November 28, 1943
In the heavily armed and gated Soviet Embassy compound in Tehran, Iran, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was hosting a steak-and-baked-potato dinner for his indispensable wartime counterparts, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Joseph Stalin. The meal was being prepared by Roosevelt’s cherished Filipino mess crew, who knew exactly how he liked his steaks grilled. The cooks had arrived that afternoon to find that, inexplicably, someone had removed the stove, and they’d scrambled to create a makeshift kitchen from scratch, installing a range and kitchen equipment in an empty room at the embassy.
The circumstance that placed the president of the United States in Tehran for a meeting with Churchill and Stalin was a crisis point in the Second World War. After more than four years of fighting, the free world was at the brink. Adolf Hitler’s armies had surged across western Europe and into the Soviet Union and the Mediterranean. The Allies had fought hard, and in the last year they had scored important victories at the edges of Axis-controlled territory: a successful campaign in North Africa; inroads into southern Italy, where Benito Mussolini’s government had collapsed; and a brutal victory in Stalingrad. In the Pacific theater, Allied victories at Midway and Guadalcanal had created positive momentum. But the successes felt piecemeal in the larger scheme of things. It might have seemed as though the Germans and Japanese were finally on the defensive, but overconfidence would have been a mistake. The Axis Powers still dominated Europe and Asia. Nazi Germany’s systematic extermination of Jews, forever after known as the Holocaust, proceeded unchecked throughout its territory. Moreover, the price of the Allies’ precious few victories had been astonishingly high—the Soviets had lost a million men at Stalingrad—underscoring the grave challenge that lay ahead. The Allies could not afford to miscalculate against an enemy so undaunted by defeat, so relentless in the face of overwhelming odds. They needed the kind of decisive win that would put the Nazis on their heels.
This was the critical issue that confronted the Big Three in Tehran. Each came with his own vision of the future. Stalin was adamant that a second front be opened in Europe as soon as possible. Churchill was unpersuaded, believing that the Mediterranean would be a more fruitful arena. FDR was in the middle, leaning toward Stalin’s view but hesitant on the question of timing. One thing was clear: the next great battle was on the horizon, and those three days in Tehran would determine its course. Hitler could still win the war. What were they willing to do to stop him?
Theirs was at times an uneasy alliance. Churchill, the most passionate of the three, felt he deserved accommodation since Great Britain had held off the Nazis virtually alone in the early years of the war. Stalin countered that more than the other nations, the USSR had suffered a true invasion of its land, costing millions of lives. He believed he was owed a rallying Allied endeavor—a second front in Europe that would relieve pressure on the embattled eastern front by forcing Hitler to move troops to the new theater. And he wasn’t shy about saying that if the United States and Great Britain were unwilling, they were cowards.
FDR, who was meeting Stalin for the first time, was determined to show the Soviet leader a full measure of respect, even if his attentiveness wounded the feelings of Churchill, who had been his closest confidant during the war. For Roosevelt, the Tehran meeting was a victory of sorts. He had been trying for more than a year to get Stalin into the same room, and he was eager to make the most of it. Among other issues, he was intent on enlisting Stalin in the war with Japan, which the United States was fighting mostly alone, with limited help from Great Britain. The urgency could not be overstated. If the Big Three did not come to common terms during that meeting, the Allied effort could falter. They needed a united policy at a time when the Soviets were fighting for their lives and Hitler’s domination of western Europe had remained largely unchallenged.
Roosevelt’s stay at the Soviet compound, after Stalin had turned over a building for his use, was an unexpected development and one that peeved Churchill. Originally, Roosevelt had planned to headquarter at the US Embassy and to hold meetings there, although it was not a large facility. Churchill had offered the British Embassy compound as an alternative. At that point, Stalin had swept in with an invitation of his own, cleverly orchestrating Roosevelt’s acceptance by presenting a vague but plausible rumor that agents of Hitler had parachuted in nearby and were plotting an assassination attempt on the Big Three. Soviet agents had learned of the plot in time to arrest some of the instigators, but they did not know if any of the agents had escaped into the hills and were planning to go ahead with an attack. Tehran, wrote Bill Yenne in his book about the plot, “was a hub of international intrigue with an underworld of double and even triple agents.” Even if Roosevelt were safe in the US Embassy, the same could not be said for Stalin and Churchill and their staffs, who would be forced to make daily mile-long journeys through treacherous streets to meetings at the US Embassy.
The prospect of the leaders of what Churchill called “the greatest concentration of power the world had ever seen” being eliminated was chilling. After twenty years in power, Stalin had no natural heir, and the messy political aftermaths of Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s deaths would impede the momentum of the war. (For one thing, Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, was an outspoken isolationist.)
The Soviets argued that the president would be safest in the fortresslike Soviet Embassy, and it was spacious enough for the meetings. Churchill argued that the same could be said for the British Embassy, which was right next door to the Soviets’, but Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s offer—the first of a series of what felt like rebuffs to his old friend Churchill. In truth, Roosevelt might have viewed it as a strategic opportunity to be close to Stalin.
“I am placing a very great importance on the personal and intimate conversations which you and Churchill and I will have, for on them the hope of the future world will greatly depend,” Roosevelt wrote to Stalin a month before the conference. However, the conference was extremely difficult to set up, and it almost didn’t happen. The barrier, in Roosevelt’s opinion, was Stalin’s insistence that it be held in Tehran. Stalin argued that he needed to be close to home because of his duties there. Roosevelt countered that he could not be so far away from the United States and out of touch with Congress during that critical time, since the rough, mountainous terrain made it difficult for cables to be sent and received. In one letter to Stalin, he pointedly added, “I am not in any way considering the fact that from the United States territory I would have to travel six thousand miles and you would only have to travel six hundred miles from Russian territory.” But he added, “I would gladly go ten times the distance to meet you were it not for the fact that I must carry on a constitutional government more than one hundred and fifty years old.”
Stalin held firm. Eventually, when it became clear that he would not attend a conference if it were not in Tehran, Roosevelt folded, graciously writing Stalin that he had cleared up his constitutional barriers. “. . . I have decided to go to Tehran, and this makes me especially happy.”
After Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s invitation to stay at the Soviet Embassy, the Secret Service sprang into action. It created a huge motorcade from the US Embassy, with a stand-in posing as Roosevelt in the presidential car. The president sneaked out in a separate car and traveled anonymously via back roads.
Once Roosevelt and his staff were settled in at the embassy, there was some awkwardness. It was lavish in its facade and accommodations but not very comfortable. The Americans knew that their rooms were bugged, and Roosevelt took special care to avoid saying anything he wouldn’t want overheard. His staff was a bit rattled by the way Stalin himself kept popping into the president’s office to see that all was well, like an obsequious but not entirely trustworthy hotel manager. Members of Roosevelt’s entourage also noticed that the maids, waiters, and bellmen all had bulges at their hips that appeared to be firearms and suspected that they were not in fact servants but members of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police.
The old calculations of which nations constituted friend or foe were very much on everyone’s minds. The Soviets might have been necessary allies, but they could be sneaky. For one thing, the story of a potential assassination attempt by Nazi infiltrators might have been a ruse—an invention by Stalin to persuade Roosevelt to stay with him.
While the mess crew was hard at work in the kitchen, in another part of the compound an introductory meeting of the Big Three was taking place. It was the first time that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were in the same room together.
Introduced earlier that afternoon, Roosevelt and Stalin had sized each other up in a private meeting. Stalin had brought his interpreter, but Roosevelt, wanting to demonstrate trust, did not have his own interpreter in the room. Stalin was impressed by Roosevelt’s powerful personality and intellect, and he felt chastened when he saw the extent of his infirmity. He suddenly realized how difficult it must have been for the wheelchair-bound president to make the journey of thousands of miles by sea and air. He graciously promised Roosevelt that their next meeting would be in a more convenient setting for the president—a promise he broke when he demanded Yalta, on the Black Sea, even farther from the United States, as the location of their second summit.
For his part, Roosevelt was surprised to see that Stalin was short—only five feet, six inches tall—but stocky, with broad shoulders and an expansive waist. His camel-hair coat over a dark blue uniform gave him an aura of elegance and a stature beyond his size. Stalin was pleasant, even witty, but his eyes were inscrutable, his mouth masked behind his thick mustache. Roosevelt would later describe the Soviet leader as “a man hewn out of granite.” At the same time, he believed he could chip away at that granite—that Stalin would give in if it suited his own needs. Courting the Soviet leader was high on Roosevelt’s list of priorities. He needed him, even if their closeness hurt Churchill’s pride.
At the dinner hour, as was his custom, Roosevelt arrived in the dining room before the others, to avoid being wheeled in as they watched. He was seated in his armless wheelchair at the drinks table, where he was mixing his signature martini cocktail: two parts gin, one part dry vermouth, shaken with ice and garnished with an olive. When the others entered, he handed them their drinks. Stalin sipped his doubtfully, and Roosevelt asked him how he liked it. Stalin politely replied that it was all right but “cold on the stomach.”
Stalin preferred vodka and wine to gin, but he was no slouch in the drinking department. It was said that as an infant he’d been given a vodka-soaked rag to suck on while he was teething, and he currently made sure that his soldiers received a daily ration of vodka. He enjoyed the procession of toasts at public events—it was typical at Russian dinners for there to be as many as forty toasts. The US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, observed that Stalin enjoyed watching others get drunk, perhaps because it gave him the upper hand, but he took care to avoid inebriation himself, often sneaking water into his vodka glass.
Despite the alcohol-fueled bonhomie at the table, there was a degree of tension. Churchill, well lubricated but unbowed, felt aggrieved, like a shunned spouse, as he watched Roosevelt turn on the charm for Stalin, even calling him “Uncle Joe.” He knew that Roosevelt had met privately with Stalin that day, and he had been hurt when the president had denied him a similar meeting. Churchill could not resist counting up slights, real or imagined. He would be the first to admit that weakness, once having said, “No lover ever studied the whims of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.” Yet he saw that they were more than whims on FDR’s part. Rationally, he understood Roosevelt’s strategy to bring Stalin into alignment. But he bristled that it was often at his expense.
Near the end of the meal, an attack of severe indigestion sent Roosevelt to bed early, leaving Churchill and Stalin to snipe at each other without a mediator. Clamping his teeth down on his smoldering cigar, Churchill glowered at Stalin, who chain-smoked cigarettes and made his case with a chilly smugness. Yet they talked. It was a striking sight. In other circumstances, they would have been natural-born enemies. Circumstances required them to engage in the painful exercise of reaching agreement, with Roosevelt serving as the leader who would help them envision and cement a partnership that would win the war.
That first dinner foreshadowed the dynamic that would continue over the next three days, when the greatest questions of the war would be debated. The central issue: What was to be the next big front? Would they finally dare a cross-Channel landing in France—and would they do it soon, as Stalin was urging? Did they have the troops and the air and sea power to make the push? The English Channel had blocked German advances during World War I, and even Hitler, at his boldest in 1940, had not crossed the Channel to invade Great Britain. If they went ahead, which US general had the skill to serve as supreme commander of that mission? Could they summon the nerve and the resources for an operation whose success could win the war but whose failure could mean defeat?
Beneath the strategizing there were the underlying questions: Could they afford to trust one another? Could they afford not to? Though they were allies, each of the Big Three had pursued war policy mostly from his own platform, which reflected their national priorities. In order to launch the next great mission, they would need to act as one. Stalin would have to quell his biases toward the West and allow a level of partnership that had not been realized before. Churchill would have to overcome his deep misgivings about Stalin’s true allegiance. Roosevelt would have to rise above the quarreling by both sides and help them achieve unity.
The story of that vital conference provides an inside view of the intimate interactions of great powers at a perilous time in history, showing both gifted leadership and human flaws. The principals’ debates would range from the profound to the petty, from the emotional to the calculated, as they sought common ground. Practiced in manipulation, each of the leaders carried his own wish list and used his persuasive power to shift the dialogue in his favor. All felt the weight of history, but only history would tell how deeply their decisions would impact the shape of the world, for both good and ill.
Through it all, Roosevelt was, by consent of the others, the lead strategist for the future and the one man who could, in effect, allow or deny the others their place in history. In the silence of his private quarters, he worried about his master strategy and the pragmatic concerns that made an alliance with a man like Stalin necessary. Stalin’s ruthless grip on power, his bloody regime that exiled or murdered his personal and political enemies, his dictatorial control over his people, were of great concern. Clearly Stalin was a transactional leader; he sought relations with the Western powers because he needed them to defeat Hitler. But could he be a reliable partner? Roosevelt longed to give Stalin the benefit of the doubt, to see him as a collaborator in building a free and equal world. If he was haunted by doubts, he didn’t allow them to show. Instead, he placed a great deal of trust in his adviser Harry Hopkins, who assured him that Stalin wanted only safety and prosperity for his people, as any leader might.
In the stifling quarters of the Soviet Embassy, Roosevelt could contemplate his ideals for the future, in the same way an architect sketches the framework of a building. But the mysteries loomed large. He was meeting Stalin for the first time, and it would require all his skill to reel him in to his side, without giving him too much room to grow stronger. Of all the moments of his life, when the weight of the future seemed to press down on his crippled frame, this, he saw, was perhaps the most significant challenge he would face—how to embrace a man who could become his enemy while he still had the space to make him a partner.
He knew that. They could not leave Tehran without a plan. In that watershed moment of the war, it was time to make a daring gamble.
It was a challenge he had been preparing for all his life.