April 12
Although he controlled a vast empire, stretching across eleven time zones, Stalin’s own world was very small. He spent most of the war shuttling back and forth between the Kremlin and what his aides called “the nearby dacha,” his country retreat on the western outskirts of Moscow. He rarely ventured outside the capital. His trips to Tehran and Yalta to meet with Roosevelt and Churchill were highly unusual breaks from a routine that consisted of long nights in his Kremlin office, continuous meetings with military and political leaders, and an occasional movie or dinner for relaxation. The supreme commander of the Red Army visited the front on just one occasion, in August 1943, largely for propaganda purposes, to show that he was directing the battle. A memorial plaque was attached to the little peasant hut where he stayed the night, transforming it into a national shrine.
The “nearby dacha” had been built especially for Stalin in 1931 on a princely estate known as Volinskoe, near the village of Kuntsevo. Like many of his personal retreats, the wooden building was painted green for camouflage purposes. A twenty-acre thicket of firs and two tall fences, the outer one fifteen feet high, ensured complete privacy. The seven rooms on the ground floor were large and utilitarian, suitable for hosting banquets and Politburo meetings but devoid of personal touches. A second floor was added during the war. Shortly after completing the renovations, the architect Miron Merzhanov disappeared into the Gulag. The nature of his infraction was never explained to his family: Merzhanov’s son was reminded of Ivan the Terrible, who ordered the blinding of his favorite architect so that he could never build anything as beautiful as St. Basil’s Cathedral. The vozhd was forced to abandon his dacha during the most dangerous months of the German siege of Moscow in 1941 when mines were laid around the estate. When Churchill visited Moscow the following year, he was put up at Volinskoe without being told that it was Stalin’s personal home. He was impressed by the “spotless cleanliness” and the “blazing almost dazzling electric lights.” An aide described the place as “vulgarly furnished and possessed of every convenience a Soviet commissar’s heart could desire,” including a spacious bomb shelter ninety feet below the garden.
With other traffic banned from the road, it took Stalin fewer than twenty minutes to make the six-mile drive from Kuntsevo to the Kremlin in a convoy of black American Packards. Awestruck pedestrians watched the cars go past as they trudged through the sludge of the late Moscow winter along dim-lit streets lined with empty stores. The poet Boris Slutsky captured the scene in a few lines of verse:
Once I was walking along the Arbat
When God drove by in five cars,
Trembling bodyguards stood around
Almost hunchbacked from fear
In their mouse-like coats.
It was late, and it was early.
From the Arbat, Moscow’s main shopping street, the slow-moving cortege turned into Afanasev Lane. Stalin entered the Kremlin by the Borovitskaya Gate, driving past the Grand Kremlin Palace and the gold-domed cathedrals overlooking the Moscow River. The convoy then turned left, toward a three-story, neoclassical building with a green roof that was built in the form of a triangle around three inner courtyards. This was the Senate building, the seat of Soviet power. A red flag fluttered from the domed roof overlooking Red Square and Lenin’s mausoleum, on the big, right-angled corner of the triangle. Farther along the Kremlin wall, next to the Nikolskaya Tower, was the entrance known as the Little Corner. A summons to the Little Corner held many terrors. One of Stalin’s generals, Nikolai Bulganin, recalled that the dictator could extend a friendly greeting and then ask menacingly, “Why are your eyes so shifty today?” An official invited to meet with Stalin never knew where he would go next: “home or to jail.”
Encircled by massive red walls, one and a half miles in perimeter, the Kremlin was Muscovy’s inner citadel, a fortress within a fortress. It had been the residence of Russian tsars until the early eighteenth century, when Peter the Great built a new capital on the Baltic Sea that served as his “window to the West.” The Bolsheviks moved the capital back to Moscow in 1918, and Lenin took up residence in the Kremlin on the third floor of the Senate building. Commissars competed with one another for the best apartments. Stalin lived in the Poteshny Palace on the other side of the Kremlin until his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, shot herself through the chest in November 1932. In despair over Nadezhda’s suicide, he persuaded his friend and later victim Nikolai Bukharin to swap apartments. He then moved to the Little Corner, and it was here that he played host to Churchill in August 1942, introducing the prime minister to his sixteen-year-old daughter, Svetlana. The freckly redhead helped lay the table but was dismissed as soon as the conversation turned to “the usual guns, howitzers and airplanes.” Svetlana later came to believe that her mother’s death deprived Stalin of “the last vestiges of human warmth. He was now free of her moderating and, by the same token, impeding presence. His skeptical, harsh judgment of men only hardened.”
The modest ground-floor flat, four rooms with vaulted ceilings, was located directly beneath Stalin’s office on the second floor of the Senate building. A permanent hush reigned in the so-called Special Sector where the top Bolshevik leaders had their offices. A green carpet trimmed with red ran down the center of the long corridor. Access to the vozhd was controlled by his secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, who sat in front of a high window in the anteroom framed by a pair of drapes that filtered out the meager sunshine. The bald-headed major general kept a detailed log of everybody who entered Stalin’s study, remaining at his post until three or four in the morning. He was doggedly loyal to his master, despite a series of humiliations culminating with the arrest of his young wife on charges of Trotskyism at the height of the purges in 1937. “Don’t worry,” Stalin had told his assistant when he attempted to intercede on his wife’s behalf. “We’ll find you another wife.” A pair of massive oak doors to the left of Poskrebyshev’s immaculately tidy desk led directly to Stalin’s office.
Stalin’s desk was at the far-right-hand corner of the long, oak-paneled room, piled high with maps, documents, and special Kremlin telephones. A portrait of Lenin sitting at his desk hung just above the general secretary’s head, gazing down with benign approval on his successor. An ornate porcelain stove stood in the far-left corner. Next to the stove, taking up most of the left-hand side of the room, opposite the windows, was a long conference table covered with heavy green felt. Breaking with Leninist tradition, Stalin ordered portraits of the tsarist generals Aleksandr Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov to be installed above the conference table after the Nazi invasion. The Marxist commissar saw no contradiction in the clashing images. He identified with the tsars who had built the Kremlin, studied their military campaigns, and pursued a similar policy of territorial expansion to ensure the security of Mother Russia. In his mind, there was a direct connection between his own achievements and the feats of his imperial predecessors. It was impossible to escape the ghosts of the past. Shortly before incorporating the Baltic States into the Soviet Union in June 1940, he escorted the foreign minister of Lithuania through the darkened alleyways of the Kremlin. “Ivan the Terrible used to walk through here,” he reminded his guest.
As he pored over maps of Europe in his Kremlin office toward the end of March, Stalin worried that he might win the war but lose the peace. After being delayed for weeks in the Ardennes, the western Allies were suddenly making suspiciously rapid progress. Churchill was boasting about his surprise visit to the western front on March 25 when he strolled “unmolested” on the German-occupied side of the sandbagged Rhine River. The city of Frankfurt had fallen to George Patton’s Third Army on March 29. In the East, by contrast, the Soviet offensive had slowed dramatically. Zhukov’s forces were no closer to Berlin at the end of March than they had been during the Yalta conference at the beginning of February. Stronger-than-expected German resistance in Hungary had obliged the Red Army to delay its drive against Vienna. Even more alarming, from the Russian point of view, was the disparity in casualty figures between the two fronts. On a typical day, nearly eight hundred Germans were killed by the Red Army, compared with just sixty German combat deaths on the western front. Conversely, roughly twenty-five hundred German soldiers were reported “missing” on the eastern front each day, compared with ten times that number in the West. The Germans were surrendering “with fanatical persistence” to the Americans, in Ilya Ehrenburg’s contemptuous phrase, while conducting a desperate last-ditch stand against the Russians.
Stalin used the same type of reasoning to analyze the behavior of Roosevelt and Churchill that he applied to his own subordinates. Did they have an objective reason to betray him? The answer was obviously yes. Evidence of motivation was evidence of guilt, just as it had been with the victims of the Moscow show trials. The spectacle of German soldiers surrendering en masse to Patton and Bernard Montgomery suggested some kind of deal. In return for treating the Nazis more leniently, the western armies would meet the Red Army much farther east than originally envisaged. If they made an alliance with Nazi generals opposed to Hitler, they might even turn against the Soviet Union. The fact that Stalin himself had concluded a nonaggression pact with Hitler’s Germany back in 1939 only added weight to his suspicions. He assumed that other politicians were no less cynical than himself.
Several recent incidents contributed to Stalin’s paranoia. A Reuters dispatch from Montgomery’s headquarters on March 27 reported that British and American troops were encountering no resistance as they raced toward the heart of Germany. Stalin was also alarmed by rumors of negotiations for a mass surrender of German troops in northern Italy. It turned out that the top American spy in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, had held a secret meeting in Berne with the commander of SS forces in northern Italy, Karl Wolff. More contacts were planned. When Molotov inquired about the meeting, he was told the talks were at a very preliminary stage. There was no need for Russian participation. This explanation did not satisfy Stalin, who wrote an angry letter to Roosevelt on March 29 accusing him of violating the Yalta agreements. He claimed that the Germans had already “succeeded in shifting three divisions from Northern Italy to the Soviet front.” To signal his displeasure, Stalin announced that Molotov would not attend the inaugural conference of the United Nations in San Francisco on April 25, a project dear to FDR’s heart. The official reason for the cancellation of Molotov’s trip merely added insult to injury: his presence was required in Moscow for a session of the rubber-stamp Supreme Soviet.
Stalin also suspected that the U.S. military had fed the Red Army false information about German troop movements. On February 20, General Marshall had relayed the contents of an intelligence intercept suggesting that the Sixth SS Panzer Army was being transferred from the Ardennes region toward Vienna for a planned thrust into southern Poland. The information turned out to be wrong. The elite tank unit had ended up in the Lake Balaton area of Hungary, from which it launched a damaging offensive against Soviet troops around Budapest. The most likely explanation for the misinformation—a change in orders from Hitler—did not occur to the morbidly mistrustful Soviet leader. He voiced concerns about a western sellout during a meeting with Czechoslovak leaders at the end of March. “We are fighting the Germans and will do so until the end,” he told them. “But we must bear in mind that our allies will try to save the Germans and come to an arrangement with them. We will be merciless towards the Germans but our allies will treat them with kid gloves.”
The more power Stalin accumulated, the more he felt threatened. Newly acquired territories in eastern Europe provided Russia with security in depth but were also a source of instability. The vozhd could not forget that the Soviet Union had lost half its European territory in fewer than six months in the summer and fall of 1941. Millions of Balts, Ukrainians, and Poles had greeted the Nazi invaders as liberators. Entire units had surrendered to the enemy and were now waging war against the Red Army under traitors like General Andrei Vlasov. Stalin had serious concerns about the reliability of the Communist-led Polish First Army, formed on Soviet soil from Polish soldiers captured during the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in September 1939. Reports from the NKVD suggested that many First Army troops were eager to join the anti-Communist army of General Anders. “When the Polish troops meet up, the majority of our soldiers and officers will pass over to the Anders army,” a First Army commander was reported to have confided to an informer. “We’ve suffered enough from the Soviets in Siberia.” Hoping to forestall a future rebellion, the NKVD carried out mass arrests of First Army soldiers with relatives serving under Anders.
Stalin was obsessed by the fear that the western Allies might make a dash for Berlin and reach the city before the Red Army. He was determined not to be robbed of his grand prize. On March 29, he ordered his two top field commanders, Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev, to fly to Moscow to outline their plans for capturing the capital of the Third Reich.
The vozhd was in a cold and suspicious mood on the evening of March 31 when the American and British ambassadors arrived for an appointment at the Little Corner accompanied by their top military advisers. Harriman and Clark Kerr wanted to present a letter from the supreme Allied commander, General Eisenhower, outlining his plan for the final defeat of Nazi Germany. Poskrebyshev had to choreograph the schedule carefully so that the envoys would not run into Zhukov, who was due to present his own report to Stalin later that night. The boss did not like his underlings sharing information with westerners.
Harriman handed Stalin a Russian translation of Eisenhower’s message explaining that his top priority was the encirclement and destruction of German forces in the industrial Ruhr region. His military experts spread their maps out on the long table to explain the next phase of the plan. Instead of aiming for Berlin, American and British forces would mount their “main effort” through central Germany, meeting the Red Army a hundred miles south of the capital, in the Leipzig-Dresden area. A secondary line of attack would come through southern Germany and Austria to prevent Hitler from falling back on his Alpine Fortress, known to western military planners as the National Redoubt. As he listened to Harriman and Deane describe Eisenhower’s intentions, the suspicious dictator “seemed to open up.” He praised the plan, saying it would accomplish the goal of cutting Germany in half. The following day, April 1, he sent a message back to Eisenhower formally approving his strategy.
“Berlin has lost its former strategic importance,” Stalin wrote. “The Soviet High Command therefore plans to allot secondary forces in the direction of Berlin.” A future chronicler of the fall of Berlin, Antony Beevor, would describe this missive as “the greatest April fool in modern history.”
Far from considering Berlin of minor importance, the vozhd was convinced that it would be the scene of the climactic battle of the war. The Reichstag and Reich Chancellery were the symbols of Nazi power, just as the Kremlin was the symbol of Soviet power. Unlike Eisenhower, who thought almost exclusively in military terms, Stalin thought in political-strategic terms. He would never have allowed his generals to take the kind of decisions that FDR routinely delegated to his supreme commander. The very fact that Eisenhower was authorized to communicate directly with Stalin on such an important matter, without consulting his British Allies, or even the president, illustrated the gulf between the Soviet and American systems and strategies for waging war.
Eisenhower’s principal goal—fully endorsed by Roosevelt—was to win the war at the lowest possible cost in American and Allied lives. The postwar arrangements were not his concern. Stalin, by contrast, never gave much thought to the human cost of his decisions but was obsessed by the political consequences. The capture of the enemy capital would seal his reputation as the conqueror of Nazi Germany, leaving him in virtually unchallenged control of a huge swath of eastern Europe. He was ready to pay a heavy price in Soviet and German lives to achieve his goal.
The American and British visitors filed out of the Little Corner office at 8:50 p.m., after a fifty-minute session with Stalin. Zhukov was admitted to the inner sanctum twenty minutes later, according to Poskrebyshev’s meticulous log. The commander of the First Belorussian Front had been delayed reaching Moscow by the same violent storm that forced the crash landing of the plane carrying the Polish Home Army leaders. After his plane came down in Minsk, he continued his journey by train and had to rush to the Kremlin for his appointment with the vozhd.
The squat, powerfully built marshal was one of the very few Red Army officers who did not quake at the knees when talking to Stalin. His competence and energy had made him indispensable to the Soviet warlord, particularly during the panic that followed the German invasion in June 1941. A former cavalryman, Zhukov had managed to survive the terror that wiped out half of the Red Army leadership in 1937. He had been at Stalin’s side in good times and bad, serving as army chief of staff in the early weeks of the Nazi invasion before being sent to the front. In his own way, he was as ruthless as his master, although not as suspicious and devious. He delivered his orders in brusque staccatolike phrases: “Obey or die!” or “If the division is not in place by 9 a.m., I’ll have you shot.” He stopped the advance of the German armies in front of Moscow by forming “interceptor battalions” to shoot cowards and deserters. He was the master of the grand envelopment, involving the movement of million-strong armies, meticulous planning, and brutal execution. At both Stalingrad and Kursk, he drew overextended German forces deep into a trap that ended with their encirclement and destruction. He was both feared and loved by his men, who viewed him as a harsh taskmaster but a fierce professional. He treated them the same way Stalin treated him, like a coachman driving on his horses. “They love and pity the animals but the whip is always ready,” explained a Stalin crony, Lev Mekhlis. “The horse sees it and draws its own conclusions.” The vozhd regarded him both as an ally and as a threat. He ordered the NKVD to bug his Moscow apartment and keep a close watch on his aides.
After working with Stalin for so long, Zhukov had come to recognize his moods and tics, studying the way he stroked his mustache or played with his pipe. According to a biographer, the pipe was both “a prop and a weather vane.” If it was unlit, “it was a bad omen. If Stalin put it down, an explosion was imminent. Yet if he stroked his moustache with the mouthpiece of the pipe, this meant he was pleased.” Zhukov paid great attention to the dictator’s eyes. “He used to pace the room slowly, stopping now and then, coming up close to the person he was talking with and looking him straight in the face.” His eyes were “clear, tenacious, and seemed to envelop and pierce through the visitor.” In normal conversation, Stalin was “calm and sober-minded,” but this could change in a flash. When he lost his temper, he “grew pale, a bitter expression came to his eyes, and his gaze became heavy and spiteful.”
Moments after bidding farewell to the western envoys, Stalin was complaining to Zhukov that the German front in the West had “collapsed completely.” The “Hitlerites” were barely resisting the Americans and the British while vigorously reinforcing their positions in the East. To prove his point, the vozhd walked over to his desk and dug out a letter from “a foreign well-wisher,” subsequently identified as a Russian spy in the British Foreign Office.
“Read this.”
The letter claimed the Germans were trying to persuade the western Allies to agree to “a separate peace.” The Allies had allegedly rejected the overture, but Stalin was unconvinced. “I don’t think Roosevelt will violate the Yalta agreements, but as for Churchill, he’s capable of anything.”
Two days later, on April 2, Stalin gathered his military commanders to discuss the final assault on Berlin. This time, he included Zhukov’s archrival, Ivan Konev, who commanded the adjoining First Ukrainian Front. He ordered an aide to read a report describing a joint Anglo-American operation to seize Berlin before its capture by the Red Army. The document listed a series of preparatory measures being taken by Allied commanders to ensure the success of the operation.
“Well, who is going to take Berlin, us or the Allies?” Stalin asked his marshals, after his aide had finished reading the telegram. Konev rushed to reply.
“We will capture Berlin. And we will take it before the Allies.”
Stalin gave a half grin, indicating this was the right answer. “So that’s the kind of man you are.” He had succeeded in setting up a competition not just between the Russians and the Allies but among his own generals. He knew that Zhukov desperately wanted to crown his glittering military career by becoming the conqueror of Berlin and was already thinking of ways to cut the strutting little marshal down to size. He would allow Zhukov to stick to his plan of attacking the German capital from the east and the north but would encourage Konev to strike simultaneously from the south. To make this offensive possible, Stalin agreed to transfer an extra two reserve armies to Konev.
Maps were spread out on the table showing the disposition of the various forces and the proposed line of attack. As the two rivals looked on, Stalin traced a dotted line with a pencil to represent the demarcation line between their two army groups. He stopped drawing when he reached the town of Lübben, about fifty miles southeast of Berlin, which was supposed to be captured by the third day of the joint operation. He did not say a word, but the message was clear. The ultimate prize would go to the commander who displayed the most initiative, energy, and ruthlessness. The vozhd had assigned a total of 2.5 million men, 7,500 aircraft, 6,250 tanks, and 41,600 artillery pieces for what he confidently expected would be the final offensive of the Great Patriotic War. It would begin no later than April 16.
“Whoever breaks through first, let him take Berlin,” said Stalin, puffing his English Dunhill pipe, a gift from Churchill.
On March 30, as Stalin was planning the capture of Berlin, Roosevelt began a much-needed holiday in Georgia. He had taken a special overnight train from Washington, passing through Atlanta around noon. He reached the spa resort of Warm Springs after lunch. It was Good Friday, and the weather was perfect, “warm and sunny.” The usual crowd of well-wishers had gathered to greet him at the tiny railway station. He had been coming to Warm Springs since 1924, soon after contracting polio, and was viewed as an old friend by the five hundred or so inhabitants. He loved to swim in the fresh spring water that gushed out of nearby Pine Mountain at a constant temperature of eighty-eight degrees. The highly mineralized water relaxed his polio-wasted muscles and left him refreshed and invigorated. He built his own little white clapboard cottage on the southern edge of town and returned year after year.
A murmur ran through the crowd as the Secret Service men struggled to lift FDR out of his wheelchair and place him in the driver’s seat of his 1938 two-door Ford convertible. Normally, the president assisted the agents, using his muscular arms to swivel gracefully from one seat to the other. He was now deadweight, drained of energy. FDR still insisted on driving the hand-controlled Ford up to the “Little White House,” but he tired very easily, told fewer stories, and had no appetite. His administrative aide, Bill Hassett, sensed that the Boss was losing his zest for life. Hassett noticed small telltale signs, like the “feeble signature,” which now simply faded away, “the old boldness of stroke and liberal use of ink gone.” That evening, he blurted out his concerns to Howard Bruenn, the cardiologist who had accompanied the president to Yalta. “He is slipping away from us and no earthly power can keep him here.”
The spartan bungalow in the shadow of Pine Mountain was a place of refuge for FDR, the perfect place to unwind. Surrounded by tall Georgia pines, it consisted of three bedrooms and a kitchen clustered around a large living-dining room with a stone fireplace. The house was modestly furnished, with models of nineteenth-century schooners, a painting of John Paul Jones, and a few rustic chairs on the deck. There were no steps or doorsills, so the president was able to wheel himself around with a minimum of fuss. The simple, familiar surroundings provided emotional reassurance to Roosevelt at a time of increasing personal stress and isolation. He felt more estranged from his wife, Eleanor, than ever, feeling nagged by her constant stream of advice. They had ceased to be husband and wife in the romantic sense back in 1918 when Eleanor discovered a stack of love letters from his former secretary Lucy Mercer, but they had always been political partners. Now, Eleanor acknowledged, “He could no longer bear to have a real discussion, such as we had always had.” When Franklin announced his intention of traveling to Georgia to recuperate, Eleanor remained behind in Washington.
FDR was accompanied to Warm Springs by a few close aides; his Scottish terrier, Fala; and the usual coterie of adoring females. His cousins, Margaret Suckley and Laura Delano, occupied the two other bedrooms in the Little White House. His secretary, Grace Tully, was also on hand. These were the people with whom he was able to relax. They never pestered him with politics, the war, or foreign policy. Instead they attended to his physical needs, laughed at his jokes, and listened uncritically to whatever was on his mind. Unbeknownst to Eleanor, he had also made arrangements to receive a visit from Lucy, who had come back into his life more than two decades after their affair. She was now Lucy Rutherfurd, the widow of a rich New York socialite. She would be accompanied by an artist friend, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, whom she had commissioned to paint FDR’s portrait. The role of trusted intermediary between Lucy and Franklin was played by Anna Roosevelt, who felt that her father deserved “a few hours of much needed relaxation” from the burdens of international crises. Anna would later remember the statuesque Lucy as “a handsome, intelligent, quiet, and unobtrusive lady” with an “innate dignity and poise” who was a source of gay, lighthearted conversation for FDR. Unlike Eleanor, Lucy was “a wonderful listener, an intelligent listener in that she knew the right questions, while Mother would get in there and say ‘I think you are wrong, Franklin.’ ”
Even in Warm Springs, Roosevelt was still not entirely free of Eleanor. Soon after he arrived, his wife telephoned him to lobby for increased military assistance to the Yugoslav Partisans. She kept him on the phone for forty-five minutes, even after FDR explained that her requests were impractical. Bruenn was with the president at the time and took his blood pressure at the end of the phone conversation. He noticed that it had risen sharply, up fifty points from earlier readings. The “veins stood out on his forehead.”
Worries about Russia, and the postwar order in Europe, were also crowding in on FDR. Soon after arriving in Warm Springs, he was shocked to receive an insulting telegram from Stalin on April 3 accusing the western Allies of striking a secret deal with the Germans. The Soviet leader flatly rejected Roosevelt’s claim that the meeting in Switzerland between Dulles and Wolff amounted to no more than a tentative feeler. According to his information, the “Anglo-Americans” had promised the Germans an easing of the peace terms in return for an agreement “to open the front and permit the Anglo-American troops to advance to the east.” FDR was furious at Stalin for impugning his integrity. He took care to stifle any public criticism of Russia by his aides for fear of causing “irreparable harm” to the war effort. But the squabbling over Poland and the differences over Germany were making him question his entire approach to the Soviet Union. He was now more receptive to the arguments of advisers like Harriman who wanted to get tough with the Kremlin. “Averell is right,” he had told a friend on March 24, thumping his fists against his wheelchair. “We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.”
The president sent a telegram to Washington instructing Admiral Leahy, his chief of staff, to draft “an immediate reply” to Stalin, which was dispatched late at night on April 4. The exchange of messages marked a low point in relations between the leaders of the anti-Hitler alliance. FDR expressed “astonishment” at the claim that Eisenhower would accept anything less than the “unconditional surrender of enemy troops” on the western front. The recent advances on the western front were due to “military action,” and the “terrific impact of our air power,” not to any kind of secret deal. It would be “one of the great tragedies of history” if “distrust” and “lack of faith” were permitted to undermine the final victory over Nazi Germany. Roosevelt approved a final stinging sentence drafted by Leahy. “Frankly I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”
Stalin replied on April 7 with a more diplomatically worded message insisting that he had never doubted FDR’s “honesty and dependability.” At the same time, he did not back down from his main point, which was that the Germans had ceased to put up much resistance on the western front. “They continue to fight savagely with the Russians for some unknown junction, Zemlienitsa in Czechoslovakia, which they need as much as a dead man needs poultices, but surrender without any resistance such important towns in central Germany as Osnabrück, Mannheim, Kassel. Don’t you agree that such behavior of the Germans is more than strange and incomprehensible?”
While angry with Stalin, Roosevelt wanted to avoid a showdown. Unlike Churchill, he had no intention of using German territory to bargain with the Russians. The prime minister had been dismayed by Eisenhower’s message to Stalin ceding Berlin to the Red Army. In an April 1 cable to FDR, he stressed that the German capital remained of “high strategic importance” and predicted that the Russians would become even more quarrelsome if allowed to take Berlin in addition to Vienna. “From a political standpoint we should march as far east into Germany as possible,” he told FDR. “Should Berlin be in our grasp we should certainly take it.” Churchill was also upset by Eisenhower’s failure to discuss his military plans with the British prior to revealing them to Stalin. “There is only one thing that is worse than fighting with allies,” he grumbled to his top general, Alan Brooke, “and that is fighting without them.”
The prime minister’s arguments failed to convince Roosevelt, who agreed with Eisenhower that there was little point sacrificing hundreds of thousands of American lives to seize territory that had already been designated part of the Soviet occupation zone. Given the fact that American troops advancing into Germany outnumbered the British by two to one, Churchill had little choice but to back down. “I regard the matter as closed and to prove my sincerity I will use one of my very few Latin quotations,” he cabled on April 6, “Amantium irae amoris integratio est.” The White House Map Room provided a translation: “Lovers’ quarrels always go with true love.”
Dealing with all the conflicting political and military pressures was becoming increasingly burdensome for FDR. The great juggler could no longer keep all the balls in the air at once. Indeed, he could barely keep up with the minimum paperwork required of a president under the Constitution. His correspondence with Churchill and Stalin was conducted largely through ghostwriters in Washington like Leahy or Marshall. He slept late in the morning and took another long nap in the afternoon prior to a drive in the country in the early evening. His working day was squeezed into a couple of hours in the morning, during which he would glance at the newspapers, browse through the overnight telegrams from Washington, and sign a few bills and decrees. It required a huge effort to get to his books and beloved stamp collection, which were packed away in a long wooden crate that he now called “the coffin,” a touch of black humor that alarmed Grace Tully. Above all else, he looked forward to the arrival of Lucy Rutherfurd.
Monday, April 9, was the tenth day of the president’s vacation in Warm Springs, another beautiful, sunny day. His cousins had been preparing for Lucy’s arrival, filling the guest cottage with freshly cut flowers. When FDR woke up from his afternoon nap, he invited Daisy Suckley to join him and Fala for an excursion in the open presidential limousine. They headed east, toward Macon, Georgia. Lucy was driving in the opposite direction, west from South Carolina, with her artist friend and a photographer. They had agreed to meet somewhere along the road.
The president impatiently scanned every approaching car “imagining that it was slowing up.” After an eighty-five-mile drive, there was still no sign of Lucy, who was going through similar mental agony in her car, joking to Shoumatoff that “nobody loves us.” The sun was setting, and it was getting chilly. FDR put on his navy cape to serve as a windbreaker and reluctantly agreed to turn around. They stopped in front of a country drugstore for refreshments five miles from Warm Springs when Lucy appeared in her Cadillac. A beaming Roosevelt insisted that she join him for the ride back to the Little White House. The president looked “awfully tired” all evening but was in high spirits at dinner, which was served in the living room of the cottage. He mixed drinks for his guests and entertained them with stories about life in the tsar’s palace in Yalta. He had found the Russians to be “quite a nice crowd,” except for “a few sinister faces appearing here and there.”
“Did you like Stalin?” asked Shoumatoff, who was of White Russian descent.
FDR’s talent for combining the lighthearted with the macabre had not deserted him. “Yes, he was quite a jolly fellow,” he replied. “But I am convinced he poisoned his wife!”
The artist got down to work on Tuesday morning. She had the president pose for photographs in front of the bookcase in the living room. His cape helped conceal his gaunt frame, but his eyes stared off into the distance. The photographer snapped some shots of Lucy as well, an inscrutable smile on her lips. In the afternoon, Franklin and Lucy went off with Fala to visit one of his favorite places, Dowdell’s Knob, at the end of the Pine Mountain trail. FDR loved to come up to the rocky overhang, 1,395 feet above sea level, to have a picnic or simply stare out over the lush green valley. He once recommended the view from the knob as a certain cure for despair to a fellow polio sufferer. The president and his former lover talked and watched the setting sun for more than an hour as Fala romped around the car. “He came back with a good tan,” Suckley noted approvingly.
On Wednesday morning, the president turned his attention back to international affairs as he reviewed the overnight batch of messages from Washington. Eisenhower’s forces were mopping up the last pockets of German resistance in the Ruhr. The Russians had finally captured Königsberg, capital of East Prussia, soon to be renamed Kaliningrad. FDR finalized plans to address the inaugural conference of the United Nations in San Francisco, “come hell or high water,” as Hassett reported in his diary. He approved a conciliatory message to Stalin declaring an end to the quarrel over the Berne meeting, “which now appears to have faded into the past without having accomplished any useful purpose.” Such “minor misunderstandings,” the president told Stalin, should not be permitted to arise in the future. Pretending that an intractable problem did not exist was a classic FDR gambit that he used in his private life as well as his public life. “If something was unpleasant and he didn’t want to know about it, he just ignored it and never talked about it,” his wife later remarked. “He always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough it would settle itself.”
The message to Stalin was drafted by Leahy. But FDR dictated a companion message to Churchill, also dated April 11, that reflected his philosophy for dealing with the Russians. “I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out.… We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct. Roosevelt.” It was the one of the very few cables that he is known to have written personally from Warm Springs.
The guests at supper that evening included the president’s old Hyde Park neighbor, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who dropped by for a visit. FDR produced a large bowl of caviar given to him at Yalta two months earlier by Stalin as a farewell present. He insisted on mixing the cocktails himself, even though his hands shook uncontrollably, almost knocking over the glasses. He spent most of the dinner talking to Lucy, who was seated to his right. Morgenthau tried to get him to endorse his plan for the punitive economic treatment of Germany after the war, but FDR was evasive. After Morgenthau’s departure, the four women joined the president around the fireplace, swapping lighthearted stories. Shoumatoff had just finished a ghost story about Catherine the Great when Bruenn appeared, reminding FDR that it was time for bed. As the artist later recalled, “The president, like a little boy, asked to stay up longer, but finally consented to retire.”
Roosevelt woke up “with a slight headache and a stiff neck” on Thursday, April 12. He joined Lucy and the women in the living room, sitting on his favorite leather chair in front of the fireplace. The spring sunlight streamed through the open terrace doors behind him, along with the scent of roses and azaleas from the garden. He had set aside a couple of hours for a portrait-painting session with Shoumatoff, much to the disgust of Hassett, who found the artist “altogether too aggressive.” The appointments secretary wanted FDR to sign some papers, but Shoumatoff had other ideas. She “measured the President’s nose; made other facial measurements; asked the Boss to turn this way and that. Through it all, the President looked so fatigued and weary.” A stack of official documents lay on a card table in front of him. The most urgent matter demanding his attention was a telegram from Harriman in Moscow objecting to the wording of his April 11 message to Stalin. The ambassador felt that the misunderstanding over the surrender negotiations in Switzerland was hardly a “minor” matter, but “of a major character.” He “respectfully” suggested delaying delivery of the cable until the president could consult with the prime minister.
Harriman’s telegram reached Warm Springs through the White House Map Room, along with a draft reply from Leahy, dispatched at 10:50 a.m. The admiral favored a tougher line with Moscow but knew that FDR preferred a conciliatory approach. His draft response instructed Harriman to deliver the president’s message to Stalin immediately. “I do not wish to delete the word ‘minor’ as it is my desire to consider the [Swiss] misunderstanding a minor matter,” the suggested reply stated. The Map Room received Roosevelt’s response to Leahy’s cable at 1:06 p.m. “Approved,” it stated simply. It was FDR’s last official communication.
Nine minutes later, at 1:15 p.m., the president slumped forward in his chair. He raised his left hand shakily to his temple, staring straight ahead at Lucy and Daisy, seated together on a couch. “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” he said softly.
Spring had come early in Moscow. By the middle of April, the snow had all disappeared, and the pussy willows lining the driveway to Spaso House were in full bloom. On the night of April 12, Averell Harriman invited foreign diplomats and a few “tame Russians” to his residence for a farewell party for an embassy staffer. People were swaying happily to a windup gramophone in the ballroom when Kathleen dragged her father off into the adjoining Blue Room. Soon afterward, the ambassador’s secretary abruptly turned off the Victrola and announced it was time for everyone to go home. The guests were escorted to the door without explanation.
As soon as the guests had left, a somber Harriman gathered his aides in his upstairs room to inform them that FDR had died from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of sixty-three. The news had been broadcast over the radio at 1:00 a.m. but the ambassador was “so used to being secretive about everything important” that he hesitated to make a public announcement. Instead he placed a phone call to the Foreign Affairs Commissariat asking for an appointment with Molotov. The commissar was still awake, after attending a late-night session at the Kremlin with Stalin and Yugoslavia’s new Communist leader, Marshal Tito. At 3:05 a.m., an aide called to say that Molotov was on his way over to express his condolences. He arrived soon afterward and was shown into the Blue Room. “He seemed greatly moved and disturbed,” Harriman reported later that day. “I have never heard Molotov talk so earnestly.” The ambassador assured the commissar that the new president, Harry Truman, would pursue the same policies as his predecessor.
Harriman had been lobbying the State Department for weeks to be permitted to return home for consultations. He wanted to alert Washington to what he saw as the dangerous, unhealthy turn in U.S.-Russian relations since the Yalta conference. In his latest dispatch to Stettinius, drafted on April 10 but not sent, he warned that Americans were allowing themselves to be pushed around by the Kremlin. “We have accepted slights and even insults from the Soviet Government without concretely showing our displeasure,” he complained. Soviet officials had “come to believe that they can force their will on us.” He ticked off the “almost daily insults,” ranging from the impasse on Poland to the friction over the American prisoners of war to a grounding of U.S. planes operating from Soviet-controlled territory. Harriman wanted to be given “some concrete means”—perhaps a suspension of certain kinds of lend-lease assistance—to show “Russian officials that their outrageous actions against us are affecting their vital interests.” He was convinced that “roughness” was the only language Stalin understood. “The longer we wait the more difficult it will be and the more drastic the action on our part will have to be.”
After his meeting with Molotov early on the morning on Friday, April 13, Harriman cabled Stettinius to say he planned to leave Moscow on Monday morning “to talk to you and the President unless you instruct me otherwise.” The secretary of state overruled him yet again. “Now of all times it is essential that we have you in Moscow,” he cabled. But the ambassador had another trick up his sleeve. He would use Roosevelt’s death to persuade Stalin to drop his refusal to send Molotov to the opening session of the United Nations in San Francisco. If Stalin agreed, it would be hard for Stettinius to continue to block Harriman’s repeated requests to return home. His presence back in the United States would become obligatory.
Harriman was shown into Stalin’s office at the Little Corner at 8:00 p.m. that evening. He noted that the Soviet leader seemed “deeply distressed at the news of the death of President Roosevelt. He greeted me in silence and stood holding my hand for about 30 seconds before asking me to sit down.” Like most foreign leaders, Stalin knew practically nothing about Truman and had lots of questions. The new president had focused almost entirely on domestic affairs as a senator from Missouri; his foreign experience was limited to seven months’ service in France as an artillery officer during World War I. Harriman described Truman diplomatically as the kind of “man Marshal Stalin would like—a man of action and not of words.”
“President Roosevelt has died, but his cause must live on,” Stalin intoned gravely. “We shall support President Truman with all our forces and all our will.”
This provided Harriman with the opening he sought. The most effective way to help the new president and signal the continuity of Soviet foreign policy, he told Stalin, would be to dispatch his closest aide to the United States. Molotov could stop off in Washington to meet with Truman and proceed from there to San Francisco. Harriman would be pleased to put a plane at his disposal, similar to the plane used by Roosevelt to travel to the Crimea. It could make the trip from Moscow to Washington in just thirty-six hours.
“We could paint a red star on the plane and man it with a mixed Soviet-American crew,” offered Harriman, only half joking.
The thought of plastering an American military plane with the Communist insignia did not appeal to the vozhd. He suggested “a green star.”
“We will paint the whole aircraft green, if that’s what you prefer,” the ambassador promised. Like a salesman determined to clinch the deal, he described the comforts and speed of the C-54 plane. He could not “find words to express too strongly” how much a visit by the foreign policy commissar would mean to the American people and to Truman personally. The entire world would view the event as a “great stabilizing influence.”
“Time, time, time,” Molotov protested in the background. He was evidently thinking of the Supreme Soviet session.
Pressed by the American, Stalin quickly relented. Molotov added one stipulation. Instead of taking the most direct route, westward across the Atlantic, he preferred to travel eastward across the length of the Soviet Union, via Siberia and Alaska. This arrangement suited Harriman perfectly. He planned to return to the United States by the faster route, in his own plane. He would arrive in Washington two days ahead of Molotov, which would give him time to begin the foreign policy education of the former haberdasher from Independence, Missouri.