asset in modern resources.In Asia, Manchuria was the key to enormous industrial potentials, while China as a whole represented an inexhaustible source of manpower for al most any purpose-agricultural, industrial, or military. This vast Eurasian storehouse, workshop, and labor pool, all to be put to the serviceof Russian foreign policy, was the prize Stalin sought and won.

That Roosevelt was "a sick man" at Yalta-in truth, a dying man-is hardly to be disputed in view of the evidence concern ing his physical condition which has subsequently come to light. His extraordinary statement to Congress on March I, 1945,in his report on the conference, that "1 was well the entire time" and "I was not ill for a second until I arrived back in Washington" can only be taken as an example of the duplicity to which he so frequently felt free to resort in order to allay public suspicions. There is pathos in the picture of this pale and shaking man, with sagging jaw and cavernous eyes, addressing the Congress and feeling it politic to say,in a speech broadcast to his country and to th.e world, that he had just returned from his trip "refreshed" and that he had not been ill "for a second." It is shocking to re... flect that he could treat the truth so casually and to be reminded by so glaring an example that the half-truth or, if need be, the 8 TWO MEN AND A SECRET plain prevarication came so easily to his lips whenever political repercussions unfavorable to him might ensue from honesty.

However, to blame the Yalta debacle on Roosevelt's state of health or to shield him from culpability on that ground is to take too easya way out. Yalta followed the pattern of statesmanship if it can be called that-which Roosevelt, Hopkins, and the other favored Presidential intimates, "advisers," and "experts" had al ready established in their handling of the foreign affairs of the country. It was a natural extension of the habitual procedure of abject and reckless appeasement of the appetites of the Soviet Union. If that was Roosevelt's policy when he was sick, it had also been his policy when he was well. FrOIDthe Atlantic Charter through Quebec, Casablanca, Cairo, Teheran, and Yalta, as well as by his instructions to the emissaries he sent to other meetings in London and Moscow, the role he played in this respect was always the same, as the following chapters of this book will show.

By intention and deed he not only built up the power of the So viet Union and made it a high-priority project but also fanatically devoted himself to bringing about a state of affairs in Europe and Asia in which there would be no neighboring powers capable of offering any check to Soviet ambitions. His "unconditional sur render" ultimatum and his insistence upon keeping American and British troops out of the Balkans and eastern German areas were but parts of this general design; and he overrode with in flexible stubbornness the efforts of Winston Churchill to look to the future and guard against the threat of a colossal Commu nistic hegemony casting its dark shadow over all of Europe and Asia}5 Churchill had the historical perspective to know that the mili tary defeat of Germany and Japan could not alone be the cure for the violent tensions of the Eurasian continent or bring free dom from the fear of war to an unhappy world. He was also realist enough to know that conjuring up a new League of Nau •••AND BY ME."

tions and bestowingupon it the euphemisticname"The United Nations" could not be expected to· accomplish such a miracle. Therefore, although he was willing to indulge good-humoredly the penchant of political leaders like Roosevelt for making stir ring speeches that dripped with hope and confidence and was not above giving forth some very sanguine rhetoric himself and exchanging loving toasts with the Russians at vodka-flushed ban.. quets, he knew the importance of getting the right troops to the strategic places before it would be too late. The right troops in his mind were British and American, not Russian. Roosevelt must have known all this, too. There is ample evi.. dence that he did. Yet he did things which made both peace and justice for Europe and Asia impossible, and he concealed from the American people information which could have put them on notice of the perils into which they were being steered by their leaders. The onus cannot be shifted to the generals and the admirals. The President too often vetoed or ignored their sug..

gestions. They were expected to execute policies made for them on the political level. Even Harry Hopkins became a dilettante military authority. When he spoke to generals or admirals, they were not unaware that they were facing the alter ego of the Commander-in-Chief himself. We know from the writings of General Deane, General Mark Clark, General Wedemeyer, Admiral Leahy, Admiral.Zacharias, and others and from the information which has been permitted to leak out concerning General Patton's show of recalcitrance that there was grave ap prehension in Army and Navy circles concerning the Russians at the very times that Roosevelt was pretending to the world that relations were excellent. Such fears were not allowed to be pub licized. "While our armed forces were fighting with superb skill and courage," William C. Bullitt has written, "our foreign policy was being handled with ignorant and reckless disregard of the 10 TWO MEN AND A SECRET vital interests of the American people."16This is not political invective. It is the serious judgment of a man who had served by the appointment of Franklin D. Roosevelt himself as an Am bassador to Russia and to France but whose deep patriotism re volted at the spectacle of folly approaching downright treachery which he observed.

There is no doubt that Roosevelt was, throughout the war, determined that the truth about our relations with Soviet Russia should not come out. In the government and in the armed serv ices, he rewarded those who helped him conceal it, and he promptly punished all who sought to reveal it. Looking back over the public effusions of the Roosevelt officialfamily, it is hard now to suppress a smile at such flights of oratory as that of Ed.. ward R. Stettinius, then Under Secretary of State, who said in a radio broadcast in January of 1944 that the end of the war would find Soviet Russia to be America's biggest, strongest, and warm est friend. It has been widely said that Stettinius was well mean ing but a man of considerable naivete, but there is nothing to justify the belief that he was so naive that he believed that pre diction. The Soviets had shown their real hand long before that in innumerable ways, as Stettinius well knew (not to mention the historical and ideological factors which made the prophecy so unlikely).

Nor is it credible that by such statements it was hoped to cajole the masters of the Kremlin away from unfriendly attitudes and plans which were basic to them and which had already been plainly manifested to American representatives in high and low posts both at home and abroad. One has only to read the rem.. iniscencesof General John R. Deane, head of the American Mil itary Mission in Moscow during the war, to realize how belliger ent to their "allies" the Russians really were during the entire war and how impervious they were to cajolery. The General titled his book The Strange Alliance.17 It •••AND BY ME." II No, when Stettinius spoke in January, 1944,to his radio audi ence, he was merely parroting the theme which at that time, an election year, was of the gravest concern to the political fortunes of the Roosevelt clique. The President and Harry Hopkins and the others had crawled too far out on the Russian limb to allow the limb to be sawed off. Stettinius was rewarded for this and similar public professions by being promoted to Secretary of State. In that post, one of his closest advisors was Alger Hiss, the revelation of whose sub rosa activities was to shock the country a few years later.18 To those who retort that hindsight is better than foresight and that Roosevelt, Stettinius, and others should not be condemned for not having seen the future as in a crystal ball, the simple answer must be given that statesmen of any competence are pre sumed to have a reasonable appreciation of the probable conse quences of the policies they chart. As a matter of fact, the hand writing was on the wall, in legible terms. Many Americans saw it; courageous ones pointed to it publicly and were usually sav agely attacked by the Rooseveltian propagandists.

If our statesmen read such honest analyses as Dr. David J. Dal lin's SovietRussia'sForeignPolicy/9it was their policy to ignore their practical implications and even to resent angrily the expres sion of any views that Soviet Russia might be something less than a "peace-loving democracy." "We must not annihilate either Germany or Japan," Professor Nicholas Spykman of Yale warned in a book shortly after Pearl Harbor, "lest we leave Eu rope or the Far East open to domination by Russia." And he was bold enough to stress that our foreign policy "should be designed not in terms of some dream world but in terms of the realities."20To Rooseveltians, this was heresy. No professor es caped from his placid campus to land a lush job in wartime Washington with that kind of talk. The Russophilism of the. Harry Hopkinscoterieof,White Housefavoriteswas of almost 12 TWO MEN AND A SECRET pathological intensity. These men were unmoved by logical con siderations bearing upon the security of the United States in the years to come. General Deane, who watched the flow of Ameri can resources to Russia from his vantage point in Moscow and attended conferences dealing with it, writes that Hopkins carried out the Russian aid program "with a zeal which approached fanaticism." Hopkins' enthusiasm "became so ingrained that it could not be tempered."21 Meanwhile, the public was treated in the spring of 1943 to such balderdash as Joseph E. Davies' Missionto Moscow/2 which would have been on the level of the moronic if it had not been conceived as sheer propaganda. This book was filmed in Holly wood with great fanfare and did much to condition the Ameri can people for the vast benefits to be conferred upon our Soviet "allies." Stalin was pictured as a sort of combination of Pavel Milyukov, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Bernard Baruch, and Jane Addams. People who called themselves "liberals"were deserting reason in droves, as though struck by what Aldous Huxley calls "herd-poisoning." But not all were struck. Norman Thomas went to see the movie Mission to MoscoUl and came home dis gusted. It was dishonest, and he was a man of intellectual integ rity. The next day, he organized a protest petition and found fifty-two fellow anti-Communist Leftists to sign it. The state ment asserted that the film "falsifies·and glorifies dictatorship ...

creates the impression that the methods of Stalin are not incom patible·withgenuine democracy." But Norman Thomas, in spite of his prominence, met difficulty in getting his protest to many newspapers or on the air. Missionto Moscowwent its dizzy way through the theaters of America, and so cleverly had its Holly wood contrivers and their "special advisers" from Washington done their .work that millions of Anlericans. could not separate the ,go.per cent of fiction from the 10 per cent of fact. Sparked· by the President and his indefatigable wife, whose u •••AND BY ME." 13 politicalshrewdnesswas of such a subtle characterthat it escaped the perceptionof most of .her admirers, by the fanaticismof Harry Hopkins and the covey of strange birds which he gath... ered in the government, and by the Communist agents in this country operating either openly or surreptitiously, all of the moderntechniquesof propagandawere put to work to sell the American people what may best be described colloquially as "a bill of goods." A preposterous delusion was foisted upon the electorate of the United States.Why?

And why, as victory mounted upon victory, did a strange un easinessgrip so many patriotic Americans? Why was there, to people of discernment, a foreboding mystery about so many things that were happening, a hollowness in so many of the fine words that were spoken? The reason was that the President of the United States had a secret.

Chapter11 THE SECRET IN THE CLOSET THE SECRETwhich Franklin D. Roosevelt guarded so obstinately could not, from his point of view, be allowed to come out. He had too much at stake. And public suspicion of it had to be stifled. It was not a small secret, like those which often burden politi cians, such as a departmental scandal or some shady vote-trading deal or petty personal graft. Roosevelt's robust genius far tran scended these lesser stratagems. This man did everything in a big way; even his secrets were gigantic. This one was as big as a war. In fact, it was a war. But it was not the war with Germany and Italy, the war which found Great Britain, France, Russia, the United States, and other countries lined up in resistance to the aggressions of Adolf Hit ler and Benito Mussolini. That war involved the demands of Germany and Italy, spurious or otherwise, for Lebensraum, the arrogance and brutality of their ruling regimes, and the general problem of preponderant German power on the continent of Europe. Everybody knew about that war.

Nor was it the clash which Japan precipitated by her insist ence upon creating what she liked to call the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," which would have put China and South14 THE SECRET IN THE CLOSET 15 east Asia, at the least, under the economic aegis of a bloated Japanese Empire. Everybody knew about that war, too. But there was also a third war, one which Franklin D. Roose velt was determined should be hidden from the masses of the American people by a camouflage which was to be his chef d'oeuvre. That war involved Soviet Russia,the fount of Com munism. In it, Russia was the aggressor. It was she' who was on the march, both literally and figuratively. She waged her offen sives with a perseverance and cunning probably never before equalled in the annals of warfare. This secret war must not be confused with the others men tioned, although they overlapped. Thus when Hitler turned his divisions east in the summer of 1941 and invaded Russia, Stalin, who had theretofore been on the prowl in Poland, Finland, Ru mania (Bessarabia), and the states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and who had tried to reach a deal with Hitler for carv ing up the Middle East, was, of course, put temporarily on the defensive himself.* He had to meet this development, and his other plans were contingent upon his success in doing so. But the war which was dearest to his heart and which was implicit in his ideological credo had started long before Hitler's Panzers rolled into the Ukraine and was to continue long after der Fiihrerwas a charred corpse under the rubble of Berlin and his Third Reich nothing but a memory. It was destined to prevent the return of peace and security to the world for many years after what was popularly thought of as World War II had come *It is probablethat Russia would have turned on Germany at a propitious moment if Hitler had not struck first. The Soviets were planning to attack Germany in the autumn of 1941,according to Gen eral Alexei Markoff (see his article in the Saturday Evening Post [May 13, 1950], 175). Most opinions are that Stalin would have waited to see America committed and his prey weakened by Allied bombing.

16 TWO MEN AND A SECRET to an end. World War II was really three wars. Two of them ended in 1945. The third one did not. Against whom was the Soviet Union waging this war, the concealment of which from the American people was the corner stone of President Roosevelt'sforeign policy? The more imme diate victims slated for conquest were, of course, Russia's terri torial neighbors: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Rumania on the west; Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan on the south; and China and Japan on the east. Near-neighbors on the list were Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Iraq, and Tibet. Indochina, India, Burma, Malaya, and the· Dutch East Indies, chafing restlessly in colonial or semi-colonial status, loomed like rich, unripe plums for later plucking. On a broader scale, but with equal intensity of purpose, the war was being waged against all of the capitalistic countries of the world, by military attack or threats of attack, subversive conspiracy and infiltration, economic debilitation, or by a combination of these means. True to Lenin in this regard, Stalin charted a course of flexibility and opportunistn, and wherever possible he would have others fight his battles for him.

The United States and Great Britain, as the major bulwarks of democratic capitalism, were, of course, archenemies whose ultimate downfall was essential. That this project was not to be easywas apparent to such coolplotters as Stalin, Mikoyan, Molo tov, Voroshilov, Vishinsky, and the lesser-known, behind-the scenes zealots of the Politburo; so the most.subtle indirections were reserved for its long-term accomplishment. Geqnany and Japan, the two great buffers against Communist expansion in Europe and Asia, were first to be removed from the path in two simultaneous wars. England, France, and the United States would help Russia crush Germany. The United States could vanquish Japan singlehandedly; there was no doubt about that.. The SovietUnion would not have to dissipate her strength fight..

THE SECRET IN THE CLOSET 17 ing Japan, but only manage to swoop in at the surrender,,··A new chaos would be precipitated in China, and into the power vacuums thus created in both Europe and Asia, Soviet Russia would then step. Through his sourcesof information in the United' States, some of whom were in high places, Stalin knew that Franklin D. Rooseveltcould be relied upon to seeat least this phase of the pro gram through. He was not mistaken. Does this mean the American people had elected a crypto Communist as President? Or that this President, by shunting the third war, the secret one, out of sight, consciouslyintended harm to his country? It does not. No such inference is intended. To make it is, to misapprehend the Roosevelt mentality. Here we touch a delicate point. Rooseveltwas no more a Com munist than he was a Jeffersonian. Conversely, he was no more a Jeffersonian than he was a Communist. Ideologies were not the stuff of the cerebrations that took place in that handsome head.

Here was no furrow ..browed zealot for a system, no Karl Marx, no Adam Smith. In the presence of an argument between a socialist and a capitalist, he would be likely to steal the show with a charmingly put evasion. To Harold Ickes' wistful plaint that it was "impossible to come to grips with him," James F. ** A war between Japan and the United States was a consumma tion which could only have favorable consequences for Soviet Russia because for half a century Japan had been a check to Russian expan sionism in the Far East and her defeat in a war with the United States was inevitable. It is well known that pro~Soviet influences in W'ash ington discreetly fomented an outbreak of hostilities. Nor was Mos cow indifferent during the months that preceded Pearl Harbor. In January, 1941,Sir Stafford Cripps, then British Ambassador to Russia, wrote'in his diary: "At the moment the Russians seem more sphinx like than ever and I doubt if even the Germans know what they are thinking. There are indications of something being on the tapis with Japan; I think an attempt to encQurageJapan to go to war with Amer ica and so get Japan defeated and that danger out of the way."

18 TWO MEN AND A SECRET Byrnes has added that "Franklin Roosevelt was not the same to any two men."! The man who, as we shall see, clan~estinely obtained the recommendations of Earl Browder, the head of the Communist party, in the crucial months of the war, wore a dif ferent collar than the man who discussed affairs with Byrnes. That a web of subversion was spun over Washington in Roose velt's administration is now beyond question. J. Edgar Hoover's Mastersof Deceit is but one of many authoritative sourceswhich verify that the government was infiltrated by both Communist sympathizers and Soviet agents and that U.s. policies, plans, and officialattitudes were not only influenced by these infiltra tors but also promptly reported to Moscow. In Washington, however, some people were spiders in the web and some were flies. Some were strange hybrids. Most were none of these. If Franklin D. Roosevelt became, as the war went on, Stalin's favorite fellow-traveler, it was not necessarily because any ideo logical conversion had occurred. Byrnes observesthat his "stamp collection was often referred to as his hobby,· but politics was really his hobby," while one of his cabinet officers,Jesse Jones, put politeness aside to describe him as "a total politician." Here it is that the psychobiographers of the future will probably start in their quest for the "Why?"

Historian Charles A. Beard, a man of vast human perspective, when looking for Roosevelt's war motivations, saw "only con ceit, dreams of grandeur, vain imaginings, lust for power, or a desire to escapefrom our domestic perils-and obligations." More magnanimous is the· hypothesis that in his obsequiousness to ward the Kremlin, Roosevelt was simply carried away by the hopeful expectation, implicit in the Dale Carnegie philosophy, that if you offer people a friendly smile and a warm handshake they will reciprocate in kind. The flaw here is that Roosevelt always used this technique, or abandoned it, as it suited his other plans. He did not practice it on the Germans (even the anti-Nazi THE SECRET IN THE CLOSET underground), Italians, or Japanese, and he was never one to embrace it out of sheer innocence or credulity. General Wedemeyer recalls that when he came. back from China and told the President that he felt certain the Communists would cause trouble as soon as the war ended, the President "did not seem to understand what I was talking about" and quickly terminated the interview. 2 This had happened to others before.

It is possible that Roosevelt was so constituted psychologically that he could easily insulate his mind against jarring facts and that his egocentricity was such that what he thus excluded from himself he deemed unfit for assitnilation by the public. In the present narrative, we are not concerned with the smil ing, debonaire Roosevelt as a private person but with his deeds as a powerful public functionary. Robespierre, in his private life, was a man of culture, honest and kind; in his public life, he was a different kind of man. Vengeance was not the Lord's, but his. Under his leadership, the bloodletting that followed the French Revolution became a travesty on justice that went down in his tory as the Reign of Terror. We shall see, as we follow Roosevelt through his foreign summit conferences with Churchill and Stalin, that he permitted himself to become a tacit accomplice to, and abet, a terror on so broad a scale that the excesses of Robespierre's day are dwarfed by comparison.

Some believe today that Roosevelt's mind was possessedby a myth. Thus Arthur Koestler writes that Roosevelt "sincerely be lieved that Stalin's regime was a kind of uncouth, Asiatic New Deal" and that he could be sympathetic to its enhancement be causehe was under this illusion. This is too facile.It was the same regime that his successor, President Truman, denounced on Washington's Birthday, 1950, as "a modern tyranny far worse than that of any ancient empire." From its bloody inception it had been the antithesis of a democratic state. The fascist theory of the "elite" and the rejection of parliamentarianism had al20 TWO MEN AND A SECRET ways been dominant with Stalin, as with Lenin. As Franz Bor kenau,the leadingauthorityon internationalCommunism,says, "it was Stalin who regarded .democracy as the worst enemy."3 This dictator had shown his venomous hostility toward the Western democracies time after time. In all of them he main tained apparati of subversion and sabotage, and, viper-like, he had snapped at them in an interview given to Pravdaon Novem ber 30, 1939,saying: "It is not Germany who has attacked Eng land and France, but England and France who have attacked Germany."

The postulate, so often stated and so widely accepted on sheer faith, that Roosevelt showered American largesseon Russia only to defeat Nazi Germany crumbles under the weight of the facts. His beneficence to the Soviet regime and to Communist factions elsewhere went too far beyond such a limited objective. When Alcide De Gasperi, the non-Fascist premier of postwar Italy, told a press conference in Rome on February 24, 1954, that Italy was not entirely to blame for her failure to uproot Commu nism because "the evil plant ... was born and prospered in the Roosevelt climate," he was speaking of a country which had surrendered in 1943, only to find Palmira Togliatti rushed to Naples from the Soviet Union in an American ship and almost the whole of the local materiel and political favors assigned by the Allied command to Communists in Italy, Dalmatia, Monte negro, Slovenia,and, indirectly, Croatia, with enormous political consequences. His rueful remark about "the Roosevelt climate"

is amply verified by Borkenau's detailed researches on European Communism. Of Poland, for example, Borkenau reminds us: "From the beginning Stalin had fought a battle of extermination against any conceivable non-communist Polish leadership; a battle start ing with the 6xtermination of many thousand captured Polish officersin 1941 (in Katyn and other camps), continuing ... to THE SECRET IN THE CLOSET 21 the prompting and subsequentsabotage of the Warsaw rising. of the Polish underground army inluly 1944 (which led to the extermination of the best Polish forces,as was Stalin's intention), and to the kidnapping of all available Polish underground lead ers in March 1945.••.Between the. Lublin committee and the Polishgovernment-in-exilewhichenjoyedthe loyaltyof an over whelming majority of Poles; there ensued a fierce struggle. Wherever the NKVD went, it exterminated the· Home Army iorces within its reach, while simultaneously Roosevelt preached to the Polish leaders in exile the virtues of Stalin's Russia. ••• Thus the men of Lublin became the rulers of Poland."4 When Roosevelttold Chiang Kai-shek at Cairo in November, 1943, that he would have to coalescewith the Chinese Commu nists to hold his, Roosevelt's, favor after Japan's defeat, he was stepping out of the American-Japanese war and into another one.5 In this third war, which was to be the longest and most' crucial one of the twentieth century, we find Franklin D. Roose velt almost invariably charging ahead on the side of Soviet Rus sia. In fact, his support was the sine qua non of its successful launching. His mission, which he performed implacably, was to put weapons in Stalin's hands and, with American military might, to demolish all of the dikes that held hack the pressing tides of Communist expansion in Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, everything was done to prevent the average American citizen from -becoming conscious of this war; his mind was kept pre occupied hating Hitler and Tojo. And since Rooseveltwas con cealing the war itself, a fortiori he did not reveal his own sym pathiesin it.

Gullibility was widespread but not universal. Actually, the se cret could not be kept indefinitely from any alert observer of world affairs endowed with reasonably good powers of analysis. However, it must be remembered that many Americans were riding the crest of the wave in their personal careers, as was the 22 TWO MEN A"ND A SECRET President himself, and were content not to probe too deeply under the surface appearances. Like Cinderella, they took their moment of revelry and asked the fairy godmother no questions. The government, ·.in particular, was swarming with such indi viduals. But there were others, patriotic, disapproving people, both in and out of the armed services,who, under conditions of war hysteria, were cowed into a discreet silence. So perverted did the dominant mores become-in the press, the pulpit, the schools,and the clubs-under the impact of Roose veltian propaganda on all subjects pertaining to the war that truthful objectivity concerning "our gallant ally," Russia, was actually associated with disloyalty. In those irrational days, one courted ostracismif he was bold enough to bring up Lenin's very plain words: We are living not merely in a state, but in a system of states; and it is inconceivable that the Soviet republic should continue to exist for a long period side by side with imperialist states. Ultimately one or the other must conquer. Meanwhile a number of terrible clashes between the Soviet republic and the bourgeois states are inevitable.

Although Hitler's Mein Kampf was everywhere pointed to with horror, it was made to seem rather unpatriotic, or at least bad taste, to quote in public from Stalin's comparable call to action, his Problems of Leninis1n, or' from the bellicose resolutions of the Congresses of the Third International, dominated first by Lenin and later by Stalin. Yet the design of ultimate world con quest, through the combination of Soviet military power with revolutionary action outside Soviet frontiers, is, and was' when, Roosevelt was President of the United States, one of the most open and undisguised conspiracies of historical record.6 If Mr. Roosevelthad cared to call J. Edgar Hoover over from the F.B.I., he could have heard an earful about Stalin and the world-wide Communist mechanism to subvert and wreck the THE SECRET IN THE CLOSET 23 capitalist nations.7 Hoover and those around him had no illusion that the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were mere intel lectual exercises.They saw in them a battle plan for conquest.

The tactics might shift, they knew ("We must resort to artifices, evasionsand subterfuges," Lenin had prescribed), but the grand strategy was· unshakable. These men of the. F.B.1. were coolly efficientbut necessarily silent. Mr. Rooseveltsometimes had the New York Times brought to his bed. In that newspaper he could read such items as the report of Cyrus Sulzberger's trip to Russia. In the Times, Mr. Roose... velt·could also enjoy with his morning coffeea series of slippery articles by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg which stressed the "community of aims" of America and Russia. But for five cents he could have read the accurate premonitions of the New York Daily News. That tabloid may not have been the President's favorite newspaper, but it has been able to boast in a postwar editorial: "Begging nobody's pardon, this newspaper never did get suckered into believing that Bloody Joe was fighting for any thing but eventual Communist domination of the world." The boast was largely true.

In addition, there were ample overt warnings from within Russia. The drums of war were beating there long before Hitler attacked. The predatory intentions of the men in the Kremlin were certainly known to the President of the United States, who had an ambassadorial staff and military attaches on the spot to make constant reports to him. Surely they heard and saw as much as did the American press correspondents in Moscow,with whom they naturally·exchangedinformation.In the latterpart of 1940,there were only two American reporters left in Moscow, for the atmosphere was very belligerent and the censorship was stringent.8 One represented the United Press, the other the Asso ciated Press.An interesting report made at that time has come to light, a copy now being in the possessionof the Hoover Institute 24 TWO MEN AND A SEC·RET and Library at Stanford University.. This was a confidential, sealed report made to Hugh Baillie, president of the United Press Associations,by Virgil Pinkley, then United Press manager for Europe, after a swing through Europe, including Russia. It .is dated November 28, 1940, and was transmitted through the diplomatic pouch from Switzerland. (This (.tJas a full six months heforethe Germanattack on Russia.)In it, Mr. Pinkley said: Virtually all Soviet Republic enterprise is now devoted to building a gigantic military machine. Many competent observers believe that the idea of world revolution through propaganda has been shelved, and that emphasis is now being placed on building a tremendous military machine which will enable Soviet diplomacy to take over territories and countries by demand, and if requests are rejected, then objectives will be obtained through military force. Looking around Europe, Russians have observed the game of power politics and have proved apt pupils. [Italics added.] This definitely connotes aggressive, offensive, predatory inten tions on the part of the Soviet Union, not mere preparations for home defense. Of Stalin's government, Mr.· Pinkley wrote: Russia has swung a long way back from the left and is rapidly becoming a completely military dictatorship conducted along absolute totalitarian lines.... All detisions of any import in Russia are made by Stalin: in this respect he is far more absolute than either Hitler or Mussolini and entrusts his assistants with far less authority than other dictators.

These observations were accurate. They are supported by ev erything that transpired both before Hitler was defeated· and after he was' defeated. Further confirmation of Russia's greedy demands in the days before Hitler attacked came to light later in documents captured in the ruins of Berlin. The transcript of the conversations between Russian Foreign Minister Molotov and German Foreign Minister von Ribbentropa few weeks beTHE SECRET IN THE CLOSET 25 fore the 'attackcame as a shock to many of the gullible, people who had supinely succumbed to the love-our-ally-Russia propa ganda. This document proved that Molotov went to Berlin from the Kremlin to offer Germany a full military alliance and that he failed only because the Russian demands for territory in Eu rope and in the Middle East were too rapacious for Hitler to concede. It wassimply a caseof two bandits being unable to agree on how to divide the loot.9 The idea that President Roosevelt, with so many sources of information at his command, did not know of this background is, of course, incredible.

In July, 1941,but a few weeks after Molotov had failed to sell Stalin's plan for pillage to Hitler,. the exuberant Harry Hopkins flew to Moscow to see Stalin and to promise him vast supplies of weaponsand materielfrom the UnitedStates.The Russiandicta tor, calm and cool and implacable, knew then that the Europe and Asia he had envisioned and plotted for might become a real ity-with American help. He had an ally-at the least an unwit ting one-in his war, his long-term crusade for the destruction of capitalism and the domination of the world by militant Com munism. With cunning and deceit and every expedient, he would press his advantage. As for Hopkins, he came' home en thralled and wrote a magazine article in which he showed a childlike reverence for Stalin's every word, gesture, and man nerism. He obviously thought him a great man who talked "straight and hard." He was charmed when Stalin, in saying good-by, "added his respects to the President of the United States."lO So Stalin's war, which was Roosevelt's secret, proceeded vic toriously,and eventuallyit became very difficultto conceal the fact that there was more. up Stalin's sleeve than the defeat of Hitler. But to the bitter end, Roosevelt kept up the show.

On the same day in January, 1944, that Edward R. Stettinius took to the radio to make his fatuous prophecy that Russia would TWO MEN AND A SECRET be America's warmest friend after the war, Karl von Wiegand~ foreign correspondent for the Hearst press, wrote in an article published in the Hearst newspapers that if Washington's policy of unbounded help to and blind enthusiasm for Soviet Russia continued without safeguards, it would be the logical, natural development of history that Russia would be America's greatest, strongest, and most formidable foe at the end of the war and would seek to become the dominating power in Europe and the world. The Hearst press was much despised and maligned by the most vociferous segment of the literati, the pseudo-intellec tuals who danced, as if they were in a trance, around the flame of what was called "one-worldism" and echoed the prevailing slogans of the day with little or no regard for the underlying historical forces which were at work in the world. It was not fashionable among the sycophants and poseursto read the Hearst press and certainly not to be caught agreeing with what was advocated in it. It was demode to see any scoundrels outside Ger many, Italy, and Japan. Fawning over Soviet Russia was the mark of a new type of snobbery among that large group of peo ple who are given to following intellectual fashions. Naturally, in those circles the warnings of such publicists as Karl von Wiegand, or Senator Robert A. Taft or Herbert Hoover, fell on deaf ears.

On February 13, 1944, when the pro-Russian propaganda sponsored by the Roosevelt administration was at its raucous height, von Wiegand had the courage to write in his column: "The next war-the coming war is showing its horrible face be fore this war is ended-will be the first of the wars between the East and the West and will be led by Russia. By strange irony of destiny, America and Britain are clearing the way for Russia." On October 4, 1944, in answer to a letter from Vice Admiral William A. Glassford, he wrote: "As you so clearly indicate, the end of the shooting and bombing this time will not be the end THE SECRET IN THE CLOSET 27 of thewar. Throughthe smokeand dustof the battlefieldsthere already is visible the outline of World War III. It can come in fifteen years.... Its character at first will be mainly economic and ideological." This was three months before President Roose velt went to Yalta and participated in making what his own en voy to China has referred to as "the blueprint for Communist conquest of China" and gave his benediction to the westward extension of Sovietpower to the heart of Europe. It was also be fore the secret connivance that triumphant American troops should be held back to permit the capture of Berlin and Prague by Red armies.

Von Wiegand and the handful of other writers who dared speak out were merely trying to illumine for the American peo ple a picture which the Rooseveltregime strove desperately and with a remarkable measure of success to keep in darkness. Al though both political parties in the United States were infected, in varying degrees, by the same psychological disease, which dulled their critical faculties and distorted their perspective, it was the Roosevelt regime which set up and controlled the cen sorious and propagandistic Office of War Information, and it was Roosevelt himself who locked the secrets of his machina tions with foreign potentates securely away from the ears and eyes of the massesof the American people. The OWl was "stacked." There sat Owen Lattimore as a dep uty director, and there were many like him. It was easy for an Adam Tarn to get a job in the OWl (after the war, this man switched his citizenship to Communist-governed Poland).

James F. Byrnes, who as a Supreme Court Justice, Director of War Mobilization, and later Secretary of State, knew the Wash ington bureaucracy from many angles, put it mildly when he wrote: "Many of the people in OWl, admittedly a propaganda agency ... were sympathetic with Soviet ideology."ll Roosevelthimself knew the truth about the Sovietdictatorship.

TWO MEN AND A SECRET The evidence to that effect is overwhelming. He knew to a cer tainty that the intentions of Stalin and his Politburo did not fit the pattern of the postwar world as envisioned by the.American public. He knew that Stalin's show of adherence to the princi ples of the Atlantic Charter was just a hoax. He was familiar with the outrages already committed. From Ciechanowski, Mikolajczyk, General Sikorski and others, he re ceived unimpeachable evidence of what was taking place and being planned in eastern Europe. The gruesome facts of the Katyn massacre, which had wiped out fifteen thousand Polish officerswho had been taken prisoner by the Russians in 1939and whose whereabouts had been shrouded in mystery, had been laid on his desk; he was silent when the Kremlin angrily broke off relations with the Polish government in April, 1943,because the latter had appealed to the International Red Cross to investi gate the Katyn murders.

Premeditated and organized savagery, this pogrom will likely rank in history alongside the slaughter of the French Huguenots in the Massacreof St. Bartholomew in 1572.The diabolical pur pose of Stalin had been to obliterate at one stroke the flower of the Polish army, literally to bury the entire trained officercorps. Scheming to impose Communism, he wanted no potential guardians of Polish freedom to live to resist.12 When the piles of corpses were discovered by the Germans in April, 1943, the Polish Red Cross reported to the International Red Cross in Geneva they were satisfied the massacre had taken place in March or April of 1940 (a time when the Germans were not within hundreds of miles of Katyn Forest). Stalin screamed to Churchill that the free Poles under General Sikorski,prime minister of the exiled Polish government, who wanted an inves tigation, were "Fascists." Prompted by Roosevelt, Churchill re plied to Stalin on April 23, 1943, that any International Red Cross probing was unthinkable. "We shall certainly oppose.vigTHE SECRET IN THE CLOSET 29 orously any investigation.... Mr. Eden is seeing him [Sikorski] today."18When a special intelligence report and documents and pictures attesting Russian guilt in the cold-blQodedatrocity were brought to Roosevelt in the White House, he reacted with anger, not at the Russian murderers, but at those who had collected the facts, and he clamped the lid down tight.

The Congressional committee which in 1952 investigated the Katyn Forest massacre declared that the suppression of informa tion about it was a product of the "strange psychosis" of the Roosevelt administration. However, the case can be put more simply: whenever there is a big secret, there must be many little ones, too. Katyn was one of the many little ones. The popular delusion that Russia, our "gallant ally," was a freedom-loving, non-aggressive democracy anxious to co-oper ate with the United States was insidiously nurtured, although Roosevelt could not have believed it himself. His own experi ences at the conference table put him on notice that the opposite was true. The predatory government that had, in December, 1939, been expelled from the League of Nations for its cold blooded attack on little Finland, had swallowed up Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and had, in concert with Hitler, carved up Poland and erased that nation from the map could not and did not undergo a metamorphosis. Its leaders were not miracu lously purged of international banditry when another bandit, Adolf Hitler, turned on them. They never specifically recanted; they showed no penitence. They never told Roosevelt they would free the BaItsand the others, nor did he ever require them to say so. On the contrary, they continued to whet their appetites as war raged. He was aware of this, even if. the American people were not.

The idea that·Roosevelt, not a naive man, was fooled is unbe lievable.The camouflage,not the exposing,of Sovietimperialism was the expedient that bestfittedhis own politicalplans. Friendly 30 TWO MEN AND A SECRET critics who write magnanimously of what they call Roosevelt's "Great Design" for luring the Reds into cooperative, peaceful ways,14a design which they say somehow miscarried, are merely spinning a yarn. Some of these people know better. For the rest, the sentiment is father to the thought. They do not really know their man. To becloud the issues whenever glimmerings of truth seemed to be reaching the public, it pleased the sycophants to have Rus sia spoken of, semi-romantically, as a great mystery and Stalin as a strange enigma. What Russia wanted was no mystery.15 What Stalin was determined to do and to take was, as John T. Flynn picturesquely puts it, "as plain as the mustache on Stalin's face." That these intentions did not square with the Atlantic Charter was equally plain. But even Mr. Flynn falls at times into the error of presuming that Roosevelt was "taken in," that he "completely deceived himself" about Stalin. He states that Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman and Joseph E. Davies were com pletely taken in (even to the point of not considering Stalin a Communist at all) and that they, in turn, "passed on their de ceptions to Roosevelt, who swallowed them without salt."16This interpretation would make Roosevelt more the fool and less the hypocrite, and it is not entirely consistent with Flynn's analysis of Roosevelt's character· from .other aspects.

Generally, men are puzzled, mystified, as they look back at Roosevelt's dealings with the Soviet leaders and reread his elo quent words. A distinguished former university president makes the not uncommon comment that "the reason for our encour agement of Soviet Russia ... is one of the historic enigmas of our time." Butit ceasesto be an enigma when one casts aside all false assumptions of Roosevelt'sintegrity, while the riddle must other wise remain forever insoluble. RobertE. Sherwood, at one point in Rooseveltand Hopkins, speaks of Roosevelt's "incomprehensible character."1TFrom one THE SECRET IN THE CLOSET who writes of Roosevelt in the honey-dripping manner of Mr. Sherwood, this is probably meant to be a compliment. It is like speaking of the mystery of God. The remark is significant. To his worshipers, there must perforce be an element of incompre hensibility in Franklin D. Roosevelt's character. The wide gulf between his words and his deeds, the manifold contradictions in his avowed policies, can most felicitously be bridged if the work ings of his mind remain somewhat inscrutable. A curtain is then more easily drawn over the troublesome facts that might other wise mar the picture, and this is psychologically necessary in the process of rationalization.

Diverse as Roosevelt's personal traits were, naivete was not one of them. Not a student or reader of books,t8 his talents lay in the field of direct human relationships, in which his activities were always marked by a keen perceptivity and the extraordi nary shrewdness which is the politician's special gift. A scholarly academician with his head in the clouds, such as Woodrow Wil son, might conceivably have been deceived about the true mo tives of someone with whom he was in contact over a number of years, but not Franklin D. Roosevelt. lIe knew people far too well. To use a pithy colloquialism, people were "his dish." And his man Friday was the amazing Harry Hopkins. Harry knew the secret, too.

ChapterIII HIS MAN FRIDAY GENERAL HUGHJOHNSON,a key man in the early New Deal, once wrote of Harry Hopkins, that "he has a mind like a razor, a tongue like a skinning knife, a temper like a Tartar and a suffi~ cient vocabulary of parlor profanity ... to make a muleskinner jealous."l This is a description of the man President Roosevelt sent to have private chats with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. This is the man Roosevelt always brought along with him to the big international conferences. There, as the great men sat around the table, Hopkins would scribble and pass over to the President intitnate and gossipy little notes. That .these two men, Roosevelt and Hopkins, reveled in the glamorous roles they were playing on the world stage and that they were particularly susceptible to the lure of the power and adulation which vast international manipulations offered to them is obvious upon the least study of their characters. But it is quite another matter to say that they were ever really "taken in"

by the blandishments of Churchill or of Stalin. At Casablanca, at a dinner attended by the Sultan of Morocco, Hopkins, arrayed in black tie, was seated next to the French Gov ernor, General Nogues. His comments about this dignitary are characteristic. General Nogues, he wrote in his notes, "is the bird HIS MAN FllIDA y. 33 that De Gaulle wants ,pitched out of here•••.He lives in a big palace and is the bigshot in this part of the world .... I wouldn't trust him as f-ar as I could spit." At the same dinner, "a smart British Marine walked in about the middle of dinner with a des patch." But, noted the suspicious Hopkins, "I have a feeling Churchill cooked that up beforehand."2 This attitude is typical. Cynical and worldly, something of an epicure in his tastes, and a man of extraordinary political· shrewdness, Hopkins was a so phisticate in whom one does not find the weakness-if it be that -of credulity. If he was conlpliant to Soviet interests most of the time to the point of servility, it was not because he could not see behind the Soviet mask; it was because he saw only too well, liked what he saw, and found that it coincided with his own objectives.His influenceon the Presidentof the United States exceeded that of any other person during most of the long re gime. That the President, in turn, chose this man as his intimate helps us to understand the character of Franklin D. Roosevelt himself.

It is, of course, impossible to study the story of the foreign con ferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt without perceiving at the out set the enormous power which was wielded, in the open and be hind the scenes, by the ubiquitous Harry Hopkins. His finger was in every pie. Consequently, his character becomes of great importance to students of the Roosevelt period. It is unfortunate that the voluminous notes and private papers of Harry Hopkins, who died early in 1946, were turned over to his closefriend RobertE. Sherwood, the playwright, rather than to an impartialbiographeror made availableto serioushistori ans. During the war years, Hopkins, Sherwood, and Sam Rosen man had collaborated in the writing of Roosevelt's speeches,as Mr. Sherwood candidly admits. When Hopkins died, Mr. Sher wood was asked by the Hopkins family to write the book which Hopkins was prevented by death from writing himself. So we 34 TWO MEN AND A SECRET have from the pen of this able dramatist a book which is a run ning narrative. of the war years, a quasi-biography, an eclectic publication of notes, letters, and extracts, and a potpourri of reminiscences and hearsay which one must accept on faith, all put together under the title Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Inti mate History.

When Mr. Sherwood was called in by the Hopkins family to undertake this work, he found that "there were some forty filing cabinets packed with papers in the Hopkins· house, and a great many more in a warehouse." For eight months an assistant em ployed by Hopkins had been going over the papers.s Obviously, a big job of selection and editing was·done before any of the private papers of Harry Hopkins saw the light of day in Mr. Sherwood's book, and it is doubtful that for this job there could have been chosen anyone more friendly to the reputations of both Roosevelt and Hopkins than Robert E. Sherwood. Never theless, the book contains a vast amount of interesting informa tion. In extenuation of its errors, which are more conspicuously those of omission and misinterpretation than of misstatement, it should be mentioned that Mr. Sh~rwood quite frankly avows in his first chapter a friendship for Harry Hopkins "which," he says, "must color everything I write about him and for which no apologies are offered." Such loyalty to a departed friend is commendable, but it is not conducive to objectivity in the writ ing of history.

As a professional and successfulwriter of fiction for the stage, Robert E. Sherwood had a keen senseof the dramatic. The play wright must above all else possess the ability to make a sharp emotional impact upon an audience. Using the tools of imagina tion, he fashions an illusion of reality which can evoke sorrow or laughter, anger or good humor, hatred or love. He deliberately creates sympathy for this character, antipathy for that. The end he is striving for may be clear enough, but his means to achieve HIS MAN FRIDAY 35 it are professional tricks or, if one prefers, special techniques of the art. ··These are recognizable by experts in the field of the drama; other people are generally unconscious of the clever de viceswhich have been used to evoke their emotional responses to the play. It was not because of his knowledge of economics or world affairsthat RobertE. Sherwoodoccupieda compartment in Roosevelt's own car in the Presidential train which toured the country during the election campaign of 1940, when Roose velt was running for a third term. Nor was it for such reasons that he slept in the White House so much of the time during the next four and one-half years. His plays Idiot's Delight and The PetrifiedForesthad been smash hits on Broadway but certainly his qualifications as an expert on the affairs of state were rather inconspicuous, to say the most about them.

In that same.Presidential Pullman car in the fall of 1940 were also Harry Hopkins and that ghostliest of ghosts, Sam Rosen man. By this time, as even some of Roosevelt's staunchest admir ers now concede, the President was determined that the formal entry of the United States into the war was only a matter of time, yet he knew that if he bared his real intentions to the pub lic, he would be defeated in the election. There was much sus picion in the country. Mothers wanted to be assured that if they voted for Roosevelt, they would not be voting to send their sons into battle. A strong anti-war statement had to be brewed for the important speech in the Boston Arena near the end of the cam paign. Roosevelt knew this, and so did the triumvirate of Hop kins, Sherwood, and Rosenman, who were strongly pro-war but whoalso wantedaboveallelseto havetheirillustriousfriendand benefactor reelected. As the train sped through the night, there were·some worried heads in the President's car, for disquieting reports had come from the party politicians in the hinterland.

At this point, we learn, there came from the fertile mind of the playwright the ·famous phrase: ".•. again-and again-and TWO MEN' AND A SECRET again....". Roosevelt, who could recognize a good punch line as well as the crustiestjournalist,grabbedthe wordsavidly. And from the Boston Arena there went out over the air to an anxious people, in sonorous tones and studied cadences, the promise that sealed his election: And while lam talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars. The playwright had earned his fare. Embedded in the Presi dent's words, of course, was a sly quibble. The average American thought he was talking about wars on foreign soil when he used the words "foreign wars," whereas Roosevelt (who knew per fectly well how the words would be taken by the public) really meant nothing more than wars not involving the United States.

By the latter interpretation, no war would be a foreign war, no matter where fought, if the United States were in it. Thus the all-important question of whether or not the country would be led into a war, or an attack upon us provoked, was completely begged. The clever word-spinners of the President's private car knew that the President had pledged nothing. That this cam paign coup was a monstrous piece of chicanery is now, in the light of· facts since revealed, hardly deniable. Even Sherwood admits that his conscience bothers him. "I burn inwardly," he writes, "whenever I ·think of those words 'again-and again and again.'" That his conscience may have had moments of elasticity we gather from his confession that "unfortunately for my own conscience, I happened at the time to be one of those who urged him to go the limit on this, feelingas I did that any risk of future embarrassmentwas negligibleas comparedwith the risk of losingthe election."5 The ghost of Machiavelli must have been stalking the PresiHIS MAN FRIDAY 37 dent's car as it rolled on toward Boston in that campaign of 1940.

It will be perceived that what was really involved in this inci dent, and others like it, was the deceiving of the people of the nation with regard to the most vital issue of the day. That must be why Sherwood's conscience later stirred, why he "burned in wardly" when he thought of the luatter. Sherwood declares in his Introduction that he tried, in writing of the Hopkins period, not to be influenced by subsequent events. This is not surprising, for he finds "the present" (the book was publishedin 1948) not only"appalling"but also "inexplicable."6 One is tempted to suggest that the reason the present is "inex plicable" to him is that he is affiicted with a bad case of historical myopia. The causative factors which lie in the past of which he writes escape his vision. It is shocking to reflect that one who pleads guilty to such a lack of historical perspective should have been for years a member of the inner White House circle and a writer of speeches for the President.

To the volatile characters for whom Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to have a strong affinity and who made up his entourage, the heady wine of war and the fast action of high-level diplo macy and politics on a world stage were an exhilarating adven ture. This produced mental phenomena which, as· Sherwood describesthem, appear not entirelyunlike the symptomsof in toxication.Referringto his work on his!book,he writes that it was a privilege to escape back into the days "when, as Herbert Agar has written, 'Good men dared to trust each other,' when 'the good and the bad, the terror and the: splendor, were too big for most of us,' when 'our spirits and our brains were splitting at the seams, which may be why so many are today denying that life was ever like that.' "7 One suspects that the gifted playwright never did know what "life" was "like" in those ecstatic days, as far as the realitiesof world affairs were' concerned,and one is therefore not surprised that later events, which followed as TWO MEN AND A SECRET the night the day, were "appalling and inexplicable" to him.

This discussion of Robert E. Sherwood's book is important to the purpose of this volume for the reason that Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History is the repository, for good or ill, of so much "Hopkinsiana" and is bound to influence academic as well as popular thinking about the man who was, says Mr. Sherwood, "the second most important individual in the United States Government during the most critical period of the world's greatest war."8 What manner of man was Harry Hopkins? A sinister figure, a Rasputin, a backstairs intriguer? Or a selfless man of deep hu man compassion? Was he a blunderer in a world he was not qualified to understand, or a paragon of judgment? As in the case of Roosevelt,the psychoanalyst must explain to us his inner springs of motivation, those drives of conscious or subconscious prejudice, fear, envy, and ambition which were so adeptly masked from view. One thing is clear: Hopkins was an aggres sive, pushful man with overweening personal ambitions.

Misconceptions have arisen from the fact that he was a "social worker" when he first cuddled under the wing of Franklin D. Roosevelt while the latter was governor of New York. He had never been anything but a social worker-a professional one. As he moved up the ladder, from Christadora House to the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, to the Board of Child Welfare, to the Red Cross, to the Milbank Fund, to the New York Tuberculosis Association, more and more dol lars came to his pockets: $40 a month, $60 a month, $3,000a year, $8,000 a year, $I 5,000a year-in pre-inflation dollars. The career of a welfare worker, says Robert E. Sherwood, is "uncomplicated by the profit motive."9He does not give us his definition of the profit motive. After Hopkins entered the government, his financial emolu ments became incalculable. One must consider not only his salHIS MAN FRIDAY 39 ary but also the many things he no longer had to pay for. Free trips abroad, suites at Claridge's, weekends at Chequers, Hobcaw Barony, and Hyde Park, cars and chauffeurs, theater parties with Mrs. Roosevelt and her favorites, and a thousand other luxuries were his as he basked in the Presidential aura. It is not recorded that a bill for room and board was ever presented to him during the long years he resided in the White House.Whether the hos pitality be considered that of the Roosevelt family or of the tax payers of the country, Harry Hopkins was indubitably one of the most successful house guests in American history. Nor has any attempt ever been made to evaluate, in monetary terms, the ministrations of Dr. McIntire, the White House physician, or the advice of the Surgeon General of the United States Navy, or the sojourns for weeks and months at the Naval Hospital, with the medicines, facilities and experiments that were made freely available to this friend of the President. For Hopkins, who had serious ailments requiring expert treatment and much rest dur ing most of these his years of glory, these gratuities saved tens of thousands of dollars. In short, there are at least two ways to ob tain the luxuries of life that money can buy. One way is to earn the money to pay for them; the other is to manage to be the No. I man in the palace guard of a President like Roosevelt and not have to pay for them. The second was Hopkins' way. This is not to imply any corruption or even impropriety on his part, .but merely to challenge the notion that Harry Hopkins was a sort of selflesshumanist who sacrificed his all for public service.

It was not only for money that Hopkins was greedy. It was for power. This was attested to by his behavior in social-welfare work and later in government. Through his relationship with President Roosevelt, he achieved great power, even to affect the course of world history, as these pages will show. But he failed in his ambition to be President. Perhaps that was because the idea of Harry Hopkins being President was, as General Hugh JohnTWO MEN AND A SECRET son called it, "ineffable nonsense," or perhaps it was because it so happened that an insatiable lust for power was not left out of the character of Franklin D. Roosevelt and he was budged from the Presidency only by death. However that may be, Mr. Sher wood tells us that Hopkins thought for a long time that Roose velt would retire in 1940 and that he, Hopkins, might succeed him. As far back as December, 1937, it appears, this rosy dream had already come to him. His biographer writes: "Hopkins did take himself seriously as a candidate at that time, and one of the last requieststhat he made before his death was that, if anything should be written about him, there should be no attempt to dis guise the fact that he once had ambitions for the highest office and that he worked and schemed to further tlKm."lO There is something rather pathetic about this "one of the last requests':' of Harry Hopkins. It was not enough that he thought himself big enough to be President; he wanted the world to know-posterity to know-that he thought so! It is as though, with his devious mentality,· he·believed on his deathbed that by binding his probable biographer to make this strange post humous revelation, he could raise himself, in the eyes of history, to a higher stature.

The cream of the jest is that apparently, Roosevelt-if we are to believe Hopkins' handwritten notes of a private conversation with the President in the spring of I938-led Hopkins to believe he was his, Roosevelt's, own choice for the Democratic nomina tion in J[940.11 The ironic appointment of the soaring social worker to the Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce was supposedly part of the "build ..up" which followed. Since Hopkins had never had .any experience as a part of the American business and industrial system and was known to be unsympathetic to it, it seemed logical· that the exigencies of politics should demand such a maneUver. To make a show of re-establishing a residence in his native state of Iowa (which he had abandoned immediHIS MAN FRIDAY 41 ately after he finished school), Hopkins even took a lease on a farm there in 1939.He never lived on this farm and visited it only once.12 But if Harry Hopkins was a sly fox when it came to poli tics, in the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue there lived a slier one. While Roosevelt was nurturing this happy hope in the breast of his crony, he was giving very different ideas to others, as the memoirs of Cordell Hull, Frances Perkins, and James A.

Farley disclosed after Roosevelt had passed on to his reward. Serious illness in 1939 dampened Hopkins' ambition, to be President, and the growing realization that Roosevelt intended to seek a third term squelched it entirely. He was sure of the truth long before Cordell Hull was. Hull was being told by Roosevelt right up to the month of the Democratic convention of 1940 that he, Hull, would be nominated. ls The practical maneuvering of the nomination at theconven tion was handled by the trusted Hopkins, who had resigned himself to the not uncongenial fate of being the good man Friday of the President of the United States in the exciting war years ahead. From a suite in Chicago's Blackstone Hotel, with a direct wire to Roosevelt at his hand, he directed the sham proceedings which "drafted" Roosevelt for a third term. The faithful biog rapher Sherwood, unable to escape what he calls the tawdriness and vulgarity of this notorious display of high-powered practical politics, would ha~~ )t,ps believe that Roosevelt and :Hopkins both had great distaste for this sort of thing, although evidence of such delicate sensibilities on their part seems conspicuously lacking. Weare expected, apparently, to share the assumption, which Mr. Sherwood takes for granted, that "the job that Hop kins had to do ... had to be done."14 It is not surprising that Mr. Sherwood takes pains to bring Harry Hopkins· out of this episode unscathed. Throughout his book, the dramatist draws him as a man of finer mold. He had "lyrical impulses," we learn, and was even known to have writTWO MEN AND A SECR.ET ten poetry. Experiencing such a "lyrical impulse," he said after a look at the English countryside: "It's only when you see that country in spring that you begin to understand why the English have written the best goddam poetry in the world."15Whether he had ever heard of Sophocles, Virgil, Li Po, Dante, Goethe, Heine, or Verlaine is not recorded. Nor are we told whether or not Boss Kelly's infamous "voice from the sewers" at the Demo cratic convention in Chicago in 1940 should be considered one of Harry Hopkins' "lyrical impulses."

With the re-election of Franklin D. Rooseveltfor a third term, the star of Harry Hopkins climbed high in the heavens. He, a dilettante in the field, was catapulted into the inner circle of world statesmen. Lend-lease, which followed after the election, resulted in his wielding almost dictatorial powers over the giving of billions of dollars in American resources to Britain, Soviet Russia, and other recipients. In Washington, London, Teheran, Moscow, Yalta, on the high seas, and in the air, as he breezed through the war years like a boy at a country fair, he was, with his illustrious chief, one of the co-architectsof the most terrifying "peace" ever to follow a great war. History, it is safe to predict, will be less kind to the memory of Harry Hopkins than is his adulatory friend, collaborator, and biographer, Robert E. Sherwood. It will not soft-pedal the "sub sequent events."

Chaptey·/V WHOSE CRUSADE? IN A CORNER of Amiens Cathedral there is a wreath of Flanders poppies dedicated to the memory of the British soldiers who per ished in France in World War 1. An inscription reads: Went the day well or ill? I died, and never knew. The most poignant tragedy of war is perhaps the fact that those who fall in battle know not for what they died. Subjec tively, a man fights for those ends which he is told and believes will follow a victory. Objectively, however, he fights for the consequences which actually will ensue in a compassionless world of cause and effect. If his leaders have misinformed him or if they betray him at the council table, the quintessence of irony may be brought to pass: a man may forfeit his life for the exact opposite of that of which he dreamed. General Dwight D. Eisenhower's war memoirs were published under the imposing title Crusadein Europe.The war ostensibly ended in complete military victory. Five years later, the good General was still-or again-crusading, only now he was cru..

sading against the forces he had previously crusaded with. On September 4, 1950, in a nationally broadcast address launching a movement· called the Crusade for Freedom, he said: "The people behind the Iron Curtain have no conception of a free press .. or of free discussion••••This is what the Soviet planners 43 44 TWO MEN AND A SECRET contemplate for all the world, including America.... How de... pressing it is to realize on this Labor Day, 1950, that one-third of the human race works in virtual bondage. In· the totalitarian countries, the individual has no right the state is bound to re... speet."! In 1952, General Eisenhower was elected President. of the United States. His most serious task was to fend off the con sequences of World War II. What, one must ask, was the great crusade of 1941-1945meant to accomplish? Just the defeat of Hitler? Or was it a crusade to bring the Russians to the Elhe? To partition Poland again? To lop off one-fourth of the arable land of overpopulated Germany?

To make Konigsberg, German sinceits founding by the Teutonic order seven hundred years ago and the home of Germany's greatest philosopher, Immanuel Kant, a Russian city? To hand Stalin the keys to eastern Europe and eastern Asia? To uproot and cast upon the open roads ten million people whose homes were bartered away at a conference table? To put eight hundred million people under the yoke of Communism? To make the eighty million people living on the tiny islands of Japan depen dent upon the United Statesfor their economic survival? To put the whole world under fear of Soviet aggression? Actually, all of these things, and more, were accomplished. A crusade with such multifarious results should be suspect. Whose crusade was it ? Was there one crusade, or could it be that there were several, contemporaneous but irreconcilable in· purpose? The intellectual climate of America during World War II, writes William Henry Chamberlin, was "a depressing com pound of profound factual ignorance, naivete, wishful thinking and emotional hysteria.,,2 The disillusioning results followed inexorably. In the Intro duction to his war memoirs, Winston Churchill gloomily looks at the world and observes: "The human tragedy reaches its eli..

max in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrificesof hunWHOSE CRUSADE? 45 dreds of millions of people and of the victories of the righteous cause,we have still not found peace or security, and th~t we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted."3 On four separate occasionssince the war, Churchill has said that only the possession of the atom bomb in American hands kept the Red Army from invading western Europe after the war. The war aims of the United States, as proclaimed by President Roosevelt, were grandiose. They went far beyond the mere mili tary defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Months before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt took pains to identify himself in the public mind as the harbinger of spectacular reforms, which were to be the fruits of the war and which would accrue to all of the peoples of the world, victor and vanquished alike. The United States was still technically at peace with all nations when, in August, 1941, he staged his dramatic meeting with Winston Churchill on a battleship in the Atlantic. For the Prime Minister, the occa sion served but to hasten the entrance of the United States into the war, but for public consumption,chiefly in the United States, there emerged a windy document that was promptly hailed as the Atlantic Charter. Roosevelt had long since determined upon war.4 If men needed causesfor which to fight and die, here they were. Here was the vision of a world of justice, liberty, and abun dance for all men everywhere.

On December 15, 1941, eight days after Pearl Harbor, Presi dent Roosevelt took to the radio on the occasion of the anniver saryof the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791. Over a nation wide hookup, he said in a stirring peroration: We covenant with each other before all the world that, having taken up armsin the defense of liberty, we will nOt lay them down before liberty is once again secure in the world we live in.5 This pledge was intended for the ears of all the people of··the world, and it was rebroadcast across the seas. It obviously did TWO MEN AND A SECRET not mean liberty only for Americans; it meant liberty for Poles, for Lithuanians, for Manchurians, for sad, regimented men and women in Dresden and Budapest-all people who had become the pawns of tyrants. It was a covenant "before all the world," and it brought upon Franklin D. Roosevelt the prayers and bless ings of humble people wherever tyranny existed. Naturally, its leavening effect upon the American audience was very important to Roosevelt.He wanted no misgivings about the moral rectitude of any phases of the global struggle he had championed so vigor ously and into which American men and resources were to be thrown on a prodigious scale. The war would not be over in 1944 when he would run for his fourth term.

The crusade was on. Roosevelt, although never a student, knew something of history; he knew very much about the psy chology of his countrymen. No doubt he was aware that Ameri cans have a habit of idealizing the wars in which they become engaged as almost holy crusades. "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." T he Battle Hymn of the Republic gave emotional satisfaction to the armies of Grant and Sherman, just as, half a century later, the slogan of World War I, "To make the world safe for democracy," fired the imagination of a half-reluctant people and made acceptable to them a conflict the issues of which were far from clear. Now, a generation later, we were embarking upon an even more heroic crusade, this time allied with a semi-Oriental dictatorship which rested upon ideo logical foundations repugnant to most Americans and which had only two years before been expelled from the League of Nations for brutal aggression upon a small, peaceful neighbor.

This phantasmagoria set in motion, Roosevelt took it upon him self to pledge to the world on our behalf that we would not lay down our arms "before liberty is once again secure in the world we live in."

WHOSE CRUSADE? 47 This promise, in addition to the alluring, if ill-defined, quix otisms of the Atlantic Charter, put upon the project, or projects, the stamp of self-righteousness. Nor did Roosevelt overlook the fact that religion is a cause for which men have often fought. He took pains to sanctify the struggle long before the United States was in it. In his message to Congress in January of 1939, he asserted that the United States was menaced by "storms from abroad." These storms, the President said, challenge "three in stitutions indispensable to Americans. The first is religion. It is the source of the other two-democracy and international good faith."6 To be sure, there were religious persecutions occurring in Germany and Austria, to which Roosevelt was referring, but religion was dealt with roughly in other countries, to which he was not referring and which he then and later condoned. The Nazi cruelty was indeed deplorable. However, since the nations of the world were not at that time lining up on a religious basis (nor did they later), this statement of his was luerely an over simplification of a tangled skein of issues.

Not all observers were willing to grant the purity of President Roosevelt's solicitude about religion in his message of January, 1939. The historian Charles A. Beard was moved to comment, with dripping sarcasm: "Evidently he was clearing a way to make the next war a real holy war."7 (Coincidentally with the end of the "holy war" some years later came the brutal oblitera tion of religious freedom in vast areas of eastern Europe.) At the end of November, 1939, the Red war machine invaded little Finland. Since the Roosevelt administration had for years been very cordial with the Soviet dictatorship (one-sided though the cordiality had been), this was naturally embarrassing to the President, just as the German-Soviet pact of the preceding August had been. In the United States there was a potent bloc of voters TWO MEN AND A SECRET of Scandinavian descent. They were irate at Soviet.Russia. Sym pathy for the Finns was widespread throughout the world, and 011 December 14, Russia was expelled from the League of Na tions for her ruthless aggression, which had been initiated, with dramatic cruelty, by the bombing of Helsinki. But it was the im.pact upon public opinion in the United States which par ticularly disturbed President Roosevelt. Within a matter of months, a Presidential election campaign would be starting. He was never one to be insensitive to any political wind that was blowing at such a time. Although he had never previously ex pressed any particular abhorrence for the Soviet system of gov ernnlent and had not appeared shocked by its religious practices, he now deemed it expedient, in a speech to the American Youth Congress on February 10, 1940, to call Russia a dictatorship and to say that he detested "the banishnlent of religion" from Russia.8 However, this sudden moral upsurge was temporary, for after the election of 1940 was. safely passed and the dictator Stalin was locked in mortal combat with the dictator Hitler, none of Roosevelt's plenteous supply. of righteous wrath was reserved for Soviet Russia. If Marxian dialectic materialism had no room for God, that was never again mentioned. On the contrary, when Roosevelt started pouring lend-lease into Russia in 1941, he told skeptical reporters at an aluazing press conference that they should read Article 124 of the Russian Constitution; the provi sions concerning religion, said he, are "essentially what is the rule in this country; only we don't put it quite the same way."

Since the Russian .Constitution with its Article 124 had been adopted in 1936, why had he not mentioned it on February 10, 1940, when he had momentarily deplored "the banishment of religion" in Russia? Could it be that his research experts had simply overlooked the fact that Russia had a constitution, or was it because he and they knew perfectly well that the Russian Con stitution \-vas luere window dressing and that Article 124.was WHOSE CRUSADE? 49 not tohe taken seriouslyas giving a true picture of religionunder the Sovietsystem? The plain truth is that at that time it had served a temporary purpose of Roosevelt to appear perturbed by the pugnacious atheism of the Soviet regime. Now, in 1941, he had another purpose: to give Russia a clean bill of health on religion. It was purelya matter of politicaltactics.Nor was Rooseveltin the least deterred by the fact that Article 124 of the Russian Constitut~on contains several jokers and is heavily weighted in favor of anti religious forces in the Soviet Union.

9 His bald statement would be published in·all newspapers, and who would bother to check its veracity by seeking out a copy of the Russian Constitution and analyzing its tortuous phrases? None but a few inquisitive souls.The soporificsadministered by the efficientRoosevelt prop aganda machine had already begun to dull the public's con sciousness of the realities of world affairs. So godliness was added to the virtues at stake in President Roosevelt's great crusade. The details were a bit hazy, perhaps, but most people were inclined not to quibble about them. They felt rather exalted following the plumed knight from Hyde Park, who promised to bring about a Utopia on earth. These grandiose aims all converged in the beloved concept of freedom. That was something an American could understand and would fight for, would pour out his wealth for. Franklin D. Roosevelt well knew this. But from former President Her bert Hoover, there was a stern warning. He said on June 29, 1941, one week after Germany attacked Russia and while Roose velt was preparing to give all-out aid to the Soviets: "Joining in a war with Stalin to impose freedom is a travesty." He called it a "gargantuan jest."lOBut Rooseveltnever let it be thought of as anything but a war for universal freedom, and such was the alchemy of mass propaganda that he largely succeeded in im planting that fallacy in the public mind. As we have seen, there 5° TWO MEN AND A SECRET were really three wars being waged simultaneously, one of which was kept secret from the American people and was to continue to rage long after the termination of the other two.

How Roosevelt-by means of an oil embargo which would stall the machines of Japan and reduce her people to starvation and by means of other measures-deliberately, and over Navy objections, goaded the Japanese into their rash attack on Pearl Harbor is now a revealed, thoroughly documented story.ll After that attack, the theme of self-defensewas joined with that of the crusade for universal freedom. We now had to fight. The crusading spirit was infectious. For one thing, the Presi dent had much to offer to those who would jump on his band wagon. The flighty Wendell Willkie, after losing in his try for the Presidency in 1940, suddenly "got religion" and became an ebullient emissary for Roosevelt, traveling to London, Moscow, and Chungking in an Army transport plane, emotionally over come by his precipitate arrival in the upper regions of interna tional fame. His much-publicized slogan, "One World," served well to help cover up the real state of affairs. In a speech in Toronto, he gushed: "This war is either a 'grand coalition' of peoples,fighting a common war for liberation, or it is nothing 1"12 This, of course, was meaningless jargon, just as "One World"

was. With Stalin as a partner, did Willkie think he was going to liberate the Lithuanians? Who was going to liberate the millions of Poles Stalin had captivated in 1939 and whom he still claimed as his subjects? What did he think were Stalin's plans for Man churia, for Rumania, for Bulgaria? Was the great liberator in the Kremlin going to give back to Finland what he had just stolen from her? Did he think the Red Army of Communism was going to bring to the lands it overran things never tolerated in Soviet Russia-such as free speech and free elections? Whether other Republican leaders, such as Hoover and Taft, and dissident Democrats, such as former Secretary of War WHOSE CRUSADE? 51 Harry H. Woodring,lookedupon these anticsof Wendell Will kie as those of an opportunistichypocriteor an impressionable dupe, we know not. They themselves had no hallucinations about "a 'grand coalition' of peoples, fighting a common war of liberation." Where did Willkie get this idea ?There was nothing in the array of forces at battle to suggest it. He got it from his new host and promoter, President Roosevelt.Where did the President get it? From his own fecund imagination. It was an ipse dixit, a supercilious pontification, a self-serving dictum, never anything more. Its promulgation was the Atlantic Charter.

This remarkable document was the fulcrum of Franklin D. Roosevelt'sherculean feat of embroiling his country in war, hyp notizing its people into what the war was about, and winning for himself a third and a fourth election as President of the United States.It was nevercarriedout. It was never intended to be carriedout. In the rush of time, it has never yet been held up to more than superficial scrutiny, although it has an import far greater than historical. For a people who profess to be self-gov erning, there are lessons now to be learned. The children of 1941 are adults of our day. What do they know of these techniques? More than their parents did? Perhaps. Yet in the intensity of men's craving for the peace and justice which World War II made impossible, traps will be laid again, and words-bewitching words-will again be the bait. "Behind the shallow truism that 'history repeats itself,'" Arthur Koestler gloomily remarks, "hide the unexplored forces which lure men into repe~ting their own tragic errors."

j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j j J PART Two The Atlantic Charter: Platform for a War Decipimur specierecti. HORACE Chapter V FROM SHOUTS TO WHISPERS WHEN THE Atlantic Charter was proclaimed to the world on the fourteenth of August, 1941, wild cheers and hosannas arose in certain quarters. A state of mind bordering on ecstasy seems to have possessedthe editorial room of the Atlanta Constitution, for example. That newspaper hurried to rank the Roosevelt Churchill declaration with Magna Carta and the United States Constitution, an evaluation which the Roosevelt sycophants through the country proceeded to echo with alacrity. The New York Times saw "the beginning of a new era." So moved was the president of Chicago's Zionists that after reading the words Roosevelt and Churchill had put together at their battleship rendezvous, he looked back as far as the dawn of human history and then pronounced this conference to be "the most momentous meeting in the history of the world."