Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (18 page)

The arguments would run and run. Much of the lobbying went on in private as the diplomats pursued agreements behind closed doors. Ed Stettinius was based in the penthouse suite at the Fairmont. The U.S. delegation met there every day to confer with their opposite numbers from Britain, China, France, and the Soviet Union. When he wasn’t in conference, Stettinius was constantly on the phone to Truman, Eden, Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko, and others, consulting some, advising the rest, always trying to move the process forward. Eden, too, was always either on the phone or deciphering telegrams from Churchill, back at home, or talking to diplomats in quiet corners. It was a tedious, mind-numbing, soul-destroying business, something that nobody enjoyed, not even the career diplomats and professional lobbyists whose lifeblood it was. Yet, for all that it was a talking shop of the worst kind, the United Nations conference had one great, incontrovertible, and undeniable factor in its favor. It was better than war.

*   *   *

THE RUSSIAN DELEGATION
was led by foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. He was based at the Saint Francis Hotel, where he had been besieged by autograph-hunting bobby-soxers on his arrival from the airport. The Russians had done more than anyone to stop the German army in its tracks, and the free world was grateful. But the goodwill of the war years was rapidly dissolving as Communists and capitalists came together in San Francisco and failed lamentably to iron out their differences. Wartime cooperation had given way to paranoia and distrust as the Russians squared up to the Western Allies and made it clear that the Anglo-American view of Europe in a postwar world was radically different from what the Soviets had in mind.

The Russians wanted control of all the countries along their European borders: Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and any other nations they could lay their hands on, a vast cordon sanitaire between their own borders and any further invasion from the west. After all they had suffered since 1941, they would settle for nothing less. They remained deaf to the objections of the Western Allies, whom they suspected of seeking to bring those countries into their own domain in order to make trouble for the Communists in due course. To the victor, the spoils, in the Russians’ view. They wouldn’t budge an inch.

Molotov was the embodiment of Russian paranoia. He had spent a few days in Washington before San Francisco, staying at Lee House, next door to the Truman family. He had amused them all with his refusal to sit with his back to a door or window. A Russian valet had checked the pockets of his suits when they came back from the cleaner’s, and a Russian always stood watch when the Blair House staff made Molotov’s bed. He had amazed his American hosts still further by prowling the grounds of Blair House at three or four in the morning, long after everyone else had gone to sleep.

In San Francisco he was no better, accompanied everywhere by a phalanx of unsmiling Soviet agents in terrible suits. Molotov seemed determined to put the worst possible interpretation on anything that came his way. He was already doing his best to make trouble at the conference, creating artificial objections to other countries’ proposals and threatening dramatic walkouts when his own proposals were not accepted. To the dismay of observers, he seemed hell-bent on destroying the United Nations before it had even drawn up its charter. The idea of cooperation between nations did not appear to have crossed his mind at all.

He was particularly inflexible on the subject of Poland. The Russians were determined to impose a Communist government on Warsaw, one that would always look to Moscow for direction. But the Anglo-Americans wanted to see Poland free again, as it had been before the war. The issue was especially important to the British, because Poland’s freedom had been their reason for going to war.

The British wanted to take Molotov aside and put it to him bluntly that Poland’s freedom was nonnegotiable. But the Americans wouldn’t back them. They feared that a tough line with Molotov might lead to a Russian boycott of the conference. The United Nations needed Russia much more than it needed Poland. Molotov was well aware of this, and saw no reason to make any concessions. Why should he, when the Soviet Union had so many millions of troops on the ground?

*   *   *

AMONG THE MANY AMERICANS
unimpressed by Molotov’s antics was Lieutenant Jack Kennedy, recently of the U.S. Navy. After active service as a torpedo boat commander in the Pacific, Kennedy was preparing for surgery on his back before going to law school in the fall. In the meantime, his father had arranged for him to attend the conference as a reporter for the
Chicago Herald American
and other newspapers owned by his friend William Randolph Hearst.

Joe Kennedy’s war had not been nearly as distinguished as his son’s. As the U.S. ambassador to Britain in 1939, he had been very close to prime minister Neville Chamberlain, fully supporting his policy of appeasement toward Germany, partly because the Germans had been badly treated at Versailles and partly because the Nazis seemed the lesser of two evils when compared to the Communists. Joe Kennedy had got straight on the telephone to Chamberlain on the day war broke out. He had been with his son Jack at the House of Commons when the air raid warning had sounded, trooping down to the shelter with all the Members of Parliament. But Joe Kennedy’s closeness to Chamberlain had not served him well in the months that followed, as the British buckled down to the war. His assertion that they would quickly surrender had proved horribly wide of the mark. Professional U.S. diplomats had lobbied successfully for his recall.

Kennedy’s troubles hadn’t stopped there. His eldest son, also called Joe, had been killed in an air force accident over Suffolk, taking with him his father’s hopes for a Kennedy in the White House. Joe Jr. had been groomed for the presidency from an early age, raised to expect it almost as his due. A good war record was deemed essential for anyone seeking high office in future years, but death in active service had played no part in the Kennedys’ plan. Joe Sr.’s grief for his son had been the same as any father’s, but he mourned for his family’s ambitions as well.

The mantle had fallen now on Jack, the second of his four boys. By arranging for Jack to attend the United Nations conference, Joe was hoping that the young man might develop an interest in politics or at least learn how history was made. He would also come to the attention of millions by writing for Hearst newspapers “from the point of view of the ordinary GI.” Bowing to his father’s wishes, Jack had installed himself at the Palace Hotel, from where he could report on the conference by day and chase girls by night.

He was not a particularly good reporter. His reputation rested on his book
Why England Slept
, which had been written for him by someone else. But what he lacked in writing skills he made up in shrewdness and common sense. Unimpressed by Molotov, he nevertheless understood the Russian fear of another invasion, the refusal to countenance an anticommunist government in any of the countries along Russia’s western borders: “The Russians have a far greater fear of the German comeback than we do. They are therefore going to make their western defenses secure. No government hostile to Russia will be permitted in the countries along her borders … They feel they have earned this right to security. They need to have it, come what may.”
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Understanding the other side’s point of view was halfway to winning the battle, in Jack Kennedy’s estimation.

But he couldn’t warm to the United Nations. He disliked “the timidity and selfishness of the nations gathered at San Francisco,” compared to the courage and sacrifice he had seen in the war. Above all, he disliked the way the new organization was being set up, with a power of veto vested in each of the five permanent members of the Security Council. What that meant in practice was that Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States would each be able to vote down anything they didn’t like, which was surely a recipe for disaster. The United Nations was supposed to be about solving problems in partnership, not stymieing the opposition. Kennedy wondered if it would ever be the right place for the world to settle its disputes, when the setup was so flawed from the outset.

*   *   *

ORSON WELLES,
too, was covering the conference as a journalist, but not for Hearst newspapers. After his recent performance in
Citizen Kane
, a thinly disguised and none-too-flattering portrayal of the newspaper magnate, he was never going to find any employment with the Hearst Corporation.

He was writing for a daily newsletter entitled
Free World
, published in English, French, and Spanish for the duration of the conference. He was also hosting the Free World Forum on radio, interviewing UN delegates about the proceedings and occasionally allowing them a word in edgeways. As a longtime political activist, hoping to make a living from politics rather than the cinema, Welles was taking a keen interest in the UN conference. He claimed that he was speaking for the whole world in demanding radical change from San Francisco. Whether the whole world shared the radicalism of the changes he demanded was another matter.

But few could disagree with his anger at the concentration camps. Newsreel of Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley going round Ohrdruf-Nord, a small camp near Buchenwald, had just been shown to the delegates in San Francisco. Welles had added his own commentary in his column “Orson Welles Today”:

The heaped-up dead in evidence. The burdened ovens. The ingenious machinery for the gift of pain. The eyeball blinking in the open grave … Patton and Bradley, their eyes choked full of this. Eisenhower, moving slowly, with immense dignity, through the long tableau. A huge black anger knocking with heavy blows on the commander’s heart.
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The Americans had also filmed local Germans being shown what had been done in their name. As elsewhere, the civilian population had denied all knowledge of any atrocities, to unconcealed skepticism from Welles:

The Military Police are gentle with the Herrenvolk. You realise that they need to be or they would strike them down, each with a single blow … One place of torture, you will learn, was camouflaged as a madhouse. Here the most grisly of all Grand Guignol conceits was realized: here the wardens were the lunatics … This is a putrefaction of the soul, a perfect spiritual garbage. For some years now we have been calling it Fascism. The stench is unendurable.
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Welles apparently sought consolation for his anger in women. He was married to Rita Hayworth, but the marriage wasn’t going well. According to the FBI, whose agents followed him everywhere in San Francisco, he had found other female company during the conference. He was sleeping with a stripper. The unnamed woman had a burlesque act in the city, but was planning to reinvent herself as a nightclub artiste, now that she had gone up in the world and was mixing with Hollywood royalty.

*   *   *

ON THE OTHER SIDE
of the globe, in a royal hunting lodge just outside Madrid, Spain’s General Franco was following the proceedings in San Francisco with mounting dismay. He was wondering if there was going to be a place for Spain at the United Nations, or whether his country was to be denied admission as punishment for having backed the wrong side in the war.

The omens were not good. So soon after their own civil war, Franco had been careful to keep the Spanish out of the larger conflict—at least until he could be sure that the British were going to lose—but there had never been much doubt as to which side he was on. Hitler had urged him repeatedly to declare war on Britain and allow German paratroopers to seize Gibraltar without delay. Franco had replied that the Royal Navy would seize the Canary Islands if he did. He had resisted all attempts to get Spain in on the Axis side, while making little secret of his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini and offering them plenty of covert help. In the Allies’ view, he had given their enemies all the help he could, short of actually entering the war.

But there had been a heavy price to pay in economic isolation and pariah status as the rest of the world proved reluctant to do business with the Spanish. It hadn’t been a problem at first, with Germany in the ascendant and everyone else in retreat, but it was rapidly becoming one now that Germany was beaten and Spain had no other friends. Franco had been backpedaling for months, frantically distancing himself from the Axis and struggling to reengage with the rest of the world.

The autographed photos of Hitler and Mussolini had been removed from his study, to be replaced by a picture of the Pope. Spanish troops had been withdrawn from the Russian front and German agents evicted from Tangiers. Spain had just broken off diplomatic relations with Japan and was about to do so with Germany as well. To anybody who asked, Franco was letting it be known that his previous flirtation with the Nazis had simply been a ploy, a delicate balancing act to keep his country from being occupied. What else could he have done, with the German army breathing down his neck and Italy just across the water?

He had written to Churchill and Roosevelt, suggesting that their countries should be friends. Churchill’s response had been chilly. Roosevelt’s, mindful of the congratulations Franco had lavished on Japan for bombing Pearl Harbor, even chillier. Between them, Churchill and Roosevelt had made it clear that there was no place for Spain at the forthcoming peace conference, nor much chance of Spain belonging to the United Nations under its present regime. The United Nations had no room in its charter for fascism.

Franco had other enemies in San Francisco, domestic enemies from Spain itself. After his victory in the civil war, many defeated Republicans had fled to Mexico, where they had been welcomed with open arms. The Mexican delegation to the United Nations was heavily influenced by anti-Franco Republicans, openly lobbying to deny Spain a seat at the table. Franco could protest all he liked, but his regime was too closely associated with Hitler and Mussolini for the rest of the world to want him at their conference.