Roosevelt (92 page)

The books and articles and editorials helped establish the context within which the peace planners worked; so did the presidential campaign. In mid-August Dewey declared that he was deeply disturbed by reports that the Dumbarton Oaks Conference would “subject the nations of the world, great and small, permanently to the coercive power” of the Big Four. A four-power alliance, he said, would be immoral and imperialistic. With Roosevelt’s approval, Hull put out a statement denying that any “superstate with its own police forces and other paraphernalia of coercive power” was being thought of; he denied that the Big Four could coerce other nations. Dewey designated his foreign-policy adviser, John Foster Dulles, to meet with Hull, and after three days of long discussion the two men worked out a statement designed to remove the more controversial aspects of postwar organization from the presidential campaign.

The issue that was cleaving the men at Dumbarton Oaks, however, was not the Big Four against the other nations of the world, but the Big Four against themselves. Early in the proceedings Ambassador Gromyko, head of the Soviet delegation, advanced the principle of Big Four unanimity, and he stuck to it all the days following with might and main. The innocuous word cloaked the momentous proposition that assuming the rule of unanimity an aggressive Big Four power could veto Council action intended to protect a smaller nation or—and this aspect was played down—another Big Four power. The Americans had shifted back and forth on the veto question—they could never forget the specter of Senate isolationism—but at Dumbarton Oaks they took the position that a party involved in a dispute, whether a great power or small, should not be allowed to vote on the question. Gromyko flatly opposed any limitation on the veto, as expected, but then he threw a bombshell into the sedate mansion by demanding that all sixteen of the Soviet republics be seated in the new organization.

February 4, 1944, C. K. Berryman, courtesy of the Washington (D.C.)
Star

“My God!” exclaimed Roosevelt when Stettinius told him of the request. He asked the Undersecretary to inform Gromyko that such a proposal—labeled “X matter” to keep it from becoming known—would end the chances of the new United Nations being accepted by the Senate or the American people. Actually, the sixteen-vote proposition seemed so preposterous to Roosevelt that he expected to talk Stalin out of it. The veto was another matter. The more the Anglo-Americans opposed it, the more Gromyko insisted on it. Stettinius, convinced that solving the veto question was crucial to the whole enterprise, decided to bring out his “biggest and last remaining gun.” Would the President talk with Gromyko? Would Gromyko, the President asked the Undersecretary, be offended if he received him in his bedroom? Stettinius thought he would be impressed.

It was an odd encounter the next morning between the President in his old bathrobe and the dark, personable young
Ambassador. After chatting breezily, Roosevelt turned to the main issue, noting that traditionally in his country husbands and wives in trouble could state their case but not vote on it. He dwelt at length on old American concepts of fair play. Gromyko was pleasant but unyielding. Roosevelt then proposed a cable to Stalin reiterating his argument. That was up to him, Gromyko said. The President sent a friendly but strongly worded cable to the Marshal. Almost a week later the reply came back. The basic understanding was the unanimity of the Big Four. That presupposed no room for suspicion among the major powers. He could not ignore, said Stalin, certain absurd prejudices hindering an objective attitude toward the Soviet Union.

So deadlock had been reached on preserving the peace even as Soviet and Anglo-American troops were winning it. The Russians were still insisting on their sixteen votes. The Dumbarton Oaks meeting adjourned with the shining structure of a new international organization agreed on, but with a dark cloud over the capacity of the great powers to order their own relationships.

In mid-September 1944 Roosevelt and Churchill and the Combined Chiefs met again in Quebec for another conference, this one essentially military. The scene was the same as before, with Roosevelt and Churchill quartered in the Citadel and their staffs in the Chateau Frontenac, perched high on the north bank of the St. Lawrence, but the situation was radically different. Churchill and Roosevelt met as victors. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt greeting the Churchills at the station seemed more like the reunion of a happy family than a gathering of world leaders.

Out of ever-increasing solidarity and friendship, Roosevelt said at the start of the conference, had come prospering fortune. Though no one could yet forecast when the war with Germany would end, it was clear that the Germans were withdrawing from the Balkans, and it seemed likely in Italy that they would retire to the Alps. The Russians were at the point of invading Hungary. In the West the Germans probably would retire to the Rhine, which would be a formidable rampart. In Asia, the President went on, the American plan was to regain the Philippines and to control the mainland from there or Formosa, and from bridgeheads that would be seized in China. If forces could be established on the mainland of China, China could be saved.

“Everything we have touched has turned to gold,” Churchill summed it up in his own equally favorable review of the situation.

These heady successes helped the conferees debate some of the old issues in relaxed fashion. No longer was the Mediterranean a source of contention; the Americans were willing to leave their
troops in Italy until the Germans were defeated or pushed out. Churchill now spoke more freely of Vienna as a key objective, after giving the Germans a “stab in the Adriatic armpit,” and the American Joint Chiefs were now less hostile to an amphibious landing on the Istrian Peninsula and even willing to bequeath landing craft to General Wilson for that possibility.

The sharpest turnabout was on Pacific strategy. Gone were the days of trying to limit the diversion of troops and ships to the amphibious attack against Japan; now the British wanted to play their full part. Japan, Churchill told the plenary session, was as much the bitter enemy of the British Empire as of the United States. He proceeded to offer the British main fleet to take part in the major operations in the central Pacific under American command. A detachment could operate under MacArthur if desired, and he also proffered RAF bombers. The Prime Minister knew that King and other admirals were cool to the idea, so he pressed for a showdown while Roosevelt was present. Could he have a definite undertaking about using the British fleet in the main operations against Japan?

“I should like,” Roosevelt said vaguely, “to see the British fleet wherever and whenever possible.” King said that the matter was being studied.

“The offer of the British fleet has been made,” Churchill persisted. “Is it accepted?”

“Yes,” the President said.

“Will you also let the British Air Force take part in the main operations?” Marshall answered that not so long ago “we were crying out for planes—now we have a glut.”

Evidently the British could not break into the American preserve in the Pacific without a bit of hazing. But Pacific planning still turned largely on the progress of the war in Europe. At the time of the Quebec meeting the Combined Chiefs had high hopes, based on Intelligence estimates, that the Germans would surrender within twelve weeks. Though the President was not so optimistic, it seemed high time to reach final agreement on occupation zones. Roosevelt had long opposed the earlier plan that the British occupy northwest Germany and the Low Countries and the Americans southern Germany, Austria, and France; “I am absolutely unwilling to police France,” he had exclaimed. But now at Quebec he changed his mind and approved the original plan, partly because the British agreed that the Americans could control Bremen and its port of Bremerhaven in order to supply their forces.

Long-run policy for Germany was a harsher problem. For weeks Morgenthau, Hull, and Stimson had been debating the treatment of Germany after its surrender. Stimson was willing to punish the
Nazi leaders, destroy the German Army, and perhaps partition Germany into north and south sections and internationalize the Ruhr, but he did not want to destroy raw materials and industrial plant crucial to European recovery. Morgenthau was burning to diminish and fragmentize Germany, dismantle and move out all plants and equipment, close the mines in the industrial heartland, and take control of education and publishing. Hull at times seemed to favor a punitive policy, at other times a softer one, but always a State Department role. Roosevelt talked tough at times—he wrote to Stimson that the Germans should be fed from army soup kitchens for a while—but on policy he wavered among his contending advisers. His central guideline seemed to be that the German people as a whole were responsible for a lawless conspiracy and must be taught a lesson.

Summoning Morgenthau to Quebec, Roosevelt asked him to present his proposals on Germany. As the Secretary spoke, he could hear and see “low mutters and baleful looks” from the Prime Minister. Churchill had never been more irascible and vitriolic, Morgenthau remembered later, as, slumped in his chair, he let loose the full flood of his biting, sarcastic rhetoric. He looked on the Treasury plan, he said, as he would on chaining himself to a dead German. The President sat by saying little. The next day, in a less negative mood—because he wanted Morgenthau’s help on Lend-Lease matters, perhaps, or, even more, because he had been persuaded that Britain would gain economically from a deindustrialized Germany—Churchill dictated a statement which he and Roosevelt initialed. It went far in Morgenthau’s direction.

“The ease with which the metallurgical, chemical and electrical industries in Germany can be converted from peace to war has already been impressed upon us by bitter experience. It must also be remembered that the Germans have devastated a large portion of the industries of Russia and of other neighboring Allies, and it is only in accordance with justice that these injured countries should be entitled to remove the machinery they require in order to repair the losses they have suffered. The industries referred to in the Ruhr and in the Saar would therefore be necessarily put out of action and closed down….

“The program for eliminating the war-making industries in the Ruhr and in the Saar is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”

Eden, who had flown to Quebec from London, was shocked by the statement. “You can’t do this,” he exclaimed to Churchill. “You and I have said quite the opposite.” A testy quarrel broke out between the two while Roosevelt looked on silently. The Morgenthau plan, it was clear, had an aptitude for dividing
people. Stimson had hotly opposed it, Hull would soon turn against it, Churchill eventually would repudiate it, and Roosevelt would quietly back away.

The Quebec Conference, which had opened in a “blaze of friendship,” in Churchill’s words, closed amicably because of agreed-on military matters. Soon after, Churchill visited Roosevelt at Hyde Park for final discussions. Leahy and others sat by enthralled at lunch the second day while Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt debated long-run peace strategy—the First Lady contended that peace could best be established by improving living conditions throughout the world, Churchill that it would be kept best by an agreement between Britain and the United States to prevent war if necessary by using their combined forces. Roosevelt was largely silent. He was more interested in the military plans for the short-run than philosophical questions about the long-run.

But even as Roosevelt was bidding Churchill good-by, reports were coming in of German resistance that lowered hopes for victory by year’s end and vitiated some of the military planning of the second Quebec Conference.

The Presidential Room of the newly built Hotel Statler, in Washington, September 23, 1944. Hundreds of union men, Democratic politicos, and Washington officials pushed back their chairs from their dinner tables. At the head table sat Franklin Roosevelt, flanked by Daniel J. Tobin, of the Teamsters, AFL chief William Green, ship-maker Henry Kaiser. The President was framed by an array of microphones in front of him and a star-spangled curtain behind. Tobin introduced his guest. The room broke into a storm of applause, which died down only to erupt again and again as the President threw his head back and grinned.

Finally the room quieted. There was an air of expectancy. All had heard the rumors of Roosevelt’s illness—the pictures from San Diego, the sound of his voice from Bremerton, the long delay while Dewey had campaigned across the nation. Did the old campaigner still have it? During dinner, at a table of Roosevelt’s family and friends, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger leaned over and asked Rosenman: “Do you think that Pa will put it over?…If the delivery isn’t just right, it’ll be an awful flop.”

Roosevelt began to talk. Then a surprise—he was still sitting down. The first words seemed to come strangely, as though the President were mouthing them.

“Well, here we are—here we are again—after four years—and what years they have been! You know, I am actually four years
older, which is a fact that seems to an-
noy some
people. In fact, in the mathematical field there are millions of Americans who are mo-o-o-re than
eleven
years older than when we started to clear up”—now his words quickened and sharpened—“the mess that was dumped into our laps in 1933.”