Eleanor (12 page)

A letter that she received from Harry Hopkins just before she left for the London General Assembly and her first encounter with the Russians represented the view of many of Roosevelt’s New Deal associates about the breakup of Big Three unity.

I cannot say I am too happy about the way the atom bomb is being handled. In fact, I think we are doing almost everything we can to break with Russia which seems so unnecessary to me.
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Her run-in with Vishinsky in London over the issue of forced repatriation gave her a taste of how difficult it was to reconcile the outlooks and interests of East and West; yet she thought that with patience, firmness, and a willingness to look at Russia’s economic
and security needs without self-righteousness a harmonization of interests might in time be achieved. When, during the quick trip that she made to occupied Germany after the London meetings, GIs asked for her ideas on how to deal with the Russians, she crisply ticked off four points:

Have convictions.

Be friendly.

Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs.

Work as hard as they do.

The Russians had “an inferiority complex,” she went on, and also “tenacity.”

We shall have to work very hard to understand them, because they start from a different background. They have a great belief in their own reasoning and if we don’t have just as great convictions, they won’t understand.
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Unlike Vandenberg, who had captured the headlines on his return from London with a speech to the Senate on “What is Russia up to now?,” she did not believe there was any mystery about Russian behavior, telling Truman as much when she saw him shortly after Vandenberg’s speech and giving him her own assessment of Soviet policy.

Soviet agitation in Iran and the Dardanelles, she thought, reflected at bottom a reaching out for “security in the economic situation,” which the Russians evidently felt could only be secured through political control. In eastern Europe she thought Russia was “chiefly concerned with military security. That is why she will try to control the governments of the nations in all those areas and why she dreads seeing Germany built up as an industrial power against her.” Russia had not yet learned how to live with an opposition at home, and this was reflected in her foreign policy. “This is largely a question of maturity and of course, trust in the people themselves
and not such great dependence on the absolute control of the head of the government.

“It will take some time for Russia to achieve this.” America, meanwhile, must act out of affirmative belief, not fear. The United States was the strongest country on earth. “The whole social structure in Europe is crumbling,” she counseled the president, “and we might as well face the fact that leadership must come from us or it will inevitably come from Russia.” The key to the future was the economic situation in Europe. “I feel very strongly that it cannot be handled piecemeal. . . .The economic problem is not one that we can handle with a loan to Great Britain, a loan to France, a loan to Russia. It must be looked on as a whole.”
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Above all, American leadership meant vigorous support of the United Nations in order to keep the world from dividing into armed camps. In this respect she found herself at loggerheads with Winston Churchill, who, on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, in the presence of President Truman, delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech calling for an Anglo-American military alliance and a showdown with Russia.

Even before that speech she had been afraid of his influence over Truman. She intended to see the president as soon as she returned, she had written from London, “It seems to me he is being too attentive to Churchill. I fear Winston will make him believe certain things which just aren’t so.”
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Elliott agreed with her. He had attended most of the wartime conferences as his father’s aide, and he recalled many bedtime conversations with his father in which the latter had spoken of his differences with Churchill. When Elliott proposed to write a book reporting those conversations she encouraged him to do so.

Churchill came to Hyde Park after his “Iron Curtain” speech to lay a wreath on his wartime comrade’s grave in the rose garden, and, of course, Mrs. Roosevelt received him with respect and affection. “No matter how much any of us may differ at times with the ideas which Mr. Churchill may hold,” she wrote, “none of us will ever cease to be grateful to him for the leadership which he
gave during the war.” Having paid her respects to the great man, she proceeded to take issue with him:

Unless we build a strong United Nations Organization it is fairly obvious that the U.S.S.R., the United States and Great Britain, the three great Allies in the European war, are each going to become the center of a group of nations, each building up its individual power.

All three countries wanted peace,

but the old way of counting on our own individual force seems still to have a strong hold on us. We have not worked together enough really to feel that we understand each other. We still question whether our different political and economic systems can exist side by side in the world. We still suspect each other when we belong to different racial and religious groups. We are still loath to give up the old power and attempt to build a new kind of power and security in the world.

I am convinced that this timidity is perhaps the greatest danger today.
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Part of her suspicion of Churchill stemmed from a fear that he spoke for a group in the United States and Britain that wanted to rebuild and rearm Germany “as a buffer in Central Europe against the spreading out of the Soviet Union and its influence over neighboring states.” An American official, whose business it had been during the war to keep track of the international cartels and their efforts to circumvent the blockade, sent her a report on proposals to rebuild German heavy industry. She sent it on to Truman:

Mr. [Bernard] Baruch tells me that what he has to say is undoubtedly true. I have always known that a certain group in Great Britain would try to bolster Germany’s economy as they are really less afraid of a strong Germany, in spite of the wars which we have had, than of a strong Russia because that
group in Great Britain is more afraid of an economic change than anything else. I am also afraid that Mr. [Robert] Murphy, our representative in Germany, has always played with this group and this line of thought. From my point of view it threatens not only the peace of Europe but of the world.
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Yet, uneasy as she was over some of the developments in western policy, she did not exempt Soviet Russia from its share of responsibility for the breakup of wartime Big Three unity: “We must get together with Russia, but it must be a two-way matter.” Her cousin, Joe Alsop, sent her an article that he and his brother Stewart had written for
Life
. It was called “Tragedy of Liberalism,” and its theme was that “by ignoring the challenge of Soviet imperialism, U.S. liberals are destroying their nation’s chances of building a peaceful world.” Soviet
realpolitik
, the Alsop brothers argued, could not be handled by “loving kindness.” He was sending the article to her, Joe Alsop wrote, “because with perhaps less patience and good temper than you, I think along precisely the same line that you do.”

“Slowly I have been coming to much the same feeling that you have on Russia,” she replied two days later,

with one exception, namely, that I do not feel there has been enough plain speaking among the people in our countries. Since Harry Hopkins, I do not believe that anyone has talked “turkey” to Mr. Stalin personally, and certainly most of us haven’t talked honestly with people like Mr. Gromyko, Mr. Vishinsky, etc. I am going to make a great effort to get to know Mr. Gromyko and tell him a few of the things I feel.

I think the difficulty with them is to make them see that they have to trust for safety to the United Nations. Otherwise there is no safety for anybody. They are doing exactly what you describe but I think they are doing it because they have no conception of what a strong UN might mean in security for all, and no trust in any one. However, we have no more trust than they have and neither has Great Britain.
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The Soviet government still wanted her to visit the Soviet Union. But U.S. officials feared, as did some of Mrs. Roosevelt’s friends, that the Russians would turn her visit into proof of their propaganda thesis that Truman’s policy of firmness toward Russia was responsible for the breakup of the wartime alliance and was a betrayal of Roosevelt. She had dropped her plans to go to Russia, she told the press. “Just say I am going to be at Hyde Park working on my autobiography.”
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Although Mrs. Roosevelt said she agreed with the Alsop analysis of Soviet expansionism, she carefully refrained from endorsing their further view, expressed in the same
Life
article, that Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace was the liberal leader most guilty of an “idealized” and “otherworldly” view of the Soviet Union. And when, in September, 1947, Wallace publicly broke with the Truman administration over its “get tough with Russia” policy, her reaction was by no means unfriendly. He was the Roosevelt associate from whom she expected the most in the way of liberal leadership. On the day she moved out of the White House she had written him:

Though I hope to see you today and perhaps to talk with you more about my hopes for America and the future, I do want you to know that I feel that you are peculiarly fitted to carry on the ideals which were close to my husband’s heart and which I know you understood.
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She shared many of the misgivings about American policy that he voiced in his departure from the Truman cabinet. Commenting on his letter to Truman of July 23, 1946,
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in which Wallace condemned the increased army budgets and the bomb tests in the Pacific and which made it look to the rest of the world as if we were only paying “lipservice to peace,” Mrs. Roosevelt said, “I do not agree with it in every detail, but it’s a good letter.” She thought Wallace’s explanation of the break with Russia, showing that the United States was not blameless, was a “fair analysis. . . .The test
of any situation is to put yourself in the other man’s place and we have not done that very successfully in our attitude towards Russia.” She, too, had deplored the phrase “tough policy” to describe the U.S. attitude toward Russia. Wallace’s highly critical stand on the increasingly military emphasis in the U.S. approach to the world, his assertion that some military men favored a “preventive war,” also struck a responsive chord. In May, 1946, when President Truman had threatened to draft striking railroad workers into the Army, she had written Truman in dismay:

You will forgive me, I hope, if I say that I hope you realize that there must [not] be any slip, because of the difficulties of our peace-time situation, into a military way of thinking, which is not natural to us as a people. I have seen my husband receive such advice from his military advisers and succumb to it every now and then, but the people as a whole do not like it even in war time, and in peace time military domination goes against the grain. I hope now that your anxiety is somewhat lessened, you will not insist upon a peace-time draft into the army of strikers. That seems to me a dangerous precedent.
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She gave public expression to her fears about the growing influence of the military in her Armistice Day column:

Someone said to me the other day that the atmosphere in the country was changing. From having been a non-militaristic nation where the majority of the people wanted only a small army and navy, we were almost imperceptibly moving toward a situation where the wishes of the War and Navy departments carried more weight than did the State Department. That is more or less natural at the end of a war—particularly a war like the one we have just been through, where our men are still scattered throughout the world and where peace has been so long in the making.

Nevertheless, I believe the time is approaching when we had best take thought about where we are drifting. . . .

Whenever our fleet is particularly strong, we have a tremendous urge to send it around the world, or to some far-away point. The Mediterranean has been particularly attractive of late, and I must say it did not fill me with great joy to have the planes from the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt writing the ship’s initials in the sky over Greece at a time when many people wondered just what was going to happen in that country.

Our ships are just paying nice, friendly visits, and it surprises us when anyone thinks that some ulterior motives might lie behind these visits. This is another example of a trait no other nation seems to possess in quite the same degree that we do—namely, a feeling of almost childish injury and resentment unless the world as a whole recognizes how innocent we are of anything but the most generous and harmless intentions.

It is true that we do not have a Red Army anywhere in the world, but we do make a pretty good showing with our navy and our air force and—tucked away, out of sight of the rest of the world—a few little atomic bombs. On the whole our armed services have been doing pretty well in the way of keeping us defended, but I hope our State Department will remember that it is really the department for achieving peace. . . .
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Fearful of the growing influence of the military, Wallace’s pressures in the other direction seemed healthy to her. But there were differences between her attitude and Wallace’s which in time proved to be basic. “I have always wanted cooperation with Russia,” she wrote after Tito’s planes had shot down two unarmed U.S. transports that had strayed off course. “We have an obligation to meet other nations halfway in friendliness and understanding, but they have that obligation, too—and these latest developments show no realization of their responsibility.” She was able to go along with Wallace’s speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden in September because he criticized Russia as well as the United States and Britain for the breakdown of Big Three unity. But Wallace’s listeners, among whom Communists were heavily represented, had not liked that part of the speech. “Why any American audience
should boo Mr. Wallace for saying what he did about Russia and the need for Russia to come halfway in her contacts with us, is beyond my understanding.”
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