American Experiment (323 page)

The Yalta Conference dealt with a wide range of issues, including postwar arrangements for regions like the Baltic and the Balkans and for the division of Germany. But for Roosevelt three issues were preeminent—and in each case he held weak cards.

The knottiest of these was Poland. The Big Three had long agreed that the war-racked nation would be picked up like a carpetbag and set down a few hundred kilometers to the west, satisfying Russia’s appetite for real estate, penalizing Germany’s, and taming Warsaw’s. But who would run postwar Poland? For some time Moscow had been dealing with the “Lublin Poles,” a coalition dominated by Polish communists, while London and Washington dealt with the “London Poles,” the Polish government-in-exile
in the British capital. Roosevelt was under no illusions about Soviet plans for Poland. As the conference met, the Red Army was completing Poland’s liberation—or rather, its occupation. The question was how much representation for noncommunist Polish elements could be extracted from a Kremlin that viewed liberals and conservatives as bourgeois exploiters if not fascists, and was absolutely determined both to create a buffer state against future invasions from the west and to consolidate Soviet control of Eastern Europe.

Roosevelt, reminding Stalin of the “six or seven million” Polish-Americans who opposed recognizing the Lublin group because it represented only a small portion of the Polish people, urged a government of national unity. Churchill backed the President. But Stalin was adamant. “During the last thirty years our German enemy” had passed through Poland twice, he said. And he admonished Churchill for proposing that a Polish government be established at Yalta, when no Poles were present. “I am called a dictator and not a democrat,” he said, “but I have enough democratic feeling to refuse to create a Polish government without the Poles being consulted.” During the next three days Roosevelt and Churchill, step by step, drew formal concessions from the Russians for a more inclusive government, free and unfettered elections, and participation by the London Poles. But it was probable that Washington and London would have little actual influence over the holding and policing of elections.

The President was nearing the end of his leverage with Stalin. And a cardinal reason for that was Roosevelt’s supreme military goal at Yalta— the participation of Russia in the war against Japan. The President and his military chiefs had long agreed that Soviet action on the Asiatic mainland was imperative to avoid unacceptable American losses. Nor was there any question that Russia would intervene; this had long been agreed upon, and it was to Moscow’s interest anyway. The question was when and how and with what power the Red Army would intervene. Would it hold back while the Allied forces assaulted the bulk of the Japanese troops in the home islands and on the mainland—and then move in for the spoils? Or would the Russians take their share of the burden from the start?

Was history playing a grotesque trick? For three long years Stalin had urged—demanded—pleaded for a second front in France and the Anglo-Americans had taken their time about it, or so it seemed to the Kremlin, finally crossing the Channel when it suited their own interests. Now it was Roosevelt who was asking for a second front and Stalin who could take his time. Stalin made the most of his bargaining position by gaining confirmation of a host of political concessions: return of southern Sakhalin to Russia; cession of the Kurile Islands to the Soviet Union; preservation of
the Moscow-controlled regime in Outer Mongolia; internationalization of the port of Dairen; recognition of Moscow’s “pre-eminent interests” in Manchuria. On some issues the President asked for postponement so he could consult the absent Chiang. In return Stalin promised in writing that he would enter the war against Japan two or three months after the surrender of Germany.

For any misgivings Roosevelt had about certain compromises at Yalta he had a great consolation—but one that also served to narrow his leverage. This was agreement on the shape of the United Nations, his third supreme goal at Yalta. Here the President was acting not only out of his own hopes and convictions but for a large body of liberal and internationalist feeling in the United States expressed by such diverse notables as Henry Wallace and Wendell Willkie (before the latter’s death in the fall of 1944). There was no question that a UN would be established; the question was its power and structure. Roosevelt found Churchill cooperative though skeptical, Stalin grudgingly responsive but insistent on the principle of great-power unanimity. Stalin and Molotov were still pushing their outlandish idea that the Soviet Union should have sixteen votes in the proposed assembly, one for each of its sixteen component republics. When Molotov suddenly cut down the request to two extra votes, and the British—doubtless with an eye on their own dominions—appeared to go along with this compromise, Roosevelt felt he had to agree.

Some in Roosevelt’s delegation thought he had compromised too much, but the President believed that an effective United Nations organization could rectify the failings of Yalta and earlier conferences. He was so eager for its establishment that he risked being a hostage to its success. “Mr. President,” Leahy said at one point, “this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without even technically breaking it.”

“I know, Bill—I know it. But it’s the best I can do.” The two men were discussing the Polish settlement, but the exchange could have related to any of the major Yalta compromises. Holding only weak hands in the great poker game of Yalta, Roosevelt believed he had won the foundations of future peace. It was with hope and even exultation that he and his party left Yalta for the long journey home.

Above all, he left with confidence that, whatever the problems ahead, he could resolve them through his personal intervention—whether it was dealing with Stalin over Poland, or with Chiang over Far Eastern settlements, or even with Churchill or de Gaulle over imperialism in India or colonialism in Indochina. But Roosevelt did not know, for neither his doctor nor anyone else had ever told him, that his heart had been failing
for several years. On his return from Yalta people in the White House— especially the correspondents—noted more than ever before how gray and scrawny he appeared, even vacant of face with his jaw drooping and mouth falling open—but then how he would suddenly come to life, tell a joke, his laughter booming out above theirs. He appeared to compartmentalize his health and malaise as he did the rest of his life, alternating intervals of intense activity like Yalta with long periods of rest away from Washington.

He looked forward to his trip to San Francisco for the founding meeting of the United Nations in April, and to a voyage to England later in the spring with the First Lady. What a grand reception he would receive from the British! But first he would report to Congress, and then he would journey to Warm Springs at the end of March for an old soldier’s R&R— rest and recreation.

A
FTER BUFFETING HEAVY SEAS
off the Chesapeake capes, the cruiser
Quincy
glided into Newport News on February 27, 1945, bringing the Commander-in-Chief back from Yalta. Two days later Roosevelt was wheeled into the well of the House of Representatives and seated in a red plush chair in front of a small table. Apologizing for speaking while sitting—“it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs”—he reported optimistically on Yalta but warned that whether it was entirely fruitful or not lay in the hands of “you here in the halls of the American Congress.”

Those looking down from the packed galleries—Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting royalty and dignitaries—watched the President with concern. It was uncharacteristic of him to refer to his disability. Slightly stooped over the table, he spoke in a flat tone, slurring his words and stumbling a bit over his text. The resonant voice of old had lost its timbre; it was the voice of an invalid. Friend and foe noted his gaunt face and trembling hand. Yet his flagging voice rose to a note of desperate urgency at the climax of his address.

“Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive, again.” Yalta “ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.” He called once again for a universal organization of peace-loving nations.

Almost the whole of his fourth term apparently lay before the President—plenty of time to organize the new United Nations, finish off Hitler, throw the full weight of Allied power against Japan, and strengthen his working partnership with Stalin. In fact only eight short weeks remained to Roosevelt, and in half that time relations with Moscow turned sour.

Again Poland was the main engine of conflict, just as it had been in 1939
and before. Within the loose framework of the Yalta agreement, Stalin was absolutely determined to install reliable communists as rulers of Poland. He was already operating on a bald sphere-of-interest basis: the Anglo-Americans were to have a free hand in Greece and points west, and the Russians in Poland and the Balkans. Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom?” He might have to reveal in Parliament, Churchill added, a British-American “divergence” unless the Allies confronted the “utter breakdown of what was settled at Yalta.”

The crisis in the “Rainbow Coalition” became even more acute when Stalin suspected that Anglo-American talks with the defeated Germans in Italy were the first step toward a negotiated separate peace—a violation of the Big Three pledge to require an unconditional surrender to all three Allies jointly. Angry messages flew back and forth between Moscow and the Western capitals. Stalin, once again facing the old bogey of German troops being released in the West to fight in the East, accused the West of not merely a “misunderstanding but something worse.” Roosevelt cabled Stalin that he bitterly resented Stalin’s “informers” for their “vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.” The President perhaps was even more upset when he learned that not Molotov but only Ambassador Gromyko would head the Soviet delegation to the San Francisco UN organizing conference. If this reflected Stalin’s downgrading of the UN, it was a serious blow to Roosevelt’s high hopes for postwar unity.

Still, Roosevelt’s spirits seemed to brighten by April, when events reached one of the great climacterics of history. The whole German defense structure was crumbling west of the Rhine. The Red Army was across the Oder and grinding its way westward against last-ditch resistance. After a bloody struggle, a huge amphibious task force that in February had launched a massive invasion of Iwo Jima was mopping up the tiny island. On April 1 Nimitz’s men invaded Okinawa and made rapid progress during the first days ashore, while the invasion fleet stood guard offshore and beat off hundreds of suicide attacks by Japanese aircraft.

Relations with Stalin seemed to ease a bit in early April. On the afternoon of April 11 the President dictated the draft of a speech for Jefferson Day: “… Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world at peace.…

“The work, my friends, is peace. More than an end of this war—an end
to the beginnings of all wars. Yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killing of peoples.…

“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”

Franklin Roosevelt died April 12, 1945, at his second home in Warm Springs, Georgia, among greening trees and flowering dogwood and wild violets. He died in the company of women he held dear—his secretary Grace Tully, his cousins Margaret Suckley and Laura Delano, and his friend Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Eleanor Roosevelt, notified at the White House, arrived in time to accompany her husband’s body on the funeral train that next day rolled slowly north through Georgia and the Carolinas into Virginia. Glimpsing the weeping faces and solemn crowds at the little depots and crossroads, she remembered:

A lonesome train on a lonesome track,

Seven coaches painted black.…

A slow train, a quiet train,

Carrying Lincoln home again.…

Following the obsequies in Washington, the funeral train once again headed north, now pulling seventeen cars filled with officials and politicians. The train passed through New Jersey and Manhattan and up the east bank of the Hudson. At Garrison, across from West Point, men removed their hats just as men had done when Lincoln’s funeral car passed eighty years ago that spring. At the little siding at Hyde Park cannon sounded twenty-one times as the coffin was moved from the train to a horse-drawn caisson. Behind the bier another horse, hooded and with stirrups reversed, led the little procession as it toiled up the steep slope to the rose garden on the bluff above. There stood Eleanor Roosevelt, Anna, and one son who could be freed from war duty, along with President Harry Truman and his cabinet, and a phalanx of six hundred West Point cadets.

The aged rector prayed as servicemen lowered the body into the grave. Cadets fired three volleys. A bugler played taps. The soldier was home.

The death of any President leaves Americans in shock and grief. The passing of Roosevelt left them also empty and disoriented. Millions of Americans in their teens and twenties had never really known another
President. For them Roosevelt
was
the presidency. And for many he would continue to be. More than any President since Jefferson, FDR dominated his times; more than any President since Lincoln, his ideals and policies would influence the presidencies to come.