On March 1, Roosevelt rolled into Congress to report on the Yalta Conference. “I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say,” he said in a rare reference to his infirmity, “but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs, and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.” Many in the audience were shocked to see Roosevelt’s appearance—his face was like a death mask, the skin on his cheeks stretched and pale, and his body shrunken and bent. But Roosevelt didn’t seem aware of his ailments. He joked that although he had not been ill a single day of the trip, he had returned to Washington to read press reports of his impending demise.
It was a grand speech and quite lengthy, his voice rising to the occasion his body could no longer manage. He spoke glowingly of the continued collaboration of the three nations:
Of course, we know that it was Hitler’s hope—and the German war lords’—that we would not agree, that some slight crack might appear in the solid wall of Allied unity, a crack that would give him and his fellow gangsters one last hope of escaping their just doom. That is the objective for which his propaganda machine has been working for many months. But Hitler has failed.
A rousing ovation greeted Roosevelt’s words. For once Americans could feel victory in their grasp. Roosevelt was consumed with the next stage in the Big Three partnership: the time after the war. He had accepted an invitation from Churchill for him and Eleanor to visit the prime minister in London in May, and arrangements were under way for him to attend the first UN conference in San Francisco in late April.
He was full of plans, but he was worn out. When Suckley saw him during those weeks, he looked “so tired that every word seems to be an effort.”
Needing a rest, he left for Warm Springs on March 29. Suckley and Tully accompanied him, along with his cousin Laura Delano and Dr. Bruenn. Lucy would join them later. Roosevelt was taking some of the burdens of office with him, as presidents always do, but he hoped that the mood of his retreat would put his mind at ease and help him recover. Eleanor remained behind in Washington, her instincts not calibrated to her husband’s desperate state. In fact, one evening she called him and kept him on the phone for nearly an hour with entreaties on behalf of Yugoslavian partisans, for whom he could do little. Dr. Bruenn said the president’s blood pressure had risen fifty points in the course of the call.
This time, Warm Springs did not offer him its usual solace. The aftermath of Yalta was complicated by unresolved tensions among the principals, especially now that the European war was drawing to an end. Things seemed to be unraveling. State Department officials speculated that Stalin had received heavy blowback from the Politburo for agreements made at the conference, and his mood of cooperation had changed. At Warm Springs, FDR received an irate message from Stalin claiming that Russian intelligence had picked up signs that the United States was trying to make a separate peace with Germans in Switzerland. It was outrageous, he raged, that Americans would betray the common agreement and allow one arm of Germany to make a deal for itself while others continued fighting.
FDR responded that it simply wasn’t true. “I am certain that there were no negotiations in Bern at any time,” he wrote, “and I feel that your information to that effect must have come from German sources which have made persistent efforts to create dissension between us to escape in some measure responsibility for their war crimes.” He concluded the telegram emotionally: “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 was partly mollified. “I have never doubted your integrity or trustworthiness,” he wrote, although he had, and he did. And FDR had reason to doubt Stalin’s. Even then, in the early days after Yalta, the Soviets were making a mockery of the agreement, brutally disbanding the Polish underground and setting the stage for rigged elections. Roosevelt could only hope those matters would be settled in San Francisco. At Warm Springs, he was drafting a Jefferson’s Day speech, in which he would outline the new mission: “Let me assure you that my hand is the steadier for the work that is to be done, that I move more firmly into the task, knowing that you—millions and millions of you—are joined with me in the resolve to make this work endure.”
Lucy arrived on April 9, and that eased FDR’s mind. Lucy was attentive and sweet. She had nursed her own husband through his illness, and she knew just the right note to strike. In the glow of her adoration, Roosevelt immediately felt better. She told him she thought he looked handsome and strong. Suckley may or may not have been glad to have Lucy there; she wrote in her diary, a bit sharply, “Lucy is such a lovely person, but she seems so very immature, like a character out of a book.” By then Suckley had taken on the role of an overseeing matron, watching over Roosevelt’s diet and pressing him regularly to drink cups of gruel, intended to help him put on weight.
Thursday, April 12, was a warm, sunny day. FDR woke with a headache and a stiff neck, which he eased with a hot-water bottle. Merriman Smith, who was camped with the press nearby, planned a barbecue for 4:00 that afternoon, and the president had accepted an invitation to attend.
Lucy had commissioned her friend the Russian American portrait artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff to paint a portrait of the president, and he was sitting for it that day. He emerged well dressed in a double-breasted gray suit and crimson tie, a cape arranged over his thin shoulders to give him the appearance of heft. He was smiling and seemed happy. In fact, for the first time in a long time he looked well. Shoumatoff was so struck by the difference from the previous day that she exclaimed, “Mr. President, you look so much better than yesterday, I am glad I did not start working before today.”
At 1:00, as the valet began setting the table for lunch, Roosevelt told Shoumatoff they had only fifteen minutes remaining. Suddenly, at 1:15, Suckley, who was crocheting in the corner, looked up to see the president swipe at his forehead and bend over; she thought he’d dropped his cigarettes. He said, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.” Then he slumped forward, unconscious.
Bruenn rushed in to examine the president, and together they lifted him onto a bed. “I was cold as ice in my heart, cold & precise in my voice,” Suckley remembered. “I opened his collar & tie & and held up the left side of his pillow, rather than move him to the middle of it . . . two or three times he rolled his head from side to side, opened his eyes. . . . I could see no signs of recognition in those eyes.”
An hour followed, then another, and he never regained consciousness. Bruenn summoned Dr. James Paullin, a heart specialist from Atlanta, and just as he arrived, FDR’s breathing grew heavy and then stopped. At 3:35, Roosevelt was pronounced dead. The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage. Immediately, Lucy and Shoumatoff packed their bags and left, before others—including Eleanor—started descending on Warm Springs.
When Roosevelt had not arrived at Smith’s barbecue by 4:20, Smith called up to the house and received no answer. Finally, sensing that there was news—he thought perhaps Germany had surrendered—he drove up and was greeted by tear-stained faces and the terrible news. He put in a call to the UP office just as Early was making the official announcement in Washington.
“The night of April 12 was truly a nightmare,” Smith wrote. “It was a horrible, discordant symphony of people shouting for telephones, automobiles racing along dusty clay roads, the clatter of telegraph instruments and typewriters.”
Eleanor was at a benefit in Washington when she was called urgently to the White House. There, Early and McIntyre told her FDR had died. She stood stoically at Truman’s side while he took the oath of office and then cabled her sons before leaving for Warm Springs:
DARLINGS: PA SLEPT AWAY THIS AFTERNOON. HE DID HIS JOB TO THE END AS HE WOULD WANT YOU TO DO. BLESS YOU. ALL OUR LOVE. MOTHER.
Hearing the news, Sherwood couldn’t believe it—didn’t want to believe it. “I listened and listened to the radio, waiting for the announcement—probably in his own gaily reassuring voice—that it had all been a big mistake, that the banking crisis and the war were over and everything was going to be ‘fine—grand—perfectly bully,’” he recalled sadly. But Morgenthau, who had dined with FDR the evening of April 11, had noted his poor condition and was irritated when he heard McIntyre telling people that the president’s death had been completely unexpected. He called the claim “sheer damned nonsense.”
Arriving at Warm Springs, Eleanor was crushed to be told that Lucy had been with her husband in his final moments. The secret of their relationship had been successfully kept for years, and she felt betrayed, most of all by Anna. The purity of her grief was spoiled by the hard truth of her husband’s infidelity, and as she accompanied his body back to Washington her mind was tormented. When she saw Anna, she did not console her daughter as a mother might but rather questioned her closely about Lucy, as if that were the most important issue in the midst of such overwhelming grief. Anna was shattered and on the defensive. She believed in her heart that she had done the right thing by her father, but her mother’s searing judgment wounded her. Eleanor might have reserved her anger for her husband, but she had long since stopped viewing him in a romantic or intimate way. Instead she blamed her daughter for being a party to the deception. It would take time for their relationship to heal, but, feeling it was the right thing to do, Anna placed a call to Lucy several weeks later, acknowledging the fact that she was grieving, too.
It would always haunt James that his father had died without any family members around him. He thought that if the doctors had not been so dishonest about the dire state of Roosevelt’s health, they would have been there. “I . . . hated the fact, and I could not make myself think otherwise, that Pa—our Pa, our early playmate, our sailing partner, our cruelly stricken father, so courageous in adversity, our sunny companion, our President, our Commander-in-Chief, but always our Pa—had died alone.” By that he meant without his wife and children at his side. But FDR had not died alone. In a sense he had chosen a family, and they had been there.
FDR had not liked the practice of dignitaries lying in state with crowds walking by to gawk at their caskets. His coffin was placed in the East Room of the White House, where the gathering was by invitation only. Off to one side sat his empty wheelchair. At one point Eleanor requested a private moment, with the casket opened just for her. At another point Harry Truman, now president, entered the East Room. Nobody stood. After a simple Episcopal funeral service, the coffin was placed on a train for Hyde Park.
Struck by the beautiful simplicity of the service, Suckley wrote approvingly of the way it had been done—although it wasn’t exactly what FDR would have wanted—“As he told several of us, he never even wanted to be embalmed. He wanted to be wrapped in a sheet and laid next to the ground. But that is hardly possible under the circumstances, & I am quite certain that he is not worrying about that at all where he is.”
In his funeral plans, Roosevelt had stated his desire to be buried in the rose garden at Hyde Park. Preparations were made for a burial on Sunday, April 15.
A battalion from the Corps of Cadets at West Point was brought to Hyde Park, along with battalions from the army, navy, marine, and coast guard. The air force would fly in a formation above Hyde Park before the service.
Shoulder to shoulder, more than one thousand soldiers, sailors, and marines lined the route from the train station, saluting the flag-draped coffin as it passed on a caisson pulled by six horses from the army. A riderless horse draped in black followed the caisson. Bugles intoned “Hail to the Chief.” As the processional approached the grave site, a twenty-one-gun salute boomed out, followed by the mournful chords of Chopin’s funeral dirge.
Nearly two hundred close friends and relatives, along with assorted dignitaries, including President and Mrs. Truman and their daughter, Margaret, crowded into the area around the grave site. Several ministers were on hand, each reading a prayer. As the first prayer began, a single air force bomber that had circled back from the formation appeared overhead, dipping its wings in a salute. The requiescat was a recitation of lines from John Ellerton’s hymn:
Now the laborer’s task is o’er
Now the battle day is past . . .
Father, in Thy gracious keeping
Leave we now Thy servant sleeping.
Drums rolled as the casket was lowered into the ground, and cadets fired three volleys over the grave. Fala, held on a leash by Suckley, barked with each volley. The poignant notes of “Taps” were played as the commander in chief was sent to his final rest in the fragrant garden of the home he loved. A simple white stone marks the grave, with no inscription but Roosevelt’s name and dates and Eleanor’s name and dates. In the summer, it is surrounded by roses.
From across the Atlantic, Churchill paid tribute to his friend and partner with tears streaming down his face: “As the saying goes, he died in harness and we may well say in battle harness, like his soldiers, sailors, and airmen, who side by side with ours, are carrying on their task to the end all over the world. What an enviable death was his.”
In Moscow, Stalin seemed bereft. “President Roosevelt has died but his cause must live on,” he told Harriman in a rare moment of emotion. He couldn’t possibly have meant it.
IN EUROPE, EISENHOWER WAS directing the endgame of the war, whose strategy now centered on Germany and the ultimate prize, Berlin. Churchill had wanted British troops to take Berlin, but Eisenhower made a different calculation. Given the strategic positioning of the Allied forces, it was more practical for the Russian army to be the first into Berlin—an expedient he believed would prevent some fifty thousand additional casualties. He got flak for it, of course, but he reminded Marshall that as commander he had authority in the field and believed his charge was to act in the most efficient and effective way possible to win the war. Perhaps, too, a part of him felt that the Russians, who had suffered such an intolerable blow at the hands of the Germans, deserved to deliver the coup de grâce.
As the Russians advanced on Berlin, they met little resistance from the Nazis, who were fleeing or surrendering to save their own lives even as their leader was preparing to end his. Hitler could not face the retribution of his enemies. He would not sit before tribunals. He chose the coward’s way out. Isolated at the end, in an underground bunker with his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, whom he had married the day before his death, and their two dogs, he wrote his last will and testament. He then poisoned Braun and the dogs with cyanide before taking a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head. In his last will and testament, he wrote, “I myself and my wife—in order to escape the disgrace of deposition and capitulation—choose death.” He instructed that their remains be immediately cremated, and they were, unfortunately giving rise to endless speculation about whether Hitler was really dead.
Within a week of Hitler’s death, Germany unconditionally surrendered on May 7, and the following day Churchill declared VE Day—Victory in Europe Day. Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Soviet Union was signed on May 9.
Eisenhower remembered only how weary they all were after the surrender documents were signed. “When the signing finally took place, a little before three in the morning of May 7, I think no person in the entire headquarters gave much thought to starting a public celebration or participating in a private one,” he wrote. “My group went to bed to sleep the clock around.” But around the world, elated citizens swarmed into the streets when they heard the news.
The May 7 issue of Time magazine featured a cover portrait of Hitler’s face with a big red X crossing it out, accompanied by a victorious missive: “If they [his enemies] had been as malign as he in their vengefulness, they might better have hoped that he would live on yet a little while. For no death they could devise for him could be as cruel as must have been Hitler’s eleventh-hour thoughts on the completeness of his failure. His total war against non-German mankind was ending in total defeat. Around him, the Third Reich, which was to last 1, 000 years, sank to embers as the flames fused over its gutted cities.”
But the Japanese were still fighting, refusing to accept that defeat was imminent. At a Big Three meeting in Potsdam, Germany, from July 17 to August 2, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin signed a declaration calling for the unconditional surrender of Japan. Privately, Truman informed Stalin that the United States possessed “a new weapon of unusual destructive force” that could be used against the Japanese if they refused to surrender. Stalin was pleased. Churchill already knew of FDR’s atomic bomb program and agreed that using the bomb might be necessary. Truman was relieved at their response. He had learned of the atomic bomb program only after FDR’s death—a pretty big secret to keep from the vice president—but he would not hesitate to use it if it would end the war.
Eisenhower was at Potsdam when he was told about the bomb, and he felt sickened. He urged Truman to reconsider—to offer the Japanese a way to save face. But Truman stood firm, and unfortunately the Japanese refused to budge. On August 6, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, followed by a second bomb on Nagasaki on August 9. The horror was unlike anything ever experienced. Tens of thousands of people were instantly carbonized or crushed in their homes, with many thousands more dying slowly of burns and a terrible radiation sickness. With the city centers in ruins, the homeless victims huddled in the streets, suffering, sick, and shell shocked by the destruction.
The Soviet Union declared war on Japan only on August 8, after the first bomb fell—late by any measure. However, with one million Soviet troops flooding into Manchuria to fight the Japanese, it might have been the extra pressure that made the difference.
On September 2, the unthinkable happened: Japan surrendered unconditionally. In an address to a stunned nation conditioned to never surrender, Emperor Hirohito explained that it had been the only choice. “The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives,” he said. “Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”
The rejoicing at the end of the war was blunted by the heartache of its price. A new form of warfare had been born, rising in the mushroom clouds over Japan’s cities, replacing the bloody battlefields of World War II with a more frightening weapon that would stir nightmares and dominate foreign policy for generations to come.
FDR HAD ANTICIPATED HAVING years to build the peace, had dreamed of a postwar era when he could be a moderating influence on Stalin and when the ruins of war would sort themselves out. He imagined being able to resolve with money (aid) what had been difficult to manage at the conference table, buying time for the United Nations to assert itself formally. He expected the war-torn nations to be focused on rebuilding and weary of fighting, making them more malleable to compromise.
“Roosevelt believed in dollars,” Molotov said cynically after the war. “Not that he believed in nothing else, but he considered America to be so rich, and we so poor and worn out, that we would surely come begging. ‘Then we’ll kick their ass, but for now we have to help keep them going.’” In that remark, he betrayed a fundamental grievance, undoubtedly shared by Stalin, that Roosevelt had never quite seen the Soviets as equals.
FDR had expected to be there to see it all through. With the San Francisco Conference only weeks away, he was focused on how to heal the rifts that had been developing after Yalta. In his heart, he remained a robust strategist, reliant on his old crew of advisers. He barely knew Harry Truman and had not taken him into his confidence about anything important, including the atom bomb. Perhaps he had expected the bomb to be the United States’ final ace in the hole, not realizing that the Soviet Union was well on its way to developing its own nuclear technology.
In Tehran, FDR had executed a daring strategy to bring Stalin into alignment with the West and thus win the war. The central disagreement of the conference over Overlord had pitted him against Churchill and aligned him with Stalin, and he had seen a strategic purpose in the rift with his old ally. In the end, Tehran had produced the declaration that had paved the way for the war’s end. It might be said that Tehran won the war but Yalta failed to secure the peace.
There has been much speculation in the past seventy-five years about whether Roosevelt had been too ill at Yalta to do justice to the finer points of the negotiations. Those who were with him there have disputed this characterization. More likely, he had pushed where he must and pulled back where he could, walking a fine line with Stalin to get what he wanted at the moment, figuring he could bring Stalin around more fully in future meetings. He had made the decision that the details could be ironed out later and it was more important to present a united front while Germany and Japan were still on the offensive. When questioned at a press conference after Tehran about the details of the agreement, he had replied, “We are still in the generality stage, not in the detail stage, because we are talking about principles.” He thought there was time. (It is not surprising that the Soviets thought they were the ones who had made all the concessions at Yalta. Vladimir Pavlov, Stalin’s interpreter, later said, “It was asserted in the United States after Roosevelt’s death that he made too many concessions to Stalin at the conference. I believe that more concessions were made by the Soviet delegation than by the British or American delegations.” He didn’t elaborate.)
George Kennan, Harriman’s deputy in Moscow and later briefly the US ambassador to Moscow under Truman, had been outspoken even during the war about the failure of the American government to fully appreciate the nature of Russia and Stalin. His analysis of Roosevelt’s illusions about Stalin is brutal. Roosevelt, he wrote, relied on the conviction that he alone, by force of his personality, could change Stalin—“that the only reason why it had been difficult to get on with him in the past was because there was no one with the right personality, with enough imagination and trust to deal with him properly; that the arrogant conservatives in the Western capitals had always bluntly rejected him, and that his ideological prejudices would melt away and Russian cooperation with the West could easily be obtained, if only Stalin was exposed to the charm of a personality of FDR’s caliber.” Kennan was an outlier during the war, and his harsh judgment fails to recognize the realities Roosevelt faced. But there is just enough truth in his words to strike a recognizable chord.
Perhaps after the war Roosevelt would have been tougher. In the days before his death, he already saw that Stalin was reneging on his agreements. Perhaps if he had lived, he would have been the one to bring Stalin back into line. We’ll never know.
When Stettinius first met with Truman, he told him about FDR’s difficult dealings with Stalin after Yalta and his own opinion that relations had deteriorated since the conference. Truman reacted instantly by telling Stettinius that the United States must stand up to the Soviets and not go easy on them. Truman’s subsequent hostility at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, when he met Stalin, had a chilling effect on Soviet cooperation. “Roosevelt knew how to conceal his attitude toward us, but Truman—he didn’t know how to do that at all,” Molotov would say in 1975. “He had an openly hostile attitude.”
At the same time, the Russians were boldly in retreat from conference niceties. Discussing the issue of free elections in eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference, Stalin said what he had obviously believed all along: “A freely elected government in any of these countries would be anti-Soviet, and that we cannot allow.”
Did FDR’s concessions to Stalin at Tehran and Yalta set the stage for the Cold War? Though he was masterful as a war strategist, his choices have nonetheless been subject to debate. Did the United States fall on its sword in the final decisions of the war? Had Roosevelt lived, would relations with the Soviet Union have been better? Did Roosevelt know that the Soviets were developing nuclear technology? Could the Cold War have been avoided if FDR had played a different hand at Tehran and then Yalta? Or, considering that Stalin already had control of eastern Europe, was Roosevelt’s only choice to edge toward agreement and buy time? Finally, was Eisenhower’s decision to let the Russians take Berlin the act that gave them a stake in Germany that would lead to decades of hardship and separation?
It was in FDR’s nature, for better or ill, to be a collaborator. “President Roosevelt was well aware of the nature of Soviet society,” Stettinius observed. “Its dictatorial and authoritarian aspects were as repugnant to him as to any American. But he also had a strong sense of history. He knew that no society was static, and he believed that the United States could do much, through firmness, patience, and understanding, over a period of time in dealing with the Soviet Union to influence its evolution away from dictatorship and tyranny in the direction of a free, tolerant, and peaceful society.” Those are nice words. The question is: Was Roosevelt on a productive path, cut short by his death, or was he blinded by his hopes for a different world?
It’s easy to forget in the aftermath of the long Cold War the critical role the Soviets played in the fight against Hitler. It’s easy to forget how desperate the Allies were for victory and how often that victory was in doubt. Roosevelt needed Stalin to be an ally, not an enemy. His strategy was to slowly reel him in, and it worked for his immediate purposes. Given Stalin’s actions after the war and the Cold War–era abominations of the Soviet Union, one can doubt the wisdom of FDR’s approach, but those three days in Tehran, which might have birthed the Cold War, were also the turning point in the hot war.
It was a grand deception on Stalin’s part. The reasonable, friendly “Uncle Joe” of those conferences was a different person altogether in the Soviet Union. “The Western Allied leaders were unaware of conditions behind Soviet lines,” R. C. Raack noted in Stalin’s Drive to the West 1938–1948: The Origins of the Cold War, citing “In part censorship, in part preoccupations that distracted attention and desire to learn. The net effect: Stalin was effectively director of an institution, the ‘Big Three,’ where other members were self-blindfolded.”
Entrapped by a desire to help Stalin help them win the war, the Western Allies missed or ignored his desire to move his power to the west, in what Raack called “conduct unbecoming an ally.”
Germany became one focal point of that surge. In Tehran and then at Yalta, Stalin preached moralistically about the need to destroy Germany in order to prevent another Hitler, but in the process, he laid the groundwork for carving off the eastern part of the country and making it a subject of the Soviet Union. His true aim was offensive, not defensive. He wanted control, and weak nations were easier to conquer.
Hugh Lunghi, reflecting on FDR’s and Churchill’s accommodations with Stalin, wrote:
What amazed those of us, British and Americans, living and working in Moscow, experiencing the realities of life there, was the extraordinary ignorance, as it seemed displayed by our principals and their advisors. Most astounding and puzzling was why Roosevelt and Churchill, the State Department and the Foreign Office, could for a moment believe that Stalin would allow free elections, let alone the concomitant of a free press, in liberated Europe, when those very freedoms were denied to the peoples of the Soviet Union.
Roosevelt had convinced himself that he could handle Stalin after the war, without considering the transactional nature of Stalin’s alliance with the West and his deeply rooted contempt for democracy. Roosevelt also believed that the Soviet Union would be so domestically shattered after the war that it would have neither the will nor the wherewithal to become an aggressor.
When the war ended, the change was instantaneous. Strong-arming the global organization that had been FDR’s treasured vision, Stalin reveled in intransigence. Speaking out against Western values and institutions, he blamed capitalism for inspiring the rise of Hitler. After the war, he was now free to be more who he had truly been all along. When Roosevelt had spoken of self-determination, free elections, and a peaceful world, Stalin had nodded along and said he wanted those, too. His compliance was like a drug to Roosevelt. “The old Bolshevik,” as Roosevelt jokingly referred to him, had not changed because of the war. He intended to do exactly as he pleased, regardless of anything he promised.
As General John R. Deane, a former chief of the US Military Mission in the US Embassy Moscow, wrote in 1947, “In my opinion there can no longer be any doubt that the Soviet leadership has always been motivated by the belief that communism and capitalism cannot coexist.”
At the moment of victory, Stalin reverted to his default. In a speech in February 1946, he reveled in the triumph of the Soviet social structure, feeling he had free rein at last to do what he wanted. Roosevelt was dead; Churchill was out of office. Stalin had little respect for Truman as an adversary. And the Soviet Union was developing the bomb—the Cold War’s centerpiece.
The harsh verdict of history may well be that faced with his moment of truth, FDR blinked. Every president since World War II has faced similar crises—standing up or standing down, recognizing that the negotiating table can be even more treacherous than the battlefield. There’s a uniquely American perception that as long as we’re talking, we’re making progress. Roosevelt thought so, too. It takes faith and hubris to think you can talk your way out of a global jam, negotiate with someone who shares none of your values, and gain lasting consensus.
“If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly,” Ronald Reagan said in a 1982 speech to the House of Commons, after the Cold War had stymied six presidents before him.
. . . During the dark days of the Second World War, when this island was incandescent with courage, Winston Churchill exclaimed about Britain’s adversaries, “What kind of people do they think we are?” Well, Britain’s adversaries found out what extraordinary people the British are. But all the democracies paid a terrible price for allowing the dictators to underestimate us. We dare not make that mistake again. So, let us ask ourselves, “What kind of people do we think we are?” And let us answer, “Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.”