TWO DAYS LATER THE doorkeeper of the House of Representatives bawled out word of the President’s arrival, Congressmen and packed galleries stood and applauded, and then quieted to a hush as the President of the United States was rolled to the well of the chamber in an armless wheel chair and seated in a red plush chair in front of a small table. Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt looked down from the gallery; Princess Martha, Baruch, Halifax were there; Vice President Truman and Majority Leader McCormack presided at the dais behind; arrayed in a row of chairs immediately in front of the President were members of his Cabinet. In the rows just beyond were members of the United States Senate, one-third of whom could thwart Roosevelt’s carefully laid plans for postwar organization and peace.
“I hope that you will pardon me for an unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say,” the President began, “but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.” Then he added lightly and quickly: “First of all, I want to say, it is good to be home.”
“It has been a long journey. I hope you will also agree that it has been, so far, a fruitful one.”
Slightly stooped over the table, the President was talking in a flat tone, sometimes slurring his words and stumbling a bit over his text, which he followed with his forefinger. Occasionally he raised his voice for emphasis, but the ringing rhetoric of old was gone. His voice had lost its timbre, Acheson felt; it was an invalid’s voice. Friend and foe noted his lean, set face, his trembling hand as he reached for a glass of water.
“Speaking in all frankness, the question of whether it is entirely fruitful or not lies to a great extent in your hands. For unless you here in the halls of the American Congress—with the support of the American people—concur in the general conclusions reached at a place called Yalta, and give them your active support, the meeting will not have produced lasting results.”
It was a long rambling speech, with little that was new to his listeners. He had not been ill for a second, he said, until he arrived back in Washington and heard all the rumors that had spread in his absence. He talked at length about plans for Germany, reiterating that unconditional surrender would not mean the destruction or enslavement of the German people, describing the four occupation zones, and promising the destruction of the Nazi party, militarism, and the German General Staff, “which has so often shattered the peace of the world.”
The President ad libbed over and over again, to Rosenman’s despair; his voice almost gave way at one point; and throughout there was a repeated tiny faltering in his emphasis, as though his mind could not sustain its grip on the speech. But toward the end his flagging voice took on an edge of desperate conviction.
“The Conference in the Crimea was a turning point—I hope in our history and therefore in the history of the world. There will soon be presented to the Senate of the United States and to the American people a great decision that will determine the fate of the United States—and of the world—for generations to come….
“No plan is perfect. Whatever is adopted at San Francisco will doubtless have to be amended time and time again over the years, just as our own Constitution has been….
“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.
“The Crimea Conference…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.
“We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join….”
Victory—and an end to power politics. It was a time for hope. Allied forces were converging on the Rhine; Cologne was under direct attack; to the south American troops pushed into Trier. The whole German defense structure west of the Rhine was crumbling. On the Eastern Front the Red Army was streaming across the Oder hardly fifty miles from Berlin; other troops had turned north toward the Baltic to cut off Danzig.
Peace would break out soon; could it be secured? A conference had been called to meet at San Francisco on April 25 to frame the charter for the United Nations Organization. The President had chosen a bipartisan delegation, including Vandenberg and Stassen, to represent the United States. He looked forward to going there as host, he told reporters, just to say “howdy do.” The general response to the Yalta Conference seemed favorable, though Senator Wheeler called it a “great victory for Stalin and Russian imperialism” and the old isolationist press charged a sellout of the Atlantic Charter. Cantril reported that the conference had raised hopes for a long-time peace and that Americans were impressed both by Big Three co-operation and by the way the administration was handling American interests abroad. Even the Polish arrangements were accepted. Cantril did report colossal public ignorance about the actual decisions at Yalta, but the more informed seemed the more satisfied.
Then, in just one month, while Roosevelt looked on dismayed and almost helpless, everything seemed to come unhinged.
Again Poland was the engine of conflict, just as it had been in 1939 and before. The three leaders had agreed at Yalta that Molotov, Harriman, and Kerr would serve as a commission in Moscow to supervise the reorganization and broadening of the provisional Polish government. Crucial matters were left to the commission, such as what Poles should be initially consulted, whether the Lublin (now the Warsaw) Poles should constitute the core of the new government, with the other elements serving as window dressing, or whether the provisional government should be totally reorganized into a broad-based, coalition, antifascist regime. The underlying question was whether Moscow would control Poland.
Churchill knew the line that the Russians would take if he pressed them. Stalin would remind him that Moscow had not intervened in Greece; why should the British interfere in eastern Europe? Hence Churchill had to pitch the issue at a higher level and to do this he needed Roosevelt’s support. But the President seemed at first curiously unresponsive to elaborate British formulas to protect the non-Communist Polish elements; Churchill felt that he was not getting through to him. Time was running short, he saw, for every day the Kremlin and the Warsaw Poles seemed to be fastening their grip on the country. On March 13 Churchill cabled to Roosevelt:
“…Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom?…I do not wish to reveal a divergence between the British and the United States Government, but it would certainly be necessary for me to make it clear that we are in presence of a great failure and an utter breakdown of what we settled at Yalta….”
Stalin seemed so rigid about Poland that Washington and London observers speculated that the Politburo was forcing a strong line on him. But the Marshal had not shifted ground. He had agreed to the Polish formula at Yalta because Churchill and Roosevelt were always talking about public opinion and he was willing to help them appease it with a formula. If Western public opinion was not satisfied with the formula, it should be re-educated. The blood of Soviet soldiers had been shed prodigiously to liberate Poland. Did Churchill and Roosevelt really think he would allow in Warsaw a bourgeois-dominated government that would threaten the Red Army’s rear today and Soviet frontiers tomorrow?
All through March the President had been putting off Churchill’s proposal that the two of them join in a stiff note to Stalin. Finally he decided to move on his own. On March 29 he cabled to Stalin that the high hopes and expectations raised by Yalta among the peoples of the world were in danger of being crushed. “Having understood each other so well at Yalta I am convinced that the three of us can and will clear away any obstacles which have developed since then.” He could not understand the Russian insistence on preserving the Warsaw government. “I must make it quite plain to you that any such solution which would result in a thinly disguised continuation of the present Warsaw regime would be unacceptable….”
Roosevelt was suffering from another bitter disappointment when he sent this letter. He had learned from the State Department that Ambassador Gromyko would head the Soviet delegation to the San Francisco conference—Molotov would not attend. For a second-rank official to represent Russia at the founding conference, on which Roosevelt had set his hopes, struck him as a veiled attack on the nascent organization. He appealed to Stalin to let Molotov come for at least the vital opening sessions; he warned of world reaction otherwise. Stalin was adamant; public reaction, he said, could not decide such matters.
The President had a public-opinion problem of his own at this point. After conceding the Soviet Union two extra Assembly votes at Yalta and winning Churchill’s and Stalin’s consent to two extra for the United States, Roosevelt abandoned the latter notion but kept the extra Soviet votes secret, possibly because he hoped he could talk Stalin out of them before San Francisco. Inevitably the story leaked out. An outburst of anger followed on Capitol Hill, and the President was left on the defensive.
Physically, Roosevelt seemed at a low ebb. He had again begun to work late into the evening. He complained of not being able to taste his food. But once again Bruenn found his basic condition unchanged: his heart size was unchanged, there were no cardiac symptoms, the systolic murmur had not changed. For the moment even the blood pressure values were somewhat lower. But few around him, medical or lay, could doubt that the election and then Yalta and now the crisis over Poland were taking their toll of his strength and vitality.
At the grand climax of coalition warfare, with German resistance buckling, everything seemed to be deteriorating politically: Russia and the West were at odds; even Churchill and Roosevelt exchanged some stiff messages as they groped for a way to deal with the Bear; the San Francisco Conference itself seemed flawed by power politics and compromise. “My God, what a mess Europe is in!” Eden said to Harold Nicolson. “What a mess!”
Observers were asking what had gone wrong. Internal tensions in the Kremlin? Anti-Soviet attitudes in the West? Stalin’s paranoia? Churchill’s old anti-Communism? Roosevelt’s fatigue, or his utopianism? Or simply the utter hopelessness of such ancient problems as Poland?
Few saw the main source of friction—the internal dynamics of a coalition in the process of losing the enemy that had united ideologically diverse partners—until an obscure event set off an illuminating blaze of fear and suspicion.
Early in March General Karl Wolff, SS commander in Italy, secretly met in Zurich with Allen Dulles, OSS chief in Switzerland, to explore the possibilities of some kind of German surrender in Italy. Eleven days later there was a second exploratory meeting. Churchill realized that the Kremlin might be suspicious of a separate military surrender in the south, which would enable the Anglo-American armies, he admitted later, to advance against lessened opposition as far as Vienna and beyond, or even toward Berlin or the Elbe, so he ordered that Moscow be informed. Molotov already knew of the “negotiation” and demanded to be told why the Russians had not been invited to take part. He suspected not just a misunderstanding, “but something worse.”
The answer lay partly with the Combined Chiefs. They did not want the Russians to be part of the early stages of the parley. The meetings, they contended, were preliminary, mainly about mechanics; no political matters would be discussed; if the Russians took part the meetings would be protracted, a great opportunity might be lost, more Allied soldiers would die.
He had to support officers in the field, Roosevelt told Stalin, when there was a possibility of forcing the surrender of enemy troops. As a military man the Marshal would understand this, he added. “There can be in such a surrender of enemy forces in the field no violation of our agreed principles of unconditional surrender and no political implication whatsoever.”
Stalin’s answer reflected all the fears and suspicions that were gripping the strategists in the Kremlin. Talks with the enemy, he said, were permissible only if they did not give the Germans opportunity to use the negotiations to cause German troops to be switched to other sectors—above all, to the Soviet sector. That was why he wanted Russians present at even the preliminary negotiations. The Germans had already taken advantage of the talks to shift three divisions from northern Italy to the Soviet front. What had happened to the agreement at Yalta to hold the enemy on the spot and to prevent him from maneuvering? The Red Army was living up to this, he said, but Alexander was not. The Red Army was encircling Germans and exterminating them. Were the Germans in the west opening their front to the Anglo-Americans?
Indignantly Roosevelt denied all these charges. There had been no general negotiations. Lack of Allied offensive operations in Italy was due mainly to transfer of Allied forces to the Western Front. The shift of German troops antedated all the surrender talks. The trouble, he concluded bitterly, was due to Germans trying to sow suspicion between the Russians and the West. Why let them succeed?
Instead of placating Stalin, Roosevelt’s message—and his continued protestation of innocence—brought to a pitch the pent-up distrust felt by the men in the Kremlin. Why were the Allies insisting on the Swiss talks in the face of Soviet objections? What were they trying to hide? Was it simply a stratagem to permit Hitler to transfer even more troops to the east? Were the Anglo-Americans maneuvering to subdue the Communists and leftist elements in northern Italy, as they had in Greece? Were they still aspiring to get to Trieste—or even Vienna—before the Russians? Would they engulf whole sectors of Germany while the Nazis held back the Red Army? Or were there even more diabolical plans on foot? All these suspicions spilled over into Stalin’s reply to Roosevelt.
“You affirm that so far no negotiations have been entered into. Apparently you are not fully informed.” His military colleagues had information that negotiations did take place whereby Germany would open the front to the Anglo-American troops and let them move east, in exchange for easier armistice terms. This was why those troops were advancing into the heart of Germany almost without resistance. He saw the advantage for the Anglo-Americans, but why conceal this from the Russians?
“And so what we have at the moment is that the Germans on the Western Front have in fact ceased the war against Britain and America. At the same time they continue the war against Russia, the ally of Britain and the U.S.A.”
It was the most brutal message Stalin had ever sent Roosevelt; it was also the most portentous. The surrender discussions had incited the fear that had dominated Soviet strategy for over a decade—the fear that the fascist and capitalist powers would combine against Russia. Everywhere Stalin looked events seemed to be conspiring in that direction: the shift of German troops to the east; the furious defense by the Hitlerites of obscure towns in the east while they yielded big cities to the Anglo-Americans in the west; the mysterious discussions with Wolff in Switzerland, and the stubborn refusal to let the Russians take part. And always there was the secret Allied development of an atomic weapon. Roosevelt was the tool of Churchill—the same Churchill who had tried to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution at birth.
Once again Roosevelt responded indignantly. He had received his message with astonishment, he told Stalin. He asked the same trust in his own truthfulness as he had always had in the Marshal’s. Could the Russians believe that he would settle with the Germans without Soviet agreement? It would be a tragedy of history if, just as victory was within their grasp, such lack of faith should prejudice the entire undertaking after all the colossal losses.
“Frankly,” he concluded, “I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”
There could be no question now—the edifice of trust and good will and neighborliness that Roosevelt had shaped so lovingly was crashing down around him. The same Stalin who was making these horrendous accusations was practicing power politics in Poland, withholding Molotov from San Francisco, and doubtless planning to use the veto to disrupt the United Nations. And Roosevelt was innocent of Stalin’s charges; he had neither the will nor the capacity to indulge in labyrinthine maneuvers at this point. But his innocence had a dangerous edge. He was being tripped again by his old tendency to compartmentalize military and political decisions. Because to him military negotiations need not have political implications, he did not see what Stalin saw: that any discussion with the enemy, on any kind of time schedule, inevitably created certain political possibilities and blocked others.
For a moment Stalin sensed that he might have gone too far in upbraiding the President. He assured Roosevelt that he did not question his trustworthiness, but then he repeated all his arguments. Time was running out. Stalin’s latest message on Poland was dated April 7, 1945.
Brilliant Allied victories amid deteriorating coalition politics—that was the strategic plight of Asia, too, in the late winter of 1945.
In mid-February a fast carrier force under Spruance slipped through thick weather to a point seventy miles from the Japanese coastline and sent several hundred bombers over Tokyo. It was the first naval attack on the capital since Doolittle’s raid. Next day a huge amphibious force appeared off Iwo Jima, a tiny island which, with its three airfields, flat surface, and steep mountain at one end, was like a stationary aircraft carrier seven hundred miles from Japan. On D day—February 19—seven battleships and an armada of cruisers and destroyers smashed the beach areas with the most concentrated prelanding bombardment of the Pacific war. The defenders had mainly fortified the higher ground inland, however, and as soon as the bombardment lifted and the assault craft hit the beaches, the Marines were pinned there under withering fire. The attackers held on and began the bloody business of blowing and burning out deep underground strong points. Over 6,000 Marines died during the next five weeks of cave-to-cave fighting, along with virtually all the 21,000 defenders. Kamikazes sank an escort carrier and crippled the fleet carrier Saratoga.
Iwo Jima proved that the American Navy could seize enemy territory within a few hundred miles of the Japanese mainland and thus thrust its line of steppingstones almost to the heartland; it also demonstrated that the enemy could exact a fearful price for a few square miles of volcanic ash. Roosevelt, returning from Yalta, could feel vindicated in paying a price for Soviet participation in the Asian war.
It was this same price, however, that was causing unrest in Chungking during the weeks after Yalta. Rumors were circulating through the capital that the independence of China had been gravely compromised by a deal between Roosevelt and Stalin. Hurley felt he must return to Washington to ascertain from the President his long-range plans for China. He left in mid-February, with General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had succeeded Stilwell as Chiang’s Chief of Staff.
Hurley had other reasons to see his chief. After a promising start, his mediation between the Nationalists and the Communists had collapsed. In November he had won Yenan’s adherence to a five-point agreement providing for “unification of all military forces in China for the immediate defeat of Japan” and for a new coalition government “of the people, for the people, and by the people” that would control all the military forces in the country, including the Communist. Triumphantly Hurley had brought to Chungking not only the draft agreement, but Chou Enlai himself to take part in the negotiations, only to be accused by the Nationalists of having been sold a bill of goods. To agree to a coalition government, the Generalissimo said, would be to acknowledge total defeat. In return he offered a three-point proposal that would recognize the Communists as a legal party in exchange for control by the Nationalist government of the Communist armed forces. The Communists turned this down fiat on the ground that they were simply being asked to surrender. The indefatigable Ambassador managed to persuade the two sides to resume talks. All in vain. The distrust was too deep.
“China is in a dilemma,” Stettinius summed it up to the President early in January. “Coalition would mean an end of Conservative Kuomintang domination and open the way for the more virile and popular Communists to extend their influence to the point perhaps of controlling the Government. Failure to settle with the Communists, who are daily growing stronger, would invite the danger of an eventual overthrow of the Kuomintang….”
Hurley had troubles of his own. He had become convinced that the Foreign Service officers in China not only held different views from his own but also were sabotaging his relations with the State Department. He was certainly right on the first point. In contrast to the Ambassador, who liked Chiang, had confidence in the long-run survival and improvement of his government, and, with Wedemeyer, came to believe he was making a fair fight against the enemy, the China hands, who had had far more opportunity to observe, deemed Chiang and the Kuomintang ineffective, corrupt, reactionary, insensitive to the misery around them, incapable of reform, and not only unable to fight the Japanese but also unwilling to do so because they were hoarding their men to fight the Communists after the war. Late in February the Chargé d’Affaires at Chungking reported to Stettinius that American aid to the Nationalists was threatening to drive Yenan closer to Russia, that China was headed toward a disastrous civil conflict, and that Washington should deal directly with and aid Yenan. This message arrived at the State Department while Hurley was in Washington and led to a confrontation between Hurley and officials of the Far Eastern office.
So it was an indignant Ambassador who reported to the President. Just what happened when he went to the White House twice during March is not wholly clear. He said later that he wanted a showdown with the Commander in Chief but “when the President reached up that fine, firm, strong hand of his to shake hands with me” and Hurley found in his hand a “loose bag of bones” and saw the wasted face, he lost some of his nerve. Apparently the President was in better shape than he looked, for he scoffed at Hurley’s worries and stated vigorously that he had not surrendered the territorial integrity or political independence of China. “You are seeing ghosts again.” He was loath to let Hurley have the Yalta documents on the Far East, but Hurley insisted on seeing them, and in a later meeting the Ambassador felt—or so he testified later—that the President seemed less confident about the agreements and had decided that Hurley should see Churchill and Stalin to discuss them. The President stuck to the basic policy of giving military aid only to Chiang, but he urged Hurley to continue to conciliate the Communists and he approved representation for Yenan on the Chinese delegation to the San Francisco Conference. Hurley left the White House satisfied that he had been thoroughly sustained in his fight with the young China hands.
Thus passed a last opportunity for Roosevelt to abandon his China strategy. Yet despite all the illusions that dominated American thinking about China it was not ignorance or stupidity or illness that was the prime source of Roosevelt’s continuing gamble on Chiang. It was a combination of Utopian hopes for the possibility of Chinese unity, stability, progress, and democracy, Western-style, and of hard-nosed military planning to minimize American casualties in the conquest of Japan.
Hurley had hardly left Washington for his trip to London and Moscow when Americans were once again reminded of the need for Soviet help in the final struggle. On April 1 Marine and army divisions swarmed ashore on Okinawa, the largest island in the Ryukyus and a threshold to the East China Sea. It was the most daring move in the Pacific campaign, for Okinawa lay only four hundred miles east of the China coast and barely 350 southwest of Kyushu itself. The invaders had an April Fool’s surprise when they met little resistance the first day. But during the following week, as the infantry pushed south through choppy terrain, they encountered the most formidable defenses in their Pacific experience. Losses mounted appallingly as hardened Marines and soldiers ground their way through endless mazes of mutually supporting strong points.
Several hundred Japanese aircraft from the home islands also attacked the invaders. Most were shot down, but enough kamikazes slipped through to cause heavy losses, especially among destroyers and picket ships. Twenty-two of the first twenty-four suicide crashes were effective. Clearly Japanese fanaticism was intensifying as the Americans drove closer to Kyushu and Honshu. More sharply than ever the Commander in Chief and the men in the Pentagon confronted the question: If a few Japanese divisions and a handful of suicide planes could exact such a price in defending an outlying island, what would happen when the Americans attacked the heartland?
By early April it seemed likely that the atomic bomb would be finished in time to use against Japan if not against Germany. Would this make the difference? Scientists were becoming more and more worried about the prospects of dropping the bomb on civilians, the lack of international control of information, the still-pervasive secrecy. Bush and others were pressing Stimson to support a general pooling among nations of all scientific research to prevent secret plans for weapons, but Stimson wanted to give the Russians information about the weapon only on the basis of a “real” quid pro quo. He seemed to draw back a bit after a long talk with his aide, Harvey Bundy, during which the two went “right down to the bottom facts of human nature, morals and government,” Stimson noted in his diary, but the Secretary was still divided between continuing secrecy and international sharing and control. So was Roosevelt, who wanted to put off a decision until the first bomb was tested. Einstein wrote a letter to the President introducing Leo Szilard, who raised the portentous atomic questions of the future. This time Roosevelt did not respond.
Early in April Bohr returned to the United States and prepared for the President a new memorandum against atomic secrecy and distrust. He asked Halifax and Frankfurter how the statement could be brought to the President’s attention. The Ambassador and the Justice decided to discuss the matter in the privacy of Washington’s Rock Creek Park. They planned to meet on April 12.
Wedemeyer, as well as Hurley, visited the White House in March—characteristically Roosevelt had his two China lieutenants in separately—and he was even more disturbed than the Ambassador by Roosevelt’s drawn face and drooping jaw. But on one point at least the President was clear and emphatic. He was going to do everything possible to grant the people of Indochina their independence from France. He instructed Wedemeyer not to hand over any supplies to the French forces operating in the area.
Independence for Indochina had become a near-obsession of the President’s during the past year or two. He told Stalin at Yalta that he had in mind a temporary trusteeship for Indochina, but that the British wished to give it back to France, since they feared the implications of a trusteeship for their own rule in Burma. De Gaulle, he said, had asked for ships to carry Free French forces to Indochina. Was he going to get them? Stalin asked. The President answered archly that he had been unable to find any ships for de Gaulle.
Indochina seemed to engross the President on the way home from Yalta. For two whole years, he told reporters, he had been terribly worried about that country. He recounted his Cairo talk with Chiang, who had said that the Chinese did not want Indochina but that the French should not have it. Roosevelt had proposed the temporary trusteeship idea, he told reporters. “Stalin liked it. China liked the idea. The British don’t like it. It might bust up their empire….” Wilhelmina, he went on, was planning to give Java and Sumatra independence soon, New Guinea and Borneo only after a century or two. The skulls of the New Guineans, the Queen had explained, were the least developed in the world.
Churchill, a reporter remarked, seemed opposed to a policy of self-determination. He had said that the Atlantic Charter was not a rule, just a guide. He seemed to be undercutting it. The President agreed.
“The Atlantic Charter is a beautiful idea,” he said. Did he remember the speech, a reporter asked, that Churchill had given about not being made prime minister to see the Empire fall apart?
“Dear old Winston will never learn on that point. He has made his specialty on that point. This is, of course, off the record.”
The most significant sentence in these remarks was, perhaps, the last one. Roosevelt would not make a public issue of colonialism. It would only make the British mad, he said. “Better to keep quiet just now.” He could not forget an incident at Yalta. Stettinius had begun to discuss trusteeships under the new world charter when Churchill broke in, exclaiming that he did not agree with a single word. His phrases spilling out in spurts of anger, he shouted that as long as he was prime minister the British Empire would not be put into the dock. He would never yield a scrap of his country’s heritage. Roosevelt had intervened only to ask that Stettinius be allowed to finish his statement; the Secretary was not talking about the British Empire. Churchill had subsided ungraciously, muttering, “Never, never, never.”
Roosevelt would tease Churchill to his face about his colonies; he would joke or complain about Churchill’s imperialism with Stalin and others; but he would not directly confront the Prime Minister. He was serious about the trusteeship idea, telling Hurley at their March meetings that United Nations trusteeships would be set up at the forthcoming San Francisco Conference. But such a policy required the concurrence of Britain and France and perhaps other colonial nations, and Roosevelt gave little indication that he was ready to challenge the other Atlantic powers. Indeed, since his talks with de Gaulle in July 1944 he seemed also to be veering toward more recognition of the French interest in Indochina, especially if de Gaulle lived up to his promises about giving Indochina representation within a postwar French federal system. Even more important in the whole situation was Roosevelt’s Atlantic First strategy, which in early 1945, as China weakened and the Soviets seemed to grow more chauvinistic, seemed likely to be as important after the war as it had been during it. Caught between these forces, Roosevelt left Indochina in a political void. He merely provoked Churchill and de Gaulle without accomplishing anything specific.
The President had anticolonial ideals; what he lacked was a carefully conceived strategy to carry them out, given the global strategic considerations and the checkered and volatile politics of Southeast Asia. Great possibilities were open in the early months of 1945. Roosevelt’s anticolonialism, his sponsorship of the Atlantic Charter, his support of Philippine independence were well known to nationalistic and revolutionary leaders in Burma and India, in Indonesia and Indochina. So was America’s own revolutionary past. When Ho Chi Minh was drawing up a manifesto of independence he asked an American friend for the language of the great declaration of 1776. Roosevelt was not willing to launch a crusade against colonialism or to risk the kind of public confrontation with the Atlantic powers that would have captured for him the allegiance—or at least the rapt attention—of the colonial peoples of Asia.
Rather, he felt that his stated goals combined with his personal influence with Wilhelmina and King George and even Churchill and de Gaulle would be enough to resolve the issue when the fighting was over. So it was not necessary to frame comprehensive programs and detailed policies, especially since it was hard to calculate all the factors in advance, and the war had to be won first anyway. He would attend to it at the right time. It was not the lack of personal convictions but the easy assumption that he would be around to translate them into decision and action, along with the shadowy dominance of Atlantic First, that flawed Roosevelt’s anticolonial credo at the beginning of spring 1945.
If events abroad were reaching one of the great climacterics of history, domestic affairs by the spring of 1945 were following their own tepid cycle. In the wake of the President’s challenging pronouncements of January the committees of Congress assumed command of the legislative process with their ancient weapons of discussion, dilution, and delay. The manpower bill, after passing the House, slowly bled to death in the Senate as victories abroad blunted the spur of emergency. Wallace was finally confirmed as Secretary of Commerce, but only after a bitter struggle in the Senate—and only after the big federal lending agencies were separated from. Commerce so that the former Vice President could not “control” billions in loans. Congressional investigators of subversive activities conducted feckless little witch hunts. The Senate rejected Roosevelt’s nomination of Aubrey Williams, former National Youth Administrator, as head of Rural Electrification. John L. Lewis threatened another coal strike.
Not for years had the President’s legislative fortunes seemed at such a low ebb. The Republican and Democratic congressional parties were collaborating smoothly. Roosevelt, however, seemed hardly aware of the congressional situation; in any event he was not going to invite a quarrel with the legislators over domestic matters at a time when he needed Republican and conservative support for his foreign policies, especially for American leadership in the new international organization.
His administration ran on with the momentum of twelve years of liberal activism. He urged renewal and strengthening of the Trade Agreements Act. He asked for an inquiry into guaranteed annual-wage plans. He received ambassadors, awarded medals, discussed jobs with Democratic politicos.
He seemed to be dwelling in the past and the future, as well as the present. “I still say, thank God for those good old days and for old and tried friends like you,” he wrote to a Dutchess County friend who had remarked that it was a long step from the size of apple barrels—an issue in Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign—to meeting Churchill and Stalin and perhaps deciding the fate of the world. He was looking forward to his trip to San Francisco in April and to England later in the spring with his wife. And by late March he could relax about military prospects in Europe. When he told Frances Perkins of his projected trip to England and she protested that it was still too dangerous, he put his hand to the side of his mouth and whispered: “The war in Europe will be over by the end of May.”
Both Anna Boettiger and Grace Tully were quietly trying to conserve the President’s strength until he could get some rest at Warm Springs. Both were perplexed by his sudden changes in appearance. So were the reporters, who were watching him closely. At the White House correspondents’ dinner, Allen Drury noted how old and thin and scrawny-necked he looked when he was wheeled in, how he stared out at the crowded tables as though he did not see the people, how he failed to respond to the blare of trumpets and to the applause.
Then he suddenly came to life, Drury noted, and began to enjoy himself. The notables of Washington were there, including Leahy and Marshall, Byrnes and Ickes and Biddle and Morgenthau, Justices Douglas and Jackson, Senators Ball and Morse and Austin; and Vice President Truman, with a handkerchief carefully folded so that the four corners showed. Danny Kaye performed, and Jimmy Durante and Fanny Brice. Everyone watched the greatest performer of all—how he steadily drank wine and smoked his uplifted cigarette, how he leaned forward with his hand cupped behind his ear to hear a joke repeated as laughter welled up in the room, how his booming laughter rang out—but then a few moments later simply sat at the table with an intent, vague expression on his face, while his jaw dropped and his mouth fell open.
But he lasted out the evening and gave a talk at the end. It was about Humanity, he said—“We all love Humanity, you love Humanity, I love Humanity….” And in the name of Humanity he would give them a headline story—“I am calling off the press conference for tomorrow morning.”
The applause rang out as he was shifted back to his wheel chair, Drury noted in his diary, “and just before he went out the door he acknowledged it with the old, familiar gesture, so that the last we saw of Franklin Roosevelt was the head going up with a toss, the smile breaking out, the hand uplifted and waving in the old, familiar way.”
The usual crowd clustered around the little Warm Springs station as Roosevelt’s train pulled in on Good Friday, March go, 1945. Something seemed different this time as Roosevelt’s big frame, slumped in the wheel chair, seemed to joggle uncontrollably as he was rolled along the platform. A murmur drifted through the crowd. But the President drove his own car to the Little White House atop the hill.
That evening Hassett suddenly blurted out to Bruenn that the President was slipping away. Hassett admitted that he had been maintaining a bluff to the family and even Roosevelt himself, but he felt there was no hope for him. His feeble signature—the bold stroke and heavy line of old were gone, or simply faded out. Bruenn cautiously granted that Roosevelt was in a precarious condition, but said it was not hopeless if he could be protected from emotional and mental strain. That was impossible, Hassett said. He and Bruenn were on the verge of emotional upset.
But after a few days in the warm Georgia sun Roosevelt’s gray pallor changed and some of his old vitality returned, though the level of his blood pressure had become extremely wide, ranging between 170/88 and 240/130. The news from Europe was exciting: American, British, and Canadian troops were encircling the Ruhr, spearing northwest toward Hannover and Bremen, driving ever deeper into the heart of Germany. Reports were also coming to Washington of the many thousands of civilian deaths in the fire bombings of Japanese and German cities; it is doubtful that Roosevelt understood the enormity of the civilian losses, which would compare with the effects of the later atomic bombings.
Stalin’s harsh messages were forwarded to Warm Springs. Roosevelt was disturbed but not depressed by his deteriorating relations with the Kremlin. Unlike Churchill, who at the time foresaw the darkness ahead, as he said later, and moved amid cheering crowds with an aching heart, Roosevelt was sure that things would be put aright. He tried to calm the troubled waters. The Swiss incident was fading into the past, he cabled to Stalin; in any event there must not be mutual distrust. He urged on Churchill that the Soviet problem be minimized as much as possible; things would straighten out. He added:
“We must be firm however, and our course thus far is correct.”
The President seemed more concerned with Asia than with Europe during these early April days. He was pleased with the news of the sudden fall of the Japanese Cabinet in the wake of the invasion of Okinawa. President Sergio Osmeña was back from the Philippines to report on the terrible destruction in Manila. The President talked with reporters in remarkable detail about conditions in the Philippines, economic problems, needed American assistance. It was the President’s 998th press conference.
He was especially determined that there be no change in plans for immediate independence for the Philippines. It depended only on how quickly the Japanese were cleared from the islands. He would set an example for the British and the other colonial powers. He wrote to his old chief, Josephus Daniels, that he would like independence to go into effect in August and to be present himself, but he feared he might have to be in Europe for a conference about that time.
On the afternoon of April 11 the President dictated the draft of a speech for Jefferson Day.
“Americans are gathered together in communities all over the country to pay tribute to the living memory of Thomas Jefferson—one of the greatest of all democrats; and I want to make it clear that I am spelling that word ‘democrats’ with a small d…”
The President paid a traditional tribute to Jefferson as Secretary of State, President, and scientist. Then he continued:
“The once powerful, malignant Nazi state is crumbling. The Japanese war lords are receiving, in their own homeland, the retribution for which they asked when they attacked Pearl Harbor.
“But the mere conquest of our enemies is not enough.
“We must go on to do all in our power to conquer the doubts and the fears, the ignorance and the greed, which made this horror possible….
“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.
“Let me assure you that my hand is the steadier for the work that is to be done, that I move more firmly into the task, knowing that you—millions and millions of you—are joined with me in the resolve to make this work endure.
“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.
“Today, as we move against the terrible scourge of war—as we go forward toward the greatest contribution that any generation of human beings can make in this world—the contribution of lasting peace, I ask you to keep up your faith. I measure the sound, solid achievement that can be made at this time by the straight edge of your own confidence and your resolve. And to you, and to all Americans who dedicate themselves with us to the making of an abiding peace, I say:
“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”