XIII. Teheran

ChapterXIII TEHERAN DR. EDUARD BENES, the last and tragic president of the First Re public of Czechoslovakia, visited Moscow on December 12, 1943, eleven days after the Teheran Conference. To his nephew and close associate, Bohus Benes, he reported his observations. "1 recall," the latter relates, "how President Benes was astonished when, visiting Moscow shortly after Teheran, he found Stalin jubilant."1 The Russians tickled Dr. Benes' ethnic pride by telling him he could now be sure that the Slavs would eventually rule Eurasia. "Stalin did not tell Dr. Benes that, at Teheran, Churchill and Rooseveltsecretly consented to Red Army liberation of Czecho slovakia." Voicing the postwar bitterness of a tortured people, Bohus Benes speaks plainly: "General Patton was stopped from liberating Czechoslovakia by General Eisenhower acting on instructions from Washington as a result of Teheran and Yalta.

Patton had to stand by while Nazis were shooting Czechoslo vakians until three days later the Reds came in. Can you iUlagine that Czechoslovakians felt for the second time they had been betrayed by decisions behind their back and lost faith in democ racy? .••President Benes also told me how astounded he was when •••President Roosevelt told him to advise Stalin that 'he 210 WASTEBASKET ROAD could have his Baltic states,' though nothing should be published about it." The Poles were especially worried about Teheran. It was in evitable that the future of Poland would be discussed, yet no Pole was invited. Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the prime minister of the exiled government of Poland, was not granted an interview by President Roosevelt until June 6, 1944, six months after the conference. The fourth-term campaign was looming, and the Polish spokesman had to be quieted for a few months more. "I haven't acted on the Polish question because this is an election year," Rooseveltsaid to him.2 He held out hope, and his manner to his visitor was one of great courtesy. "I later learned," writes Mikolajczyk sadly, "that Roosevelt had only a few months be fore agreed to turn over to Stalin the huge section of Poland that the Red Army had invaded while an Axis partner." When this Polish statesman came to write his book on these events, he could find no more apt title than The Rapeof Poland.

What, indeed, did happen at Teheran? Why did Dr. Benes find Stalin so jubilant? The basic reason is that the Russian dic tator learned something at Teheran-something very joyous for him. He discovered that he had the President of the United States dans sa poche, as the French would say. Some things remain hidden to this day. That the Atlantic Charter (Points One, Two, and Three in particular) was treated as so much rubbish by·the three Caesars who confronted each other around the green baize table in the Russian Embassy at Teheran is ·known beyond conjecture or surmise. But some of the furtive military arrangements-which had grave conse quences-are still being tossedabout like hot potatoes by the peo ple who had to execute them. And the precise words spoken by the triumvirate, the unguarded comments, and the air of cyn icism, conspiracy, and contempt for the millions of human be ings whom they were preparing to push around, which must TEHERAN 211 have pervaded their discussions because it is inherent in their works, have only partially seeped through the wall of secrecy.

When in April, 1953,Senator William F. Knowland demanded the opening of the officialfiles on Teheran, the State Department promised to make them public before June 30, 1955.3 They re main locked up. It is probable that some of the more embarras sing, if not heinous, details will not see the light of day until after the deaths of a number of people now living. And yet, as a direction marker for what was to follow, Tehe ran was perhaps more important than the more publicized Yalta. It was at Teheran that the basic decisionswhich later took concrete and appalling form at Yalta were plotted.· It was at Teheran that it first became evident that Stalin, not Roosevelt, was to shape the peace. So closely guarded were some of the Teheran decisions dur ing the last months of the war that even so highly placed a per son as Vice-President Truman (Senator at the time of the Con ference) was unaware of them and of their Yalta sequels and was hurriedly briefed on these secret agreements by Harry Hopkins when he was projected into the Presidency in April, 1945. By then, he was already a prisoner of Roosevelt'sfolly.

Significantly, the Communists in the United States were never in doubt about the decisiveimport of what had taken place. Get ting their newest line through an international grapevine, they quickly announced that Teheran had changed the world. It had generated, they said, a new atmosphere in which COlumunists could work unreservedly with Washington. Earl Browder, then chief boss of the American Communist Party, whom Roosevelt had released from jail (for a passport fraud) on a White House pardon, arranged a Madison Square Garden mass meeting in New York on May 25, 1944, where he bellowed to fifteen thou sand Communists that Teheran had supplied the pattern for the postwar world. Later, he elaborated the theme in a book Teheran 212 WASTEBASKET ROAD and After, issued·and widely exploited by the Communist party. We now know that President Roosevelt maintained a secret liaison with Browder. One Josephine Adams, an artist, acted as a courier between the two men. She relayed information, and even documents, between them, conveying to each the views·of the other. She saw Roosevelt between thirty-eight and forty times during the three year period preceding his death. The meetings were held either at the White House or at Roosevelt's Hyde Park home. (Years later, Miss·Adams so testified under oath before a subcommittee of the United States Senate.)4 Brow der has confirmed this, taking obvious pride in the fact that he presented his "views on world events" to the President by this device and adding that the President "appreciated the service I gave him."5 The salient fact that emerged at Teheran was that President Roosevelthad been grotesquely wrong in his confident assurance that he could "handle" Stalin. It was easy for him to assume, in the fawning atmosphere of Washington, that he had but to meet the Russian, "turn on" his famous personality, and have his way.

When they met, he was in for a rude awakening. He found Stalin, says Sherwood, "much tougher than he had expected and at times deliberately discourteous.,,6 It was Stalin, not Roose velt, who did the handling. Stalin, with Georgian cunning, had deliberately waited until he could take a threatening tone with Roosevelt and Churchill before consenting to meet them in a summit conference. He was prepared to drive a hard bargain now. As for Roosevelt, he had already lost the psychological hour for bargaining. But that was not his technique with Stalin, and never had been. The dramatis personae of the Teheran meeting lifted it to the eminence of high theater. There was Stalin, the mystery man, flanked by Molotoy and Voroshilov. This incredible figure, who had already won a place in history alongside Ivan the Terrible, TEHERAN 213 had at last stepped from the shadows. The world was to take his measure, when pitted against the West's top statesmen.

In contraposition was Winston Churchill. So deep seated was his detestation of Communism that he had once lost an election to the House of Commons by overstressing the issue. But he was an opportunist, capable of bizarre switches and turns and flights from principle when he thought it was to Britain~ s gain. By a sardonic twist of fate, this man, with his unsleeping awareness of the Russian peril, had been destined to be one of Moscow's saviorswhen Hitler stood on the brink of conquest in 1941.What unvoiced thoughts passed through his fertile mind as he sat op posite the Communist dictator at Teheran, with the unctuous American President at his side holding the balance of power, can be imagined. The third principal was Franklin D. Roosevelt. This .was his great hour, and he played his role for all it was worth. "If there was any supreme peak in Roosevelt's career," says Sherwood, "I believe it might well be fixed at this moment, at the end of the Teheran Conference." With his weakness for self-hypno.

sis, Roosevelt no doubt persuaded himself that he accomplished something good at Teheran. History has regretfully handed down a different verdict. Stalin, with his unerring judgment of men, quickly sensed that Roosevelt was the weak link of the Big Two. He set about at once to establish an entente. Pleading his concern for the President's safety,he invited Rooseveltto move out of the Ameri can Legation into the heavily guarded Russian Embassy com pound. Roosevelt accepted, whereupon Stalin ostentatiously turned over·the main villa to him and moved with his staff to one of the smaller buildings. The President and his party were now under the Russian microscope.The servants who made their beds and cleaned their rooms were all members of the highly efficientNKVD, the Soviet secret police.7 214 WASTEBASKET ROAD Fifteen minutes after Roosevelt arrived in his new quarters, Stalin came to call. It took no perspicacity to discern that the President was fairly bursting to please him. Roosevelt talked about various parts of the British colonial empire in a way which made plain his detachment from Churchill. Then he had a new bonbon to offer. By the end of the war, he said, the American and British merchant fleets would have achieved such propor..

tions that they would be more than· two nations could possibly need and he felt that some of these·ships should be made avail.. able to the Soviet Union.8 Naturally, to Stalin, who had his own long-range plans for Communist penetration into Southern Asia, the Middle East, and Africa and inroads into world trade, all of this was music with a lovely melody. It meant that Roosevelt could be counted upon not only to help make the Soviet Union the dominant land power in Europe and Asia but also to en hance her stature as a maritime nation. The dictator was in a mood to impress. Hopkins noted that he was dressier now, wearing a uniform with gold epaulets, each bearing a large white star fastened with a red pin. Harriman has said that Stalin, in greeting Harry Hopkins at Teheran, dis.. played more open and warm cordiality than he had been known to show to any foreigner.9 This hard-shell specimen, this Tartar whose flinty eyes hinted the Mongolian admixture in his blood, this tyrant who had starved the Kulaks and cut down with cal lous savagery every human obstacle in his rise to power, was hardly an affectionate type, but he was shrewd enough to know a friend when he saw one. No doubt his pleasure at seeing Hop kins at Teheran was sincere.

Playing upon the President's vanity, Stalin hurried to propose that Mr. Rooseveltbe chairman of the sessions.Churchill agreed. At the first plenary session,the chairman welcomed Stalin, Mo lotov, and Voroshilov as "new members of the family circle." After painting this weird picture of a family circle, which TEHERAN 215 shouldhavebroughtlaughsbut did not, he proceededto predict that the three nations would work together in close cooperation "for generations to come." When Stalin spoke, he got down to military business fast. He said it would be "unwise" for his Western allies to "scatter forces" in operations throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and he pooh-poohed the idea of their moving northward in Italy or into the Balkan area. He wanted the cross-Channel invasion of France (OVERLORD) to be the preoccupation of his allies in 1944, and he wanted some American and British forces taken out of Italy and sent into southern France to supplement it.

Then he turned to the war against Japan. He said Russia would come into that one when Germany was finally defeated. He then added a remark that most Americans probably would have considered sheer impudence. "We shall be able by our common front to beat Japan," said Stalin.10 That night, the President was host at a dinner for Stalin, Molo tov, Churchill, Eden, Kerr, Hopkins, Harriman, and three inter preters, at which the six Filipino cooks he had brought with him displayed their talents. The conversation was that of men giddy not only with the martinis, the vodka, and the champagne, which flowed profusely, but alsowith sheer power; for these men commanded almost all the naval forces of the world, three-quar ters of its air power, and land armies numbering nearly twenty million men. Stalin set the tone. He spoke contemptuously of the French nation and of what he called its "ruling class"; he said the Germans must be given harsh treatment permanently; and he said a big chunk should be handed over to Poland. Feel ing his way, he did not spell out what aggrandizement he had in mind for the Soviet Union, beyond a categorical remark that he would keep the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Es tonia, which his armies had seized.

The next day, Churchill sent a message to Roosevelt suggest216 WASTEBASKET ROAD ing that they have lunch together preparatory to the second plenary session.Roosevelt sent back his regrets. But he did have a private confab that afternoon with "Dncle Joe."·We have ac counts of this tete-a-tete from son Elliott, who was present with his father, and from Sherwood, who had accessto the President's logbook. If anything wa5 needed to convince Stalin that he was fortunate enough to be dealing with an infatuated Don Quixote, this meeting must have sufficed. Rooseveltseems to have done most of the talking. He brought nods of approval from Stalin when he told of his missionary work with Chiang Kai-shek at Cairo-how he had exerted pres sure to have Communists brought into the Chinese government. As they talked about the Far East, Stalin held his cards close to his chest; he gave out nothing. Roosevelt then asked Stalin if he cared to discussthe future peace of the world. This question non plussed the Russian, for his mind was attuned to concrete situa tions, not airy abstractions. He replied that there was nothing to prevent them from discussing anything they pleased, whereupon Roosevelt sprang his idea of "The Four. Policemen." He con ceived a United Nations organization consisting of an Assembly, an Executive Committee, and an enforcing agency which he termed "the Four Policemen." The Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, and China were to comprise this constabulary.

Little nations threatening the peace would be handled by block ades and embargoes. A major threat to world peace would arise if a large power made a gesture of aggression; in this case, said Roosevelt, the Four Policemen would send an ultimatum to the threatening nation, and, if the demands were not immedi ately met, they would bomb and, if necessary,invade that nation. There is no evidence of any discussion of the possibility that the offending aggressor might be one of The Four Policemen. It must have been obvious to Stalin that Roosevelt's world was TEHERAN 217 a phantasmagoria. He encouraged the delusion and was quite willing to be a policeman. Stalin went into the second plenary sessionlater that afternoon so sure of Roosevelt's captivity that he permitted himself to be blunt toward Churchill to the point of rudeness. With his usual persistence, the Prime Minister started talking about the eastern Mediterranean area. Sharply, Stalin said he wanted to talk about OVERLORD; Turkey, Rhodes, Yugoslavia, and even the cap ture of Rome were not important enough. Churchill made a last, gallant effort, but Roosevelt went along with Stalin. OVER..

LORD, coupled with an attack in southern France; Stalin knew what he wanted and that is what he got. It was obvious at Teheran that both Stalin and Voroshilov rec.. ognized General Marshall as a friend.!! Marshall, it will be re membered, had plugged for a diversion into southern France at the First Quebec Conference. This was precisely what Stalin had been prescribing, for it relegated the amphibious forces in the Mediterranean to a distant corner of Europe (from the Russian viewpoint) and away from the Balkans, and it headed British American troops away from the eastern half of Europe. The geo politician MacKinder had written that he who rules eastern Eu rope commands the heartland, he who rules the heartland com mands the world island, he who rules the world island rules the world. As Chester Wilmot points out,· "there was a long-term political strategy behind the Russian desire for the Allies to can..

centrate on Western Europe and the Western Mediterranean.,'12 At Teheran, Churchill was disgusted to find that General Mar shall, taking his cue from Roosevelt and Hopkins, had joined forces with Stalin. The President told his son Elliott after this session: "If there's one American general that Winston can't abide, it's General Marshall."18 The President· made another remark to Elliott, in the privacy 218 WASTEBASKET ROAD of his apartment, which revealshow susceptiblehe was to Stalin's purposes: Trouble is, the P.M. is thinking too much of the postwar, and where England will be. He's scared of letting the Russians get too strong.14 It was quickly apparent to the Russians at Teheran that Roose velt, unlike the British delegation, had arrived with a supine, trust-Russia mind. Had Roosevelt stood firmly with Churchill, it would have been possible, even at this late date, to block Stalin's rapacity. The die had not yet been cast. The German army, though retreating, was still on Russian soil, five hundred miles from the borders of Germany proper. American and Brit ish military, air, and naval strength, still uncom~itted, was overwhelming and could strike where it chose.But Rooseveltdid not stand firm with the Prime Minister. He affected the flatter ing role of middleman between two contenders. Actually, he al ways leaned Stalin's way. Churchill, thus isolated, was forced to capitulate. At every turn, Stalin had Roosevelt's open or tacit support for his determination that on V-E Day there should be no British or American troops in eastern Europe to challenge his plot for a Communist hegemony.

(One American. who soon protested vigorously was General Mark Clark, commander of the u.s. Fifth Army in Italy. He made a strong plea to General Marshall for an invasion of the Balkans, in spite of the Teheran decision.15 It was, of course, in vain. General Clark has written : A campaign that might have changed the whole history of relations between the Western world and the Soviet Union was permitted to fade away.... Not alone in my opinion, but in the opinion of a num ber of experts who were close to the problem, the weakening of the campaign in Italy in order to invade Southern France, instead of pushing on into the Balkans, was one of the outstanding mistakes of the War.... Stalin knew exactly what he wanted ... and the thing TEHERAN 219 he wanted most was to keep us out of t1?e Balkans.... It is easy to see, therefore, why Stalin favored ANVIL at Teheran. 16 ) After Stalin had bludgeoned his way through the second ple nary session, he was host at dinner. Hopkins' notes record that during this dinner, the Prime Minister asked Stalin an important question. He wanted to know what territorial interests Russia might have in the future. Stalin was quoted as having replied: "There is no need to speak at the present time about any Soviet desires-but when the time comes, we will speak."17This chilly closure of the subject had ominous portent, but there is no evi dence that it caused Roosevelt the slightest discomfort.

This Russian banquet was a raucous bout at which serious subjects were discussed in a rolling gunfire of toasts as course after course was washed down with vodka and champagne. Harry Hopkins lasted only halfway through. Whenever tension ran high between the British and the Russians, Roosevelt would achieve a superficial truce by rushing in with a breezy wisecrack. However, one of his jokes fell flat (although it has won a kind of notoriety because both Churchill and Elliott Roosevelt saw fit to include it in their memoirs). Stalin rose and proposed a blood-curdling toast. The strength of the German army de pended, he said, upon fifty thousand high officers and techni cians. His toast was a salute to shooting them "as fast as we capture them, all of them." Churchill was horrified. Quick as a flash, he was on his feet; his face and neck were red, says Elliott Roosevelt,who was pres ent. He announced that British conceptions of law and justice would never tolerate such butchery. Into this breach stepped President Roosevelt. He had a compromise to suggest. Instead of executing fifty thousand, perhaps "we should settle on a smaller number. Shall we say 49,500?"

All the Russians at the table roared with laughter. So did the 220 WASTEBASKET ROAD Americans, who were obliged to show proper appreciation for their chief's humor. The Prime Minister, shocked as much by F.D.R.'s flippancy as by Stalin's barbarity, left the table. That joke-or was it a joke ?-was too grim. Amiability was restored the next day, which was Churchill's sixty..ninth birthday. It was climaxed with a dinner party to which all the military and civilian conferees were invited. "1 think about a hundred toasts and speechesmust have been given that night," General H. H. ("Hap") Arnold remembered. Is Again, because of Roosevelt's attitude of deference, Stalin was accorded the right to be sarcastic and cagey and to collect valu able information while giving out none. In his mild way, Gen eral Arnold writes, "I am not so sure we were as successful in discovering what· the Russians wanted as they were in finding out what oUr objectiveswere."

Actually, Roosevelt and Hopkins already knew. The secret prospectus Harry had carried in his pocket at the Quebec Con ference the previous August .. was unequivocal. Not only was Russia to "dominate Europe," but she was also to be assisted and propitiated by the United States in every possible way. Further more, at Roosevelt's dinner two nights before, Stalin had made it· plain that he had in mind carving up both Germany and Poland. Perhaps that is why, the next day, before the last plenary ses sion, at which the Polish question was to come up, the President went into a private talk with Stalin and Molotov. If he had taken a copy of the Atlantic Charter into this meeting and required Stalin and Molotov to reread it, he would have been fulfilling a pledge and duty. But such was not his purpose. It was not to plead for the Poles; it was to plead for himself. He felt it neces sary to acquaint Stalin with the facts of American politics, par ticularly with the fact that there were six or seven million Amer icans of Polish extraction, and otherso£ Lithuanian, Latvian, and TEHERAN 221 Estonian origin, allof whom had the same votes as anyone else.

19 (This meant, in terms of practical politics, that any decisions which would be offensive to these groups would have to remain secret at least until after the Presidential election of 1944.) Stalin said he understood the problem. (No doubt he did; yet a few months later, Roosevelt, then exercising his blandishments on the democratically minded Mikolajczyk, recounted with great amusement: "You know, I mentioned the matter of our forth coming American elections to Stalin, and he just couldn't under stand what I was talking about."20) Having thus prepared Stalin, Roosevelt was now ready to re treat to the sidelines and pretend to look the other way while the Polish nation was placed on the sacrificial altar-with public announcements of the bloody deed to be withheld until he had coasted in safely to a fourth term as President. What was to be done about Poland was a sort of ethical test of the Allies in this war. The British had based their declaration of war on Germany in 1939 upon Hitler's violation of the Polish frontier. The territorial integrity of Poland was the moral justifi cation for plunging into war. The war would degenerate into a monstrous, historic fraud if the Allies themselves were to enact a new rape of unhappy Poland.Y et this was exactly what hap pened.

The background of the Teheran discussions was important. In the preceding April, Stalin had broken off relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London, following the Polish de mand for an International Red Cross inquiry into the Katyn Forestmassacre.The 'Germans had revealed that the bodies of fifteen thousand Polish officers had been found in the Katyn Forest, slaughtered by the Russians. Stalin was furious at the thought of a Red Cross inquiry and demanded that the London Poles deny the truth of the charge. When they refused, he repu diated them.

222 WASTEBASKET ROAD Premier Mikolajczyk, realizing that the future of Poland was at stake, endeavored to enlist the support of the Americans and British for the coming struggle for freedom. Hoping to put his case before President Roosevelt·before the latter met Stalin,.he offered to come to NorthAfrica to see him en route to Teheran. Roosevelt had dodged him repeatedly and now would not give him an appointment. A last, desperate wire sent to Cairo brought from Roosevelt a reply through an American charge d'affaires. The President asked Premier Mikolajczyk to rest assured that he had made an extensive study of the Polish situation and was fully prepared to present the Polish case at the meeting with Stalin.21 When the discussion of Poland took place at the last plenary session,Rooseveltdid not take part.22 Neither did he utter dissent to the formula which was evolved for the dismemberment of Poland. Stalin had a cut-and-dried plan. Eastern Germany, as far as the Oder River, was to be taken from the Germans and given to Poland, and the eastern half of Poland, which had been seized by Stalin while he was an accomplice of Hitler in 1939, was to be ceded to the Soviet Union. This was a bitter potion for Churchill to swallow. However, abandoned as he was by Roosevelt, he was powerless to stand up to the high-riding dic tator. The resulting agreement, a shameful betrayal of the Polish people and a clear-cut violation of the Atlantic Charter, re mained a secret until at Yalta, thirteen months later, it was rati fied with little change. History knows that on the afternoon of December I, 1943, in the Russian Embassy at Teheran, the Polish Republic was secret!y partitioned by a Russian, an· Eng lishman, and an American. Forty-eight per cent of the land of Poland was to be torn away and given to the Soviet Union.23 No Pole was present. There was no talk of plebiscites, of the will of the people, of justice, of compensation to the inhabitants, TEHERAN 2~ of legal rights, of moral rights. It was a naked power deal. Roose velt did not lift a finger to prevent it and must be deemed to have acquiesced. Reading Churchill's memoirs, one is struck by the casualness-and the callousness-with which these Moguls of the twentieth century wielded the cleaver. Ancient cities were picked off like the wings of butterflies. "I was not prepared to make a great squawk about Lvov." And "Stalin then said that the Russians would like to have the warm-water port of Konigs berg."

It would seem that man, panoplied with power, is incorrigible. He mouths his pretensions of virtue and compassion, and a credulous world listens, and even believes; but with a change of time and company and mood, his natural recidivism cuts loose. So it happened at Teheran. It was late in the afternoon at this last meeting by the time the dissevered body of Poland was hauled away. Stalin then asked: "Are there any other questions?" President Roosevelt al. ready knew there was something else dear to Stalin's hopes; it w·as the permanent debilitation of Germany. Obligingly, he re plied: "There is the question of Germany."24 Stalin was ready.. He said he would like to see ·Germany split up. Like an echo, quick agreement· issued from the President's lips. Actually, Roosevelt was ready with a proposal, which he had not shown to Churchill. He said he was throwing it on the table as a basis of discussion. It was a plan to split the German nation into five separate, autonomous states: Prussia (minus its eastern province); Hanover and the Northwest; Saxony and the Leipzig area; Hesse-Darmstadt, Hesse-Kassel, and the section south of the Rhine; and Bavaria, joined with Wiirttembergand. Baden.

The malice of the project was that the richest industrial area of Germany-the Ruhr, the Saar, the port of Hamburg, and the Kiel Canal-should be taken away outright and turned over to 224 WASTEBASKET ROAD the.United Nations. No plan was better calculated to wipe out Germany as a major nation, Balkanize the Continent, and facil.. itate Russian domination. When Roosevelt started expounding this fantastic scheme, Stalin, with a grin, cut in to remark that Churchill was not listening because he was not inclined to see Germany split up. But Churchill listened, and he was staggered by what he heard. Restraining himself, he retorted: "If I might use the American idiom, I would say that the President has 'said a mouthful.'" Churchill was historian enough to know that to do what Roosevelt was proposing would leave central Europe a festering sore. In fact, although he favored treating Prussia sternly, his mind was running toward the amalganlation of the rest of Ger..

many with a Danubian confederation to form a large, German led buffer power in the heart of Europe. This, he thought, would be more conducive to peace. He was, of course, conscious of the Red peril. He did not say so, but no doubt Stalin knew what was in his mind. The President's "mouthful" was chewed over for a while, with Stalin liking it, Churchill reluctant, and Roosevelt agreeing warmly with everything Stalin said. The Russian had a secret reason to be elated. It suited his strategy to have the United States identified in the German mind as the architect of German ruin; and Roosevelt'sfatuous haste to take the initiative at Tehe ran to design a Carthaginian peace could be used to good polit ical advantage by Communist propagandists in the crucial years ahead. Nothing came of it at the time. The question was referred to the European Advisory Committee in London, to Churchill's relief. The President, undismayed, continued to contemplate all-out revenge upon post-Hitler ·Germany, and he was to come up with an even more vindictive proposal the following Septem ber at the Second Quebec Conference.

TEHERAN 225 When Churchillpublishedhis memoirs,he ended his chap ters on the TeheranConferencewith this wail of remorse and this prophecy: The Polish frontiers exist only in name, and Poland lies quivering in the Russian-Communist grip. Germany has indeed been parti.. tioned,but only by a hideous division.... About this tragedy, it can only be said, "'IT CANNOT LAST." Has the importance of Teheran been exaggerated? It was a spectacular encounter of three extraordinary political personal ities, but was it historically significant in the sense that the con versations of Alexander I, Castlereagh, Metternich, von Harden berg, and Talleyrand at Vienna upon the downfall of Napoleon were significant? The balance of power they fabricated in 1815 was broadly operative in Europe for one hundred years, down to the outbreak of World War 1. The conclusion is inescapable that the Teheran Conference is not just of passing interest as part of the cacaphony of World War II. It was a calamity of historic proportions. Wilmot erred, if at all, only on the side of moderation when he wrote, in The Struggle tor Europe: Even before Teheran it was inevitable that the enforcement of "Un conditional Surrender" upon Germany would leave the U.S.S.R. the dominant power in Eastern Europe, but it was by no means inevitable that Russian influence would extend deep into Central Europe and the Balkans. After Teheran, it became almost a certainty that this would happen. Thus. the Teheran Conference not only determined the military strategy for 1944, but adjusted the political balance of postwar Europe in favor of the Soviet Union. 25 The more indirect consequences are unfolding as each year passes. The piper has not yet been·paid.

After the conference, Roosevelt admitted that he had found Stalin tough and stiff and that at first he had made "no personal 226 WASTEBASKET ROAD headway." Back in Washington, he related to Frances Perkins that he had worked for three days to make Stalin laugh and had ended up calling him "Uncle Joe.,,26To an extrovert like Roose velt, this was a major success, even though he had had to use the Prime Minister of Great Britain as the butt of the jokes that finally brought guffaws from "Uncle Joe." He had concluded that Stalin was "getatable," to use his term, but in the Roose veltian sense, a man had been "gotten at" when he evidenced a liking for.Roosevelt. In the case of Stalin, the recipe had been a simple one: he had sided with the dictator.on every issue and had not once crossed him. So as we contemplate the Teheran atmosphere and decisions in the light of what followed, it is easy to perceive that this con ference was the point in the war where. the control of events passedinto Stalin's hands. The responsibility must be ascribed to Roosevelt.His psychological aberration was such that in spite of Stalin's bludgeoning tactics and cynicism and in spite of the sordidness of the price he, Roosevelt, waswilling to pay, he could believe that he was purchasing a relationship from which the concomitants of genuine friendship could be expected to flow.

We must either judge that he was too smug to doubt this or that he was using his high place to push a monstrous fraud when, upon his return home, he made a world-wide broadcast on Christmas Eve from Hyde Park in which he alluded to Stalin in these words: He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and 1 believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people~very well indeed. Nobody knew the American people better than Franklin D. Roosevelt. This language-trailing off into its folksy amiability -was most carefully chosen to popularize an impression that Stalin was a good fellow ("stalwart good humor"), that he was TEHERAN 227 a representative ruler who did what his people wanted him to do, and that Soviet aims for the future were compatible with the ideals for which the American people had been told the war was being fought. This was a compound of three falsehoods, yet wafted over the air by the voice of the President of the United States,it gained wide currency. The innuendo that lurked in his speech, that he, Roosevelt, by his skill at Teheran, had won the golden key to lasting friendship with the Soviet Union, would serve him decisively in the forthcoming campaign for a fourth term, for the American people would be loath to dispense with the servicesof an emissary who appeared to have such winning ways at the council tables of the world. Having secretly com promised himself and the future tranquility of Europe and Asia at Cairo and Teheran and having torn up the Atlantic Charter in a clandestine conspiracy to gratify a brutal, power~lusting ty rant who already had along record of crimes, he now permitted himself to lull his countrymen, in fact the whole world, into a specious sense of security.

The biographer delving into the Teheran episode is in for a dismal experience. So unsavory a performance it was, both mor ally and strategically, that the mythmakers and canonizers usu ally shun it altogether or give an expurgated account. This first meeting with Stalin brought out in high relief the weaknesses that flawed the character of the charming Roosevelt. Stalin, the cold percentage player, took the measure of these weaknesses and moved in quickly for the kill. After Teheran, the disaster of Yalta and its galling aftermath followed with the relentless ness of a Greek tragedy. But first there was to be another "Big ~rwo" conference, again in the lovely Canadian city of Quebec. This one themythmakers and the canonizers avoid as they would the pox. For here, Frank ... lin D.Roosevelt did indeed, by almost universal recognition of those who know what happened, reach the nadir of folly, if not depravity.