Bohlen, Harriman, and Stalin at Yalta
Harriman, Acheson, Bohlen and Kennan wrestle with a biting bear
Harriman was the type of busy man who took pride in always being busy. Yet on a hot August weekend in 1941, he found himself idly playing croquet at his Sands Point, Long Island, home and fretting about being left out of things.
As “expediter” of aid to Britain, he had flown to North Africa to inspect the supply routes and then on to Washington to report his findings. After convincing Lovett and others that the U.S., though still not at war, should assume the burden of operating some of the supply lines, Harriman decided to delay his return to London. Churchill was sailing across the Atlantic for his first meeting with Roosevelt, and Harriman hoped to be there.
The President, however, had grumbled about too many people and too little space when his envoy asked for an invitation. Harriman could imagine very little worse then to watch from the shores of Sands Point as the presidential yacht sailed north without him. So he persisted in his pleas through Harry Hopkins and others. Finally the President, quite bemused by Harriman’s gyrations, relented. He told their fellow Grotonian Sumner Welles, the Under Secretary of State, to pick Harriman up at Sands Point and join the presidential party en route to Newfoundland.
While McCloy and Lovett helped run the U.S. military effort, their colleagues were making their marks in a variety of diplomatic posts. Harriman, as the London-based coordinator of Lend-Lease shipments, and Acheson, as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, were both initially concerned with providing aid to the Allied effort. Kennan, after five months of internment in Germany, was posted to Portugal and then sent to dabble briefly in postwar planning with the European Advisory Commission in London. Bohlen, whose internment lasted six months, was brought back to Washington as assistant chief of the Russian section of the State Department. Eventually, as the war progressed and the peace loomed, all of them would become increasingly concerned with the same issue, one that would have a direct bearing on their postwar outlook: America’s stormy relationship with her Soviet allies.
The meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt produced the Atlantic Charter, an idealistic proclamation that envisioned a Wilsonian world of free trade and free people. Nations should have the right of self-determination, it declared, and military force should not be used to dictate territorial changes or spheres of influence. In public at least, Roosevelt would henceforth proclaim that the Atlantic Charter—in particular its opposition to spheres of influence—was the foundation of U.S. foreign policy. Partly it was a matter of political necessity: Americans were more likely to support a war fought for idealistic principles than one designed to divvy up hapless nations like Poland into power blocs. In addition, Roosevelt the idealist believed in these principles. Yet Roosevelt the pragmatist would turn out to be far more willing, quietly and privately, to make the realistic concessions necessary to preserve the wartime alliance with the Soviets. Eventually, conflicts would arise between the principles that Roosevelt proclaimed (even to his closest advisers) and the tacit concessions that Stalin, who had little use for the liberal capitalist idealism of the Atlantic Charter, came to believe that Roosevelt had made.
For Harriman, the Atlantic Conference had a more immediate significance: he was chosen to accompany Lord Beaverbrook, the irascible newspaper publisher who was Churchill’s Minister of Supply, on a mission to Moscow to offer aid to Hitler’s newest enemy. The Soviet Union, failing to heed Allied warnings that Germany was preparing to abrogate the 1939 nonaggression pact, had been staggered by a massive assault that began on the same date as Napoleon’s invasion 129 years earlier.
Within hours of their arrival in London to prepare for their Moscow mission, Harriman and Max Beaverbrook had a showdown that foreshadowed the passing mantle of Western leadership. At a meeting of their combined delegations in the underground conference room of the War Cabinet, Beaverbrook pressed Harriman to declare the total amount of aid the U.S. would be willing to supply, implying that the British would decide how it should be allocated between them and the Soviets.
In an animated clash, Harriman insisted instead that the two delegations determine jointly who should get what. Although not yet at war, America was no longer willing to take a back seat to the British in European affairs. Churchill supported Harriman. “I know how difficult he can be,” the Prime Minister said of his Supply Minister. The following evening Harriman laid down the ground rules to Beaverbrook. “Dinner tonight was in rather sharp contrast to last night with the P.M.,” young Kathleen Harriman, his daughter, wrote to her sister. “One’s a gentleman and the other is a ruffian. Ave, luckily, can talk both languages.”
On the flight from Archangel, Beaverbrook ordered the pilot to break the Soviet practice of flying at treetop level. Consequently, they were met near Moscow by Soviet antiaircraft fire until their plane swooped down and revealed its markings. In a speech to the members of his delegation, Harriman made clear the purpose of the trip: “To give and give and give, with no expectation of any return, with no thought of a quid pro quo.”
Late on the night they arrived, Harriman and Beaverbrook were summoned to the Kremlin and ushered into the conference room deep inside. It was Harriman’s first visit to that inner sanctum, with its long conference table and huge portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Engels. In ensuing years, the room was to become, in a peculiar way, a source of renewed energy for Harriman. Whenever his influence waned at home, he would find a way to return there, to be invited back to meet with whoever was holding court at the table, and the power in the room would help recharge his own.
Stalin, shorter and bulkier than Harriman had imagined, was candid and friendly that first evening. The situation was near critical, he admitted, but the Soviets could and would hold Moscow. Although they desperately needed American weapons, he promised to avoid “asking for astronomical quantities.”
The next night, however, the Soviet dictator, pacing and chain-smoking, was in a different temper. “He questioned our good faith,” Harriman recalled. “He seemed to suggest that we wanted to see the Soviet regime destroyed by Hitler.” The Allied offerings were not nearly sufficient, Stalin insisted. “Why is it the U.S. can give me only 1,000 tons a month of armor-plate steel for tanks—a country with a production of over 50 million tons?” Harriman corrected him. The U.S. could produce 60 million tons a month. But the demand in the U.S. was great, and the Soviets were requesting a special type of steel. Stalin could be blunt, but then so could Harriman.
Beaverbrook was dismayed by the confrontation, but Harriman counseled patience. Reviewing the list of seventy items the Soviets had requested, they made a few modifications in their own offer. The next night they found Stalin more serene, puffing on a pipe and seemingly satisfied that he had gotten the best deal possible; he doodled on a pad, drawing wolves and coloring the background bright red. When they finally worked out the details of the Lend-Lease plan, the steely dictator actually smiled. “Now we shall win the war!” exulted Litvinov.
Harriman felt that he had learned a lesson about the violent mood swings of Soviet leaders, who could appear gracious one minute, enraged the next, and grandly effusive once convinced that they had accomplished all they could. Exceeding his instructions, he accepted Stalin’s request that they put their agreement in writing as a formal protocol.
Harriman had pointedly excluded from the negotiations the U.S. ambassador, Laurence Steinhardt, who had become quite embittered during his tenure in Moscow. Such disillusionment was an occupational hazard for American envoys. In a “half-jocular” discussion, Stalin and Harriman each expressed concern about the other country’s ambassadors; Harriman passed on the sentiment to Roosevelt, and both men were soon replaced.
When Hopkins offered him the job of ambassador, Harriman insisted he could be more useful remaining a special envoy. The confined life of a diplomat in Moscow, he noted, “appears an intolerable existence for anyone with an active mind.” The post went instead to Admiral William Standley, former Chief of Naval Operations and a strong proponent of aid to the Soviets.
At the time, the standards of financial disclosure and conflict of interest were less rigid than they later became. During his wartime dealings in London and Moscow, Harriman remained an active partner at Brown Brothers Harriman (unlike Lovett), retained his private business interests, and even quietly held on to his Russian investments. In July of 1941 these included, among other things, $560,000 worth of Soviet government notes from the 1928 liquidation of his manganese contracts. Harriman inquired on the status of various Russian holdings in a “confidential” 1943 letter to an assistant, J. D. Powell. Among them, he was told, were $142,000 worth of Imperial Russian Government Certificates plus 52,500 shares of the Russo-Asiatic Consolidated Company acquired during the 1920s. On his mission to Moscow with Beaverbrook, Harriman took along Allen Wardwell, who was officially representing the American Red Cross. A prominent Wall Street lawyer, Wardwell had helped Harriman negotiate with the Soviets over the manganese concessions.
Harriman knew that the $1 billion worth of commitments he had made in Moscow, which included such things as the delivery of five hundred tanks per month, would be difficult to sell to an American public wary of the Bolshevik regime and still vaguely hopeful that the U.S. could remain aloof from the European war. So he took it upon himself to purchase, with his own money, time on CBS radio to explain the government’s case. “I am not concerned with the social and economic beliefs of those who are fighting Hitler,” he told his audience. “What does concern me is that the bitter experience of others and our own enlightened self-interest clearly dictate a course of action.”
Harriman’s job as Lend-Lease expediter was broadly defined, and—being better at carving out authority than following it—he made the assignment even broader when he returned to London. In addition to coordinating aid to Britain, he took on the task of keeping Moscow happy with its new suppliers. Crossing the Atlantic was difficult enough; he was bumped from his Pan Am clipper to make room for some mail sacks, and it took a phone call to Juan Trippe to get him back on. For good measure, a vexed Harriman also called Lovett to insist that a regular military service be set up to cross the Atlantic. The problems with the Soviets that awaited him, however, were far more difficult to solve.
As soon as the U.S. entered the war, Stalin began pressing for an Anglo-American invasion across the English Channel that would draw German units from their assault on the Soviets. Roosevelt, backed by Stimson and Marshall, made soothing promises. But Churchill was opposed. He gave Harriman the same late-night tour of the empty seats in Parliament that he had given McCloy, emphasizing that he could not justify sending another generation of British boys to the trenches until it was absolutely necessary.
Stalin’s ire over the absence of a second front made him less than a gracious recipient of Lend-Lease aid. Despite its sincere efforts, the U.S. had trouble delivering the material Harriman had promised to the Soviets. The American procurement bureaucracy was snarled, and the military establishment, with McCloy and Lovett and Forrestal at the fore, was understandably anxious to build up its own strength. An even greater obstacle was the terrible difficulty Allied convoys had surviving German attacks on their way around the northern tip of Norway through the Arctic Ocean to Archangel.
The Soviets were reluctant to promote alternative convoy routes, such as through Iran or Siberia, because these would require greater internal transportation costs. Instead, suspicious of Allied motives, they complained about the timidity of British vessels and the insincerity of Western efforts. “We are turning the town upside down to get supplies for Russia,” Hopkins wrote an anxious Harriman in May of 1942. But deliveries lagged behind schedule, and the summer months brought long daylight hours and heavier tolls along the convoy routes to northern Russia. One-quarter of all Allied ships on that run were destroyed by German U-boats in March, April, and May.
With Harriman in tow, Churchill flew to Washington in June to inform Roosevelt that he planned to suspend the convoys until the longer nights of autumn could provide greater safety. In addition, the Prime Minister insisted, there could be no cross-Channel invasion in 1942.
Shortly after they had returned to England, Harriman drove out to Chartwell, Churchill’s country home, for a private dinner. The Prime Minister said he had decided to go to Moscow to tell Stalin of the decision to suspend the convoys and postpone the second front. The Soviet leader would be enraged, but perhaps a personal explanation could soften the blow and assure him of the sincerity of his allies.
That weekend, after Churchill left for Moscow, Harriman decided it would make sense for an American to go along. Partly he wanted to make sure Stalin understood that Churchill was not acting alone; partly, of course, he was anxious to be personally involved. But when he cabled for permission, Roosevelt refused. So Harriman appealed to Churchill, who was making a stopover in Cairo. The Prime Minister was only too happy to intervene on Harriman’s behalf. “Would you be able to let Averell come with me?” he wired the President. “I have a somewhat raw job.” Roosevelt relented. “Have wire from Former Naval Person,” he wired his eager envoy, “saying he thinks you would be helpful.” The British delayed for Harriman a military flight leaving that night for Cairo, much to the annoyance of the plane’s other passenger, a haughty Free French leader named Charles de Gaulle.
At his meetings with Churchill and Harriman, Stalin repeated his pattern of violent mood swings. On the first night he seemed to accept Churchill’s plan for a probe into the Nazis’ “soft underbelly” on the Mediterranean as an alternative to an immediate cross-Channel invasion. “The Prime Minister drew a picture of a crocodile and pointed out that it was as well to strike the belly as the snout,” Harriman reported to Roosevelt. Late the next night, however, they faced the delayed fury of the Soviet leader, who curtly read a scathing message about English military cowardice and broken American supply promises.
Churchill, distraught and depressed, kept Harriman up talking almost until dawn, despite Harriman’s assurances that things would go better at their third session. “The technique used by Stalin last night resembled closely that used with Beaverbrook and myself,” he wired to Roosevelt. Indeed, the trip ended amicably. “The Moscow visit, which could so easily have turned into a disaster for the alliance, had raised the wartime relationship with Russia to a new plane of understanding,” Harriman later noted.
Poland had been the proximate cause of Britain’s entry into the war. In April of 1943 came the first ominous signs that debates about its postwar fate would chill any future peace. The German Army announced with great fanfare the discovery of a mass grave in the Katyn Forest, an area that had been swallowed by the Red Army after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. The Germans charged that ten thousand Polish officers had been executed point-blank by the Russians. Moscow, naturally, claimed that the Nazis had conducted the slaughter after capturing the territory in 1941. Harriman did not know who was right, nor care much at the time.* What upset him was that the dispute suddenly threatened the hope that the Grand Alliance could emerge from the war with a shared vision of how liberated Europe would be governed after the war.
The exiled government of Poland, residing in London, promptly asked the Red Cross to investigate the German allegations. On the surface, the move seemed understandable, even mild. For the prospects of the exiled leadership’s postwar relations with Russia, however, it was devastating. Harriman called on the Polish Prime Minister in London and bluntly took him to task. Whether the German accusations turned out to be true or false, Harriman said, the Polish statement was bound to enrage Moscow. Indeed it did. The Kremlin immediately broke off relations with the exiled government and formed its own rump leadership in Moscow called the Union of Polish Patriots. Efforts to repair the breach and save some semblance of Polish sovereignty would consume Harriman—and poison East-West relations—for more than two years.
Churchill sailed on the Queen Mary that May for another visit to Washington, taking both Harriman and Beaverbrook with him. During the voyage, Beaverbrook supported Stalin’s bitter reaction to the exiled Polish government. Harriman sharply disagreed with what he labeled an “appeasement policy.” To Churchill he argued: “I feel strongly that we must be friendly and frank but firm when they behave in a manner which is incompatible with our ideas. Otherwise we are storing up trouble for the future.”
The discussion aboard the Queen Mary revealed a significant change in Harriman’s thinking about Russia. In light of the “ominous rift over Poland,” as he called it, and the Kremlin’s orneriness over Lend-Lease, he had begun to abandon his belief that the U.S. should “give and give and give . . . with no thought of a quid pro quo.” When he met with Roosevelt upon his arrival in Washington, Harriman began pushing what he called a “friendly but firm” approach, one that took a flinty view of bargaining with Moscow that was befitting a pragmatic entrepreneur. Partly because of the persistent way he pressed his views, the change in Harriman’s attitude would have an enormous influence on American policy.
Ambassador Standley, once a staunch supporter of unconditional aid to the Soviets, had undergone a similar transformation. A gregarious man, he had hoped to make friends with the Russians through such kindnesses as the exchange of intelligence information and the distribution of Walt Disney films. But once in Moscow, he began to bridle, just as Bullitt and Steinhardt had, under the continuous “personal discomforts” and “isolation” imposed by Soviet authorities. Increasingly he argued that any American aid should be given on a “bargaining basis,” warning Roosevelt that gifts without strings seemed to “arouse suspicions of our motives in the Oriental mind rather than to build confidence.”
When Standley kicked up a storm by telling American correspondents in Moscow that the Soviets were ungrateful for U.S. aid, Harriman supported him. “The feeling is growing here that we will build trouble for the future if we allow ourselves to be kicked around by the Russians,” Harriman wired Hopkins from London. To Edward Stettinius, then the administrator of Lend-Lease, he urged: “My experience is that the Russians are brutally and bluntly frank with us and we can well afford to be equally so.”
When he arrived back in Washington in May of 1943, Harriman learned that Standley had submitted his resignation. Once again, Roosevelt and Hopkins offered him the post, and once again he expressed a reluctance to abandon his unfettered status. After much discussion, Harriman returned to London at the end of June still undecided. “As you know, I am a confirmed optimist in our relations with Russia because of my conviction that Stalin wants, if obtainable, a firm understanding with you and America,” he wrote Roosevelt in July. “Real accomplishment by an ambassador in Moscow is a gamble, with the odds against success, but the stakes are great.”
The matter was not settled until August, when Harriman traveled to Canada for the first Roosevelt-Churchill Quebec Conference. Fishing on a lake there with Hopkins, he weighed the possibilities, finally concluding that as ambassador he could help overcome Soviet suspicions. Yet he was worried that some of Roosevelt’s ideas were naïve. Over a lunch back at the White House, the President confidently predicted he could explain to Stalin, whom he had never met, the adverse reaction that would result if there were no free elections in Poland or the Balkan countries after the war. “He did not seem to realize that once the Russians occupied a territory the plebiscite would almost certainly go their way,” Harriman later noted.
Yet Harriman also harbored hopes, ones that were perhaps no more realistic than Roosevelt’s. The disheartened Admiral Standley happened to be staying at the Mayflower Hotel, which Harriman used as his Washington base. Harriman invited his predecessor to a private dinner in his suite. After discussing Russia until midnight, Standley rose to leave. “I don’t envy you, Averell,” he said. “It’s a tough assignment.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” said Harriman, forcing a smile. “I know it will be difficult, but they’re only human, those Russians. Stalin can be handled.”
Standley walked down the hall shaking his head. He had thought much the same thing eighteen months earlier. Harriman later admitted: “A large number of people in the West had the idea that they knew how to get along with Stalin. I confess that I was not entirely immune to that infectious idea.”
Harriman and Acheson, like most of their pragmatic friends, did not put undue faith in “universal Plumb Plans.” But both agreed with Roosevelt’s goal of providing postwar loans to the Soviets and the rest of Europe. To Harriman, this was a way to gain some bargaining leverage with the Kremlin. In addition, both he and Acheson saw the value of helping develop stable economies once the war was over. The first tentative steps toward this goal were proposals for a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) that were made to the U.S., in differing forms, by Britain and Russia.
Acheson was designated as the U.S. delegate on a four-member UNRRA committee that began meeting in Washington in January of 1943. Representing the Soviets was Maxim Litvinov, the plump and voluble westernized Bolshevik who as Foreign Secretary had negotiated the 1933 recognition agreements.
During the committee’s six months of work, Russian attitudes that would soon become familiar first emerged: the major countries must have a veto power over all decisions, Litvinov insisted, and any programs inside Russia must be supervised solely by the Kremlin. The Soviets seemed concerned, above all, with preventing any penetration of their insular system, even by international organizations offering aid. “Relief, we said with righteous fervor, must be kept free from politics,” Acheson later recalled. “The idea amused Litvinov.” Nothing in the U.S.S.R. was free from politics, and any aid sent to the country must be fully controlled by the Kremlin. “We were present, so to speak, at the creation of the pattern,” Acheson noted.
By June an agreement had been reached. But Acheson faced another touchy obstacle. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, in Acheson’s words, “was just emerging from his isolationist chrysalis and had not yet learned to manage his new wings.” Flapping with indignation, the Michigan Republican protested that the Senate had not been consulted and that the scheme “pledged our total resources to whatever illimitable scheme for relief and rehabilitation all around the world our New Deal crystal gazers might desire to pursue.”
Perhaps because he was similarly susceptible, Acheson recognized Vandenberg’s weak point: vanity. Remaining patient through days of questioning (unlike Secretary Hull who had stormed out), Acheson revised the UNRRA text to accommodate congressional concerns. Mostly, however, he simply stroked Vandenberg, explaining to him the importance of a relief organization and the historic role he could play in establishing it.
Despite his “suspicions,” Vandenberg decided to declare victory and and hail “the triumph of constitutional procedure.” It was the beginning, Acheson later said, of Vandenberg’s “long day’s journey into our times,” one that culminated with his dramatic January 1945 “confession” on the Senate floor of the errors of isolationism and his realization that “our oceans have ceased to be moats which automatically protect our ramparts.”
Roosevelt signed the UNRRA agreement in November 1943, and the first session of what was the precursor of the United Nations promptly convened in Atlantic City’s Claridge Hotel. Acheson was elected chairman. Although the meetings went smoothly, one incident foreshadowed the troubles ahead. As the conference ended, the Russians asked to show a film of the fighting on the eastern front. Acheson acquiesced. To his horror, he discovered that it was a propaganda piece. The Polish people were shown joyfully embracing their Soviet liberators and, according to the Russian narrator, the Communist doctrines they brought with them. Afterward, Acheson found himself faced with a bitter protest from the ambassador of the exiled Polish government.
“We have found you a very tough man to deal with,” said Molotov when the new ambassador paid his formal courtesy call in October of 1943.
“I have come as a friend,” Harriman responded.
“Oh, I know that,” Molotov said. “I intended my remarks to be complimentary.”
Harriman understood that the Soviets did not necessarily consider pliable negotiators to be friends, nor did they regard tough negotiators as enemies. That night he recorded in his notebook that he told Molotov there were many things they disagreed on, but that these could be solved “with a frank personal relationship.”
Harriman and his daughter Kathleen, who served as his hostess while Marie Harriman stayed back in New York, found the atmosphere in Moscow during their first few months somewhat less chilly than they had feared. During his tenure as Lend-Lease expediter, the Soviet state-run media had touted Harriman as a symbol of Allied cooperation. With his distinguished bearing, he proved immensely popular with the Russian people, who tended to be far more fascinated than frightened by titans of capitalism. Indeed, he became quite a celebrity in the country and an object of curiosity wherever he ventured.
Kathleen, too, captured the eye of the citizenry, especially with her skiing prowess. She was even invited to race in the Russian women’s slalom competition, finishing third and winning a mention in the Moscow papers. With packs of her father’s Chesterfields and snacks from the embassy kitchen, she was able to make friends with younger Russians, or at least those less wary of the watchful eye of the secret police.
Harriman occasionally joined her on Sundays on the snowy slopes of the Lenin Hills, somewhat to the chagrin of his secret-police shadows. On his first foray, Harriman went to the top of Sparrow Hill, from which Napoleon had watched Moscow burn, and raced straight down the slope. His NKVD escort made a valiant attempt to follow, only to crash into a snowbank halfway down. “Unfortunately for him,” the deadpan ambassador wrote his wife, Marie, back in New York, “he is not too skillful.” From then on, whenever Harriman went skiing, a former member of the Russian ski team was added to his NKVD detail.
The Harrimans were permitted contact with a limited circle of Moscow personalities, mainly from the arts. A few months after his arrival, Harriman sent Bohlen a note asking him to get “my newest tail coat and trousers” from Marie and send them along. For the grand parties that the mission held at Spaso House, to celebrate such occasions as Christmas or Harriman’s birthday, the new ambassador (salary: $17,500) dug into his own pocket to import such items as turkeys and cases of Bourbon.
He warned his staff and the American journalists to be wary of the Soviet practice of ganging up on one foreigner at each party and toasting him under the table. Harriman could usually hold his own. His only failure came on Red Army Day in early 1944, when Molotov and a bevy of generals cornered him at a reception. Kathleen tried to rescue her father only to be waved off with an “I’m aw right.” Finally he had to be carried home. Time magazine reported: “As the evening wore on, the Union Pacific’s headlights grew dimmer and dimmer.”
The Harrimans’ closest Soviet friend was the playwright Alexei Tolstoy, a cousin of the famous Leo Tolstoy. Kathleen found him “a very loveable sort.” Tolstoy once invited the Harrimans to his dacha for a grand dinner that (apparently with government help) made a mockery of the meager rations available to most of the Russian population and that of the rest of wartime Europe. He expounded on various subjects relatively freely, once even intimating that terror in the Kremlin was not simply a function of Stalin or Communism. “To understand the Kremlin today,” he said to Harriman in words that would have pleased Kennan, “you must understand the Kremlin of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.”
Spaso House was spacious (thirteen bedrooms) yet bleak. “Ave’s bathroom is about the size of my apartment in New York,” Kathleen wrote her sister. “His bedroom has the only fireplace. Bullitt apparently had a hand in the interior decorating and for that I’m going to resent him for the rest of my life.” Harriman, who generally worked sixteen hours a day, turned the space by his bedroom fireplace into a cozy conference area. There he would meet with aides and reporters early each morning, wearing one of his dark silk dressing gowns and red Moroccan slippers. For exercise he took to chopping the sickly shrubs in the back garden and shoveling the snow off the walk, much to the bafflement of the Russian staffers who could not understand why anyone so rich and powerful would do such things for recreation.
Harriman had traveled to Moscow with Secretary Hull, who was attending the first Foreign Ministers Conference there. Hull confided that he did not want to go, but he feared Roosevelt would replace him with Sumner Welles if he balked. The Secretary spent most of his time securing a four-power Declaration of General Security, a grandiloquent document of dubious value, which the idealistic Hull pronounced would produce a world in which “there will be no need for spheres of influence.”
Harriman found himself more concerned with issues that Hull found peripheral, most notably working out an agreement about Poland so that Moscow would not impose a puppet government there. “They gave us no indication during the conference that they were interested in the extension of the Soviet system,” Harriman wrote Roosevelt at the conclusion of the conference. “I take this with some reservation.”
There would be many other issues on which the U.S. and the Soviets were destined to disagree before the conclusion of the war. But Poland, in Harriman’s words, “was to become the touchstone of Soviet behavior in the postwar world, the first test of Stalin’s attitude toward his less powerful neighbors.” It represented the inevitable clash between the differing visions that the two sides brought into the war: the Anglo-American idealism, enunciated in the Atlantic Charter, of fighting for freedom and self-determination, versus Stalin’s harshly realistic view that the Soviet Union needed a ring of “friendly” states along its border, ones that would never again form an antagonistic “cordon sanitaire” or a corridor for invasions from the west.
Postponing the Polish issue until after the Red Army captured the country, Harriman felt, would make a negotiated arrangement next to impossible. So he hoped Roosevelt would raise the matter at Teheran in November of 1943, when the wartime leaders finally got together for their first tripartite summit. The President, however, was more interested in military plans, proposals for the postwar treatment of Germany, and setting forth his vision of a United Nations organization. By making implicit concessions to Stalin on certain border issues and by deferring the question of how to guarantee Poland’s sovereignty after the war, Roosevelt (at least in Harriman’s view) allowed Stalin to assume that the Atlantic Charter’s idealistic proclamations against spheres of influence were mainly for domestic political consumption and would not be used to prevent the Soviets from imposing “friendly” regimes along their periphery.
Harriman did not think that the Kremlin would attempt to swallow up Poland, for its ethnically diverse empire was already showing signs of indigestion. Nor did he feel that Moscow wanted to impose a Communist system on Poland, he told American reporters in Moscow in January 1944. Its goal, as he saw it, was to make sure that postwar Poland was friendly to Russia, something that the independent Polish government in London, composed mainly of aristocratic émigrés, was not. Thus Harriman concluded that tough bargaining could bring about a compromise in which the moderate members of the Polish group in London would join with pro-Soviet Poles in creating a tame but free government after the war. He was worried, however, that in the absence of any compromise, Stalin would find Poland tough to control and would eventually feel the need to impose a rigid Red Army-backed regime in Warsaw.
As Soviet troops were “liberating” Poland in mid-1944, Harriman warned that unless the exiled Polish government reconstituted itself the Soviets would set up their own “Committee of Liberation.” Roosevelt, however, was still unwilling to face the issue. So his independent-minded ambassador went on his own to Stalin in February to see what could be done to improve Soviet relations with the London Poles. Stalin hinted at a solution: Their leader, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, might be acceptable to the Soviet government, but most of the other London Poles, who were hard-line anti-Communists, would have to step aside.
“Again the Poles,” Stalin growled when Harriman came back the following month. “The émigré government,” as the Soviet leader called it, was making impossible demands. The Polish population, he insisted, would welcome the Red Army as liberators. Harriman doubted it. He thought, but did not say, that the Soviets would be considered just another set of invaders and would be forced to impose police-state controls.
When Harriman brought up the problem of public opinion in the U.S., a fact that Roosevelt often used to no avail, Stalin countered with his concern “about public opinion in the Soviet Union.”
“You know how to handle your public opinion,” said Harriman.
“There have been three revolutions in a generation,” answered Stalin.
At the time, Harriman felt that the problem could be negotiated amicably. “Stalin is convinced that there is no hope for a friendly neighbor in Poland under the leadership of the controlling group in London, and he is unwilling to have the Red Army re-establish them in power,” he wrote in a March memo. “I believe he is basically right. In spite of the conjectures to the contrary, there is no evidence that he is unwilling to allow an independent Poland to emerge.” Harriman would soon be convinced otherwise.
Late in June of 1944 an event occurred in Moscow that was to have as much effect on hardening Harriman’s line than almost anything the Soviets could do on their own: George Kennan arrived at the embassy as counselor.
Harriman, desperately seeking a professional Soviet expert to be his second-in-command, had first requested Chip Bohlen. As part of his duties in the Soviet Section at the State Department after his six-month internment in Tokyo, Bohlen had served as a translator and adviser at the conferences in Moscow and Teheran in late 1943. Bohlen had taken a more pessimistic view than Harriman of what transpired in Teheran, noting in a memo to the ambassador that the Soviets seemed intent on reducing the rest of Europe to impotent vassals. “I knew something of the true nature of the Soviet Union,” he recalled of his attitude at that time, “that its leaders were animated by a philosophy not only alien but also definitely hostile to everything democratic governments stood for.”
Even so, Harriman was impressed with Bohlen’s knowledge of Russia and its language. More importantly, the somewhat stiff Harriman warmed to Bohlen’s genial personality, which he found appealing and comforting, even magical. In asking that Bohlen be assigned to him, Harriman wrote the State Department that “we have worked together and come to a clear understanding as to policies.”
Unfortunately for Harriman, Harry Hopkins had also come to know and like Bohlen. They met somewhat inauspiciously at a Washington dinner party in late 1942. Hopkins asked—“rudely” as Bohlen remembered it—if he was part of the anti-Soviet clique at the State Department. Bohlen was, in fact, a supporter of the “realistic” approach shared by his boss, Loy Henderson, and most of the others who had served in Moscow during the 1930s. “The Soviet Section was still wary of the Russians,” Bohlen later wrote. “From Henderson on down, the specialists shared the view that the Soviet Union, even though now an ally, had to be closely watched because its ultimate aims clashed with those of the U.S.”
But despite his love for the occasional good argument among friends, it was not Bohlen’s style to challenge (at least with any fervor) Washington’s prevailing pro-Soviet attitude nor to tangle with the exemplar of that attitude, Hopkins. He replied that he knew of no such anti-Soviet cabal in the State Department. Hopkins then launched into a discourse about how great the Russians were acting in the war. Yes, Bohlen agreed, that is perfectly true, but there were other aspects of the Soviet Union that should not be forgotten, especially their opposition to freedom.
Bohlen and Hopkins resumed their conversation while in Cairo together before the Teheran Conference. What struck Hopkins was not Bohlen’s view of the Soviets, nor even the careful manner in which he defended it, but rather his amenable style of getting along with people. Hopkins and Roosevelt agreed that the young diplomat was the type of man they needed at the State Department. The official reason they gave Harriman for not sending Bohlen to Moscow was that he was only a Class IV officer and an appointment as counselor would require promoting him two grades. In fact, Harriman had sent a cable saying he would take Bohlen even without the official promotion and leave the post of counselor vacant.
In early 1944, Bohlen was made chief of the Soviet Section at the State Department. He initiated a series of informal Saturday gatherings at one of Washington’s waterfront seafood restaurants, where officials from various departments met to discuss Soviet policy. (The sessions were soon dubbed “fish and Chip.”) By the end of the year his leap into the inner circle of power was formalized when he was appointed the department’s official liaison with the White House.
Harriman, meanwhile, was still seeking a second-in-command. Hopkins agreed to see if he could get him the services of Kennan.
After his release from internment in Germany, Kennan had been assigned to Lisbon, where, in October of 1943, he was ordered to secure U.S. military rights to Portuguese naval bases in the Azores. The whole episode had become a grand diplomatic snafu involving crossed wires and unread cables from Kennan explaining to an un-receptive State Department the need to offer U.S. guarantees of the sovereignty of Portuguese colonies before making any requests. At the Pentagon’s insistence, Kennan was recalled to Washington for consultations. He ended up sitting in the corner of a top-level meeting in the office of Henry Stimson, who, at the end of Kennan’s explanation of the situation, inquired: “Who is this young man?” When told that Kennan was charge d’affaires in Lisbon because the ambassador there had died, Stimson solemnly noted that it was “high time we had a full-fledged ambassador.” Stung by his treatment and upset with the callous way official Washington proposed to treat Portugal, Kennan decided to take the matter directly to the President. To his great surprise, Kennan had no trouble getting an audience with Roosevelt, who helped clear up the matter by writing a personal letter to Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Salazar.
When a new ambassador finally arrived in Portugal at the end of 1943, Hopkins succeeded in getting Roosevelt’s approval to have Kennan, then thirty-nine, sent to Moscow as the number-two man at the embassy. But Hopkins, suffering from cancer, had a severe relapse at the time, and he forgot to pass the word to the State Department. Nor did Kennan know of the proposed move. Instead he was dispatched by the department to serve on the new European Advisory Commission, which was holding vague discussions in London about the future of liberated areas.
Harriman was desperate. He offered to trade two of his people, Llewellyn (“Tommy”) Thompson and Maxwell Hamilton, in return for Kennan. Just as a deal was about to be struck, Kennan (who was totally oblivious to all the maneuvering) proceeded to complicate the arrangements by being hospitalized in London with an ulcer. A despairing Harriman was duly informed.
Upon his recovery, Kennan became embroiled in a dispute within the EAC over the proposed border for the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany. Dismayed (yet again) by his orders from Washington, he flew home and requested another meeting with the President. Roosevelt, amused by Kennan’s gumption, quickly cleared things up to the anxious diplomat’s satisfaction.
When he returned to Washington in May of 1944, wrote Kennan in his Memoirs, “the department, I think, had no clear idea what to do with me.” In fact, that was far from the case. Harriman had resumed his struggle to get him assigned to Moscow, and the ambassador just happened to be visiting Washington while Kennan was wandering the city at loose ends.
Bohlen and Harriman took matters into their own hands. Bohlen took Kennan to the Mayflower Hotel, introduced him to the ambassador, and the three had dinner together in Harriman’s suite. Kennan recalls that he “took pains to emphasize that my views on policy toward the Soviet Union were not exactly those of the Administration.” Harriman did not care. His views, in fact, were also no longer exactly in line. They agreed that Kennan would report for duty at the end of June.
Before his departure, Kennan had one of his periodic arguments with his closest friend over Soviet policy. Over a long dinner at Bohlen’s house, they readily agreed about all the faults of the Soviet system. But to Kennan the conclusion was that it was futile even to deal with the Kremlin. Roosevelt’s policy of seeking a Grand Alliance was hopelessly naïve, he said. Where the U.S. could force the Soviets to abide by its wishes it should; in areas where the U.S. was powerless, it should simply wash its hands of the matter. Poland fell into the latter category.
Emboldened by not a few drinks, Bohlen lit into his colleague. Although he was not the type to make waves within the councils of government, Bohlen always relished rousing arguments with friends. He accused Kennan of knowing nothing about the realities of power and politics, of having his head in a gloomy cloud of abstract notions that prevented him from dealing with the world as it was. What began for Bohlen as a collegiate sort of joust evolved into a bitter personal argument. He went up to bed angered and drunk. Kennan, far more sensitive to attacks from the man he had come to admire, walked home through the dark streets of Washington in tears.
Harriman and Kennan had distinctly different personalities and styles. Whereas Harriman was thick-skinned, businesslike, and nearly oblivious to matters he felt unworthy of his focus, Kennan indulged himself as an anguished and sensitive intellectual, tormented by slights and disappointments both real and imagined.
Harriman enjoyed exercising power and being close to it. He sought to comprehend great events by getting to know the great men who determined them. Kennan, on the other hand, felt that he could come to understand the Soviets through detached observation, academic study, and intuitive personal rumination. He became deeply engrossed in the writings of his namesake and distant cousin. Yet Harriman, to his surprise, never mentioned the remarkable coincidence that the elder George Kennan had written the two-volume authorized biography of Harriman’s father.
Years later, Chip Bohlen wrote a letter in which he attempted to describe Harriman’s style as a boss. “One thing he does not like is too much contradiction,” wrote Bohlen, “although he enjoys a good discussion. Above all don’t make any smart cracks or anything that smacks of freshness in regard to anything he says or does . . . I think the best way to describe Averell’s attitude towards juniors who work for him is ‘feudal.’ He will give them complete loyalty if they give him in return their complete loyalty.”
To Kennan, Harriman’s unreflective and cold personality was perplexing. “He had that curious contempt for elegance that only the wealthy can afford,” Kennan later wrote. “I often think: what a trial I must have been to him, running around with my head in the usual cloud of philosophic speculation, full of interests other than my work . . . bombarding him with bundles of purple prose on matters which, as I am sure he thought, it was the business of the President to think about, not mine.”
Such insecurities were legitimate: Harriman did get annoyed at Kennan. He called his deputy’s discourses “batting out flies” and considered many of them pointless. “Small wonder that he was often peremptory,” Kennan later wrote of Harriman. “He didn’t shout you down, for he never shouted; but he had a way of running roughshod over unsolicited suggestions. A hundred times I came away from our common labors asking myself, without finding an answer: ‘Why do I still like this man?’”
One answer was that Harriman, for all of his annoyance, genuinely respected Kennan’s mind and found himself influenced by his outlook. “I used him on every occasion that I possibly could,” the ambassador later recalled, “and I consulted him on every subject. He had good instincts. He is a man who understood Russia but didn’t understand the United States.”
The gruff entrepreneur and the sensitive analyst would sit up late at night by Harriman’s fireplace while Kennan railed against Soviet slights and conduct. As Kennan later noted: “He soon showed, by his own official acts, that he had not been obtuse to the same evidences of misunderstanding that caused me such concern.”
Shortly after Kennan arrived in Moscow, the Polish situation came to a head. With the help of Roosevelt and Harriman, Mikolajczyk and some of his colleagues in the exiled Polish government wangled an invitation to see Stalin. As they were on their way from London, the Kremlin announced the recognition of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, a pro-Soviet government that had established itself in liberated Lublin. When Mikolajczyk and his men appeared at the Kremlin, Stalin told them they must henceforth deal with the Lublin Poles.
Harriman asked Kennan for his views on the prospects for the London Poles. Unsurprisingly, Kennan was pessimistic. The Soviets, he said, “will be confident they can arrange the affairs of eastern Europe to their own liking without any great difficulty, and they will not be inclined to go far out of their way either for the Poles or us.”
Kennan thought it best not to mention to Harriman a darker suspicion: One major reason that Stalin wanted a puppet group in Poland, Kennan felt, was to prevent the truth about the Katyn Forest massacre from being discovered. The Soviets had made a great show of summoning reporters to the Katyn Forest once they had retaken it to produce “proof” that the Nazis had done the killing. Among those who went with the press corps was Kathleen Harriman, a former reporter herself. Some of the Soviet evidence seemed persuasive on the surface, yet there were clear indications that a lot of it had been faked. Kathleen confessed to be somewhat confused about the truth, but Kennan had no such doubts. The Red Army had committed the mass murders as a way to crush any future Polish resistance to Soviet domination, he thought.* The Kremlin would thus never permit a government in Poland that might expose this fact.
Kennan found it awkward even to look at the hapless London Poles who haunted the American Embassy. “They were, in my eyes, the doomed representatives of a doomed regime,” he recalled. When one of them asked what he thought their chances of regaining their homeland were, Kennan gave a gloomy assessment. “But I warned him that I usually leaned to the pessimistic side, and advised him to take this into account.”
A paper on the issue that Kennan drafted for his files began, typically enough, with nineteenth-century quotes about Russia’s historic treatment of Poland. “The jealous and intolerant eye of the Kremlin can distinguish, in the end, only vassals and enemies, and the neighbors of Russia, if they do not wish to be the one, must reconcile themselves to being the other,” he concluded. So much for Harriman’s hopes of bargaining for an independent Polish government that Moscow would consider friendly enough. It was “frivolous,” Kennan felt, for the U.S. to make any efforts on the matter. Americans ought merely have “the good taste and judgment to bow our heads in silence.”
In the midst of Mikolajczyk’s visit came the doomed Warsaw uprising. On August 1, 1944, as the Red Army neared the Nazi-occupied city, Polish underground fighters, encouraged by a clandestine broadcast from Moscow, rose up in revolt. At that moment the Red Army halted its advance, refusing to come to the aid of the resistance. The Soviets insisted this was mainly because they did not yet have the supplies to fight their way across the Vistula River. But there was another reason, one that Stalin himself as much as conceded: the Warsaw uprising was led by fighters more loyal to London than Lublin-Moscow. It was in the Kremlin’s interest to let both the Nazis and the Polish patriots batter themselves to death in the bloody fighting, thus freeing the Soviets from future resistance from either side.
Harriman sent the Kremlin a note requesting landing rights in Russia for American and British planes so they could come to the aid of the Polish resistance. Deputy Foreign Minister Vishinsky, in response, called the uprising “a purely adventuristic affair to which the Soviet government could not lend its hand.” Harriman demanded an audience at the Kremlin. “It was the toughest talk I ever had with a Soviet official,” he later recounted. Vishinsky again refused to give the necessary landing rights. “I am for the first time since coming to Moscow gravely concerned about the attitude of the Soviet government,” the generally stoic ambassador cabled Roosevelt that night. “Its refusal is based on ruthless political considerations.”
As German divisions moved into Warsaw and the prolonged revolt became even bloodier, Harriman insisted on seeing Molotov, Vishinsky’s boss. Reasoning with Molotov, Harriman discovered, was “futile.” He was only carrying out instructions. Kennan recalls that Harriman returned to Spaso House “in the wee hours of the night, shattered by the experience.” Kathleen wrote her sister that he was “beginning to show the strain.”
Harriman’s anger was reflected in his telegrams to Washington. “I feel strongly that the Russians should be made to realize our dissatisfaction with their behavior,” he wired on August 21. Four days later he wrote a harsher message that he decided not to send. “Under these circumstances,” it said, “it is difficult for me to see how a peaceful or acceptable solution can be found to the Polish problem.”
Finally, in early September, Stalin reversed himself. The Soviets and their Western allies began to aid the uprising, although the Red Army still did not move in to join the battle against the Nazis. Stalin conceded to Harriman that he had misjudged the motives of the resistance leaders and pledged to give whatever aid he could to the uprising. But it was all too little and too late. Warsaw was by then in ruins, blanketed by bodies. One-quarter of its population was dead.
In retrospect, Harriman gave Stalin some benefit of the doubt. At an off-the-record discussion of the origins of the Cold War organized in 1967 by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Harriman said that the uprising “was the London Poles thinking they could put it over on the Russians by seizing Warsaw.” The failure of the Red Army to move in, Harriman said in hindsight, was not part of a ruthless political plot (as he had reported at the time), but was dictated by military realities. “In spite of my very strong emotions at the time,” he noted in an oral history in 1970, “my guess is that the military facts” were what prevented Stalin from coming to the aid of the Warsaw rebels. By that period in his life, Harriman had become aligned with the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party and had mellowed in his view of the Soviets. At the time of the Warsaw uprising, however, the event deeply disillusioned him. “Our relations with the Soviets have taken a startling turn evident during the last two months,” he wrote in a personal letter to Hopkins.
Kennan, as might be expected, was even harsher in his judgment about what was, in truth, an example of Stalin’s ruthless nature. “It has been my opinion, ever since, that this was the moment when, if ever, there should have been a full-fledged and realistic showdown with the Soviet leaders,” he wrote in his Memoirs. The U.S., he told Harriman, should consider cutting off all of its military aid and support for the Soviets. Harriman quietly demurred, but Kennan began to barrage him with memos on the matter.
Harriman had already come to the conclusion, during the first half of 1944, that military aid to Moscow could no longer be given, as he had once proclaimed, “with no thought of any return.” In January he had written Churchill that “the Russian bear is demanding much yet biting the hand that feeds it.” General John Deane, the embassy’s military attaché, had stumbled across the discovery that at a time when the Soviets were requesting fifty more American diesel boat engines, they had yet installed only three of the ninety delivered the previous year. Many of the engines, which the Allies could have desperately used in the D-Day invasion, were rusting on the docks.
Deane and Harriman began to urge Washington to force the Soviets to justify any future requests. “They are tough, and they expect us to be tough,” Harriman argued. A firmer attitude would cause the Soviets to “respect us more,” he wired Hopkins. “To get a trading atmosphere into our negotiations over mutual assistance in the war is, as you know, most distasteful to me,” the former financier explained to the former social worker, “but trading seems to be the language the Soviets understand.”
Despite his hardening line, Harriman still supported providing the Soviets with loans for their postwar reconstruction. He saw such credits as offering many advantages: they would help open a vast Russian market for U.S. goods at a time when there was reason to fear the resurgence of the prewar depression; they would give Moscow a stake in preserving the peacetime economic order; above all, they would provide leverage and bargaining chips that the U.S. could use to influence Kremlin conduct.
Soviet Trade Minister Anastas Mikoyan first made a concrete proposal to Harriman for a postwar loan in February of 1944, suggesting a $1 billion credit at 1.5 percent interest. Harriman countered with his own unofficial suggestion, to both Washington and Moscow, that a $500 million credit at prevailing interest rates was more reasonable. The ambassador cabled Secretary of State Hull that a loan offered “one of the most effective weapons at our disposal to influence European political events in the direction we desire and to avoid the development of a sphere of influence of the Soviet Union over Eastern Europe and the Balkans.”
At the time, the Johnson Act forbade any nonmilitary loans to the U.S.S.R., and the matter of outright postwar aid was not seriously considered for a year. But those who favored providing American credits for Russian reconstruction came up with a clever temporary scheme in early 1944: Under a section of the Lend-Lease Act known as 3(c), equipment could be shipped on credit after the end of the war until mid-1947. Designated to negotiate with the Russians for extended credits under the plan was Dean Acheson, who had just finished representing the State Department at the Bretton Woods Conference that established the International Monetary Fund.
Fearful of having no hand in such a critical matter, Harriman convinced a reluctant State Department to allow him to fly to Washington in May to consult with his old school chum. They met in Acheson’s office and quickly hammered out a memo for the President. As an opening gambit, they said, the U.S. should offer to “wipe the slate clean” of all Soviet debts at the end of the war and accept liberal terms for aid used by the Soviets for their reconstruction.
Edward Stettinius, who as Lend-Lease administrator in Washington had tangled with Harriman and who continued to do so after becoming Under Secretary of State, was disturbed at the ambassador’s presumption. He told Acheson’s assistant Eugene Rostow that the Harriman-Acheson plan was “superficial,” adding sharply: “It is not something for an ambassador to run to daddy with.” Harriman, however, did go to Roosevelt with the plan, and a slightly modified version was presented to the Soviets by Acheson.
Acheson met with the Soviets over the loan plan almost daily beginning in July of 1944. Acheson remembers “the almost unbearable heat” of the old State Department building; but as repercussions from the Warsaw uprising dispute reached Washington, “even the heat of our room could not warm the chill between allies.” The two sides disagreed over interest rates and other details. Any attempt by Acheson to find signs of flexibility “brought only the same stolid and verbose replies from the Russians.”
Acheson was guided by a lesson from his former crew coach. Vishinsky had once told Harriman, at the intermission of a ballet during his 1941 mission with Beaverbrook, that he should never be upset by the inflexibility of Russian negotiators, who could never make concessions until they had received specific instructions from the Kremlin. Consequently, Harriman advised Acheson, there was little use in trying to argue with or convince a Soviet negotiator. The only way to assure that they reported back to Moscow for new instructions was to present what at least appeared to be a revised proposal and call a recess. “This will enable them to call Moscow and get instructions,” Harriman said. Acheson tried the tactic a few times in August, but to little avail.
By that point Harriman’s line toward the Soviets had sufficiently toughened. “I hope as a matter of principle no further concessions will be made,” he cabled. Acheson had reached the same conclusion on his own. In mid-September he presented his final offer and told his Soviet counterpart to return home to consult with his superiors if he felt he could not sign it. The meeting adjourned and the Russians never returned.
When the issue first came to a head in the fall of 1944, it was not cast in East-West terms. Instead it was considered a straightforward question of what would be best for the peace and prosperity of all the Allies: should Germany be allowed to rebuild or should it be denuded of its industrial base?
The leading American advocates of a revived Germany were Wall Streeters, men firmly committed to Europe, internationalism, and free trade. Their private careers had been spent making foreign deals, and a multilateral system of commerce was integral to their philosophy of world order. This ideal was as old as John Hay’s “Open Door” and had found its twentieth-century expression as the third of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points: “the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers.” Trade restrictions, it was believed, would lead to gluts in domestic markets, unemployment, and possibly the rise of totalitarian sentiments. A throbbing world economy, on the other hand, would promote prosperity, peace, and democracy.
Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s first Secretary of State, was the most fervent apostle of the cause. Freer world trade, he said, would end “the economic dissatisfaction that breeds war.” Henry Stimson agreed. “The essential basis of enduring peace must be economic,” he proclaimed.
The rejection of these ideas by mainstream Republicans helped persuade Acheson and Harriman to become Democrats. Harriman had voted for Al Smith in 1928 primarily because of his belief in the need to lower tariffs. Acheson, whose affinity for the Democrats likewise was rooted in the free-trade issue, blamed the collapse of the nineteenth-century Pax Britannica economic order for the rise of “totalitarian military states.”
In considering how to treat a defeated Germany, those with an internationalist economic outlook—most notably Stimson, McCloy, Lovett, Harriman, and Acheson—felt that destroying that nation’s industry would remove the “spark plug” (to use the metaphor popular at the time) of the European economy. With its capacity to export manufactured goods and import raw materials, Germany could play a critical role in a system of world trade. Part of Germany’s production, of course, should be exacted as reparations; but a full-scale looting of its industrial base would lead only to a stagnant world economy and the need for greater American subsidies for the rest of Europe.
McCloy became involved in the issue when he began drafting a directive, known as JCS 1067, to provide military commanders with guidelines for administering occupied territories. In the course of his consultations, he and Stimson invited Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to lunch at the War Department in August of 1944. Despite reams of studies from State Department planning groups, no decision had been made about how to manage occupied Germany. Nor was there any real indication at the time that the issue would divide both the Roosevelt Administration and the wartime alliance with Moscow.
Morgenthau, the son of a successful and politically active Manhattan property developer, had begun his career as a farmer in upstate New York. There he made friends with his neighbor Franklin Roosevelt, whose political career he actively embraced. As Treasury Secretary he had developed a good working relation with the War Department; a prominent Jewish leader, he had defended McCloy against accusations that his hard line on Auschwitz and refugee issues made him “an oppressor of the Jews.”
Morgenthau had just returned from Europe, and over lunch he broached to Stimson and McCloy his plan for “removing all industry from Germany and simply reducing them to an agricultural population.” Neither of his hosts had given much thought to the long-term treatment of Germany, and Stimson wrote in his diary that “it was a very satisfactory talk.” But a few days later, after thinking the matter through, Stimson noted that Morgenthau reflected “a very bitter atmosphere of personal resentment against the entire German people without regard to individual guilt and I am very afraid that it will result in our taking mass vengeance.”
Stimson pressed his case on the President. “The need for the recuperative benefits of productivity is more evident now than ever before,” he wrote. “Speed of reconstruction is of great importance if we hope to avoid dangerous convulsions in Europe.” Morgenthau, however, was more ardent in pressing his case on the President, and soon Roosevelt was proclaiming his willingness to “pastoralize” Germany’s industrial areas and let its people survive on “soup kitchens.”
McCloy, as usual, was trying to play mediator. His main concern was to give the military enough leeway to act as it saw fit, and he led Morgenthau to believe that their ideas “were fairly close together.” The Treasury Secretary noted in his diary that McCloy claimed to have advised Stimson to “modify” his position. At the same time, however, McCloy was warning Stimson against Morgenthau’s efforts.
In fact, behind the Treasury Secretary’s back, McCloy embarked on a merciless campaign to discredit what had become known as the “Morgenthau Plan.” Each afternoon he and Lovett would get together and think up absurd methods for pastoralizing Germany and gleefully spread their satiric barbs through the Washington bureaucracy. The personal parries broke out into the open when the Heavenly Twins came up with a way to ridicule Morgenthau’s practice of tape-recording all of his meetings. One day McCloy brought a tiny spy camera into a meeting in Morgenthau’s office and began snapping away as soon as the tape recorder was turned on. When Morgenthau interrupted the meeting to ask what was going on, McCloy responded, “Well, since you’ve been recording everything without our permission, I thought you wouldn’t mind if I did too.” While the rest of those in the room laughed, Morgenthau fumed.
As an alternative to the Morgenthau Plan, Stimson toyed with the notion of putting Germany’s industrialized Ruhr and Saar areas under international control. He and McCloy discussed the idea over lunch with Wall Street’s favorite Frenchman, the financier Jean Monnet. Both Stimson and Monnet agreed that the plan would be a fair and safe way to help meet the needs of Britain, Russia, and the rest of Europe. But for the first time, McCloy raised a concern that had not yet entered the calculations about the treatment of Germany. As Stimson reported in his diary: “McCloy, much to my surprise, was alarmed at giving this addition to Russia’s power.”
As the dispute with Morgenthau became public in the fall of 1944, McCloy and Stimson began to line up support from their friends. Frankfurter came by for dinner, and Stimson noted: “Although a Jew like Morgenthau, he approached the subject with perfect detachment and great helpfulness.” On a weekend trip to New York with Stimson, McCloy went to see many of his former colleagues on Wall Street to enlist them in the cause.
Morgenthau, however, was doing them one better. He had been invited to Quebec for the Roosevelt-Churchill summit. There the two leaders initialed an agreement that called for “converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.” When Stimson and McCloy discovered what had happened, they were incensed. They blamed the influence of Morgenthau and Churchill’s science adviser, Lord Cherwell (Dr. F. A. Lindemann, known as “the Prof”); Stimson called it “Semitism gone wild for vengeance.”
The details of the agreement quickly leaked, producing an unexpected public uproar. McCloy drafted for Stimson a memo citing the aims proclaimed at the Atlantic Charter Conference three years earlier. “Under the Atlantic Charter,” McCloy argued, “victors and vanquished alike are entitled to freedom from economic want.” Roosevelt, as he was prone to do, immediately began fudging his intentions. “No one wants to make Germany a wholly agricultural nation again,” the President announced at the end of September. The following month he postponed any further discussion. “In view of the fact that we have not occupied Germany yet,” he said somewhat illogically, “I cannot agree at this moment as to what kind of Germany we want in every detail.”
McCloy then proceeded to do what he did best: hammer out a vague compromise policy that suited his objectives. Working with the Treasury and State departments, he began revising JCS 1067. The directive, intended as an “interim” guide for military occupiers, said there should be “no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany,” but it also contained a broad loophole that called for “the production or maintenance of goods and services” necessary to prevent epidemics or serious civil unrest.
The debate over how harsh to be in exacting reparations from Germany was left unsettled for the time being, and it would come back to bedevil the wartime alliance. But once again, in the absence of a clear policy decision, the way the issue was coordinated and administered by men such as McCloy proved to be as important as the way it was finally decided. When Lucius Clay got around to implementing the directive, “he did precisely what the War Department expected him to do,” McCloy later noted. “He whittled away the unworkable clauses of JCS 1067 empirically and piecemeal.” Two years later, while visiting Churchill at his country home, McCloy brought up the Morgenthau Plan. “He hastily repudiated it,” McCloy wrote in his journal. “Damned Morgenthau and the Prof—said they were Shylocks.”
Until the fall of 1944, before the Kremlin’s brutal response to the Warsaw uprising and before it became clear that Germany would soon be defeated, Harriman viewed the U.S.S.R. as a somewhat schizophrenic ally, one that was prone to erratic lurches from friendship to paranoid fury yet was nonetheless still a partner in the cause of peace. The problem of Poland and the prodding of Kennan, however, had begun to force a dramatic change in Harriman’s outlook. The Soviet Union, he came to feel, was more than just a difficult partner: it was a nation with aims and motives that fundamentally clashed with those of the West.
In a letter to Hopkins in September, Harriman explained that the Soviets seemed determined to impose their will on weaker nations rather than join in a collective peace. “Unless we take issue with the present policy,” he wrote, “there is every indication the Soviet Union will become a world bully.” America’s generous attitude was seen in Moscow as a sign of weakness, he argued, and should be replaced by “a firm but friendly quid pro quo approach.”
When Hull asked the Moscow embassy to provide an analysis of Soviet attitudes, Harriman told Kennan to prepare a draft. “I slept on the questions we were talking about last night,” Kennan said, handing Harriman his notes the next day, “and these are the results.” As they worked on the response, Kennan had his first real chance to shape Harriman’s philosophy. Although signed by the ambassador, most of the ideas in the two cables they sent were pure Kennan.
The U.S., unaware of the Soviet tendency to use words differently, had underestimated what Stalin meant by his desire for “friendly governments” on his borders, the cables reported. Recent events indicated the Kremlin’s secret war goal: a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe firmly under Moscow’s control. A year later the idea of a divided Europe half dominated by Moscow would not seem so surprising; in September of 1944, the vision was a shocking one. “I believe that it is their intention to have a positive sphere of influence over their western neighbors,” said Harriman’s report.
Kennan had been arguing that yes, of course this was true, but the U.S. neither could nor should care about preventing Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. This was the only major point on which Harriman and Kennan disagreed. In the telegrams, Harriman raised Kennan’s view only to debunk it. “It can be argued that American interests need not be concerned,” Harriman said. “What frightens me, however, is that when a country begins to extend its influence by strong-arm methods under the guise of security, it is difficult to see how a line can be drawn. If the policy is accepted that the Soviet Union has the right to penetrate her immediate neighbors for security, penetration of the next immediate neighbors becomes at a certain time equally logical.”
In his rejected draft, Kennan explained his arguments for conceding the Soviets a sphere of influence. If the Kremlin continued “to reserve moral judgment” on American actions in the Western Hemisphere, they would certainly expect to act freely in the Eastern European security belt they had won so dearly. Advocating free elections in Poland, Kennan said, would be foolish and futile. The important thing was to “determine in conjunction with the British the line beyond which we cannot afford to permit the Russians to exercise unchallenged power.” The Soviets had probably not yet decided how far to push their sphere and may be waiting “to see how we would react to their efforts toward expansion.” America and Britain must be “friendly but firm” in making clear where the line lay. Kennan called these ideas “realistic.” In a later incarnation, they would be known as containment.
The berating he had received from Bohlen before heading for Moscow had caused Kennan to question his deep aversion to the Soviet system. Perhaps things had changed, he thought. He was, he recalled, “prepared to reserve judgment until I could see for myself.” What he saw, however, only hardened his attitude. The isolation of foreigners had gotten worse, and Kennan found U.S. diplomats “treated as though we were the bearers of some species of the plague.” He even expressed sympathy for the German prisoners who were marched through Red Square by the Soviet Army.
In late September he put his thoughts into a thirty-five-page private essay, “Russia—Seven Years Later,” which expanded on the arguments he had been making to Harriman. “In it I poured forth, as in nothing else I ever wrote, the essence of what I knew about Russia,” Kennan said in his Memoirs. “It was a better paper, broader, more balanced, and more specific than the so-called X-Article written two and a half years later, which went in part over the same ground.”
Soviet pledges about collective security, Kennan wrote, were cynical ploys designed to further their ultimate aim, the domination of Eastern Europe. This drive had little to do with Marxist ideology. “Russian efforts in this area are directed to only one goal: power,” he wrote. “It is a matter of indifference to Moscow whether a given area is ‘communistic’ or not. All things being equal, Moscow might prefer to see it communized, although even that is debatable. But the main thing is that it should be amenable to Moscow’s influence.” Kennan would later come to think that ideology played a role in Soviet foreign policy, but at this point he saw Stalin (probably correctly) as just another in a long line of Russian nationalists pursuing expansionist policies to enhance their personal power and protect the empire from a hostile outside world.
With a combination of self-pity and conceit, Kennan concluded that Russia, riddled with contradictions, would always remain an enigma to Americans. “There will be much talk about the necessity for ‘understanding Russia’; but there will be no place for the American who is really willing to undertake this disturbing task,” he wrote. “The best he can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe he has been.”
Kennan gave his essay to Harriman with the notation that he “might want to glance at it” on his trip back to Washington in October. In his Memoirs, Kennan says he never found out whether the ambassador read it. In fact, he did. “Bob, I definitely want to read this on my way home,” he scrawled to his personal assistant, Robert Meiklejohn. Harriman then gave it to Harry Hopkins, urging him to read it. At Kennan’s request, Meiklejohn also passed along a copy to Bohlen, who after all had helped to provoke it.
One great believer in a “realistic” policy of spheres of influence, as opposed to a Wilsonian “idealism” about self-determination, was Winston Churchill. The British Prime Minister had been quietly working with the Soviets in dividing responsibility for Greece, Rumania, and the rest of the Balkans. Without consulting the State Department, Roosevelt tentatively agreed to such an arrangement. But he remained uneasy. Any deal, Roosevelt insisted, should apply only to short-term military matters; above all, it should not lay the groundwork for postwar spheres of influence.
Despite all his caveats, Roosevelt’s tacit acceptance of military spheres in the Balkans allowed Stalin to believe that the Atlantic Charter was largely window dressing. Roosevelt’s advisers thought no such thing, which heightened the conflicts that would occur after his death. But whatever Roosevelt’s real intentions were, Churchill took it upon himself in October of 1944 to visit Moscow and work out even more specific arrangements for spheres of action.
The big question was whether the U.S. would be a party to any such deal, and Churchill raised the issue by asking Roosevelt if Harriman could come along. “Averell’s assistance would of course be welcomed by us,” Churchill cabled. The President, hoping to fudge the issue, sent a lukewarm reply agreeing to let Harriman sit in. On the eve of Churchill’s departure, Roosevelt wrote an ambiguous message that merely wished Churchill “good luck.”
“Chip, get the hell over here in a hurry,” Hopkins barked to Bohlen on the telephone. Hopkins had intercepted the President’s blithe “good luck” cable, and he was worried that it implied Washington was washing its hands of the affairs of Europe. Bohlen, no less alarmed, agreed that Roosevelt’s wire left the impression that the U.S. would stand aside and let Churchill and Stalin make any deals they wanted regarding the fate of postwar Europe.
Bohlen quickly drafted two cables, one to Churchill, the other to Stalin. Both emphasized that there was “literally no question, military or political,” that might arise during the talks in which the U.S. would not have a vital interest. Harriman could serve as an observer, but he could not commit the U.S. to any agreements. Roosevelt sent the wires along with a personal letter to Harriman hammering the point home. Harriman later recalled being “quite unhappy with the President’s attitude.” He had hoped that Stalin and Churchill, with American approval, would be allowed to work out some hard deals, at least relating to Poland.
Churchill in fact had much more in mind, but Harriman did not discover this until three days after a startling deal had been struck. The secret arrangement came at a late-night meeting between Churchill and Stalin in the Kremlin. (Churchill incorrectly recounts in his memoirs that Harriman was present.) After arranging to have Mikolajczyk invited to Moscow for a new round of talks on Poland, Churchill suggested “let us settle our affairs in the Balkans.” Blatantly carving out spheres, the no-nonsense Prime Minister wrote on a scrap of paper the amount of influence London and Moscow would have in each country: 90 percent predominance in Rumania for Russia, 90 percent in Greece for Britain, 75 percent in Bulgaria for Russia, and a 50-50 split in Yugoslavia and Hungary.
Stalin took the paper, paused for a moment, made a large check on it with a blue pencil, and passed it back to Churchill. “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?” Churchill asked. “Let us burn the paper.”
“No, you keep it,” Stalin replied.
Harriman got some inkling of what was up when he had lunch with the two leaders the next day. In a wire to Roosevelt that evening he warned that Churchill “will try to work out some sort of spheres of influence with the Russians.” But it was not until two days later that the American discovered what had happened. Churchill was dictating memos in his bed that morning when Harriman walked in. The Prime Minister read a draft of a letter for Stalin outlining their agreement. The President, a startled Harriman replied, would repudiate it. When British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden came into the room, Churchill told him, “Averell doesn’t think we should send this letter.” Churchill then agreed that it was “wiser to let well alone.”
Eden nevertheless continued to work with Molotov in polishing up the percentage agreement, making a few numerical concessions to suit the Soviets. Despite Churchill’s later denials, both the British and the Soviets were aware that the implications of the deal went beyond merely determining temporary military spheres. Would Stalin assume that the U.S., by default, was acquiescing to the idea of dividing the liberated countries into political spheres? Harriman was worried. “Churchill has been using the unpopular term ‘spheres of influence,’” he wired Roosevelt. What the British were seeking, he explained, was a “practical arrangement” on responsibility for problems in the Balkans, and “they have explained to Stalin and Molotov that they have no authority to commit us.” Harriman went on to emphasize that the plan should not be seen as a precedent for carving Eastern Europe into spheres. “They put Poland in an entirely different category as the Polish question requires a specific solution involving all of us.”
Bohlen was among those infuriated when Harriman cabled Washington with news of Churchill’s deal. “Aside from its cynicism, the arrangement was unrealistic,” Bohlen later wrote. It was ludicrous to trust the Russians to abide by any power-sharing formula. “A non-Communist Premier with Communist ministers would be like a woman trying to stay half pregnant.”
Kennan, on the other hand, told Harriman that the U.S. should wash its hands of the Balkans. Since America had “no effective means of influencing” what happened there, it should assume no “moral responsibility” for the situation. Americans, Kennan added, “have been allowed to hope that the Soviet government would enter into an international security organization. We are now faced with the prospect of having our people disabused of this illusion.”
Churchill’s visit to Moscow prompted the usual outward displays of Allied friendship. Stalin gratefully accepted a bust of Roosevelt from Harriman and fussed about his grand office deciding how it should be displayed. During one of the celebrations, Harriman danced with Madame Litvinov, who candidly confided that “the U.S. should always remember to be firm and not try to ingratiate itself in its international dealings.” Her husband, the former Foreign Minister and wily survivor, later asked an American whether it was true that Harriman had a fortune of $100 million. Added the old Bolshevik: “How can a man with $100 million look so sad?”
Harriman, of course, generally sported a somewhat blank hangdog expression. But in October of 1944, he seemed especially forlorn. He had decided it was time to return home to convince Washington that the outlook for Soviet-American cooperation was bleak at best. Even James Forrestal, later one of the most agitated of hard liners, still harbored hopes that Harriman considered dangerously naïve. “There is a great admiration here for the Russians and, I think, an honest desire, even on the part of the so-called ‘capitalist quarters,’ to find an accommodation with them,” the Navy Secretary wrote his friend.
When Harriman arrived in Washington, he was careful not to inflame public opinion on the eve of the election between Roosevelt and Thomas Dewey. With his own money the ambassador bought radio time to speak on FDR’s behalf. “Never in the history of the world,” he said, “has a nation had so great an opportunity to play such a vital role in affecting the course of history.” At an off-the-record press briefing, he studiously downplayed the dire nature of the Polish situation. Russia’s concern with having “friendly” countries along her border was “realistic,” he said, adding that he was “hopeful” that talks in Moscow would lead to “an independent Poland as we understand it, selecting her own government.”
To the President, with whom he had five long talks, Harriman was more candid about his concerns. The problem, as he saw it, was not Communism but Stalinist-style systems. “I have tried to impress the President that our principal interest in Eastern Europe is to see that the Soviets do not set up puppet governments under the Soviet system supported by the secret police,” he wrote in his notes of the visit. Roosevelt seemed unconcerned. Noted Harriman: “I do not believe that I have convinced the President of the importance of a vigilant, firm policy.”
One person who was shaken by Harriman’s tales was Stimson, a man of deep faith in the possibility of postwar cooperation. The ambassador stopped by the War Secretary’s office one Monday morning and described how the Soviets were establishing secret-police forces to dominate the countries they were ostensibly liberating. Stimson, who cherished above all the ideal of individual liberty, began what was to be a long and naïve crusade, one that would affect his attitude on the control of atomic weapons. “The foundation of our success” in dealing with the Soviets, he told Harriman, was convincing them to abandon repressive police-state practices. Harriman replied that he considered this impossible in the Soviet Union itself, but perhaps the Kremlin could be prevented from introducing the system in countries they occupied.
That afternoon, Stimson called McCloy into his office to discuss the issue. Paraphrasing his mentor, Elihu Root, Stimson said that the use of secret police “is the most abhorrent way” that governments can destroy individual freedom. The next night, at a dinner the McCloys hosted for the Stimsons and the Harrimans, the ambassador was grilled about the details of Soviet secret-police methods. “Freedom cannot exist in countries where the government uses a secret police to dominate its citizens,” Stimson noted in his diary, “and there is nothing to choose from between the Gestapo which the Germans have used and the OGPU which the Russians have historically used.”
Because the Red Army was already occupying most of Eastern Europe, Harriman felt that the only way to prevent Moscow from imposing its system was for the U.S. to have some form of leverage. Thus he continued to support a loan to the Soviets for postwar reconstruction. In January of 1945, soon after he returned to Moscow, Harriman was summoned to the Kremlin by Molotov and was presented with an extraordinary offer: the Soviets would be willing to help the U.S. avoid a postwar recession by accepting a $6 billion loan. “As a banker I’ve had many requests for loans,” Harriman recalled, “but Molotov’s was the strangest.”
Nonetheless, Harriman thought it opened up possibilities. “I feel we should entirely disregard the unconventional nature of the document,” he cabled Washington, “and chalk it up to ignorance of normal business procedures.” It should be made clear to the Russians, he added, that U.S. aid would depend on responsible Soviet behavior in Poland and elsewhere.
When the three wartime leaders met at their second summit in the Crimean resort city of Yalta in early February, it soon became clear that the enticement of a loan was not enough to make the Soviets concede on Poland. After the first night’s discussion ended in a stalemate, the President asked Bohlen to draft a letter for Stalin pointing out the dire consequences if, just as their armies were converging, the Allied leaders could not agree on which Polish government to recognize.
Instead of being resolved, the differences were papered over. “The Provisional Government which is now functioning in Poland should be reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad,” read the final communiqué. The new government, it added, “shall be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible.”
The words sounded reassuring, but ahead lay tough negotiations to put them into effect. Perhaps one hint of the eventual problem came when Churchill told Stalin that the first Polish election would have to be pure and above reproach, “like Caesar’s wife.” Replied Stalin: “They said that about her, but in fact she had her sins.” Harriman was designated, along with Molotov and Britain’s Archibald Clark Kerr (later Lord Inverchapel), to go back to Moscow and undertake the difficult task of putting the agreement into effect.
Bohlen and Harriman strongly suspected that the Polish talks would ultimately fail. “There was an expression we used at the embassy at the time—that trading with the Russians you had to buy the same horse twice,” Harriman later wrote. “I had that feeling about the Polish agreement and said as much to Bohlen.” They both still believed that spheres of influence could be avoided. During a break in the conference, Bohlen told Vishinsky that the American people would never permit the rights of small nations to be denied. Americans should learn to follow their leaders, the Russian caustically responded. “You should come to the U.S. and try telling that to the people,” Bohlen countered.
Kennan had nothing but contempt for the idealistic “Declaration on Liberated Europe” that Bohlen helped to write at Yalta and for Roosevelt’s Grand Design of a postwar alliance between Russia and the West. The accord on Poland seemed to him “the shabbiest sort of equivocation,” and in comments he wrote for himself when the text of the Yalta agreement reached him in Moscow, Kennan wondered whether a “compromise peace” with Germany might be preferable.
Above all, Kennan was distressed at Bohlen’s happy-go-lucky tendency to act as “a partisan of the moment,” to go along with the prevailing policy rather than stick up for his principles. Back on speaking terms, but still anguished over their argument a few months earlier, Kennan unloaded his feelings in a gloomy letter he typed and sent to his friend in Yalta.
“Why could we not make a decent and definitive compromise with it—divide Europe frankly into spheres of influence—keep ourselves out of the Russian sphere and keep the Russians out of ours?” he asked. He tied this proposal to a strategy of Soviet containment. “We have refused to name any limit for Russian expansion and Russian responsibilities.”
Bohlen, in an almost illegible scrawl, dashed off an angry response. “The ‘constructive’ suggestions that you make are frankly naïve to a degree,” he wrote. “They may well be optimum from an abstract point of view. But as practical suggestions they are utterly impossible. Foreign policies of that kind cannot be made in a democracy. Only totalitarian states can make and carry out such policies.” He argued that trying to force further assurances out of the Russians would be useless. “Either our pals intend to limit themselves or they don’t,” he wrote. “I submit, as the British say, that the answer is not yet clear. But what is clear is that the Soyuz [Soviet Union] is here to stay, as one of the major factors in the world. Quarreling with them would be so easy, but we could always come to that.” Bohlen, loyal to Roosevelt’s optimistic outlook, did not yet believe such a quarrel would be necessary.
As the talks in Moscow over Poland sputtered along during the weeks after Yalta, Harriman’s pessimism grew. “We are going through the usual Russian tactics of trying to wear us down,” he informed Washington. The Soviets stretched the vague accord to its limits by insisting that the Lublin leadership could veto the selection of other Poles for inclusion in the talks. As Kennan translated (“with boredom and disgust”) the many hours of wangling, it became clear to Harriman that the Soviets and their Lublin clients would permit Mikolajczyk and his London colleagues only token positions at best. “We began to realize that Stalin’s language was somewhat different from ours,” he later recalled. “‘Friendly neighbors’ had an entirely different connotation to him than to us.”
Harriman’s cables back to Washington became increasingly bitter. “I am outraged,” he told Roosevelt after one session with Molotov in March. Unless the U.S. was prepared to be firm, he wired on April 2, “the Soviet Government will become convinced that they can force us to accept any of their decisions on all matters and it will be increasingly difficult to stop their aggressive policy.” The next day he reported that the Polish talks had reached the “breaking point,” and he asked permission to return home.
Stettinius, who had taken over from Cordell Hull as Secretary of State, refused to embrace Harriman’s hard-line prognosis. The ambassador was told to stay in Moscow and try to salvage the relationship. But Harriman’s cables were beginning to have an impact in Washington. Discussion of them dominated the State-War-Navy meetings that McCloy chaired, and Navy Secretary Forrestal devoted thirty pages of his diary in April to copies of Harriman’s official dispatches.
Even more bitter were the cables Harriman wrote but chose not to send. “I feel that the time has come for us to reorient our whole attitude and our method of dealing with the Soviet government,” he said in a March 21 message that he decided to hold until he could deliver it to Washington personally. “Unless we wish to accept the 20th century barbarian invasion of Europe, with repercussions extending further and in the East as well, we must find ways to arrest the Soviet domineering policy.” At the end of the eight-page memo he concluded: “If we don’t face these issues squarely now, history will record the period of the next generation as the Soviet Age.”
On the back of some embassy stationery, Harriman wrote on April 10 another cable that he decided not to send. “Our relations have come to such a pass that no halfway measures will do,” it said. “I recommend in the strongest terms I can express that I be given some concrete means of showing Soviet officials that their outrageous actions against us are affecting their vital interests. The longer we wait, the more difficult it will be and the more drastic the action on our part will have to be.”
As a way to strengthen the West’s hand against Soviet encroachment, Harriman was developing a new strategy, one that would grow in acceptance and finally burst forth two years later in the Marshall Plan. He first sketched it out in his unsent March 21 message. “I therefore urge every consideration be given to assisting the welfare of the civilian population” in Western Europe, Harriman wrote. “This policy can be justified as a war measure, but from the standpoint of winning the peace there can be no doubt of its importance. All reasonable efforts should be made to strengthen France, Belgium, Holland, Greece and even Italy.”
Harriman took pains to deny that this plan would result in an Anglo-American sphere or the division of Europe, though that indeed was its logical consequence. “I am not proposing the concept of spheres of influence, but a forceful policy of supporting those people that have the same general outlook towards and concepts of life that we do,” he wrote in the unsent telegram. “Stalin himself told me once that communist revolution finds fertile seed in capitalist economic breakdowns. When once communist dictatorship, backed by secret police, gets hold, personal liberties and democracy as we understand the word end. There is no turning back.”
Two weeks later, Harriman finally did send his thoughts on the rebuilding of Western Europe to Washington. “Unless we are willing to live in a world dominated largely by Soviet influence,” he cabled, “we must use our economic power to assist those countries that are naturally friendly to our concepts in so far as we can possibly do so. The only hope of stopping Soviet penetration is the development of sound economic conditions in these countries.” American policy should be one of “taking care of our Western allies and other areas under our responsibility first, allocating to Russia what may be left.” The reason he gave for embarking on this plan was unabashedly hard line: “We must clearly realize that the Soviet program is the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and democracy as we know it.”
When New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger visited Moscow in early April, he found Harriman deeply disturbed. He looked haggard and had a tic, like a wink, in his right eye. The impasse over Poland seemed unbreakable, and Harriman was beginning to express some of Kennan’s ideas about containment. “Averell says we must notify the Russians just where we will not permit them to go,” Sulzberger wrote in his diary. “Otherwise, there will be trouble.”
There were signs that Roosevelt was moving toward Harriman’s position during his last two months in office. He became enraged by Stalin’s surliness at being excluded from U.S. Army discussions in Berne of a German peace feeler. In late March, he was handed a Harriman cable as he was leaving a lunch at Warm Springs. Anna Hoffman, who was there, recalls that the President banged his fists on his wheelchair and proclaimed: “Averell is right. We can’t do business with Stalin.” As Harriman later recalled: “I think he was thoroughly alive to the fact that they hadn’t kept their agreements and he was quite bitter about it. I felt his Dutch jaw was out and he wasn’t going to be pushed around by Stalin anymore.”
Yet just before he died, Roosevelt was still wavering, still harboring hopes that the Grand Alliance that had just about won the war could conquer the problems of peace. In the President’s final cable to Harriman, from Warm Springs on April 12, he rejected Harriman’s advice that he toughen his cable to Stalin regarding the Berne negotiations. “It is my desire to consider the Berne incident a minor misunderstanding,” he said.
Harriman’s attitudes toward the Russians at the time were no easier to pigeonhole than the President’s. The ambassador’s cries of despair, unlike Kennan’s, came not because he felt it was useless to deal with Moscow. Indeed, it was almost the opposite: Harriman, the shrewd and practical businessman, deeply believed in the desirability of achieving a workable arrangement. He urged a tough policy not because he felt it inevitable that Soviet-American cooperation would fail, but because he thought such a strategy had the best chance of succeeding. “In spite of recent developments,” he wired the State Department in a long report on April 6, “I am still satisfied that if we deal with the Soviets on a realistic basis, we can in time attain a workable basis for our relations.”
Although his outlook on the Kremlin had shifted dramatically during the final year of the war, there was still a constant refrain in Harriman’s advice: America’s attitude must be “firm but friendly.” Give him the right bargaining chips, the Wall Street entrepreneur thought, and he could reach suitable accords. That is why he continued to support a postwar loan to the Soviets, “although we should at all times make it plain that our cooperation is dependent upon a reciprocal cooperative attitude of the Soviet Government in other matters.”
This was the balancing act he so anxiously wanted to discuss with Roosevelt personally. But FDR would never get a chance to reply to Harriman’s telegram about the Soviet loan or summon him home for consultation. He died the day after it was sent.
Roosevelt’s death would finally give Harriman a chance to return to Washington and firm up the nebulous consensus on how to handle the Russian bear. That task was both easier and far more important now that Roosevelt, who harbored the conceit that he could conduct foreign policy out of his hip pocket, had been succeeded by a man whose only trip overseas had been as an artillery officer during World War I.