American Experiment (325 page)

This capacity to compartmentalize his presidency and even his personality over time, and at any one time, gave him political advantages. It also helped explain the greatest moral failure of his presidency—a failure even greater and far more disastrous than his authorization of relocation camps for Japanese-Americans. This was his inaction in the face of the Holocaust. For years Roosevelt, like other Western leaders, had denounced Nazi persecution of the Jews. During the months after Pearl Harbor, reports began to reach the White House that something unspeakably more horrible was taking place—the “final solution of the Jewish question”: calculated, mechanized, bureaucratized murder on a colossal scale. Reports came too of people by the hundreds and thousands buried or burned alive, of infants swung by the heels and dashed against walls, of boxcars groaning with their loads of sick, freezing, starving, suffocating, dying “passengers.”

The totality of this holocaust was matched by the near-totality of failure on the part of everything that was supposed to stand guard against barbarism—press, church, public opinion, government itself. Newspapers
became so inured to the reports, or found them so “beyond belief,” that an authentic account of the murder of tens of thousands of Jews might be put on an inside page next to marriage announcements. Leaders of the Christian churches within the United States and outside were almost silent. The public, misled by atrocity stories about the Germans during World War I, wondered if it was being bamboozled again. State Department officials, irresponsibly slow to react to anguished pleas and demands for help, appeared to reflect the moral lethargy and the endemic anti-Semitism among the public and Congress.

The President was not wholly passive. Persuaded by Morgenthau and others that Hull’s people were hopelessly inadequate to the situation, he established the War Refugee Board under his direct supervision. He authorized hostage deals and other specific operations that saved a number of Jews. He periodically denounced the slaughter in the strongest terms. But between his word and his deed lay a void. Urged to disrupt the shipment of human cargo by bombing the rail lines to the extermination factory of Auschwitz in Poland, he reverted to his role of Dr. Win-the-War, contending that all resources must be directed to the military destruction of Nazism and that such diversions would postpone that day. Yet even as that day approached, even as American bombers overflew the rail lines, overflew Auschwitz itself, European Jewry fell as steadily to its destruction as sand through an hourglass, until only three million, then only two million, then only one million, and finally only a handful of Jews remained alive, and these physically and psychologically devastated. On this ultimate crime against humanity the President never displayed—never sought to display—the consistent and compelling moral leadership that would break through bureaucratic callousness, legislative resistance, popular ignorance and apathy.

So Franklin Roosevelt left a highly divided legacy to a people themselves classically devoted on the one hand to lofty global ideals and on the other to narrow isolationist self-protection, with weak linkage between. But he left also a living legacy—living on in the unquenchable memories of his own leadership, living on also in the persons to whom he immediately passed on the legacy. One was his Vice President, a practical politician. The other was his wife, an impractical politician. They would become both allies and antagonists, politically and symbolically, in the nation’s postwar leadership. Isaiah Berlin spoke of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “greatness of character and goodness of heart.” She possessed much more than this, including some of the militance and tenacity of her Uncle Theodore—but character and goodness of heart would not be the least of the qualities she would bring to the struggle for peace.

So swiftly did the cold war envelop the Rainbow Coalition during 1945 that for decades historians would search for the sources of this early and acrimonious falling-out between Moscow and Washington. Two comrades-in-arms, who had come together from opposite sides of the globe to beat down the most murderous and monstrous threat the modern world had known, appeared suddenly to turn on each other in a new war of words and weapons. The turnabout seemed to defy conventional explanation. These two great nations had no common land borders to fight over, no heritage of ancient rivalries, no dire economic conflict, no clashing territorial ambitions. For a century before 1917 their main contact had been a mutually satisfactory real estate deal over Alaska.

American visitors to the Soviet Union noted how the two countries appeared to resemble each other: huge continental nations with comparable populations, both boasting revolutions to celebrate and world-famous leaders—Lincoln and Wilson, Lenin and Trotsky—to glorify or denigrate. Visitors from the American Midwest felt at home when they observed the immense, gently undulating plains, the seasons suddenly changing from the deep snow of winter to the bottomless mud of spring to blinding summer light and drought, the “deep, mournful, yet mellifluous and muted bellowing” of the huge steam locomotives as they rumbled across the flat plain. Russians, when you got to know them, seemed a lot like Americans—friendly, talkative, boastful, fascinated by new cars, machines, household gadgets.

Most of these appearances were deceptive. Russian history, society, psychology, culture were profoundly different from the American. The flat plains that for Americans were havens of peace and isolation—at least since the dispersion of the Indians—were for Russians avenues of attack from neighboring countries. The vast majority of Soviet citizens were peasants—religious, fatalistic, isolated in their remote and scattered villages, tending to suspicion toward outsiders. The Russian temperament, far more than the American, appeared to be at odds with itself—a popular craving for authority, leadership, and collective controls clashing with a tendency to be “independent to the point of anarchy,” in Edward Crankshaw’s words, “and expansive to the point of incoherence.” Although both peoples apotheosized common values in their sacred documents—freedom, justice, equality, human rights—American children in their families and schools and churches had been taught to abhor communism, Soviet children to abhor capitalism and the fascism it allegedly spawned. Each
side not only hated the other’s ideology but feared it. The “reds” were seeking to arouse the world proletariat against the democratic—the American—way of life; the American warmongers sought to encircle and crush the Russian Revolution—had they not tried to stifle it in its cradle in 1919?

A quarter century after the Russian Revolution, each nation grotesquely misperceived the other’s “plot” for “world domination.” United States propagandists and press quoted Marxist predictions of inevitable war, not bothering to point out that Lenin had preached the inevitability of war among the capitalistic nations rather than between communism and capitalism. Soviet propagandists seized on the more extreme statements of American leaders—notably that of a then obscure American senator named Harry S Truman, who had said during the frightful summer days of 1941, as the Nazis were rolling across the Russian plains, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible,” though he added that he did not want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.

Many on each side misperceived the other side’s
wish
for world communism or world capitalism to become the global way of life as an elaborately blueprinted
plot
for world conquest. These fears persisted throughout World War II, certainly among Americans and probably among Soviet citizens as they were continually reminded of the West’s “perfidious” failure to mount the cross-Channel invasion. Even during the euphoria of wartime collaboration, polls showed that many Americans were not counting on the Russians to “cooperate” after the war.

Was any reality perceivable through the mists of ideology? Patterns of behavior were discernible to those who looked for them, but the patterns were mixed. The Bolsheviks had waged ideological warfare against the West ever since winning power, but the trumpet calls were rarely more than bombast. In Finland and Poland and elsewhere, Moscow had shown a ferocious determination to exert control over border countries, but its aim seemed far more to prevent these nations from serving as stepping-stones for invading armies than to make them bases for Red Army moves against Western Europe or Japan. The Kremlin subsidized Communist parties around the world, but invariably subordinated those parties’ interests to its own state interests when they collided. And the West had some knowledge of Stalin’s massive party purges, in which thousands of old comrades perished, and of his “de-kulakization” and forced collectivization campaigns, in which millions of peasants were executed or sent to Siberian labor camps or died of starvation—but these were “internal matters.”

For its part, the West had waged an abortive hot war and then a long cold war against the Soviet Union. The United States had a monopoly on nuclear arms for years following World War II, while the Soviets were still militarily depleted and economically devastated, but Washington did not use the ultimate weapon. State and Defense Department officials adopted a series of carefully considered position papers, culminating in 1950 with NSC-68, which pictured the Soviet Union as “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own,” and as seeking to “impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world,” but Washington did not back up this dire assessment with military action. Above all, the Americans and British had followed their own national interests in the timing of the second front, as postwar revelations of Lord Beaverbrook and others made clear, and had left Moscow feeling deceived and millions of Russians without the sons, fathers, and brothers who had taken the brunt of the Nazi onslaught, but the Kremlin realists could not have doubted that, had the situation been reversed, they would have done exactly the same.

The cold war, in short, had started early and had never ended, not even during the war. The conflict was far too deeply rooted to be quickly or easily eliminated, but it could be managed or overridden by strong and purposeful leadership. That was the kind of leadership Roosevelt and Churchill had supplied throughout most of the shooting war, in collaboration with Stalin. During both 1942, the year of shocking defeats, and the planning year of 1943 the two Western leaders and their staffs had hammered out the shape of final victory in tandem with the Russians. After five years of doubt and agony men had mastered events, at least for the moment. Now with Hitler gone as a unifying force, could Harry Truman and his Administration offer the same kind of leadership after the war? The issue was not long in doubt.

Harry Truman would never forget his meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt after he was suddenly summoned from the Capitol to her study on April 12, 1945. “Harry,” she had said quietly, “the President is dead.” Speechless for a moment, he had asked her if there was anything he could do.

“Is there anything
we
can do for
you?”
she had replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.” The widowed First Lady knew well the toll exacted by the presidency. Within a few months the new President was lamenting that being Chief Executive was like “riding a tiger,” as he desperately sought to keep on top of events before they got on top of him.

Rarely had a new President appeared so poorly prepared for the job. The Missourian had never visited Europe since shipping back from his
World War I service as an artilleryman in France. A decent, hardworking New Deal senator, Truman had been chosen as FDR’s running mate largely because, of all the hopefuls, he would “hurt the President least.” Roosevelt barely knew him, and made little effort to see him or keep him informed—even about the A-bomb—during the months after their November victory. The last of the Vice President’s few messages to the President concerned a patronage matter. Politically Truman traded on his plain manners, blunt speech, and I’m-from-Missouri skepticism toward Senate windbags and Washington pundits. Behind the heavy spectacles and homespun features, however, lay a tangle of incongruities—a jaunty self-confidence along with feelings of inadequacy; a calm and sometimes stubborn resoluteness along with sudden flaring rages when he was crossed; a rustic morality that still accommodated itself easily to the unsavory Pendergast machine. He was a high school graduate moving in a world of college-educated men, but he took pride in his wide reading in American history.

Along with these ambivalences the new President inherited FDR’s divided legacy of principled, idealistic leadership and short-run
Realpolitik
manipulation. The organizational meeting of the United Nations, opening two weeks after Truman took the oath of office, symbolized both the high ideals and the political pragmatics of the new President and of the nations’ representatives who assembled there. In a brief, simple address piped in by direct wire, Truman urged the delegates to “rise above personal interests” and “provide the machinery, which will make future peace, not only possible, but certain.” But Poland’s seat at the conference lay empty, for Washington and Moscow were still at odds over the composition of the new Warsaw leadership. Also roiling the San Francisco assembly was Stalin’s insistence that one power could not only veto a move to use force but veto even discussion of the question. Happily, Harry Hopkins, in his last major mission to Moscow—he would be dead of hemochromatosis in nine months—persuaded Stalin to withdraw Moscow’s position on the veto. But even Hopkins could make little progress on Poland.

Overwhelmed by events, irked by the old Roosevelt hands in his cabinet who he felt shared little of FDR’s greatness, immersed in paperwork as he tried feverishly to brief himself on the hard decisions facing him, Commander-in-Chief Harry Truman at least had the satisfaction of presiding over the last battles of the European war, as Allied spearheads stabbed into Germany from east and west. Late in April, American and Soviet soldiers met and clasped hands at Torgau, on the Elbe, while British forces were taking Bremen. Within a few days all ended for the Axis in a leaders’
Götterdämmerung,
as Mussolini and his mistress were shot to death by Italian
partisans in a town on Lake Como, Dr. and Frau Goebbels killed their six young children and themselves, and Hitler and his bride of thirty-six hours committed suicide in their bunker as the Russians closed in. The German command—what was left of it—unconditionally surrendered on May 7, 1945.