How Truman Didn’t Start The Cold War, Part 2
The Myth of Yalta and The Complicated Legacy Of FDR’S Postwar Policy
Before Harry Truman considered running for reelection, the formulation of what is now considered gospel with what we now consider the neoconservatives was that FDR, largely because he was suffering from the illness that would kill him within a few months, essentially ‘sold out’ both America and Eastern Europe by allowing Joseph Stalin to walk all over him at the Yalta Conference.
The truth, as other historians have since realized, is that there was no ‘Great Betrayal’ at Yalta by FDR, just another way-station on the course he had long since chartered. A more accurate comparison might be that of Woodrow Wilson and his trip to Paris after World War I ended.
Like the man in whose cabinet he served FDR traveled to Yalta to meet with two powerful world leaders convinced that the sole force of his personality would be enough to bring about the post-war utopia he imagined. Like Wilson FDR attended this conference with a delegation that was ill-equipped to question the head of the delegation. FDR went with his new Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who was not only inexperienced and ineffectual but had been chosen almost entirely because he was pliable to FDR himself. Harry Hopkins, his trusted aide was also present but he was in ill-health himself. Jimmy Byrnes, who FDR had considered for the Vice-Presidency but passed over for Truman, had been persuaded to join the conference. But Byrnes was there almost solely to observe and pass along messages to Congress.
It is telling that FDR truly considered even then that the biggest threat to the international peace he foresee was not Stalin but the domestic forces at home in Congress. Stalin by this point had begun his expansion into Eastern Europe and had no intention of behaving like the restrained manner FDR was hoping. FDR misread Stalin as another European imperialist much like Churchill when it fact he demanded ultimate and undiluted control over the territories and population that lived under them. But FDR didn’t see a tyrant the way other members of his diplomatic corps then but a crucial if difficult wartime ally. At Yalta he eagerly sought Stalin’s help and Stalin was willing to give far less than he got.
By now FDR was focused on gaining full Soviet participation in the United Nations, which at this point was what he considered the League Of Nations could have been but with improvements. Arrangements were made for the first meeting in San Francisco on April 25th to settle on the charter as well as the question of voting procedure in the Security Council and the number of votes for the USSR in the proposed General Assembly. For that reason FR and Hopkins left in a mood of supreme exultation because for them that was the crucial issue. They got a huge jolt in that regard on March 24 when Stalin refused to dispatch Molotov to the meeting, despite Roosevelt’s plea. Only FDR’s death would cause him to reverse his original decision.
FDR was also pleased that he had received a pledge from Stalin that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan two to three months after the surrender of Germany. Stalin made it clear what his conditions were. They included the outright gain of the Kurile Islands and the South of Sakhalin, regain the lease on their naval base at Port Arthur and received endorsement for a proposal of a Sino-Soviet Railroad, essentially giving the Soviets a sphere of influence in China. Because FDR believed that an invasion of the home islands of Japan would be necessary to unconditionally defeat the country, he saw the benefits of a Soviet attack on the Japanese Army in Manchuria. That Roosevelt was essentially handed over China to the Soviet Union — something that took place with Mao’s revolution in 1949 — was a legacy of Roosevelt to Truman that he would never shake.
FDR was still focused on maintaining domestic support for his foreign policy and therefore accepted the counsel of his State Department to push Stalin and Churchill to sign a Declaration on Liberated Europe which would reaffirm the Atlantic Charter and call for the formation of interim governments in Europe ‘broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population.” It is hard to discern why FDR wanted this noble declaration signed, perhaps it was an instrument to convey to Stalin the need for moderation in Europe. But he refused to accept the State Department’s proposal to establish a High Commission to enforce the declaration which meant he had little committed to what it stood for. Stalin was more than willing to sign it but for him it was a ‘mere scrap of paper’. Less than two weeks after Yalta his deputy commissar would bludgeon Rumania’s King Michael into installing a government fully compliant to Soviet wishes. When Churchill asked FDR to join him in writing Stalin, hoping to prevent a purge of on-Communists in Europe, the President sidestepped it by declaring: ”Romania is not a good place for a test case.” By that point FDR seemed more than willing to concede Eastern Europe was under Soviet control.
Actions in Poland confirmed that. At Yalta the Western powers formally agreed to the cession of a significant part of prewar Poland to the Soviet Union but deferred the issues of Polish boundaries in the West until a future conference. Roosevelt worked with Churchill to secure a more independent and democratic Poland and had some success. Nevertheless Stettinius later claimed the agreement was “what the two countries could persuade the Soviet Union to accept.” Upon seeing the accord Admiral Leahy FDR’s close friend exclaimed: “Mr. President, this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without technically breaking it.” FDR seemed to know that with his resigned reply. “I know Bill — I know. But it’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.” And after Yalta FDR seemed far less interested than Churchill about restraining the Soviet capacity to exploit that elasticity.
When negotiations for a new provisional government bogged down, Churchill requested a forceful joint message be sent to Stalin. Again Roosevelt declined to join Churchill but this time he refused to be placated. He sent a more passionate reply to FDR stating: “Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom?”
Roosevelt actually chose to tell his cabinet we are having difficulty with British relations and that the ‘British were more than willing for the United States to have a war with Russia at any time. He was still focused on emphasizing the progress on meetings for the UN and still believed Europe had to be less important in world affairs. By the end of March Churchill again cabled his discontent to Roosevelt, pointing out the increasing puppet government of Poland.
Finally FDR seemed willing to admit some ‘anxiety’ regarding the Soviet attitude since the conference in Yalta and declared awareness of ‘the dangers inherent in the present course of events not only for the immediate issues involved…but also for the San Francisco Conference and future world cooperation. But even then he was still hoping for a peaceful resolution.
On April 1 he wrote Stalin and admitted his concern about the ‘discouraging lack of progress’ in implementing the Yalta agreements. For once being pointed FDR made it plain that any Polish solution ‘which would result in a thinly disguised continuance of the present Warsaw regime would be unacceptable and cause the people of the United States to regard the Yalta agreement of having failed.” This had no effect on Stalin, who in a reply FDR received on April 7th blamed the British and American ambassadors for the breakdown in talks and accused them of departing of the terms of the conference. Three days later the President cabled Churchill that they would need ‘to consider most carefully the implication of Stalin’s attitude and what is to be our next step.” Two days later FDR was dead. Whatever that next step might have been would be left to the discussion of his many advisers and since he had not briefed any of them, we will never know what it is. Perhaps even FDR himself had not figured it out.
To give Roosevelt the benefit of the doubt — and he very much deserves it — it is conceivable that if he had lived longer that he might have pursued actions that imposed a new definition of how Yalta might be enforced. Perhaps Yalta would be viewed as the occasion FDR made his last effort to assay Stalin’s willingness to cooperate would be a test case for how to go forward. FDR deserves all the credit in the world for as speechwriter Sam Rosenmann would put it: “the patient effort in leaving no stone unturned in the search for world peace.” The fact remains, however, that even by that point Stalin had made it very clear that he had no interest in any version of it that didn’t involve his own dictatorial designs.
At the time FDR remained more concerned about bringing about strong domestic support for his postwar plans but he did so by being less than open with almost anyone around him. Because he thought the stakes were too high and feared obstruction from the Senate, he believed any admission of the likely limitations of the settlement would be grift for man like Robert Taft to resume the isolationist settlements that had followed after World War I. As a result, however, the public was unable to see through the thin tissue that papered over the divisions between the Big Three and believed that continued unity and joint purpose would continue in a post-war world.
But the fact remains even in the days before he died it had to be clear to FDR that the center wasn’t going to hold. Stettinius informed his colleagues in the cabinet on April 2nd that a serious deterioration in relations with the Soviet Union had taken place. The following day in regard to Russian non-participation in the military surrender of German forces in north Italy led to Stalin making unfounded charges about complicity between Britain and America and the Germans. Even this didn’t cause FDR to do more than turn the other cheek. In what was his last message to Stalin, he assured the Russian leader that ‘mutual mistrust and minor misunderstandings’ should not be allowed to happen in the future. When Averill Harriman questioned the use of the word minor, FDR left it in. In what was his final cable to Churchill, which he drafted at Warm Springs, he advised the PM to “minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems in one form or another seem to arise every day…We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.” Even to his dying day he seem convinced that he could cooperate with Stalin.
It is far from easy to criticize FDR which may be the very reason that so many of his greatest defenders — including men like Oliver Stone — will not take up cudgels against him. As Max Lerner cogently argued:
“if anyone else happened to be President — Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace — the historians and the political culture would have called it the idiocy it was. But it was Roosevelt, and it is a measure of the spell he casts over us that few even now dare condemn his actions and inactions outright.”
(I would just add that there are many who if Wallace had done the same thing would have viewed him as a similar genius.)
FDR, from the start of his ‘negotiations’ with Stalin seemed more than willing to give the Soviet leader anything he wanted from the start of their relationship right until the end of it. FDR never even began to exercise the full octave of escalation that he had, seeing it only as giving Stalin everything on one side and a complete break on the other.
And it is worth noting that years later Truman made a telling point when he said: “heroes know when to die.” He was talking of Lincoln, but it could clearly have referred to FDR. When the President died on April 12th, he left Truman a complex, ambiguous and challenging nature of a post-war world with little more than a grand vision whose limitations were becoming apparent even by the time of his death. He seemed to believe Europe could be supervised by Britain and Russia, even though the two nations emerged from the war profoundly disproportionate in stature, a reality FDR largely avoided. He resisted British efforts to deepen the American commitment to Europe, never answer if it would be left alone to face a new dominant continental power that was already revealing to the rest of the world is true vile intentions and no contingency plan should his accommodation with the Soviets fall apart. He never even made clear to the rest of his administration what those assumptions were and by the time of his death they were beginning to debate the next step.
Harriman wrote down a memo to FDR which the President never read, asking to be given some concrete means of showing Russian officials that their outrageous actions were affecting their vital interests. He requested authority to inform Stalin that it was time for a quid pro quo and that his beloved UN conference might fall apart unless it was dealt with. This opinion was becoming preeminent in the thinking of the cabinet. It doesn’t seem to have entered the President’s.
And the biggest sin he did was that he never told his Vice President — a man who had been selected with the full knowledge that FDR wouldn’t survive his term — anything about his way of thinking. Nor did he tell his own feeling with his secretary of state or any single member of his cabinet or advisors. FDR more or less was skillfully juggling balls of dynamite whose nature he was fully unable to understand and Truman had to pick them up in mid-air the moment he passed away — with none of the ability to perform the juggling talents of his predecessor. And the fact that he believed that Soviet cooperation would happen more based on anything but illusions was something that Truman and those around him kept believing far longer than they should have.
In the next article I will deal with Truman’s early days in office and how he came to deal with the members of FDR’s cabinet and adviser his illustrious predecessor had left behind.