7.

“Uncle Joe’s Favorite”

HARRY HOPKINS IN MOSCOW AND AT PLACENTIA BAY, JULY—AUGUST 1941

On the day the news came through that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, Hopkins was at the racetrack. His first thought upon hearing the report was, “The President’s policy of support for Britain has really paid off! Hitler has turned to the left.” He told the Polish ambassador in Washington that Hitler’s move would complicate Germany’s position and ease the pressure on Britain. But there were also risks. Hopkins was concerned that Barbarossa would provide succor to isolationists in the United States, who could now appeal to anticommunist feeling in America, especially among Catholics. He also worried that the improved strategic circumstances of the British would drain the urgency from America’s efforts to rearm and aid them.1

Like the rest of Washington, he seems to have presumed in the early days that Germany would quickly prevail. A senior U.S. military source told the Washington Post that only an “act of God” could save Russia from an early defeat. In the weeks after the invasion, however, Hopkins’s view changed. His thinking on aiding the Soviets developed along similar lines to the president’s, firming up in tandem with evidence that they were putting up a fight.2

The Germans’ eastward advance slowed further in July, while Hopkins was in Britain. The reaction to this development back home was mixed. Newspapers were pleased by the news, but not so pleased that they supported the notion of aiding the Soviet defenders (or, as the Chicago Daily Tribune described them, “an Asiatic butcher and his godless crew”). The ambivalence of the nation’s editors was shared by their readers: while 72 percent of Americans preferred to see the Soviets win, only 35 percent believed the United States should provide them with assistance in the same way it did Britain.3

Despite his reputation for caution in the face of hostile public opinion, however, Roosevelt remained determined to extend immediate, substantial aid to Stalin. Indeed, his resolution was strengthened by news from the front and personal testimony from his former ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, who predicted that the Red Army would “amaze the world.” But getting such a policy implemented by Washington bureaucrats, many of whom disagreed with it, was another thing altogether. Frustrated by a lack of action, and spurred on by complaints from Ambassador Oumansky and Henry Morgenthau that the Soviets were being given “the proverbial Washington ‘run around,’” FDR began to lean more heavily on the departments to increase the flow of exports.4

—

AT THIS MOMENT, Hopkins staged a decisive long-distance intervention in the Washington debate. On Friday, July 25, as he was winding up his mission in the United Kingdom, he cabled Roosevelt with a startling suggestion:

I am wondering whether you would think it important and useful for me to go to Moscow. Air transportation good and can reach there in twenty four hours. I have a feeling that everything possible should be done to make certain the Russians maintain a permanent front even though they be defeated in this immediate battle. If Stalin could in any way be influenced at a critical time I think it would be worth doing by a direct communication from you through a personal envoy. I think the stakes are so great that it should be done. Stalin would then know in an unmistakable way that we mean business on a long term supply job.5

At this point, neither Roosevelt nor Hopkins contemplated a Soviet victory. Rather, as Hopkins cabled FDR from London, the “Russian business” offered a “temporary breather” to Britain and the United States—and it was worth trying to prolong the respite. Whatever Barbarossa’s final outcome, assisting Moscow made sense to Hopkins. As he commented to Gil Winant, “Every German killed by a Russian will kill no Americans or British.”6

The precise origins of Hopkins’s Moscow mission are disputed. It seems unlikely that he discussed the idea with Roosevelt before he left Washington. Everyone around Hopkins thought the notion struck him suddenly in London and the decision to go was made at the last minute—so much so that he had to cancel several meetings in London, including with a member of the royal family.7 Success has many fathers, however, and both the Soviet and U.S. ambassadors to the Court of St. James’s later claimed they first suggested the mission to Hopkins. Ivan Maisky recalled that the “idea flashed through my mind” at a lunch with Hopkins that a visit to Moscow was the only way for him to get all the information he required. For his part, Winant remembered volunteering to travel to Moscow with a “message of encouragement” for Stalin, only for Hopkins to reply, after a pause, “What would you think of my going from here?”8 (It is ironic that Winant, an ambassador who was being undermined at his post by a personal envoy, was nonetheless prepared to assume the garb of personal envoy to Stalin, despite the presence of a properly accredited ambassador in Moscow.) Perhaps these suggestions contributed to Hopkins’s decision, but given his past experiences as an envoy and his preference for direct action, he needed little prompting.

The mission obviously appealed to Roosevelt, who responded immediately to Hopkins’s cable: “Welles and I highly approve Moscow trip . . . I will send you tonight a message for Stalin.” He also checked that Hopkins would be back in time for the Atlantic Conference. Both FDR and Churchill were anxious that their marriage broker be present at their long-awaited rendezvous. When Hopkins received Roosevelt’s go-ahead late in the evening of Saturday, July 26, he was at Chequers preparing his radio broadcast for the BBC. “I had been tired up to the moment of the arrival of the message,” he recalled later in an article for the American Magazine. But once he received his orders, he wrote, “I wasn’t tired any more. I had never been in Russia. If I had any immediate concern it was to get to Moscow as fast as possible and let the gods who had been so good to me thus far take care of the rest.”9

Early the next morning, Hopkins received a second cable from the White House containing the president’s message for Stalin:

I am sending Mr. Hopkins to Moscow in order that he may discuss with you personally . . . the vitally important question of how the assistance which the United States is able to furnish the Soviet Union in its magnificent resistance against the treacherous aggression of Hitlerite Germany may be made available most expeditiously and most effectively . . .

Mr. Hopkins will communicate to me directly the views which you express to him and the particular problems involving assistance from the United States which seem to you most pressing. I ask that you treat him with the same confidence as you would if you were talking with me personally.10

FDR had two purposes in authorizing the Hopkins mission to Moscow.11 The first was to investigate Russia’s progress and her needs, about which Washington knew very little. Western diplomats and military attachés in Moscow had little contact with ordinary people or even officials, leaving them to base their estimates, in the words of one firsthand observer, “almost entirely on personal observation supplemented by rumor and newspaper articles.” Foreigners were “completely in the dark as to what was going on.”12 To make matters worse, both the U.S. ambassador, Laurence A. Steinhardt (who did not have the benefit of a close personal relationship with Roosevelt), and the U.S. military attaché, Major Ivan Yeaton, were regarded by the Kremlin as defeatists, if not cowards. As with Joe Kennedy in London a year earlier, this increased their isolation and limited their influence.13 The lack of reliable information obscured the administration’s understanding of the USSR’s needs. Roosevelt wanted Hopkins to get him the “facts” on the war, including the strength of the Soviet forces, their determination to fight, and the war materials they would require in order to hold out until the winter.14

Behind the issue of Russia’s immediate needs stood a larger, more fundamental question: what were her prospects of holding out? Roosevelt could hardly include this question in his cable to Stalin, but he expected Hopkins to answer it. FDR was predisposed toward positivity, but he wanted his intuition backed up by evidence. Hopkins captured Roosevelt’s mood of uncertain optimism in an article he drafted for Collier’s: “He wanted to be sure—hoped to be sure—that Stalin could hold Hitler off while America and Britain were reaching the peak of defensive and offensive arming.” In order to be sure, Hopkins had to see Stalin. “Stalin is Russia,” wrote the envoy. “His would be the only word of authority.”15

Hopkins’s other job was to resurrect his role as intermediary, this time between Roosevelt and Stalin. The Soviet premier was a mystery to the U.S. president. “For Roosevelt,” Hopkins told Maisky, “Stalin is at present just a name. He’s never seen the head of your government, never talked to him, and in general has no idea of what sort of a man he is.” Hopkins was to take Stalin’s measure, and “to carry a personal message from the President that we would go ‘all out’ and give every aid possible to the Soviets.”16

On Sunday morning, Hopkins went to Churchill’s bedroom at Chequers and “told him that the next move was his . . . he’d have to figure how I was going to get to Moscow.” With the Anglo-American summit looming, time was short. The prime minister telephoned the chief of the air staff, Sir Charles Portal, and ordered him to make the arrangements. He was still in bed when the reply came through: Hopkins would depart by train that very night for Invergordon in northern Scotland, where he would board a flight for Archangel on the White Sea and then on to Moscow. Winant was dispatched to obtain a Soviet visa; meanwhile, Hopkins relayed developments to FDR, assuring him that he would be “back in time to be in Canada for your visit.” The envoy passed the rest of the day like any in the country, talking to the other guests at Chequers about “books, plays, personalities” and “the war in generalities” and preparing for his BBC broadcast. If anyone other than Churchill knew about his impending mission, they gave no hint of it. “Here was British reserve at its peak,” Hopkins wrote later. “Tommy” Thompson thought Hopkins “seemed surprisingly relaxed . . . the feeling of being at the centre of great events always acted as a tonic to him.” This was an act. In fact, strong emotions and a great sense of responsibility were “churning” within Hopkins.17

Late that evening, after Hopkins had broadcast his lines from the Hawtrey Room, he repaired with Churchill to the lawn behind Chequers. As they walked back and forth in the gathering dusk, the prime minister briefed Hopkins “in the minutest detail” on the aid Britain was sending to Russia. The American asked how he should reply if Stalin asked him what cooperation Russia could expect from Britain; perhaps he was thinking about Churchill’s history as a fierce anticommunist. The PM looked hard at Hopkins, his eyes grave. “Tell him, tell him . . . tell him that Britain has but one ambition today, but one desire—to crush Hitler. You can depend upon us . . . Goodbye, God bless you Harry.” He laid his hand on Hopkins’s arm for a moment and then disappeared into the house.18

Late that night Churchill, the old Tory, drafted a cable to Stalin, the old Bolshevik:

Mr Harry Hopkins has been with me these days. Last week he asked the President to let him go to Moscow. I must tell you that there is a flame in this man for democracy and to beat Hitler. He is the nearest personal representative of the President. A little while ago when I asked him for a quarter of a million rifles they came at once. The President has now sent him full instructions and he leaves my house tonight to go to you . . . You can trust him absolutely. He is your friend and our friend. He will help you to plan for the future victory and for the long term supply of Russia.19

Averell and Kathleen Harriman drove Hopkins from Chequers to London’s neoclassical Euston railway station, with its monumental Doric arch. Little of the station was visible in the eerie London blackout, however. In the dim light Hopkins could just make out a few embassy staffers who had come to see him off and bring him his luggage from Claridge’s. At the very last minute, even as the train was moving off, Winant appeared. The unfortunate ambassador had spent the afternoon trying to sort out Hopkins’s visa. His Soviet counterpart, Maisky, had acquired the English habit of weekending in the country, but as a good left-winger he did so at the Bovingdon house of an exiled Spanish socialist leader, Juan Negrín. At the U.S. embassy’s request, Maisky returned to London early and received Winant in his study at 10 p.m. Winant’s request put the Soviet official in a bind: such permissions were usually cleared through Moscow, and in any case the visa seals were locked in a safe at a different location. Taking a chance, he wrote in Hopkins’s passport by hand, “Harry Hopkins is to be permitted to cross any frontier station of the USSR without examination of luggage, as a diplomatic person. I. Maisky, Ambassador of the USSR in Great Britain.” Winant tore off for Euston Station, ran up the platform, and handed the passport through the carriage window of the moving train. Hopkins was off. As his train pulled out of the darkened station, the Americans on the platform felt like “they had said good-bye to someone who was about to step into a rocket bound for interstellar space, for Russia then seemed immeasurably far away.”20

—

HOPKINS’S RIDE FOR THE TRIP NORTH was a special five-car train with a sleeping car, dining car, and lounge car. Also on board were his two traveling companions: Brigadier General Joseph T. McNarney, a U.S. Army officer detailed by General Marshall to accompany Hopkins; and Lieutenant John R. Alison, a young Army Air Corps pilot and assistant military attaché responsible for training British pilots on the American-built P-40 Tomahawk. At noon that day, Alison had received a “cryptic call” at his squadron outside London ordering him to report to Euston Station at 11 p.m. Whitehall had decided to send some of its P-40s, still packed in their crates, to the Soviet air force, and Alison was to train the Soviets up.21

The young aviator was concerned by the “little tinge of yellow” in Hopkins’s face but charmed by his “delightful sense of humor.” “I was a very junior officer and he treated me elegantly,” he recalled. “Very often they make the junior officer the bag smasher, but he treated me courteously as one of his party.” Hopkins arranged to meet the other two in the lounge car for a nightcap ten minutes after leaving Euston. “What will it be?” he asked Alison when the steward approached. “Sir, I don’t drink,” replied Alison, who ordered a lemon squash instead. The exchange was repeated for the second round of drinks. When the steward approached for the third time, Hopkins turned to Alison with a “quizzical half-smile” on his lips and “a twinkle in his eye.” “Alison,” he said. “I don’t care whether you drink or not but will you quit looking so damn superior!”22

Hopkins and his colleagues awoke the next morning, Monday, July 28, in Scotland. While they waited for the weather to clear, they drove across the rugged, beautiful moors and had tea at a shop owned by a Mrs. Simpson. After London’s wartime austerities, the bread and butter, heather honey, and other delights provided by Mrs. Simpson were a treat. Then orders came through from London that the flight was to depart immediately despite the poor weather. When Hopkins came down to the waterfront and saw the big PBY Catalina wallowing at its mooring out on the Cromarty Firth, he felt both familiarity and pride. Familiarity, because he had flown in the sturdy flying boats before, including one leg of his return journey from the United Kingdom in February, when his Clipper was delayed; pride, because he had fought hard bureaucratic battles to force the U.S. Navy to relinquish some of them to the British.23

The PBY-5, designated by the RAF as the Catalina Mark I, was a twin-motored, high-winged, wide-bottomed flying boat manufactured in San Diego by Consolidated Aircraft, with a fuselage sixty feet long and a wingspan of a hundred feet. The PBY would become one of the Second World War’s workhorses, used for long-range maritime patrol, antisubmarine warfare, search and rescue, and other roles. It was the only available aircraft with a chance of getting Hopkins to Russia and back in time for the Atlantic Conference.24

This particular aircraft, serial number W8416, was captained by Flight Lieutenant David “Mac” McKinley, DFC, an RAF officer from central casting except for his slight Irish accent. McKinley was one of Coastal Command’s most experienced pilots, with thirty-five hundred flying hours in the PBY. The day before, he and his crew were enjoying a picnic at beautiful Loch Lomond after weeks of patrolling the North West Approaches when another aircraft from their squadron flew overhead signaling with its Aldis lamp that they should return to base. At Invergordon on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, the station commander opened an envelope from the Foreign Office in McKinley’s presence and read him his orders. McKinley was to fly Hopkins and his party to Archangel in Russia’s far north, flying in a broad northerly sweep all the way up and around German-occupied Norway, past the tip of Finland (and several Luftwaffe bases), and then down over the White Sea to Archangel. For reasons of operational security, no notes were to be made or records kept, no special preparations were made for the flight that might have attracted attention, and only those charts covering McKinley’s precise route were provided to him.25

The flight to Archangel had an inauspicious start when the Catalina’s forward hatch blew open during takeoff and the anchor chain wrapped itself around the aircraft’s windscreen.26 On the second attempt, however, she got airborne. So began a flight that took nearly twenty-four hours, under the most primitive conditions. All PBYs were noisy and cramped. This one was particularly cluttered because it had been fitted with overload fuel tanks to enable it to fly the vast distance to Archangel. To accommodate the tanks and lighten the load, the aircrew had been reduced to five, which meant that none could be spared from flight duties to attend to the passengers. The RAF rations were basic—mainly sea biscuit and coffee, along with a little soup. Extreme turbulence usually put paid to any rations that had been consumed anyway. It was freezing cold, especially when the aircraft reached the Arctic region, yet the passengers had not been furnished with properly fitting flying clothes. At least Hopkins had Churchill’s hat to keep his head warm.

As well as being uncomfortable, the journey was dangerous. The PBY was a slow-flying, vulnerable aircraft, especially when loaded down. This one was only lightly armed, and visibility was worryingly good in the ceaseless daylight of an Arctic summer. McKinley decided to keep well clear of the Norwegian coast and fly very low—often only a few hundred feet above the surface of the ocean—in an effort to evade enemy radar. Radio silence was maintained for most of the journey. When Hopkins asked about the chances of encountering enemy aircraft, the skipper replied that they were 50/50. “Right, there’s nothing else for it,” said Hopkins. “Come on, Archangel.”

Hopkins maintained his good humor throughout the miserable flight, talking to the young crew about everyday subjects like school, family, and parties. He was determined not to be a burden and even acted as a steward on occasion. He spent most of his time in the waist of the flying boat, where two large plexiglass blisters provided what Alison called “picture window views.” Even there, however, the crew had stashed extra lifeboats and other gear that made it difficult to get comfortable. Hopkins sat in one of the pivoted gunners’ seats watching for signs of the enemy. When McKinley apologized about the rations, Hopkins patted a little medical kit he was carrying and said, “This is where my energy comes from, and it will last me for the next couple of days.” From time to time, he entered the tiny galley and injected himself with some substance from the kit, probably vitamins and liver extract. At the end of the marathon, he tried unconvincingly to tell McKinley that he had had a pleasant flight. The stoic McKinley was deeply impressed with his passenger’s “determination to totally disregard personal comfort,” noting, “Twenty-four-hour flights in the very stern austerity furnishings of a warplane and living on hard tack rations are not ideal conditions for a man in a critical state of health.”27

Half an hour out from Archangel, in the late afternoon of the twenty-ninth, three Soviet fighters appeared on the skyline. After the aircraft exchanged recognition signals, the Soviets closed in and escorted the Catalina into Archangel. The weather was pleasant and Hopkins noticed a beach crowded with bathers. McKinley put her down on the log-strewn Northern Dvina River in what he remembered as “a dodgy little landing, trying to move in and out of these huge baulks of timber that were floating down the river.” His job was not made easier when one of the Soviet planes accidentally brushed the flying boat with its wheels in midair and took off her antenna. Once the Catalina was safely down, a small mahogany launch came alongside and directed that she be moored next to a houseboat that would serve as the crew’s quarters while their passengers went on to Moscow. Later the crew heard gunfire and were told that the Soviet pilot responsible for the collision had been shot.28

Hopkins and his companions could not proceed to Moscow straight-away, as aircraft were not allowed to approach the capital at night. Any hopes of sleep were scotched by the insistence of the admiral in command at Archangel that the Americans join him for a banquet on the afterdeck of his yacht, a once elegant craft that was now distinctly run-down. “Dinner on the admiral’s yacht was monumental,” Hopkins remembered later. “It lasted almost four hours. There was an Iowa flavour to it, what with the fresh vegetables, the butter, cream, greens . . . The dinner was enormous, course after course. There was the inescapable cold fish, caviar, and vodka. Vodka has authority. It is nothing for the amateur to trifle with. Drink it as an American or an Englishman takes whisky neat and it will tear you apart. The thing to do is to spread a chunk of bread (and good bread it was) with caviar, and, while you’re swallowing that, bolt your vodka. Don’t play with the stuff. Eat while you’re drinking it—something that will act as a shock absorber for it.”29

Poor Lieutenant Alison did not have the advantage of a shock absorber, however. For a while, he managed to avoid drinking the countless toasts—to Stalin, to Roosevelt, to Churchill, even to seagulls—that left one highly decorated Soviet admiral flat on his back under the table within an hour of the party starting.30 But then a big Soviet general with an embroidered white linen tunic and “a mouthful of gold teeth” stood up, proposed a toast “to the American flyer who has come so far from his home to help us in our struggle against a common enemy,” and drained his vodka glass. Alison knew that his time had come. He stood up, thanked the general, raised his own glass, and emptied it of vodka in one gulp. This was Alison’s first taste of hard liquor, and the shock of it brought tears to his eyes. He sat down and put his face in his napkin while he recovered. When he came out from under the napkin, he found Hopkins looking at him from across the table with a smile on his face. “Well, Alison,” he said, “that shows a definite lack of character.”31

—

WHEN HE WAS NOT TEASING the previously abstemious Alison, Hopkins shared “uninterrupted” talk with his hosts—all men, except for his attractive female interpreter—about books, art, and classical music. Some of them had worked at Ford’s River Rouge factory in Michigan and wanted to know about the latest in American manufacturing. He got the impression they were no less confident of victory than their British allies, but instead of the Briton’s “cool indifference to incidental setbacks and difficulties, the Russian is apt to go poetical.” When Hopkins mentioned the approaching winter to one young Russian pilot, for instance, he replied, “There is autumn coming in nature but there is spring in our hearts.” Hopkins enjoyed the conversation, but he was distracted. McKinley noticed that throughout the meal, Hopkins “kept looking at his watch and looking at the door as much as to say, when are we going to the airport?” Finally, on about the twentieth course, he was informed that he would leave for Moscow in a few hours, at 4 a.m. The Catalina aircrew were to remain in Archangel, comforted only by the attentions of their beautiful and accommodating female interpreters.32

After two hours’ sleep, Hopkins and his party boarded an American-built Douglas DC-3 transport aircraft for the final leg of their journey. It was about the same size as the PBY but significantly more comfortable. As the DC-3 took off, its Soviet pilots gave their distinguished passenger a “special salute,” a complicated maneuver in which the plane flew only a few feet off the ground, dipping each wing in turn as if to cut the grass, then rose sharply and seemed to bounce. “It may be quite an honor, even lots of fun, in Russia,” Hopkins wrote later. “My own thoughts were that I had reached the end of my journey, that in another second or two Roosevelt’s emissary to Stalin would be in eternity with nothing to report.”

The plane covered the six hundred miles to Moscow in about four hours, again flying very low, both to avoid enemy interference and to enable it to home in on a broadcasting station in Moscow. As they passed over several hundred miles of dense forest that would be a formidable barrier even for Hitler’s panzers, Hopkins was cheered by the defensive advantages lent to the Soviet Union by its geography. (His view on the prison camps that could be seen here and there went unrecorded.) Eventually the blackness of the forest gave way to collectivized farms, then to the Volga “solid with barges,” “the factory towns belching their black smoke and yellow flames at us,” larger and more frequent towns—and then, at last, Moscow.33

—

THE MORNING OF WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, was already warm and sunny when Harry Hopkins emerged from his DC-3 on to the tarmac of Moscow Central Airport. He was greeted by Western diplomats and military officers led by the U.S. and British ambassadors, Laurence Steinhardt and Sir Stafford Cripps, a large delegation of Soviet officials, and secret police from the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. The Soviets were excited by the arrival of “the personal representative and friend of President Roosevelt,” whom they called “Garry Gopkins” according to their habit of converting an “h” into a “g,” the closest letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. But they could not help noticing that the visitor “looked very frail, very weak, pale.”34

Laurence Steinhardt was a New York lawyer turned diplomat, tall, ambitious, and vaguely equine in appearance. He took Hopkins back to his residence, one mile to the west of the Kremlin, and put him to bed. Spaso House, one of Moscow’s “merchant palaces,” had been the home of the U.S. ambassador since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1933; since the outbreak of war, it had served as the embassy, too. Built in the late tsarist period for a wealthy merchant, the ostentatious house boasted a massive chandelier that was the talk of Moscow when it was built. Hopkins was not inclined to savor the comforts of Spaso House for too long, however. In Sherwood’s words, he wanted to explore “the vast mystery which was Russia.”35

The principal purpose of his mission, Hopkins told Steinhardt, was to see whether the military situation was as “disastrous” as many in Washington believed—and as it appeared to be in the cables sent by the military attaché, Major Ivan Yeaton. The attaché was highly suspicious of the Soviets’ motives and pessimistic about their chances of holding Moscow. But Hopkins “let everybody know that the president had made a decision that we were going to help Russia,” recalled John Alison later. “Policy was going to be made in the White House and his job was to see that that policy was carried out . . . He was informal, he didn’t stand on strict protocol but he certainly let everybody know that he had the President’s authority.” Steinhardt conceded that the Soviets would be more effective in defending their homeland than they had been in attacking Finland. He protested that it was almost impossible for outsiders to get an accurate picture of the military situation, given the hostility with which they were treated by Soviet officialdom. Hopkins replied that he was determined to breach “this wall of suspicion.”36

In fact, Hopkins held Steinhardt partly responsible for the existence of the wall. That morning, the two men called on Sir Stafford Cripps, a former Labour politician whom Churchill had sent to Moscow, hoping that as a socialist he could talk the Kremlin’s language. (The British ambassador was a little cold and stiff, hence his nickname “Stuffy.”) Cripps shared Steinhardt’s skepticism about the Soviets’ war effort, but he also believed they must be encouraged to hold out until the winter. After getting rid of Steinhardt on the pretext that he had a private message to pass on from Churchill, Hopkins told the Englishman he had “sensed the atmosphere” as soon as he arrived at Spaso House: the American officials were not taking a “broad view of the situation.” Cripps was pleased to find that the two men “saw very much eye to eye about the necessities of the situation,” and to hear that “Roosevelt was all out to help all he could even if the Army and Navy authorities in America didn’t like it.”37

In the afternoon, Hopkins took a sightseeing tour around Moscow. After the gaiety of London, Moscow struck new arrivals as grim and gray. The roads were good, but few private automobiles were on them. Everywhere Muscovites queued patiently and silently for trams and buses—with the same look of resignation, thought one Briton, “as cows coming in from the fields one by one at milking time.” They dressed drably, having put their best outfits aside when clothes rationing began. Strict food rationing was also in place. Many children had been evacuated to the countryside; women, on the other hand, could be seen working everywhere. Soldiers were conspicuous. Hopkins observed that the standard of living in Russia was significantly lower than it was at home, and it was obvious to him that Stalin “had control over everyone in the USSR.” In general, however, he was reassured. He was surprised at the lack of damage done to the capital by German air raids. Hopkins watched large supply convoys move out of Moscow to the front in a regular and systematic fashion. He marveled at “the concentration of energy” he saw in the Soviet capital. He was impressed, he told Joseph Davies later, by “the executive direction and planning which was indicated by the orderliness of all this activity.”38

In the early evening, Hopkins headed for the undisputed center of executive direction and planning, the Kremlin. An embassy car took him, along with Steinhardt and an American interpreter, to the great triangular citadel on the hill. Secret police cars drove in front and behind. “Time and distance had been coordinated down to the inch and second,” he would recall. The Kremlin was a centuries-old walled compound of palaces, barracks, and cathedrals located between Red Square, with its outlandishly beautiful St. Basil’s Cathedral, and the Moscow River. Its forbidding thirty-foot-high, russet-colored walls were punctuated by soaring towers. The citadel’s shape, one author noted, “was uncompromisingly sharp. On maps the Kremlin looked like a pointed tooth biting into Moscow’s flesh.” The current preoccupation of the authorities was to ensure that this outline could not be seen from the sky. Enormous rolls of canvas like “stage scenery,” adorned with fake windows and architectural features daubed in fireproof paint, hung from the Kremlin walls. From across the river, an observer looking in the direction of the Kremlin saw only “a row of houses with gabled roofs.” Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square had been turned into a wooden cottage. Nets covered in leaves and branches were draped over the Kremlin’s courtyards and the façades of its buildings. The red stars that sat atop the Kremlin’s spires, and the golden domes of its churches, were shrouded in gray cloth. Everything was camouflaged.39

Hopkins’s cavalcade zoomed through the Kremlin gates and wound past ancient onion-domed cathedrals and monuments. It stopped outside the old Senate, a triangle of a building that was called the Yellow Palace in tsarist times. He was directed along many corridors and around many turns, passing countless doors on the way. Everywhere were soldiers wearing prominent Soviet decorations, including the large red enamel badge that signified a Hero of the Soviet Union. As he proceeded past groups of soldiers, they telephoned ahead to report that he was on his way. Hopkins was ushered through a dozen doors and offices containing secretaries and bodyguards until finally, at exactly six o’clock, he was brought into the presence of Joseph Stalin.40

—

STALIN’S OFFICE WAS LONG AND BARE. The walls were paneled in oak to shoulder height, and hanging from them were the finest maps Hopkins had ever seen. The only other decorations were black-and-white portraits of Marx and Engels, and a pale plaster death mask of Lenin. Hopkins thought the room was “furnished with severe simplicity, but with every modern, up-to-date facility.” There was a mahogany desk with five or six telephones and a panel of buttons, and a long meeting table covered in heavy green baize. The chairs were straight-backed and hard-seated. In an anteroom stood a large relief globe, perhaps ten feet high.41

At sixty-two, Joseph Stalin had been general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR for nearly twenty years. In recent months he had acquired two further titles, premier (or chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars), and People’s Commissar of Defense. But there was nothing ornamental about the man himself. Hopkins’s impression was of “an austere, rugged, determined figure in boots that shone like mirrors, stout baggy trousers, and snug-fitting blouse.” Unlike everyone else in the Kremlin, the Vozhd (leader) wore no decorations or badges of rank on his well-cut, military-style tunic. His left arm was slightly shorter than his right and he held it near his body. He was surprisingly short; in Hopkins’s generous expression he was “built close to the ground, like a football coach’s dream of a tackle.” His dark, bristling hair and his mustache were shot through with gray; his skin was pockmarked. At first glance he was unimpressive; in fact, more than one foreigner likened his appearance to that of a gardener. But the strength of his personality was soon evident to anyone, not least in the “hunted look” in the eyes of the people around him. Hopkins found Stalin “exceptionally able, quiet, but a strong man . . . There was no question he was the ‘top man,’ running the show.”42

In late July 1941, the show was in a pretty sorry state. The first fortnight of the German invasion had been a disaster for the Soviets. Much of the air force was destroyed on the ground in the first days. German forces struck out toward Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the center, and Kiev in the south. Panzers forced their way through Soviet lines and encircled the enemy from the rear, allowing them to be enveloped and destroyed by the German infantry divisions that followed. By mid-July, the Germans had taken Smolensk, not far from Moscow’s threshold. Nighttime air raids began on the Soviet capital. Estimates of Soviet losses ranged from three-quarters of a million to two million men. In the second half of the month, though, the situation stabilized a little. The Wehrmacht’s offensive slowed and its logistical problems quickened; the regime did not collapse; the Red Army regrouped. The position was still desperate; indeed, the day before Hopkins’s arrival the Red Army’s chief of staff, General Georgii Zhukov, had been removed from his post for proposing that Kiev be abandoned. But equilibrium had been restored within the regime, as it had been within Stalin himself. Having wobbled in the first week and withdrawn to his dacha outside Moscow, he was now firmly back in command.43

Also present in the room when Hopkins arrived was Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister. Molotov was a ruthless functionary who had lent his name, unwillingly, to the gasoline bombs the Finns had rigged up and thrown at their Soviet invaders during the 1939–1940 war. An imperturbable diplomat with what Churchill called a “smile of Siberian winter,” he usually remained silent during Stalin’s meetings with foreigners. Molotov struck Hopkins as “the professorial, studious type.”44

Stalin bowed slightly to Hopkins and welcomed him, and the two men exchanged cigarettes. Stalin chain-smoked throughout the meeting, which his visitor thought helped to explain “the harshness of his carefully controlled voice.” After one greeting, it was down to business. Stalin offered no small talk; when he laughed it was short and sardonic. He spoke rapidly in Russian, ignoring the interpreter, looking straight into Hopkins’s eyes “as though I understood every word.” Hopkins opened by explaining that he came as the personal representative of the president; his mission “was not a diplomatic one” in the sense that he “did not propose any formal understanding of any kind or character.” Rather, he was here to put across a message: “The President considered Hitler the enemy of mankind and . . . he therefore wished to aid the Soviet Union in its fight against Germany.” FDR believed that “the most important thing to be done in the world today was to defeat Hitler and Hitlerism,” and consequently the U.S. government was determined “to extend all possible aid to the Soviet Union at the earliest possible time.”45

The mention of Hitler had a dramatic effect on Stalin. His body tensed; his hands clenched; his person “seemed to grow larger”; his voice slowed so as to convey to Hopkins “every syllable in its implication and direct meaning.” Hitler had torn up his 1939 nonaggression pact with Russia and invaded his former ally “without a word to Stalin, not a hint.” The master of the Gulag said he believed that the Nazis’ international behavior failed to meet the “minimum moral standard between all nations” and consequently they were “an anti-social force in the modern world.” Hopkins sensed that Stalin’s “cold, implacable” anger at Hitler was “a personal hatred that I have seldom heard expressed by anyone in authority . . . I think that Joseph Stalin would have liked nothing better at that moment than to have had Hitler sitting where I sat. Germany would have needed a new chancellor.” The two men sat in silence until Stalin had recovered his composure.46

Once these questions of morality were settled, Hopkins asked about Russia’s material needs: “What would Russia require that the United States could deliver immediately and . . . what would be Russia’s requirements on the basis of a long war?” Stalin provided his wish list: in the first category, antiaircraft guns and ammunition, large machine guns, and one million or more rifles; in the second, high-octane aviation gasoline, aluminum for the construction of aircraft, and certain other items. “At this point in the conversation,” Hopkins reported to Roosevelt later, “Mr. Stalin suddenly made the remark, ‘Give us anti-aircraft guns and the aluminum and we can fight for three or four years.’” Sherwood records that Hopkins saw great significance in “the very nature of Stalin’s requests, which proved that he was viewing the war on a long-term basis. A man who feared immediate defeat would not have put aluminum so high on the list of priorities.”47

Of course, Stalin made these requests precisely to create this impression. Years later, his interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, observed that Stalin “was unquestionably a great actor.” Stalin needed allies who believed the Soviet cause was not hopeless. When Hopkins and later foreign visitors called on him, therefore, he created an atmosphere of confidence and authority:

The chimes of the Spasskaya Tower clock barely penetrated the office where silence always reigned. The boss was radiating benevolence as he unhurriedly conversed. Nothing dramatic seemed to be occurring outside the walls of that room, nothing seemed to worry him. And that was reassuring . . . What were [his visitors] to make of Stalin’s calm demeanor and the assurances he gave to Hopkins that if the Americans supplied aluminum, the Soviet Union could go on fighting even for four more years? It was obvious that Stalin had a better understanding of the situation! . . . Stalin was bluffing; but fortunately he was able to bluff it out.48

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HOPKINS WAS PLEASED with his progress, but he was anxious to get Stalin alone; perhaps he felt that the presence of Steinhardt and Molotov was preventing a meeting of minds. He later told Davies, “I saw I couldn’t get anywhere in a general meeting, so I suggested that I had some messages from the President to deliver to him personally.” Stalin replied, “You are our guest; you have but to command,” and promised to hold himself available every evening from six o’clock. It was also agreed that Hopkins would confer with Red Army representatives later that evening and Molotov the next day. With that, the meeting adjourned. Apart from his Hitler outbursts, Hopkins thought Stalin had been “a steady, gracious, schooled diplomat.”49

Back at Spaso House, Hopkins invited American and British reporters into the drawing room for a chat over whiskey-and-sodas. His exhaustion was obvious. “He looked pale and tired,” recalled an attendee, “with one thin leg dangling over the other as he slumped in his chair. He talked faintly, his voice dwindling away at times to an inaudible murmur.” The reporters complained about their inability to find out what was happening inside the Soviet Union. “Harry,” said one, “for God’s sake be human. Tell us something.” Hopkins was not in a position to give them inside information. But if his voice was hard to make out, his message was resoundingly clear. He revealed that on the president’s behalf, he had told Stalin that “whoever was fighting Hitler was on the right side of this conflict and we intended to help them.” Stalin had promised that “the Soviet people will play their role in crushing Hitler.”50

The final appointment of the day was a meeting between Hopkins, McNarney, Yeaton, and General Nikolai Yakovlev of the Soviet Field Artillery. This was supposed to be the expert discussion at which the Americans could gather the data they needed to design their aid program; in fact, the greatest insight to emerge concerned the nature of the Soviet system. The unfortunate General Yakovlev was plainly terrified of saying the wrong thing and behaved like an unwilling witness under cross-examination. He was unable to enlighten his interlocutors on almost anything, including the organization and training of antiaircraft units, the USSR’s monthly output of 37-millimeter guns, or the composition of a Soviet military delegation that was then in the United States. Quizzed on the speed of the latest Soviet fighter plane, he answered, “I am an artillery man.” When the Americans enquired into the weight of the heaviest Soviet tank, he replied, “It is a good tank.” Yakovlev could not think of any additional items the Red Army required. Asked whether the Soviets needed items such as tanks and antitank guns, which were not on Stalin’s list of requirements, he replied that he was “not empowered to say.” The hapless general made sure, however, to state that Russia needed aluminum.51

After that uninspiring conference, Hopkins made for his bed. His body desperately needed sleep, but the Luftwaffe had other ideas. For more than a week, the capital had endured nightly air raids. The authorities’ response was comprehensive. Moscow, once a city with a raucous nightlife, was thrown into deepest darkness each evening. The blackout, reported McNarney, was “magnificent. No light of any kind can be seen. It is a crime to carry a lighted cigarette on the street.” Hopkins ruminated that in Britain, an air warden who saw a light in a window tapped on the owners’ door to remind them to pull their curtains more tightly; in Russia, he tapped on the owners’ door to arrest them. “In Moscow,” he remarked, “you take to an air-raid shelter when the enemy bombers come over—or else. And you stay there until the police tell you that you may come out.” This was one of the many “differences between life in a democracy and under a dictatorship.” Fire-watching, too, was organized differently. A British visitor to the capital noted that “fire-watching is highly efficient for the simple reason that if a building catches fire the man in charge is held responsible and he is shot.”52

Shortly after midnight on July 30–31, the air raid warning sounded. McNarney later told his superiors that the antiaircraft fire created an “interesting and noisy display” lasting one and a half hours, ending with “a tremendous burst from all calibers.” But McNarney’s terse description hardly captured the ferocity, volume, or color of the famed Moscow barrage. In a determined effort to repel the attackers, especially in the first few weeks of air raids, the Soviets launched a remarkably concentrated barrage from concentric circles of guns ringing the city. Visitors watched in awe as antiaircraft shells exploded at every height and shrapnel clattered down onto roofs like hail.53

The most lyrical account came from the pioneering American photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who watched one of the early raids from the roof of Spaso House:

I have seen bombings before in other cities, but I have never before seen the entire heavens filled with shooting stars, with hanging parachute flares, with dot-dashes of tracer-gun fire, with red, white and blue Roman candles, and streamers like the tails of red comets shooting out into space. Around the complete circumference of the horizon the beams of searchlights swung restlessly, as though a horde of insects turned over on their backs were waving their luminous legs in the air. Once while we watched, these shafts of light came together in a knot and caught in their focus a plane which glowed like a silver moth against the sky. For minutes the knot of light kept the moth imprisoned as it dipped and turned, trying to escape, until suddenly it twisted violently and fell; we had seen our first German plane shot down . . .

I had not realized that there is so much music with an air raid. The most beautiful sound is the echo of the guns, which returns on a deeper note, like the bass of a Beethoven chord. The total effect is as though two types of music were being played together—formal chords with overtones of jazz thrown in. The peculiar whistle, which one soon learns to recognize, of bombs falling in the neighborhood is like a dash of Gershwin against a classic symphonic background.54

On the night described by Bourke-White, the windows of Spaso House were blown out by a thousand-pound bomb that landed fifty yards away, demolishing a theater. One week later, Hopkins watched the Moscow barrage from the same spot on the roof of the embassy. “The Germans took a hand in welcoming me to Moscow,” he observed archly. At dawn he would have heard, like a communist call to prayer, the loudspeakers on Moscow’s roofs announcing, “The enemy has been beaten back, comrades. Go home to your rest.”55

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IN WASHINGTON THE NEXT DAY, President Roosevelt met with the Soviet military delegation about which General Yakovlev had been so ill-informed. The White House press corps was struck by the novelty of seeing the visitors’ visored caps, emblazoned with the Soviet hammer-and-sickle device, hanging outside the president’s office. “We discussed prospects in Russia,” FDR later told reporters. “The Russian Army appears to be putting up an awfully good fight.” He claimed that the Soviets had the money to pay for their military purchases so he saw no prospect of Moscow receiving Lend-Lease assistance. In a radio address a few hours later, conservative Illinois congressman Stephen A. Day called on American Catholics to repudiate the president’s policies and announced he would introduce a resolution to halt U.S. aid to Moscow. FDR’s decision to send Harry Hopkins to Russia, he said, was unwarranted, illegal, and unconstitutional. “We all know that none of the four freedoms exist in the Soviet Union,” concluded the congressman, “and can never exist there unless the blood-soaked dictatorship of Stalin be overthrown.”56

On the same day, Muscovites awoke to front-page newspaper reports of the Stalin-Hopkins meeting and stories emphasizing Roosevelt’s pledge of immediate assistance to the USSR. Hopkins lunched with Cripps at the British embassy, a magnificent villa on the river embankment opposite the Kremlin that had once been the residence of a wealthy sugar merchant. Hopkins told Cripps about his first meeting with Stalin and they strategized about the forthcoming summit off the coast of Newfoundland. Margaret Bourke-White photographed the two men lounging on a sofa with Cripps’s large Airedale terrier, Joe, playing at their feet.57

At 3 p.m., Hopkins and Steinhardt called on Foreign Commissar Molotov at the Kremlin. The topic for discussion was the Far East, where Japan’s recent advance into Indochina had led to American sanctions and stoked fears that she might strike at Soviet Siberia. (In fact, the Japanese push into Indochina indicated they had decided not to attack the USSR.) Molotov commented that notwithstanding the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact, Tokyo’s attitude seemed “uncertain” and Moscow was “watching the situation with the utmost care.” He stated that the best way of preventing Japanese aggression would be for President Roosevelt to issue a “warning,” which Hopkins interpreted as being “a statement that the U.S. would come to the assistance of the Soviet Union in the event of its being attacked by Japan.” Knowing FDR’s aversion to such a proposal, Hopkins sidestepped it with diplomatic finesse, commenting only that Washington was “disturbed at the encroachments which Japan was making in the Far East” and “would not look with any favor” on further threatening actions.58

When he got back to Spaso House, Hopkins found Bourke-White in the foyer, waiting nervously to hear whether the Kremlin would allow her to photograph his second meeting with Stalin, which was taking place that evening. “Let’s forget about it and go shopping,” he suggested. Accompanied by the ambassador and a posse of secret police, they mounted a frontal assault on Moscow’s gift stores. (The security detail proved useful when the embassy car broke down and the party needed a lift.) Hopkins inspected carvings from the Urals and little green boxes made of malachite. For his daughter Diana, he purchased an embroidered Russian peasant girl’s outfit, consisting of skirt, vest, and apron, and a small clay figurine of a woman in similar dress. Steinhardt bought Hopkins his own keepsake, a small silver teapot bearing an engraving of the Kremlin. Bourke-White noticed Hopkins’s “great and intelligent interest in everything he saw,” especially the Russians they encountered: the way he watched their faces, their expressions, their clothes. Back at the embassy, she learned that at Hopkins’s request the Kremlin had granted permission for her to photograph the meeting that night. For the first time in his life, the Vozhd would pose for an American photographer.59

At 6:30 p.m., Hopkins returned to the Kremlin in his gray business suit for his second and final meeting with Joseph Stalin. This time the two men were alone, apart from a Russian interpreter.60 Hopkins “had made up his mind . . . to get down to brass tacks.” He told Stalin that “the President was anxious to have his appreciation and analysis of the war between Germany and Russia.” The Soviet leader obliged with a long and extremely detailed review of the situation. Stalin compared the numbers, equipment, and tactics of the two sides, admitting that the Soviet forces had been taken by surprise but maintaining that their morale was “extremely high,” because “they are fighting for their homes and in familiar territory.” Germany, he observed, had found that “moving mechanized forces through Russia was very different from moving them over the boulevards of Belgium and France.” When the Germans pierced the Soviet lines, the defenders did not surrender but counterattacked at another point. Soviet “insurgents” fought behind the German front line, attacking their airfields and lines of communication. Stalin repeatedly expressed “great confidence” that when winter came, the front line would not have reached Moscow, Kiev, or Leningrad—and at that point, the “tired” Germans would have to go on the defensive.61

When Stalin’s lengthy account was complete, the practical Hopkins moved to the subject of Western aid. The U.S. and British governments “were willing to do everything that they possibly could during the succeeding weeks to send matériel to Russia,” he said, but the long-term supply issues “could only be resolved if our Government had complete knowledge, not only of the military situation in Russia, but of [the] type, number and quality of their military weapons, as well as full knowledge of raw materials and factory capacity.” Consequently, Hopkins proposed that a conference be “held between our three Governments, at which the relative strategic interests of each front, as well as the interests of our several countries, [could be] fully and jointly explored.” Believing it would be “unwise to hold a conference while this battle was in the balance,” Hopkins suggested that it should occur in Moscow after October 1. Stalin replied that he would welcome such a conference. Hopkins had not discussed this striking idea with FDR, and he was careful to tell Stalin that he was not authorized to propose it officially. Hopkins later commended it to Roosevelt on the basis of his experience with General Yakovlev: “There is literally no one in the whole Government who is willing to give any information other than Mr. Stalin himself. Therefore, it is essential that such a conference be held with Mr. Stalin personally.”62

They also discussed the ports of entry through which American aid could get to the Soviet Union. All of them had their problems. Archangel was difficult due to its location, although Stalin said his icebreakers could keep it open all winter. Supplies would be shipped across the Pacific to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, where they could join the Trans-Siberian Railway; the danger there was of Japanese interception. Some matériel would have to be transported around Africa and north via the Middle East and Central Asia, although Stalin worried about the quality of the roads and railways in Iran and the loading facilities on the Caspian Sea, and urged that the U.S. military speed up construction of wharf facilities in the Persian Gulf. For the moment, all three routes would be used.63

Hopkins took lengthy handwritten notes of everything that Stalin said. He noticed during their meetings that Stalin was wont to take a pad and pencil—probably one of the blue pencils he favored, with “Third Five-Year Plan” printed on the side—and doodle or make notes. Hopkins decided to follow suit. He found that in the periods when Stalin was talking to the interpreter in Russian he could catch up on his notes. The “interpreting business was not such a bad thing,” he admitted to Davies later. “It had its advantages.”64 Later he worked up these notes into formal minutes for distribution to the president and the secretaries of state, war, and the navy. Toward the end of the second meeting, however, Stalin said he had a “personal message” for FDR. The message concerned U.S. entry into the war and was extremely sensitive. When Hopkins wrote up this part of the conversation, therefore, he made one copy, marked it “For the President only,” and recommended that it not be sent to the State Department.65

Stalin began this final session by stating that “the world influence of the President and the Government of the United States was enormous,” and that they could give “encouragement and moral strength” to “the vast numbers of oppressed people who hated Hitler” and “countless other millions in nations still unconquered.” (Stalin was silent about the vast numbers of oppressed people who hated him.) The German army and people, he said, would be “demoralized by an announcement that the United States is going to join in the war against Hitler.” Such an announcement was “the one thing that could defeat Hitler, and perhaps without ever firing a shot.” He even requested Hopkins to “tell the President that he would welcome American troops on any part of the Russian front,” under American command. Hopkins demurred, saying that “my mission related entirely to matters of supply and that the matter of our joining in the war would be decided largely by Hitler himself.” Even in the event of American participation, he doubted the U.S. government “would want an American army in Russia.” Nevertheless, Hopkins promised to pass Stalin’s blunt message to Roosevelt. In subsequent public comments, Hopkins made no mention of this final exchange; indeed, he claimed that “Stalin doesn’t want our Army.”66

Toward the end of the meeting, the two men were joined by Margaret Bourke-White. The intrepid American had been picked up at her hotel in a Soviet-built limousine and taken to the Kremlin, flanked by cars full of secret police. She was driven through the grounds past saluting soldiers and then rode in a red-carpeted elevator to the second floor of the old Senate building. Like Hopkins, she was “led along the longest, most branching, most winding hall it has ever been my experience to walk through.” She noticed that the doors were numbered in descending order, and when her party got to No. 2, the soldiers held it open and took her inside. The room reminded Bourke-White of “the board room of a small Midwestern factory”; in fact, it was Joseph Stalin’s waiting room. After chatting for a long time with the soldiers about Georgian beauties and horse riding in the Caucasus, she was finally summoned. She adjusted the red bow she had worn in her hair to catch Stalin’s eye, and was ushered into Room No. 1.67

At first, Bourke-White was disorientated by the gap between her expectations of Stalin and the reality before her. Her eyes “instinctively went to the ceiling, for I remembered those giant statues I had seen”; only then did she look down and see Stalin “standing very stiff and straight in the center of the rug.” He was significantly shorter than Hopkins, shorter even than Bourke-White. She thought he looked gray and fatigued and was astonished to see pockmarks on his cheeks: no such imperfections ever appeared in the portraits made by Soviet photographers. Nevertheless, his “rough pitted face was so strong that it looked as if it had been carved out of stone.” Bourke-White crawled around on the floor with her cumbersome camera equipment trying to find an angle “to make that stone face look human.” She conscripted the interpreter into holding her reflectors and flash bulbs. When she dropped a lens, it was Hopkins who reassured her, saying, “Take your time.” Stalin chuckled at the sight of Bourke-White on her hands and knees, with her head under a camera cloth. But when the session ended, so did the smile, “as though a veil had been drawn over his features. Again he looked as if he had been turned into granite, and I went away thinking that this was the strongest, most determined face I had ever seen.” Later that evening Bourke-White set up a makeshift laboratory in a servant’s bathroom at Spaso House and spent all night developing the pictures that would shortly appear in newspapers around the world.68

Hopkins’s conference with Stalin ended three hours after it began. It did not finish on Stalin’s word; skillfully he allowed Hopkins to terminate the visit. The premier said good-bye once, with finality and warmth but without any theatrics. Hopkins recalled that he “shook hands from Stalin’s office to the doors where my car was.”69

The Soviet leader made a strong impression on Hopkins. The American was delighted by Stalin’s confidence that Russia “would ultimately destroy Hitler as Russia had destroyed Napoleon.” He wrote that Stalin “seems to have no doubts. He assures you that Russia will stand against the onslaughts of the German Army. He takes it for granted that you have no doubts, either.” He told Cripps later he was “surprised and encouraged” by Stalin’s account; he told the press that the meeting had added to his “confidence that Hitler will lose.” Hopkins also liked Stalin’s nondiplomatic manner: his “clear, concise, direct” questions; his “capacity for clear and simple statements.” Like his office décor and his uniform, Stalin’s manner was unadorned: “he never wastes a syllable.” “He talked,” Hopkins remarked, “as he knew his troops were shooting—straight and hard.” In his article in the American Magazine, Hopkins explained that in Washington and London, “such missions as mine might be stretched out into what the State Department and Foreign Office call conversations. I had no conversations in Moscow—just six hours of conversation. After that there was no more to be said. It was all cleaned up at two sittings.”70

Hopkins was also struck by Stalin’s frankness and his “extraordinary grasp of detail.” He told Cripps that Stalin gave him “every figure and statistic that he asked for,” in most cases from memory. To Davies, Hopkins mused that the accuracy of Stalin’s recall may be “due, in part, to the fact that every phase of the industrial Five Year Plan and war preparedness had been given Stalin’s personal and direct attention over a long period.” Stalin was, Hopkins thought, “right on the ball”; his “finger was on the throttle.”71

The aura of command must have been seductive to someone accustomed to the easy informality of the Roosevelt and Churchill circles. On the rare occasions that an answer eluded the Vozhd, Hopkins recalled later, he merely “touched a button. Instantly, as if he’d been standing alertly at the door, a secretary appeared, stood at attention. Stalin repeated my question. The answer came like a shot. The secretary disappeared just like that.”72

Stalin’s openness with Hopkins was indeed something of a revelation. This was the first proper military briefing the Soviet leader had provided to a foreigner since Barbarossa began. It contained exactly the kind of intelligence that Roosevelt craved and that his Moscow embassy had been unable to provide. Ambassador Steinhardt admitted to the president that Stalin had discussed matters “with a frankness unparalleled in my knowledge in recent Soviet history.” The interpreter Berezhkov concurred that Stalin was “very candid,” even going so far as to admit mistakes, which was not his habit.73 Yet just as Stalin’s demeanor was contrived to inspire confidence, so were his statements. He played down Soviet air losses and casualties and played up Soviet morale. He predicted confidently that the German offensive would halt in front of Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev by the start of October; in fact, it enveloped Kiev in September and threatened Leningrad and Moscow until early December.74

On the other hand, some gilding of the lily was to be expected. Like Churchill before him, Stalin had to walk a careful line in convincing an American envoy that his country’s cause was serious enough to justify aid but not so dire that aid would be pointless.75 Hopkins no doubt applied a discount factor to Moscow’s confidence, just as he did to London’s. In the main, Stalin’s précis was accurate, as was his larger point: that Russia was determined to resist the German attack, irrespective of the cost.

Berezhkov records that Stalin had “high expectations” of the Hopkins visit, and based on the available fragments of evidence, they were met.76 Averell Harriman, who came to know Stalin well, said the dictator had “great respect for Harry’s courage.” The idea of “this frail sick man” with a “great heart” taking such a dangerous trip made “a very deep impression on Stalin.”77 Berezhkov testified that Stalin had “a special regard for Hopkins” because “he was the first who came after this terrible blow we got from the Germans.” Furthermore, Hopkins’s predilection for straight talk and hard work endeared him to the Soviets. Stalin was widely quoted in Moscow as saying that Hopkins was “the only man he ever met who could work harder and longer than himself.” Other officials were also impressed: in late 1941 foreign correspondent Quentin Reynolds, who by then had moved from London to Moscow, heard Molotov and a colleague “talk about Hopkins with awe. They’d never seen such a bundle of dynamite in Moscow as Harry.”78

Hopkins does seem to have made a connection with Stalin. American diplomat Charles Bohlen heard Stalin say that Hopkins was the first American to whom he had spoken “po dushe,” or from the soul. For the rest of the war, Harriman noted, Hopkins was the only foreigner apart from Roosevelt and Churchill to whom Stalin showed “any personal warmth,” invariably crossing the room to greet him. As Bohlen cautioned, however, the personal feelings of Stalin and his comrades never affected “their single-minded pursuit of their objectives.”79

Hopkins and Steinhardt dined that evening at Stalin’s favorite Caucasian restaurant, eating “a vast quantity of Georgian food,” including lamb, caviar, and vodka.80 When the air raid siren sounded during dinner, the secret police bundled the Americans off to a special bomb shelter. Stalin had already apologized to Hopkins for not looking after him better during the previous raid; he was not going to make the same mistake two nights in a row. Ordinary Russians sheltered inside Metro stations, many of which were quite beautiful, with marble pillars and elaborate ceilings. Film director Sergei Eisenstein once declared that Moscow’s “Metro is exactly what Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would think an air raid shelter should look like.” Hopkins and Steinhardt were taken somewhere even more cinematic: “the deepest shelter in Moscow,” a tiled room located beneath the Metro that was usually reserved for top party officials. There were comfortable sofas, sleeping cots, and a great “spread” of provisions, including champagne, chocolate, cigarettes, and more caviar. Hopkins laughed when Steinhardt told him that no such shelter had ever been placed at his disposal.81

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THE FOLLOWING DAY, Hopkins sent FDR his first cable from Moscow: “I have had two long and satisfactory talks with Stalin and will communicate personally to you the messages he is sending. I would like to tell you now, however, that I feel ever so confident about this front. The morale of the population is exceptionally good. There is unbounded determination to win.”82 The news of Hopkins’s optimism soon raced around Washington.

The cable arrived on a busy day for the president. In a conference with reporters, he labeled the Soviet resistance “magnificent, and frankly, better than any military expert in Germany thought it would be.” Asked by a reporter whether he was referring to the Führer, FDR replied to general laughter, “Now don’t go and spoil it.” He also met with another of his executive agents, Averell Harriman, briefly back home to report on his progress in London.83

Unusually for the genial Roosevelt, he also gave a stern forty-five-minute lecture to his cabinet that afternoon for failing to expedite aid to the USSR. Harold Ickes recalled gleefully that the president gave the departments of State and War “one of the most complete dressings down that I have witnessed. He said that these departments had been giving Russia a ‘run-around.’” Inadequate progress had been made in filling the Soviets’ requests for P-40 pursuit planes, bombers, antiaircraft guns, and other supplies, for which they were willing to pay. Morgenthau noted that FDR “directed most of his fire at Stimson, who looked thoroughly miserable. Never have I heard the President more emphatic and insistent.” He said he was “sick and tired” of promises, and ordered, “Get the planes right off with a bang next week.” The beleaguered Stimson, caught between an impatient president and an army that was loath to split its armaments with both Britain and Russia, complained to his diary that FDR “was really in a hoity-toity humor and wouldn’t listen to argument.”84

Hopkins’s cable arrived in Washington some hours after the cabinet meeting wrapped up, so it did not influence the president’s comments directly.85 However, Hopkins’s meetings in the Kremlin weighed on the president’s mind and sharpened his desire for action: Ickes got the impression in the Cabinet Room that Roosevelt was “particularly anxious” about Soviet aid because of Hopkins’s mission.86 The receipt of Hopkins’s cable that evening would have confirmed FDR’s thinking. The following day, Welles sent a formal note to Ambassador Oumansky confirming the administration’s decision to “give all economic assistance practicable for the purpose of strengthening the Soviet Union in its struggle against armed aggression.” That same day, FDR assigned a favored administrator, Hopkins protégé Wayne Coy, the task of expediting delivery of the aid, instructing him to “please, with my full authority, use a heavy hand—act as a burr under the saddle and get things moving!” The task was reminiscent of Averell Harriman’s job in London. In case there was any doubt as to FDR’s meaning, he closed his letter with “Step on it!”87

Hopkins spent his last day in Moscow reviewing the results of his mission with Stafford Cripps as well as officials at Spaso House. In his cable to FDR, he mentioned a “satisfactory” meeting with Laurence Steinhardt. In truth, he was deeply underwhelmed by the U.S. ambassador. From the moment he arrived at the airport, he had been trying to shake him so he could discuss events with other observers. Cripps “pumped it in to” Hopkins that the U.S. embassy was a defeatists’ haunt, which was “bad for the atmosphere” in Moscow. “It seemed to me after my conference in Russia with Stalin,” Hopkins wrote privately in October, “that the President should personally deal with Stalin. It was perfectly clear that Stalin had no confidence in our Ambassador or in any of our officials in Moscow. I gathered he would have felt the same way about the State Department if he had been asked.”88

For his part, Steinhardt was spooked by Hopkins’s visit and quickly fell into line behind Roosevelt’s policy. On August 1, he sent a glowing review of the mission to Washington: “The reception accorded Harry Hopkins by the Soviet Government and the unusual attention which has been devoted to him by the Soviet press clearly indicate that extreme importance has been attached to his visit by this Government . . . I am certain that the visit has been extremely gratifying to the Soviet Government and that it will prove to have exercised a most beneficial effect upon Soviet-American relations . . . [and] greatly encouraged the Soviet war effort.”89 On the same day, he confided in Cripps that he now realized how bad his military attaché, Major Yeaton, was, and foreshadowed a change in attitude at the embassy. Both his instructions to his staff and his cables home became more positive about the Soviets’ prospects of holding off the Nazis until the winter. A week later, Cripps saw Steinhardt at the Swedish legation and was delighted by his colleague’s Damascene conversion. “I never heard anyone more anti-Axis and pro-Russian than the American Ambassador was,” Cripps diarized. “A complete change has been wrought since Harry Hopkins was here and I think [Steinhardt] must have suspected that he might be in danger of being removed unless he changed his tune!”90

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BOTH AMBASSADORS WERE AT THE AIRPORT at 2 p.m. on Friday, August 1, to see Hopkins off, only two days after he had arrived. No one presumed to check his papers; indeed, the whole time he was in the Soviet Union no official ever asked to see the handwritten visa that had caused so much fuss for Gil Winant and Ivan Maisky. On board the Soviet aircraft with Hopkins was General McNarney, who at Hopkins’s request had remained by the telephone during the envoy’s conferences and otherwise made his own inquiries into the state of Russia’s defenses. However, Lieutenant Alison was not with them: he was remaining in Moscow to train Soviet pilots on the P-40, an assignment approved by Stalin himself. This time when the aircraft took off, there were no “salutes for distinguished visitors.” “Now that I was done,” Hopkins noted wryly, “I don’t think I’d have cared.” In his luggage were ninety pages of meeting notes and plentiful quantities of vodka and caviar. Something had been left behind in the rush, however: the satchel of medications on which he relied for his daily sustenance.91

Hopkins’s aircraft arrived at Archangel shortly before 7 p.m., and he was soon at the door of the houseboat that had served as the Catalina crew’s billet, asking, “Are we ready to go?” Flight Lieutenant McKinley thought he looked “absolutely worn out,” with “great blue circles under his eyes.” He seemed to have lost additional weight while he was in Moscow. Anxious to get back to Britain in time to hitch a ride to the Churchill-Roosevelt meeting, Hopkins insisted on commencing departure procedures immediately despite reports of bad weather that made a landing at Scapa Flow seem improbable. He asked whether the flying boat had a first-aid kit he could use in lieu of his own medicines, but McKinley explained that it was only a primitive kit for use on cuts and wounds and would hardly be of assistance to the sickly Hopkins. “If I have your assurances you’ll get me there,” replied the American, “that will help me more than anything else.” At 10:15 p.m. the PBY was back in the air carrying Hopkins, McNarney, and another valuable cargo, a large quantity of platinum, which was used in the manufacture of aircraft and munitions. Whitehall had compared Bill Donovan to platinum; now Hopkins was bringing the real thing back to Britain with him.92

The flight from Archangel to Scapa followed the same perilous route as the outward journey and was even less pleasant. The flying boat took off in a gathering storm and flew up the White Sea in quickly deteriorating conditions. Driving into a nasty headwind, she bucked and slid violently for hours on end. Again, McKinley kept her low, generally two or three hundred feet above the ocean’s surface. Off the Murmansk coast, she was fired on by an unidentified destroyer that did not stop throwing up flak even when McKinley flashed the Soviet recognition signal. Shrapnel hit the mainplane but caused little damage, and the flying boat dived to sea level to evade the attack. Meanwhile, its most important passenger leapt to the gun in the waist blister, crying, “If they fire at us, I’ll fire back!”

Once the PBY had passed out of range of the destroyer’s guns, however, Hopkins grew drowsy and slept for seven hours straight. “It was now very evident,” McKinley noted later in his report, “that he was critically ill and only fit to lie down and take what rest was possible.” Throughout the flight, he never complained or intruded on the crew’s flight duties. “Don’t waste food on me,” he said when they offered him a meal. “You need it to get me to Scapa Flow.” As McKinley had been unable to raise any new flight rations at Archangel, and the food was even less appetizing than on the outbound journey, this was no great sacrifice.93

After nearly twenty-four hours in the air, McKinley put the PBY down on the rough and turbulent waters of Scapa Flow. The weather was cold and wet and a thick fog lay over the archipelago, nearly hiding the Home Fleet from view. Little boats buzzed about and barrage balloons hung in the sky. A naval launch approached in order to pick up Hopkins and take him to the nearby HMS King George V, but the choppy seas prevented it from maneuvering in close enough. Hopkins suggested that if he could not be transferred by small boat, they rig up a line between the flying boat and the battleship and haul him across in a breeches buoy. “You’ll be in the water more than you’re in the air,” said McKinley. “I don’t care where I am, so long as I get on that god-damned vessel,” was Hopkins’s retort.

In the end, though, he decided to jump for it. The first attempt nearly resulted in disaster, when he began to leap just as the flying boat and the launch moved apart in the heavy swell. Luckily a quick-thinking crew member grabbed him around the waist and pulled him back into the body of the PBY. For the second time that year, the Royal Navy had saved Harry Hopkins from a dunking at Scapa Flow. Undeterred, he climbed on top of the hull, and when the distance closed to ten feet, he jumped. “He was taken in the arms of a couple of able seamen who stopped him crunching into the deck,” recalled McKinley, “but he very nearly measured his length on the deck of the thing.” He was followed soon after by his luggage, containing his precious handwritten notes from the Kremlin, which was hurled without ceremony across the open water. A few minutes later the crew of the Catalina saw Hopkins wave from the top of the gangway of the King George V and then disappear. “There’s only one man in the world like that,” thought McKinley. “There he goes.”94

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THE KING GEORGE V was the flagship of Admiral John Tovey, commander in chief of the Home Fleet and the man who had led the hunt for the Bismarck. After Hopkins had enjoyed a lively dinner with a party including Gil Winant, who had come up from London, Tovey took his guest in hand and ordered him to bed. By some reports, Hopkins looked so unwell that there were fears for his life. He did not wake up until late the following afternoon, and then spent another night at Scapa under the care of naval doctors, gradually regaining his strength.95

At midday on Monday, August 4, the prime minister’s party arrived aboard a pair of destroyers steaming in line. It included the chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir John Dill; the first sea lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound; Air Vice Marshal Wilfred Freeman; Sir Alec Cadogan representing the Foreign Office; and “the Prof,” Lord Cherwell. Churchill’s mood was buoyant; he was, observed a witness, “like a boy who’s been let out of school suddenly.” He came onto the quarterdeck of the Prince of Wales, the King George V’s sister ship, which had also been involved in the Bismarck chase and was to carry him and his entourage to the Atlantic Conference. There he found Hopkins, who had already transferred aboard. The American was standing beneath a gun turret, looking pale and fragile, his loose overcoat blowing about his thin body and Churchill’s homburg on his head. “Ah, my dear friend, how are you?” asked the PM, shaking hands with Hopkins. “And how did you find Stalin?” “I must tell you all about it,” replied Hopkins wearily as they went below with their arms linked.96

Shortly after the Prince of Wales put to sea, Churchill signaled Roosevelt as follows:

Harry returned dead beat from Russia, but is lively again now. We shall get him in fine trim on the voyage. We are just off. It is 27 years ago today that Huns began their last war. We must make good job of it this time. Twice ought to be enough. Look forward so much to our meeting.97

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THE VOYAGE ACROSS THE ATLANTIC from Scapa Flow to Placentia Bay took nearly five days. Initially, the darkened Prince of Wales was flanked by destroyers, but they could not keep up with the battleship in the heavy seas, and on the first night the prime minister’s ship lost her escort. She was naked until she was joined on Wednesday by Canadian warships that had steamed from Icelandic waters. The Prince of Wales had protection from another source, however: the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park, whose skill at decrypting German naval signals helped her to avoid lurking U-boat wolf packs.

The storm had other implications for the passengers. The 35,000-ton ship pitched and rolled; she vibrated at the behest of her turbines; terrific bangs and other mysterious sounds were heard. Huge seas broke over her bows and forecastle, leaving the decks awash. A reporter accompanying Churchill compared the vessel’s “monstrous plunges” to a “vast steelworks . . . flying unsteadily through the air.” The ship’s company was accustomed to all this, but their guests were not. “Most of us were not feeling too happy,” recalled one of Churchill’s assistants.98

Apart from seasickness, which soon improved along with the weather, the prime minister’s party was in good spirits. Churchill excitedly planned the details of his meeting with Roosevelt, including the turtle soup and grouse he intended to serve the president. “You’d have thought Winston was being carried up into the heavens to meet God!” Hopkins told friends later. The warrant officers’ mess was commandeered for use as Churchill’s private sitting and dining room; the rest of the delegation were installed as temporary members of the officers’ wardroom, a clubby room that spanned the whole width of the quarterdeck. At teatime, Churchill would join his military chiefs in the wardroom, leaving them to work at the dining table while he and Hopkins settled into comfortable chairs to listen to the wireless. “I think this must be the first Chiefs of Staff meeting held to the accompaniment of Bruce Belfrage’s dulcet tones,” diarized a military man, referring to a famous BBC broadcaster. When the weather allowed, “the Prof” strolled the deck in his yachting cap, taking the air. Churchill alternated between working on his dispatch boxes and relaxing with a nautically themed novel or a game of backgammon with Hopkins.99

Dinner was served by Royal Marines in white mess jackets. Hopkins’s caviar from Moscow was a special treat. Each night after dinner, films were presented in the wardroom. On one night it was Pimpernel Smith, starring Leslie Howard as a modern Scarlet Pimpernel figure in Nazi Germany; on another, High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart; on yet another, it was a sentimental New York comedy, The Devil and Miss Jones. Churchill enjoyed them all. One of his favorites, Lady Hamilton, a love story set during the Napoleonic Wars and starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, was also shown. The dénouement of the film was Admiral Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar. The prime minister had seen Lady Hamilton many times before but was utterly absorbed by it all over again. When the dying Nelson was told that the battle had been won, an observer noted that Churchill “took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes without shame.” At the film’s conclusion he stood up and addressed the ship’s officers, who were seated during the shows in their dining chairs, or “sixpennies,” as they were christened. “I thought this would be of particular interest to you, many of whom have recently been under the fire of the enemy’s guns on an occasion of equal historical importance. Good night.”100

The most memorable film night, though, was on Tuesday. Churchill came into the wardroom, bowed to the assembled officers, and sat down in an armchair that had been placed at the front. The room went dark. But instead of a Hollywood film, there appeared on the screen a shot of a large transport aircraft landing at a foreign airfield, met by a delegation of officials. When the plane’s hatch opened, who should step out but Harry Hopkins. “Oh, there you are, Harry!” shouted a surprised and delighted prime minister, clapping his hands. “Bravo! Bravo!” Hopkins had brought a short film back with him from Moscow showing glimpses of his mission, including his arrival, pictures of him entering and exiting various buildings, and stray shots of the Russian capital. It made a contrast to the other film shown that evening, Comrade X, a Clark Gable comedy also set in Moscow. Comrade X was pulled from British cinemas because of its unflattering portrayal of Stalin’s regime, but alliance sensitivities could not prevent its screening on the high seas.101

The night ended on a high. The Prince of Wales lacked a skilled projectionist, so when the reels were changed, the projector whirred, images from the film reappeared on the screen in reverse or upside down, and the lights went up. At this point, Churchill called for gramophone music and joined in the singing in his navy blue Royal Yacht Squadron uniform. He knew every verse of Noël Coward’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” and was almost word-perfect on “Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones.” A participant recalled that at the end of the night, “Mr. Churchill, smoking a cigar of a size recognised by the gunnery officer as ‘a fifteen-incher,’ bowed gracefully and retired on a tidal wave of benevolence.”102

As Churchill predicted, Hopkins rallied on the voyage to Newfoundland. He spent much of each day in his sea cabin on the bridge of the Prince of Wales, to which he moved after finding the engine vibration too great in the grander quarters he had initially been assigned. The sea cabin was a lovely berth with a fine view. Here Hopkins could sleep in until midday and take a nap after lunch. Sometimes he took a walk on the quarterdeck; one morning he was interrupted by Churchill clad only in a nightshirt and carrying a cigar. He was assigned a personal steward and a secretary, a corporal in the RAF whom Hopkins called his “aviator.” Like everyone else on board, Corporal Green thought Hopkins a “grand fellow.” He was “very amiable” but “very tired,” and “chatters like a monkey, only slower.”103

Green helped Hopkins to get off various pieces of correspondence to friends in England, as well as a charming letter to his daughter Diana:

I presume by this time you are as brown as a berry, and that is as it should be when one is 8 years old . . . I have been far away, to what is said to be one of the coldest countries in the world, Russia. Strange to say I found little boys and girls swimming in the White Sea.

In another far-off country I have been to there is war, and bombs and guns going off in the night. Some day that will all be over and Mr. Hitler will be defeated. Then I shall bring you to England, and we will roam over the green hills and eat in what you will think to be very queer little restaurants. The strange part of it is, little English boys and girls think that our houses and hotels and beaches are just as queer.

I shall see you very soon now, and want you to know that I love you very much.104

It was in his sea cabin, too, that Hopkins worked on his most important task: converting his meeting notes from Moscow into a report for the president. Green diarized that he had “been doing work of highest importance and secrecy for Harry Hopkins,” “heaps of reports” containing “much ‘gen’ about Uncle Joe and his effort.” Hopkins’s ambition was to relate “Stalin’s own words” to FDR. He had left Stalin, he recalled later, “packed with facts and figures as cold, as informative, as colorless, as mathematical as the reports I once made as head of the WPA and as barren of romance as the reports that went across my desk as Secretary of Commerce. Facts were what the President asked for.” Facts were what Hopkins intended to give him.105

The facts he included in his reports to Churchill and Roosevelt gave him confidence that the Soviets’ resistance would continue at least until the winter, during which they could resupply their armies and reorganize their defenses. Hopkins felt that the Red Army had been “very much underrated,” in part because the “the Soviets ‘high-hatted’ military attachés” in Moscow. In the long term, all-out aid to Russia was, he believed, a wager worth making. As Averell Harriman recalled later, nothing was lost in supporting Russia and much could be gained. “In any event,” Harriman noted, “there was no alternative.”106

What was the basis for Hopkins’s confidence about Russia’s chances? He had not visited the front in person, nor was he able to verify Stalin’s claims by reference to other sources—a point he admitted in his report to the president. Rather, he was impressed by Stalin’s assurance, the nature of his requests, and his determination to fight. In this context, Stalin’s palpable anger at Hitler’s treachery must have helped convince Hopkins that the Soviet leader was not open to another deal with the Nazis. “I hope never to be hated as Stalin hates Hitler,” he concluded.107

Hopkins had not gone to Moscow with an open mind anyway. He was predisposed to support aid to Russia. When he was asked once how he had come to his view based on only a few meetings, he reportedly replied that he reached his conclusion in the same way Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reached his verdicts: “I had a hunch where I wanted to come out and then looked around to find some reasons to justify the hunch.”108

Back in London and Washington, word was already getting around that the mission had been a success. On August 3, Winant passed Hopkins’s account to several “rather jubilant” colleagues at the U.S. embassy, and the following day Sumner Welles told the journalist Raymond Clapper that “Harry Hopkins is most enthusiastic about Russian chances now.” By August 8, the Anglophile New York banker Thomas Lamont was hearing from contacts in London that Stalin had been “very calm” and had spoken “of the struggle in terms of ‘next year,’ which is all to the good.”109

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ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, the Prince of Wales passed through the entrance of Placentia Bay, in the southeastern corner of Newfoundland. Harry Hopkins was on the bridge in his bathrobe, peering into a thick mist. He had slept badly the night before, worrying that his Moscow notes were incomplete. “I had the Russian story for the president,” he recalled later, and he wanted to get the story straight. Suddenly, “wraithlike in the fog,” the crew spotted the outlines of American destroyers. Patrol planes buzzed overhead. Slowly the morning sun burned off the mist, and then, “as if revealed by the lifting of many filmy curtains,” Hopkins saw the heavy cruiser USS Augusta, flagship of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet. He dashed back to his cabin, dressed and threw his possessions into his bag, presented his steward with the overcoat he had purchased in England as a tip, and returned to the bridge. Training his binoculars on the deck of the Augusta, lying at anchor a few hundred yards off, he saw the person of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.110

The president had devised and employed an elaborate ruse in order to get to Newfoundland in conditions of complete secrecy. The previous weekend he had boarded his yacht USS Potomac at New London, Connecticut, for what was billed as a ten-day “vacation cruise” off the New England coast. On Monday, the presidential yacht made harbor at Nonquitt, Massachusetts, so that Roosevelt could take a group of exiled Norwegian royals fishing, in plain view of hundreds of people. That evening, thousands of vacationers watched as the Potomac sailed down the Cape Cod Canal, with the presidential flag flying and a small party in civilian clothes sitting on the afterdeck, while the Secret Service and Massachusetts state troopers guarded her from the shore. Over the next week, naval dispatches claimed that the president was “enjoying the sea air from the fantail” of the Potomac. “All members of the party are showing effects of sunning,” reported the U.S. Navy, and “responding to the New England air after the Washington summer.” There was “no definite schedule” and “weather and angling prospects would determine each day’s movements.” In fact, this was all a cover story. On Monday, Roosevelt had transferred to USS Augusta for passage to Placentia Bay, accompanied by USS Tuscaloosa and five destroyers. FDR was delighted that he had duped everyone, including the Secret Service and the White House press corps. “Even at my ripe old age,” he exulted to his cousin Daisy Suckley in a letter from the Augusta, “I feel a thrill in making a get-away—especially from the American press.”111

Roosevelt’s flotilla, reinforced by additional vessels, arrived at its destination early on Thursday, August 7. Formed by long peninsulas to the east and west and surrounded by low, forested hills, Placentia Bay struck the visitors as “very bleak and beautiful.” Soon the bay was full of American warships, and aircraft patrolled the skies above it. The waters were especially crowded off Argentia on the eastern shore, where the Americans were building a naval base pursuant to the Destroyers-Bases Deal. As he cruised up and down the shore, FDR was well pleased with the fruit of that particular vine.112

The president was accompanied by his chief military advisers, General George Marshall, Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark, and Major General “Hap” Arnold, as well as the commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King. To keep the conference intimate, however, FDR had left Secretaries Stimson, Knox, and Hull at home. Two of his sons, Ensign Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and Captain Elliott Roosevelt, were ordered in from their posts, presented with aiguillettes (or as FDR dubbed them, “the gold spinach”), and detailed to serve as presidential aides. Fala, Roosevelt’s Scottish terrier, was also on board. On Friday afternoon, Sumner Welles, whom Roosevelt wanted to speak for the State Department, arrived by flying boat. With him on the PBY was another of FDR’s envoys, Averell Harriman.113

By his own admission, Harriman had invited himself along. When he called at the White House in early August, he was horrified to discover that Roosevelt had no intention of including him in the American delegation. Even when Harriman protested that Churchill wanted him to be present, FDR told him, implausibly, that there were no free berths on the Augusta. Finally, under pressure, the president admitted that Welles would be flying up from Boston and agreed that Harriman could hitch a ride with him. Once again, Averell’s brass neck was on prominent display.114

The first passenger from the Prince of Wales to come aboard the Augusta was Harry Hopkins, and his first words to the president were, “The Russians are confident.” Shortly after eleven o’clock, Winston Churchill stepped onto the U.S. flagship’s gleaming top deck and stood at attention as a Marine band played “God Save the King.” Then he walked over to Franklin Roosevelt, who stood supported by his son Elliott, executed a little salute, which was duly returned by the president, and handed him a letter from King George VI by way of a credential. Soon the formalities gave way to handshakes and smiles; the American lit a cigarette and the Englishman produced a cigar.115

Finally, after so much anticipation and so many delays, the two men had met for the first time as heads of government. This was, in a sense, the consummation of a long-distance relationship that had been sustained not only by their correspondence but through the labors of Roosevelt’s special envoys, three of whom—Welles, Harriman and, most importantly, Hopkins—were present at the climax.

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FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS, the leaders and their delegations deliberated on the progress of the war in Europe. Churchill need not have fussed as much as he did about the impression he would make. Roosevelt liked him, finding him “a tremendously vital person,” and in a letter to his cousin compared him to “an English Mayor LaGuardia! Don’t say I said so!” (He was also “amazed” at the quantity of alcohol he consumed.) The president did less talking than was his custom, satisfied by Churchill’s willingness to defer to his seniority. The two settled quickly into an easy, joking relationship. Hopkins wrote to Pamela Churchill that FDR was “ever so much impressed with your great father-in-law”; Harriman reported that the prime minister had been “in his best form” and Roosevelt was “much intrigued.” It was due to Hopkins’s work, Pamela ruminated later, that when these two strangers came together “they were able to meet as old friends.”116

Nor was Hopkins’s contribution to Anglo-American comity limited to the leaders. At his suggestion, Roosevelt sent a cardboard carton of treats, including fruit, cheese, and cigarettes, to every man in the ship’s company of the Prince of Wales. Inside each of the fifteen hundred boxes was a card reading, “The President of the United States sends his compliments and best wishes.”117

Hopkins’s most substantive job at Argentia was to communicate his Moscow findings. Harriman recalled later that his friend’s conviction that Russia would hold out and not make a new peace with Germany “pervaded” the Atlantic Conference. Franklin Roosevelt Jr.’s recollections of a briefing that Hopkins gave his father on board the Augusta help to explain why this was so. “Harry had a very clear mind,” he said later, “a very excellent simple way of expressing himself so he didn’t leave any questions or any doubts. If there were any my father would ask him a question. Harry would answer very explicitly . . . He had a marvellous way of sort of setting forth his conclusions, his thinking . . . Harry had this marvellous ability to grow into any new situation and really step up to totally understand, totally dominate the details of any new problem.” Apparently the president, always eager for insights into the personalities of other leaders, was pleased to hear that Stalin had some sense of humor.118

The power of Hopkins’s testimony was supplemented by the imperatives of realpolitik, in any case. Demands from the Kremlin for a second front, which were impossible to meet, made an ambitious supply program even more of a necessity.119 In a joint message to Stalin, therefore, that was explicitly a response to the Hopkins report, Roosevelt and Churchill formally proposed the idea of a supply conference in Moscow in order that “all of us may be in a position to arrive at speedy decisions as to the apportionment of our joint resources.” The Soviet Union was, in Churchill’s phrase, “a welcome guest at [a] hungry table.” Lord Beaverbrook, who winged his way to Newfoundland at the last minute, was selected to represent the British point of view at the conference. FDR wanted Hopkins to head up the American delegation, but in light of his physical condition Hopkins recommended Harriman instead.120

Churchill had hoped that the president would use the meeting at sea to announce a dramatic escalation of U.S. involvement in the war. But FDR remained as cautious as ever, determined to retain his flexibility and avoid any charges of making undertakings without congressional approval. According to the prime minister’s account to the war cabinet, Roosevelt said he would “wage war, but not declare it.” He would “become more and more provocative” and “look for an ‘incident’ which would justify him in opening hostilities.” The need for such caution was demonstrated during the conference by the shocking announcement that an extension of the Selective Training and Service Act had passed the House of Representatives by the dangerously narrow margin of a single vote.

The act that Roosevelt had signed into law in September 1940 had limited inductees’ term of service to one year. By the spring of 1941, military chiefs were anxious about the impending loss of hundreds of thousands of trained personnel and their replacement by raw recruits. FDR asked Congress for an eighteen-month extension, stating that the “danger today” was “infinitely greater” than it had been a year before and the army must not be permitted “to melt away.” General Marshall testified that to allow the draftees to go home in the fall would be “perilous to the national safety” and amount to the “disintegration of the Army.” But many congressmen saw draft-term extension as a breach of contract between the government and the draftees (or worried that voters would see it as such). Isolationists perceived another conspiracy to involve the United States in a foreign war, and the president’s decision to aid Stalin’s government had increased their pique. “Good God!” exclaimed Senator Hiram Johnson. “Did we ever sink so low before as to choose one cutthroat out of two?”

The extension passed the Senate easily, but it only just squeaked through the House by 203 votes to 202; even then, it might have failed had Speaker Sam Rayburn not ignored wavering congressmen and gaveled the measure through. The closeness of the vote had, Hopkins noted, a “decidedly chilling effect” on the delegations at Argentia, especially the British. It was a sobering rejoinder to those who demanded that Roosevelt be speedier and less mindful of his opponents. At the very moment that he and Churchill were planning a new world order over which they hoped to preside, Congress had nearly denuded the United States of its defenses. No wonder, as Sherwood observed pungently, the news “dropped like enemy bombs on the decks of the Augusta and the Prince of Wales.”121

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THERE WERE SEVERAL CONSOLATION PRIZES for the British. The political and military chiefs of the two countries got to know each other. While FDR balked at Churchill’s idea of joint Anglo-American-Dutch warnings to forestall further Japanese expansion to the south, fearing they might precipitate a crisis, he promised to deliver a tough message to Ambassador Nomura when he got back to Washington. (As it was, the Japanese were much disturbed by the conference. One Japanese staff officer commented that it was tantamount to America’s declaration of war.) Regarding the other important theater, the president confirmed that the U.S. Navy would soon escort combined convoys in the western Atlantic, as far as Iceland.122 Most important of all, however, was the release of the Atlantic Charter.

The Atlantic Charter took the form of a “Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister” setting out “certain common principles . . . on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.” Those eight principles were: the renunciation of aggrandizement by the United States and Britain; opposition to territorial changes in the absence of popular consent; support for democratic self-government, including for those peoples who had been forcibly deprived of it; access to trade and raw materials on equal terms (but “with due respect” for “existing obligations,” a sop to the system of preferential trading arrangements within the British Empire); international economic collaboration; a postwar peace “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” and guarantees that “all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want”; freedom of the seas; and, finally, the disarmament of nations, pending the establishment of “a wider and permanent system of general security.” The charter was not a treaty or formal diplomatic instrument; indeed, some officials present thought it “not much more than a publicity hand-out.” But if its immediate influence was limited, its broader effect was, as Sherwood writes, “cosmic and historic.”123 The dangerous ideas it contained would later excite oppressed peoples, inform the world’s thinking on the United Nations organization, and even raise uncomfortable questions for Churchill’s beloved empire.

These disturbances were mainly in the future, however. For the moment, all was serenity, especially at the divine service that took place on the quarterdeck of HMS Prince of Wales on Sunday, August 10, under the big guns. It was “a really lovely morning,” noted one of the British participants, with “a soft breeze, the sun behind thin clouds, a beautiful shimmering grey look on the waters, and the green rocky hills all round.” The president, wearing a blue double-breasted suit, and the uniformed chiefs of the U.S. fighting services came on board the British battleship, which was camouflaged and battle-damaged in contrast to the peacetime paint and immaculate trim of the American ships. A Royal Marine band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a guard of honor presented arms, and the Americans were greeted by the prime minister in his Royal Yacht Squadron outfit. Then Roosevelt slowly walked the length of the deck, bareheaded and erect, supporting himself on a stick and his son Elliott’s arm. It took him a long time to cover the distance, and the immense effort it required was visible on his features. The word went around the ship that this was the longest walk he had attempted since his paralysis. He lowered himself into a chair under the after turret, next to the prime minister. Behind them were their advisers, including three of FDR’s envoys: Hopkins, Harriman, and Welles. On either side and amidships stood mixed ranks of British and American sailors. A finer setting for what seemed to Churchill aide John Martin “a sort of marriage service between the two navies” was unimaginable.124

Churchill had decreed that the service should be “fully choral and fully photographic.” He was not particularly churchy himself, but someone, probably Hopkins, had advised him that Roosevelt loved his hymns. Churchill’s selections, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” all touched on the themes of solidarity and succor. Churchill vetted the prayers in advance, having an assistant read them aloud while he dried after his bath. Two chaplains, one American and one British, offered prayers to the president and the king. The Lesson, which was read by the skipper of the Prince of Wales, Captain John Leach, was from the first chapter of Joshua: “There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life; as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee; I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong and of good courage.” Two American flying boats flew over the ship and dipped their wings in salute. “My God, this is history!” whispered one attendee. Roosevelt later told the press he was “deeply moved” by the service, during which witnesses noted that Churchill’s “handkerchief stole from its pocket.”125

Later, the prime minister asked a shipmate if he did not think the ceremony had been “a wonderful and moving sight.” Then he answered his own question: “The same language, the same hymns and, more or less, the same ideals . . . I have an idea that something really big may be happening—something really big.’” Although he was not generally religious, he told Harriman he felt “a divine power was bringing the two nations together.”126

When the service ended, a number of sailors, and presently officers, approached the great men and asked to take their picture. As one onlooker said, this was a scene that a “press photographer would dream of after a good dose of hashish.” Both leaders were pleased to oblige, and sat chatting to each other and smoking for half an hour while sailors crawled up to within a yard of them and let off their portable cameras. As FDR described to his cousin, “We were all photographed—front, sides and rear!” Caught on film in the background was Harry Hopkins showing his new gray homburg to Averell Harriman. Eventually the press caught on to the story of the hat’s provenance, and newspaper leader writers back home had some fun with it. “Whence Came Yon Hat?” asked the Christian Science Monitor. For the Chicago Daily Tribune, this was a “Tale of Two Hats.” The Philadelphia Inquirer identified a “‘New Deal’ in Hats.” But the New York Herald Tribune made the most of it: “Churchill Lend-Leases Hat to Hopkins.”127

That same afternoon, the prime minister donned his rompers for a brief excursion to shore, accompanied by Harriman and members of his official family. The coast was rugged and empty. “We went about like the first discoverers,” recalled John Martin, “with not a soul to meet, the PM collecting a fistful of flowers.” Churchill was “like a schoolboy,” noted Alec Cadogan, delighting in “rolling boulders down a cliff.” Much to his companions’ horror, he slid over the edge himself, but no bones were broken. The party sat for an hour in a shingly little cove, Churchill musing to Harriman about “how delightful life must be at Newfoundland,” before deciding that “it would be a superb existence for others than himself.” A sudden drenching rainstorm hastened their return to the warships.128

The Atlantic Conference was the high point of Sumner Welles’s professional life. It was he, not Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who sat at the president’s side as he conferred with Churchill about the shape of the postwar order. Welles drafted part of the Atlantic Charter, and he and Alec Cadogan negotiated other matters on behalf of their respective masters. The acerbic Cadogan, no fan of Welles the previous year, was warming to him now. “He improves on acquaintance,” Cadogan diarized, although “it is a pity that he swallowed a ramrod in his youth. But I suppose that can happen in any family with sporting tastes.”129

As the conference wound down, Harry Hopkins sent a series of delightful notes from his sea cabin on the Augusta to his friends on the Prince of Wales, along with small gifts of oranges, lemons, candies, canned ham, and other rare foodstuffs. To Churchill, he warned, “These are really for your wife, so don’t use all these on the ship’s mess.” To the first sea lord, Sir Dudley Pound, “This is a token payment to the Commander of the British Navy for such a smooth and delightful voyage home.” To Sir John Dill, “These are not quite as good as tanks, but some of them are almost as hard to get. The tanks, I trust, will follow.” To the nonsmoking, teetotaling, vegetarian Lord Cherwell, he said, “My dear Prof: These tokens cannot be put on charge. I have omitted the ham so that you may ever regret being a vegetarian.” He asked Alec Cadogan to pass one of the lemons he enclosed to Anthony Eden, “along with what is left of the Far Eastern problem.”130

He also sent over a parcel of food for delivery to Pamela Churchill in London, writing playfully in the accompanying note, “Averell tells me that I am to send these to Baby Winston, but to hell with that, I am sending these to you. I didn’t see nearly enough of you over there, so why don’t you get yourself made ambassadoress to the United States? You can give one of these to Kathleen if she is behaving herself.” Averell was left to play the straight man in his own letter to Pamela and Kathleen: “Harry has sent quantities of food to everybody. I was going to send oranges to Baby Winston but he has stripped the ship so my package could only be a token of affection.”131

There was great activity during the afternoon of Tuesday, August 12, as departure preparations were made. Visitors were piped over the side for the last time and boats were hoisted on board; hatches were battened down and skylights closed. Launches moved constantly between ships; secretaries ran up and down gangways. On board the Augusta a charming little ceremony took place. At Chequers the previous month, Hopkins had found some illuminated reproductions of the verse from Longfellow’s “The Building of the Ship,” which Roosevelt had sent to Churchill care of Wendell Willkie. Now these were produced, and two dozen copies were signed by the president and the prime minister.132 Roosevelt was attended by three envoys at the Argentia conference, but a fourth was present in spirit at its close.

The Prince of Wales departed Placentia Bay shortly afterward, passing through lines of gray ships lined with American sailors. The prime minister watched from its quarterdeck in his siren suit, chewing on a cigar, while flying boats overhead dipped in salute and U.S. Marine bands played a jaunty “Anchors Aweigh.” She was escorted as far as Iceland by American destroyers including USS Mayrant, whose executive officer was Ensign Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., and made it to Scapa Flow without incident. Churchill’s special train, still waiting at Thurso, took him home to London with fighter planes providing an aerial escort. When he stepped out at King’s Cross Station, one of his party diarized that there was a “stampede down the platform, with the Press photographers easy winners. The heads of Cabinet Ministers could be seen popping up and through the forest of cameras and flashlights, and some kind of formal greeting was attempted without much success.” Gil Winant, who, unlike Averell Harriman, had not maneuvered his way to Argentia, was also at the station but could not get through the crowd. Fortunately, Clementine Churchill, wearing a purple suit and gray furs, pointed him out to her husband. “Puffing his big cigar like a destroyer under forced draft,” recorded the correspondent from the Washington Post, Churchill “elbowed through to greet the Ambassador.”133

The Americans who attended the Atlantic Conference had a shorter journey home. Harriman got a ride in Lord Beaverbrook’s private train to Gander. It was a record run: even Harriman, who had been taking fast train rides his whole life, feared “the train was going off the track at every curve.” From Gander the pair took an RAF Liberator to New Brunswick, Beaverbrook’s birthplace, and then on to Washington. Meanwhile, the Augusta and the rest of President Roosevelt’s little fleet set a course for the Maine coast, where Sumner Welles and several of the military chiefs climbed on board a PBY for a flight to Rhode Island en route to Washington. Roosevelt and his closest advisers, including Harry Hopkins, transferred back to the presidential yacht Potomac, which resumed its leisurely cruise southward.134

Friday, August 15, found the Potomac anchored in Pulpit Harbor on the island of North Haven, Maine. This lovely, sheltered little inlet took its name from Pulpit Rock, an outcrop reminiscent of a church pulpit that stood authoritatively in front of the harbor’s mouth. Woods and meadows sloped down to the harbor’s pebbly beaches, and summer homes were perched on its shoreline. One of them, Sky Farm, belonged to the banker Thomas Lamont, who was, in addition to being a booster of Wendell Willkie’s, an old friend of Franklin Roosevelt’s. After first inquiring whether the president was “receiving,” Lamont joined FDR and Hopkins on the yacht’s fantail for a talk.135

The banker began by congratulating Roosevelt on the Atlantic Conference, the “most wonderful story of the century—a stroke of genius.” Relaxing in his wheelchair, with a suntan and his cigarette holder to hand, the president looked satisfied. “We were a great assembly,” he agreed. He confided that Churchill “surprised me very much,” and said he was more encouraged “than I have been for many months.” Lamont commented, “I understand Harry Hopkins is Winston Churchill’s white haired boy.” “Yes yes,” replied Roosevelt, “but even more so Joe Stalin’s—we joke him, Churchill and I, about being ‘Uncle Joe’s favorite.’” Hopkins chimed in with his favorable impressions of Stalin, the Red Army, and the Russians—a “whole people determined to resist to the end.” He admitted he was “completely in the dark” about the quality of the Red Army’s marshals, but noted that the Soviets “declare that when snow flies, the Germans will not have taken Leningrad or Moscow or Kiev.” Seeing Lamont off the yacht after the pleasant little catch-up, Hopkins warned, “We are going to have some pretty hard bumps yet.”136

The following afternoon, vacationers in Rockland, Maine, were thrilled to see the “top-heavy, bulging, comfortable” Potomac come in to shore, escorted by a sleek, dangerous-looking Coast Guard cutter. The reception committee for what Time billed as “the greatest fishing trip that any president of the United States has ever undertaken” was a pack of impatient White House correspondents annoyed at being kept in the dark over the previous fortnight. At a press conference in the yacht’s white-walled wardroom, a visibly refreshed FDR in loose gray tweeds, looking “as pleased with himself as a canary-full cat,” told them soothingly about the meeting at sea. A “sallow” Hopkins, “just back from Moscow,” as FDR put it, sat nearby against a bulkhead. Roosevelt told the reporters that sailors from both navies had intermingled on the quarterdeck of the Prince of Wales, and that Cockney accents and Texan drawls had combined to sing the hymns. It was “one of the great historic services.” At 4 p.m., FDR was piped off the Potomac by the boatswain and driven to the train station, smiling broadly and waving his fedora gaily at the crowds, with Hopkins seated beside him. The presidential train took both men directly back to Washington.137

Roosevelt was not the only observer to accentuate the spiritual side of the Atlantic Conference. That Sunday, a Canadian clergyman and scholar, the Reverend Dr. Samuel Henry Prince of the University of King’s College, Halifax, preached at St. Stephen’s Protestant Episcopal Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The theme of his sermon was the prophet Elijah’s injunction to his servant, “Go up now and look toward the sea.” “In the last few days,” said Dr. Prince, “the eyes of millions of mankind have been looking toward the sea in faith and hope, and like Elijah’s servant have not been disappointed.”138

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HARRY HOPKINS’S MISSION to Moscow and Placentia Bay was one of the most remarkable ventures of the war. As the first senior Western official to visit the capital after the German invasion, he was able to gather valuable information concerning Russia’s chances, her needs, and most of all her leader. Hopkins’s reports had an important effect on the president’s thinking. As one historian remarks, the mission was not the “turning-point” on aid to Russia, but it was the “point of no return,” providing “a firm basis for an already strong inclination.”139 Hopkins provided a kind of character reference for the Soviet Union, just as Bill Donovan had earlier provided one for the United Kingdom. In both cases, the envoys testified that their host country would not be defeated before winter closed in. Hopkins’s influence can be seen in the decisions reached in Washington in the first week of August and at Placentia Bay in the second week, and in the administration’s increasing tendency to see Russia as a long-term prospect.

Hopkins also relayed a personal message of support to Stalin and his government. Hopkins’s status as a trusted presidential emissary was plainly important in this respect, too.140 But so was his personality. Franklin Roosevelt Jr., who saw Hopkins in action at Argentia, mused on this later:

To my way of thinking I just don’t know who else could have done the job that Harry did. Sumner Welles, no. Because Sumner Welles didn’t have the marvelous charm that Harry had. Harry could disarm you. He could make you his friend in the first five minutes of a conversation and that must have been pretty rough with Stalin who was a tough old bird. But Stalin absolutely trusted Harry . . . Harry had the ability to win him over.141

FDR was delighted at the rapport struck up by Hopkins and Stalin, boasting to dinner guests at Hyde Park in late August that the encounter at the Kremlin had been “highly successful.” Roosevelt reported that Hopkins had asked the Soviet leader why it had been so difficult for the West to get the facts it required. In the president’s telling, Stalin replied, “Because I have never before trusted any emissary sent to me by a foreign power,” and then proceeded to give Hopkins all the information for which he had asked.142

The arrival of such a powerful, persuasive envoy plainly shook up America’s official representative, Laurence Steinhardt, but in so doing it cleared the communications channel between Washington and Moscow. The embassy’s attitude quickly changed, although not quickly enough for Hopkins’s taste. He warned Secretary Stimson against accepting Major Yeaton’s opinions, and engineered the posting of a more sympathetic U.S. Army officer to Moscow to coordinate the supply of U.S. aid. Within a few months, both Steinhardt and Yeaton were recalled from the USSR.143

The Moscow mission also had a symbolic effect, and mainly in the direction FDR would have liked. Glowing stories and photographs ran on the front pages of Soviet newspapers, which was, as Steinhardt assured Washington, a fact “of much greater significance here than in any other country.”144 In the United States, needless to say, press coverage was less uniform. There was a certain amount of favorable editorial comment; on the other hand, an editorial survey taken on August 8 indicated that despite growing optimism about the war, some newspapers remained concerned about Stalin’s bona fides. There were, it found, “signs of editorial distaste for giving more than formal support to the USSR. Some commentators regarded Mr. Hopkins’s visit to Moscow . . . as laying it on a bit thick.” That is an understatement. Under the headline “Our Comrades Now?,” the Wall Street Journal, for instance, worried that Hopkins “in a casual way seems to have made this nation an ally of Soviet Russia . . . We cannot get rid of the disease of totalitarianism by strengthening one totalitarian at the expense of another. To try that is to fly in the face of common sense. Worse than that, it is to fly in the face of morals.”145

Over time, however, the combination of Hopkins’s visit to Moscow and the Atlantic Conference focused the minds of editorial writers on the strategic imperative of aiding the Soviets. A similar editorial survey conducted at the end of August indicated a marked shift in position: “Editorial writers expressed delight that the initiative had at last been wrested from the Axis. Even the shipment of supplies to Russia is accepted much more readily, now that it has been removed from the domain of discussion and made a settled policy.”146 None of that addressed the points the Wall Street Journal was making, of course. Regardless of its rationale in realpolitik, supporting the Soviet regime was disagreeable.

Hopkins’s enthusiasm for the Soviet cause should not be confused with any personal affection for Stalin. He took a more hardheaded approach, as he explained to “Pug” Ismay in a letter from the Prince of Wales on the way to Argentia: “I would hardly call Uncle Joe a pleasant man, though he was interesting enough, and I think I got what I wanted, but you can never be sure about that.” If anything, Hopkins was depressed by his glimpse of Soviet totalitarianism. “Before my three days in Moscow ended,” he wrote in the American Magazine, “the difference between democracy and dictatorship was clearer to me than any words of philosopher, historian, or journalist could make it.” He measured that difference in the fear in General Yakovlev’s eyes and the behavior of the authorities toward the citizenry. But he was pragmatic about the limits of America’s ability to bridge that difference, and he was sure that Hitler posed the greater threat. Much of the West made the same calculation. Winston Churchill was once asked by a dinner companion at Ditchley, “How can we be allies of the Russians?” Churchill replied, “I believe in holding the carnal until the spiritual is free.”147

As historian Warren Kimball notes, Roosevelt is often accused of slavishly following congressional and public opinion. In August 1941, however, “he took the tougher road, going against the thrust of opinion within and without his administration by promising both aid and legitimacy to the Soviet Union.”148 He gambled on Russia—and the Hopkins mission gave him confidence that it was a wise bet. At another inflection point in the development of U.S. policy toward the war, a presidential envoy played the vital role.

Considering both the second and third Hopkins missions together, it is clear that Hopkins helped to establish the pattern of the triangular relationship between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.149 London and Moscow would provide the manpower; Washington would provide the matériel. Hopkins was at the center of this triangle. “Incredibly,” observed one canny D.C. operator, “Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt each trusted him more than they trusted each other.”150

“We stand, all of us,” said Winston Churchill in 1941, “upon the watch towers of history.”151 That summer, this was certainly the case for Harry Hopkins.