XI. Quebec I

ChapterXl· QUEBEC I ROOSEVELT'S Secretary of State was Cordell Hull, a handsome, idealistic Southerner born in 1871. Since 1933, he had brought esteem to the Cabinet and had helped to hold the "Solid South." But Cordell Hull was a frustrated man. He was not· allowed to sit in on the President's war councils. "This was because the President did not invite me to such meetings," he writes plain.. tively in his memoirs. "I raised the question with him several times."! The shadow of Harry Hopkins was omnipresent. To Hull, it was obvious that scarcely any large..scale military opera.. tion could be undertaken that would not have diplomatic as.. peets, and he considered it a serious mistake for the Secretary of State to be left out. Even worse, he had not been taken to the Atlantic Conference or to Casablanca. Nor was he to go to Cairo or Teheran, and he was to resign before Yalta. As he puts it in his memoirs, "The President did not take me with him." He had protested this belittling treatment. "I said to him: 'I'm not look...

ing for increased responsibilities,but 1 do believe the Secretary of State should attend these meetings.' "2 Extravagant personal flat... tery was Roosevelt's way of smoothing the rumed feathers. Why was Hull left out? We know it was not age or ill health, as the public was allowed to surmise at the time; actually, Hull was to outlive Harry Hopkins nine years and the President ten 184 QUEBEC I years. We have a strong clue in the fact that columnist Drew Pearson attacked him as "anti-Russian." The New Republic (September 6, 1943) said he was "notoriously" so. Other Left Wing organs echoed this line. The truth is that Hull fancied himself a stickler for interna tional probity, and he was capable of being revolted by treachery to a principle when it was plain enough for him to recognize it. In 1942, he had blocked secret agreements Stalin had tried to get, particularly out of the harassed British, for postwar terri torial plunder which would have vitiated the Atlantic Charter even that early.3In February of that year, he had rather indis creetly sent the President a memorandum reminding him that "there is no doubt that the Soviet Government has tremendous ambitionswith regard to Europe."4 And he had shown that he was not easily to be fooled by Stalin, for he said to Churchill in March of 1943:"It's my opinion that if Russia should eventually come into the war in the Pacific, it will probably be two or three weeks before victory, during which time she can spread out over Manchuria and other large areas and then be assured of sitting in at the peace conference."5 This kind of talk did little to please Roosevelt and Hopkins.

When they went abroad to the big conferences, the Secretary of State was left at home to putter around in Washington. Yet Roosevelt needed Hull politically. Hull tried to resign in 1944 before the fourth-term election. "Mr. Roosevelt then asked that I withhold my resignation at least until after the election. To this I agreed."6A fortnight after the election, Hull resigned. From Yalta, a few weeks later, Hull received a sirupy cable signed by Roosevelt,Stalin, Churchill, Molotov, Eden, and Stet tinius. "We have missed you at this conference," it said.. This gern of hypocrisy was almost too much for the patient and gentle old man, who remembered that his presence had not been deemed necessary at Argentia, Casablanca, Cairo, or Teheran.

186 WASTEBASKET ROAD In his memoirs, he hastens to add: "I should state at this point that I was not consulted by the President or anyone elseon policy issues prior to or during the YaltaConference."7 The President saw him just before departing for Yalta, "but he did not take up any of the topics he expected to discuss with Stalin and Church ill or the decisions he might make." The undertone of irritation impels one to think that the Roosevelt brand of sirup was not sweet enough this time. The "we have missed you" was too raw to swallow. We also sense that Hull wished to assure that the judgment of history would acquit him of any guilt for the crimes of Yalta. To only one of the Rooseveltforeign conferences was Cordell Hull invited. That was at Quebec in August of 1943. However, it was arranged that he should arrive late-after the important decisions had already been made. Nor was he ever told all that happened there.

It was another Big Two conference. Delighted by the prospect of congenial Canadian hospitality, Churchill brought his wife and daughter over from England. Stalin had again coyly de clined. The American public did not know that President Roose velt's courtship of the Russian .dictator was still a one-sided romance as far as any desire for "a date" was concerned, and the press was left to speculate on whether or not Stalin had been invited. But Hull writes: "The President made his fourth unsuc cessful attempt to meet with Stalin at the time of the Quebec Conference in August, 1943. He had hoped to induce the Soviet leader to attend that meeting."8 Had Stalin come, certain people in Quebec would not have shared Roosevelt's ardor. L'Action Catholique, the newspaper mouthpiece of Cardinal Villeneuve, greeted the conferees with an editorial that began: "Stalin will not come to Quebec. We rejoice. His presence would have spoiled the pleasure ... and tarnished the pride."

QUEBEC I 187 Italy had all but surrendered. Mussolini was out. He had been deposed in the last week of July, and the government of Marshal Badoglio was frantically trying to switch sides, a flip-flop that was complicated by the presence of German forces on Italian soil. The details of Italy's status were being worked out in Lis bon by emissaries from Badoglio and from General Eisenhow er's headquarters. Italy was to surrender officially a few days after the invasion of the mainland from Sicily on September 3. In the east, the Russians had turned the Nazi summer offen sive into a rout. The 'Germans could hardly have been expected to perform well in view of what was happening behind their backs in their homeland. Germany was being reduced to rubble by the R.A.F. and the American Eighth Air ·Force. Hamburg was destroyed in six night and two day raids. Ruhr industries were almost paralyzed. On August 2, Berlin was ordered evacu ated. Throughout the Reich, thousands were dying and supplies for the fighting forces were going up in flames. Desperation, whipped up by Roosevelt's "unconditional surrender" ukase, and little more, postponed the Gotterdammerung of the Nazi re gime. At the Quebec Conference, everyone laughed at a gag credited to Churchill before he left England: INTERVIEWER: Will you offer peace terms to Germany?

CHURCHILL: Heavens, no. They would accept immediately.9 In the Pacific, the Japanese were being driven out of the Solo mons. Allied air superiority was assured in almost all of the Pacific and Asian theaters. The Japanese navy was to be spoken of largely in the past tense. Churchill met with the President at Hyde Park on August 13, before the conference, and made a detour to show his daughter Niagara Falls. Roosevelt made a pompous entry into Quebec on the seventeenth. There was a parade to the Citadel, the summer 188 WASTEBASKET ROAD home of the Governor-General, where he and Harry Hopkins were to stay and where special ramps had been built for his wheel chair. His dog, Fala, chaperoned by a Secret Service agent, had a big automobile all to himself in the parade and was visible proof to all the world that his master loved dogs and therefore had a heart of gold. The chiefs of staff had assembled in advance on the twelfth and were lodged at the luxurious Chateau Frontenac, along with assorted conference-followers and more than a hundred news reporters. All other guests were moved out of the hotel.

From all accounts, the weather was brisk after torrid Washing ton, the Canadian ale and whisky were superb, and there were many parties. Roosevelt and Churchill held their talks inform ally in their suites in the Citadel. The big question came up, for Churchill was a bulldog on the point, even though he had lost before. Where should America and Britain hurl their military might on the continent of Eu rope? Into France, as Stalin had always insisted? The plan had been made, but Churchill was still against it. Roosevelt, Hop.. kins, and Marshall were adamant. By the time Hull arrived at Quebec on the twentieth they had prevailed again. "Prior to my arrival,President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had ... decided that an Anglo-American invasion of France should be made in spring of 1944.Mr. Churchill had argued-and can.. tinued to argue up to the Teheran Conference-that the inva sion of Europe by the Western Allies should be through the Balkans, the 'soft underbelly of Europe.' " He wanted to "pre..

vent a Soviet rush into that area which would permanently es tablish the authority of the SovietUnion there, to the detriment of Britain and incidentally of the United States."lO Hopkins' notes and Churchill's memoirs both confirm the dis.. agreement, so there is no doubt that Roosevelt was untruthful QUEBEC I 189 when he said at a press conference on the day the Quebec Con ference broke up that there had been no controversy during the conference that was in any way important. The controversy, though secret,was crucial. According to Hull, Roosevelthad his way because the United States was putting up the majority of the forces. Churchill understood perfectly-as Rooseveltmust have also -that what was involved here was not the winning of this war that was no longer in doubt--but the geopolitics of postwar Europe. At stake was the heartland of the Continent. What Churchill was really talking about was not the war with Ger many, but that other war-the hush-hush one-of militant Com munism, incarnate as the new Russian dictatorship which had risen from the grave of the last Czar, against the capitalistic West, which, by the basic assumptions and written words of both Leninism and Stalinism, it was pledged to annihilate.

The busiest beaver at Quebec was Harry Hopkins. He had in his pocket an extraordinary top-secretdocument. It was headed "Russia's Position."ll If the assemblage of bigwigs at Quebec had had no other raisond'etre, the opportunity it afforded Harry to pass this docu ment around would have sufficed.The American public was to know nothing of it until after both Roosevelt and Hopkins were dead, yet it was an arrogant pronouncement of political policy of far-reaching consequence to the nation's future. Its precise authorship has never been disclosed. It claimed to be extracted from "a very high level United States military stra tegic estimate," so, presumably, somebody in the Army had either originated or embraced it. The words "high level"pointed to the officeof the Chief of Staff; the adjective "very" seemed to put it in that office. But the "very high level" could also have been the Commander-in-Chief. In either case, it is a model of 190 WASTEBASKET ROAD what a "military strategic estimate" should not be. So it is not surprising that its origin remains a mystery and its authorship an unclaimed honor.

Let us examine the document. One paragraph said: Russia'spost-warposition in Europe will be a dominant one. With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to oppose her tre mendous military forces.It is true that Great Britain is building up a position in the Mediterranean vis-a-visRussia that she may find use ful in balancing power in Europe. However, even here she may not be able to opposeRussia unless she is otherwise supported. Now to anyone heedful of the future freedom of Europe, the problem presented by this intelligence was as obvious as the rib bons on General Marshall's chest. It was how to prevent the post war domination of Europe by the Soviet Union from coming to pass. One would immediately perceive that· the war should be waged and won in a manner to thwart that calamity. To Winston Churchill, this was elementary. As we have seen, he had plans to accomplish it. But Hopkins' document made a flying leap in the opposite direction: The conclusionsfrom the foregoing are obvious.SinceRussiais the decisive factor in the war, she must be given every assistance and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship. Likewise, since without question she will dominate Europe on the defeat of the Axis, it is even more essentialto develop and maintain the most friendly relations with Russia.

In other words, give Russia "every assistance," and then, when she dominates Europe, keep flirting with her and hope for her friendship. So this was the garment being cut for America to wear. It had an unmistakable made-in-Moscow look. One can only wonder what kind of a postwar world the writer QUEBEC I of this paper envisaged. The military security of the United States seems to have been the last thing in his mind, not the first, as he made this sly foray into a mystical statecraft of "friend ship." If this was General Marshall expounding on the psycho dynamics of nations, he was beyond his depth. If it was President Roosevelt, or Harry Hopkins, he was hiding behind a mask. The American people, living in a thickening miasma of prop aganda diffusing out from the White House, had little under standing that what Roosevelt and Hopkins were seeing in their crystal ball was the domination of Europe by Communist Rus sia. This grim apocalypse would have shocked the nation. Was this what the vast sacrifices were being made for? The apoca lypse was not broadcast; it was a secret document in Harry's pocket, to be pulled out and shown to a chosen few. Nor was it grim to Harry and his boss,who continued, as though enchanted, to give "every assistance" to its fulfillment.

As for the Chief of Staff, his state of mind is sorrowfully de scribed for us by an officerwho had the closestprolonged contact with him in the Pentagon and on trips abroad during the war, General Albert C. Wedemeyer. Marshall, he tells us, "had little knowledge of the complexities of the world conflict" and "would seem to have failed to understand the nature and aims of com munism." Wedemeyer's predicament is obvious. If this is a gentle apology for his old chief, it lets off as an ignoramus the man who had the entire intelligence facilities of the United States Army at his beck and call and those of the Navy as well for the ask ing, both of which services had files bulging with information on the nature and aims of Communism. Reading on, we learn of another serious flaw in the Marshall character, but it is a com mon and human one. Wedemeyer confesses that he revered General Marshall at one time but later came to see him as a man corrupted by power and homage: "Thus he became an easy prey to crypto-Communists, or Communist-sympathizing syco192 WASTEBASKET ROAD phants, who played. on. his vanity to accomplish their own ends.,,12 Whether or not Harry Hopkins, who was an intimate of Gen eral Marshall, had inspired this "military strategic estimate" in the first place, he took charge of putting it across as a sort of credo. Harry was not a man to dispute with at that time. For three and one-half years, he had been living in the White House, which the wits in Washington were referring to as "that two family flat."13 (Mrs. Hopkins had also moved in.) When the' President's "man Friday" spoke to government officials or to high officersin the Army or·Navy, he spoke with the authority becoming one whose address was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Slipped into his document was this mystifying clause: "Since Russia is the decisivefactor in the war.... " (The dictionary de fines "decisive" as "serving to decide; determinative.") This meant that winning or losing the war depended upon Russia. The factual absurdity of this·bald assertion needs no laboring. With what motive was it implanted in this document? It was a libel against the titantic military and industrial might of the United States and Great Britain and the nations of the British Commonwealth, a force so overwhelming in the context of Au gust, 1943, that the Axis powers were inevitably doomed even if Russia had collapsed. It exhibited a strange attitude of defeat ism, almost masochistic, which somebody wished to insinuate into the American consciousness.In the postwar years, this idea -that but for Russia the Axis powers would not have been de feated-was to be one of the major propaganda weapons used by the Soviet Union throughout Europe and Asia in waging the cold war against the United States and its allies.

We know now that in Washington high naval officerswere seething with suppressed dissent. Captain W. D. Puleston, the naval historian, who was a special adviser to the Secretary of QUEBEC I 193 Navy at the time, writes: "Most of them·were convincedthat Russia needed the support of the United Nations more than they [the United Nations] needed that of Russia. The navy thought we had heard too much of Red contribution to victory and too little of the Anglo-American. They feared that if the Anglo American representatives continued to extol Russia's efforts and apologize for their own, Stalin would demand more and more concessions.,,14Puleston mentions the document Hopkins pro duced at Quebec as "this almost unbelievable policy of appeas ing Russia." Anyone who went through the Army's Command and Gen eral Staff School during 1943 or 1944, as did this author, will remember the intellectual rebellion taking place there. In spite of the docility of General George C. Marshall in meshing his every thought into the Roosevelt-Hopkins pattern, his fawning attitude toward the Russians did not permeate all echelons of the Army. There was muffled grumbling in every headquarters and field camp and along the channels of supply, where Russian requisitions were usually, by order from high above, given pri ority. Nor was it limited to the Mark Clarks and Douglas Mac Arthurs. There were men of all ranks, men of independence, whose reason and patriotism could not be desensitized by any amount of politics and propaganda, in or out of the Army. They obeyed orders, as good soldiers, but with misgivings. When thousands of white sheets had to be sent to Fairbanks, Alaska, to be furnished to Red Army pilots taking delivery of free Amer ican airplanes (because they had complained of their bedding), the comments were unprintable.Such galling incidentswere common.

The specter of a Soviet imperial colossus held no terror for Harry Hopkins. The anonymous, top-secret paper he flashed at Quebec was the Word. Sherwood writes that it was" of great 194 WASTEBASKET ROAD importance as indicating the policy which guided the making of decisions at Teheran and, much later, at Yalta." Stettinius says the same. It epitomized the Rooseveltian mind. At Quebec, Roosevelt decided to have American troops land in southern France (ANVIL), to supplement the Normandy in vasion. "I never could understand why," writes General Mark Clark, who commanded the campaign in Italy. But Roosevelt and Hopkins could understand why. It diverted American strength from Italy and a push northeastward into Austria and the Balkans and was an "assistance" to Russia in becoming "dom inant" in Europe. Thus it fitted in perfectly with the paper Harry Hopkins was carrying. Churchill, says Sherwood, fought "im placably" against Roosevelt's plan.

The Prime Minister induced President Roosevelt to sign one agreement at Quebec which was so secret that it lay hidden for almost eleven years. It gave Britain an equal voice in the use of the atom bomb, which the United States was soon to possess.In the first week of April, 1954, Sir Winston Churchill brought it to light in a debate in the House of Commons, causing an uproar on both sides of the Atlantic. It was at once apparent that the McMahon Act of 1946, which restricted exchange of American atomic information with foreign powers, had canceled the agree ment, which few men knew anything about. Congress had abro gated a secret agreement made by the deceased President while having no inkling of it. The secret agreement pledged that neither the United States nor Britain would ever use the bomb against the other, that neither would divulge any information to third parties without mutual consent, and that neither country would use the bomb against a third nation without the consent of the other. Actually, Roosevelt had made an unwarranted gift of PQwer to a foreign country, however friendly at the time. It is unthinkable that the QUEBEC I 195 Senateof the UnitedStateswould.everhave ratifieda treatycon ferring this veto power over weapons, strategy, and, in the dawn ing nuclear age, American foreign policy itself.

On this, too, the Secretary of State was kept in the dark. "I was not told about the atomic bomb," Cordell Hull's memoirs say. "I did not really know about it until it was dropped." But Klaus Fuchs· and Harry Gold and David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs knew about it. People of alien and hostile back grounds were being welcomed into installations where the new est weapons were being "developedand into governmental posi tions. In those days, however, there were many things the Secre tary of State was not permitted to know. The Communist party knew about the development of the atomic bomb even before the F.B.I. did. The F.B.I. learned about it not from the Roosevelt administration but from under cover informants in Communist circles on the West Coast. F.B.1. men got their first information in 1943 from the Commu nists, who had friendly contacts with some of the scientists at a secret project at the University of California, from which it was known to be leaking, and the F.B.I. was promptly requested to discontinue its investigation of one of the scientists.15 ChapterXII CAIRO WE NOW COME to a melancholy turn in the fortunate career of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He had but seventeen months more to live when he left for Egypt in November of 1943, taking with him his physician, his masseur, his valet, six Filipino cooks from the yacht Potomac, Harry Hopkins, and the usual assortment of "brass." He was to confer with Churchill and Chiang Kai shek in Cairo; but the real Mecca of this pilgrimage was beyond, under the brow of the SovietUnion, for Stalin had condescended at last to budge as far as Teheran, the Iranian capital, near the Caspian Sea, to share his company. In these next seventeen months were to be compressed a series of perpetrations which historians would judge the most ignoble of Roosevelt's spectacu lar life and which would forever tarnish his memory.