3 TEHRAN

Stretching from the foothills of the Alborz Mountains in the north to the edges of the Dasht-e Kavir desert in the south, Tehran was the largest city in the Middle East. The mountain range, with snowcapped Mount Damavand, the highest mountain in Iran, at its center, dominated the view. From the air the city looked as modern as a Western city, with broad paved avenues lined with trees. Mosques and minarets could be seen, and low white and brown buildings, many with green walled-in gardens. It had relatively modern hospitals, a university, museums, and a working telephone system. But Tehran was a study in contrasts. The streets were paved, but because the sidewalks were not, the air was dusty. The water supply was primitive. It came down from the mountains and ran in open streams alongside the principal streets. Because the streams were the city’s sole water supply, people had no choice but to use the water for washing as well as drinking: typhoid was rampant.

Under the circumstances the British, Russian, and U.S. embassies sent tank trucks up into the mountains to siphon water directly from mountain springs. Among the many precautions taken by the Russians during the conference was to change the procedure of accessing this water; each day their tank trucks went up into the mountains to unannounced destinations.

By 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 27, Harriman and Molotov were working on the conference schedule. It is of particular note that implicit in this first meeting was the assumption that Roosevelt’s wishes would be followed as to timing and discussion points. Harriman gave Molotov Roosevelt’s plan for the first day: Stalin to call on him at 3:00 p.m.; the first plenary session to commence at 4:00 p.m.; Stalin, Molotov, Churchill, Eden, the British ambassador, Archibald Clark Kerr, Hopkins, Harriman, plus the three interpreters to dine with him at 7:30 p.m.

Harriman then relayed to Molotov FDR’s conceptual outlook for the conference so that Stalin would be alerted. Roosevelt, said Harriman, “had not come with Churchill with fixed ideas, but was prepared to lay before the Marshal the various strategic plans…The principal question would be the influence of prompt action in the Mediterranean as against earlier or later OVERLORD.” Roosevelt’s message was clear: the cross-channel invasion was now within Stalin’s grasp—if he faced down Churchill. Harriman and Molotov parted.

Well past midnight Harriman and Clark Kerr received calls from Molotov asking them to come over to the Russian embassy immediately. When they arrived, Molotov announced that Soviet sources had just learned that there were German agents in Tehran who knew of Roosevelt’s presence, an assassination attempt was possible, the safest place for him under the circumstances was inside the Soviet compound. Driving through the city to visit each other was dangerous. Roosevelt, Molotov declared, should move.

His story was plausible. Several years earlier when the Iranian ruler had been Shah Reza, who was pro-Fascist and a great admirer of Hitler’s, there had been hundreds of German agents in Tehran, leading many to fear that Germany might assume control. To stop it from falling into Hitler’s hands, the Soviet Union and Great Britain had jointly invaded Iran, forced the shah to abdicate, and installed his twenty-one-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on the throne. In the two-year interim, however, known suspicious Germans had been deported.

Molotov was firm on the necessity of Roosevelt’s moving to the Soviet embassy and continued to maintain the existence of a possible German assassination plan as the rationale for the late invitation. Quite possibly Stalin, finally taking charge of the situation upon arrival at the embassy, had ordered Molotov to invite Roosevelt to move in even if the quarters were not finished. Possibly to give the story additional authority, General Artikov, Mike Reilly’s opposite number in the NKVD, later told Reilly that thirty-eight German parachutists had been dropped on the outskirts of Tehran a few weeks earlier and that six were still at large.

After Molotov declared that Roosevelt should move, late though it was, he took Harriman and Clark Kerr on a tour of the proposed presidential quarters, which were in the central building in the compound, next to the conference room that would be used for the plenary sessions. The tour provided at least a partial answer to the question of why Molotov was just now extending an invitation for the president to stay at the embassy: the apartment was still not finished. Although it was well past midnight, workmen were in the bathroom finishing the installation of the bathtub. In fact, the delay in asking Roosevelt to stay at the embassy had to have been caused by the delay in finishing the rooms. But it little mattered whether the danger was real or imagined. Danger cleared the air for all concerned. Roosevelt was free to accept; not even his severest critics—the rabid right wing in America who thought he was a Communist sympathizer—would be able to fault his choice of residence.

The following morning, obviously delighted at the prospect, FDR announced he would move at 2:30 p.m. and that the U.S. Navy Filipino mess crew who cooked for him at Shangri-La, whom he had brought, would prepare his meals. As all foodstuffs consumed by the U.S. forces were shipped in, and nothing bought locally, the supply of food for the presidential party was not a problem.

Reilly, taking no chances, mindful of the NKVD report and the president’s safety, laid on protective measures for the president’s move to the embassy, which would be by limousine. Early in the afternoon he assembled a motorcade, with armed jeeps at the head and rear, stationed Secret Service men armed with tommy guns on the running boards of the president’s car, and lined the streets of the route with U.S. soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder. As the motorcade moved slowly, majestically past, the Iranians cheered. But inside the car sat a Secret Service agent posing as Roosevelt. After the motorcade was on its way, Reilly whisked FDR, Leahy, and Hopkins into an inconspicuous car. The car, preceded by a jeep, then went through backstreets to the Russian embassy at a brisk pace, arriving before the motorcade. “The Boss, as always, was vastly amused by the dummy cavalcade trip,” Reilly remembered. Chief of Staff Leahy and, of course, Hopkins moved in with the president.

Stalin stayed in one of the smaller houses in the parklike Russian compound; Molotov and Voroshilov stayed in yet another.

In moving into the embassy, Roosevelt would have been well aware that his rooms would be bugged by the Russians, that every word he said, every word said to him, would be overheard. But U.S. government personnel and Roosevelt himself had assumed for years that every important building, hotel, and embassy in the Soviet Union was bugged. In 1934, Roosevelt had sent William Bullitt, America’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union, with the following advice: “You will, of course, warn all the members of the staff of both Embassy and Consulate in Russia that they will be spied upon constantly.” In 1936 a man was discovered in the attic of Spaso House, the ambassador’s residence in Moscow, dangling a microphone over a spot roughly above Ambassador Joseph E. Davies’s desk. The film Mission to Moscow, which Davies had brought to Moscow in the spring of 1943 and shown to Stalin and the assembled Politburo, had in it a scene making fun of the ubiquitous bugging of diplomats by the Soviet government. Roosevelt would have assumed that everything he and his staff said was reported to Stalin, and he would have adjusted all conversation accordingly, even though there was no bugging equipment visible. Indeed, the microphones were so state-of-the-art small, the NKVD’s head, Lavrenti Beria, boasted, that it was “impossible” to spot them. Being such a good actor, the president probably enjoyed exercising his talents.

Stalin set great store in listening to the taped conversations, according to Beria, who briefed Stalin each morning at 8:00 as to what he had heard in the president’s quarters. Stalin “even went so far as to ask for details of the tone of the conversations: did he say that with conviction or without enthusiasm? How did Roosevelt react? Did he say that resolutely?…What do you think, do they know we are listening…? Roosevelt always expressed a high opinion of Stalin.” Stalin once remarked, seemingly puzzled, “They know that we can hear them and yet they speak openly!…It’s bizarre. They say everything, in fullest detail…I was able to establish from my eavesdropping that Roosevelt felt great respect and sympathy for Beria. Admiral Leahy tried several times to persuade him to be firmer with Beria. Every time he received the reply from Roosevelt: ‘That doesn’t matter. Do you think you can see further than I can? I am pursuing this policy because I think it is more advantageous. We are not going to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the British.’ ”

Nothing underlines Stalin’s obsessive and thorough nature quite as clearly as his daily analysis of Roosevelt’s supposedly private words and attitudes. Nothing underlines Roosevelt’s ability to size people up correctly, and his talents as an actor, more than his pursuit of the invitation to stay in the Russian embassy and his conduct while there. Stalin learned only what Roosevelt wanted him to learn. Roosevelt would have been tickled pink to know that Stalin didn’t dream Roosevelt knew his conversations were being picked up by hidden microphones.

Roosevelt’s living arrangements brought out paranoia in the British. “Plainly it is convenient to him [Stalin] to have the President under his eye, where he cannot spend his time plotting with the British Prime Minister,” observed Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, voicing the general underestimation of Roosevelt’s intelligence that was endemic among the British at the conference.

Intimidatingly fit members of the NKVD wearing pistols took the place of servants in the president’s rooms. One look at the men who made their beds and cleaned their rooms made this clear. Remembered Reilly, “Everywhere you went you would see a brute of a man in a lackey’s white coat busily polishing immaculate glass or dusting dustless furniture. As their arms swung to dust or polish, the clear, cold outline of a Luger automatic could be seen on every hip.” Commander William Rigdon, assistant naval aide, left to wind up things after the presidential party had left, was startled to see that a number of the servants, shedding their white coats, were in reality Russian officers, with uniforms and insignia indicating ranks up to general. Brute Soviet soldiers were, in fact, everywhere. Two hundred soldiers armed with submachine guns ringed the embassy grounds. More soldiers, “all of them really big men[,] [n]othing under six feet two,” ringed Roosevelt’s particular building. There seemed to be a Soviet guard behind every tree in the park as well. The street between the Russian and the British embassies was turned into a passage by the placement of high walls from embassy to embassy. The Russian embassy park itself was surrounded by a stone wall. And each morning Lavrenti Beria, the collar of his overcoat turned up, his felt hat pulled down over his eyes, cruised the embassy park in a Buick with darkly tinted windows.

The president probably never felt safer. Discussing the living arrangements later, Roosevelt always left out that he had asked Stalin’s advice as to where he should stay. He told Frances Perkins a half-truth, that at no time did he believe there had been any plot. But he also told her that it was clear to him that Stalin wanted him at the Russian embassy, and, he went on, embroidering his story, the move distressed him because, to make it possible, Stalin had to move out to a small cottage on the embassy grounds.

No one, with the single exception of Hopkins, knew about Roosevelt’s original query to Stalin asking where he should live until years later when their full correspondence was published. Churchill would have been stunned if he had known. But Stalin knew, and Molotov, and that was the whole point. Roosevelt wanted Stalin to see the lengths he had gone to to lay the groundwork for their meeting. It was “a small thing to do to please them…If we could woo them in this way, perhaps it was the cheapest thing we could do…It was a matter of exhibiting my trust in them, my complete confidence in them. And it did please them, no question about it,” he said later to Perkins.

Roosevelt did it because he wanted Stalin to sign on to a full political agenda. There were the military considerations: he had to set a firm date for Overlord, the Allied invasion—the second front, as the Russians called it. And although Stalin had told Cordell Hull in Moscow in October that the Soviet Union would join America in the war against Japan, Roosevelt needed to hear such a commitment from Stalin’s lips. Soviet military plans had to be coordinated with Overlord.

But what was of supreme importance to Roosevelt was the endgame, the structure of the peace, and for that he needed Stalin’s full cooperation. Versailles—the horror and futility of that postwar peace conference—was always on his mind. Only at a conference of the victors, held while still fighting shoulder to shoulder, still in need of each other, did he feel he could shape the postwar world.

How many times did Roosevelt suggest a meeting to Stalin? Countless. By spring 1943, no nearer a meeting, FDR was beginning to feel really anxious: the tide of war was changing in favor of the Allies, and he still had no meeting scheduled. He decided to try new tactics. He proposed a meeting without Churchill because, as he told the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, with whom he had been friends since Harvard, who was visiting the White House, “I have a hunch that Stalin does not want to see the two of us together, at least at the outset, and that he would like to talk with me alone.” FDR envisioned this meeting as taking place in Alaska, possibly in Nome, in August. He had it all worked out in his mind: he would meet up with Mackenzie King in Ottawa, the two of them would drive north on the Alcan Highway (FDR had ordered its construction in 1942, the Army Corps of Engineers had finished it against all odds eight months later; he was dying to see it), then he would continue alone to Alaska to meet Stalin.

King, who knew Churchill at least as well as FDR did, told FDR he foresaw no objection from the prime minister, because Churchill had been in Russia “and seen Stalin there.” But King was wrong—Churchill minded a great deal—and Roosevelt would later in June deny to Churchill that he had written to Stalin asking him for a private meeting. It had been Stalin’s idea, Roosevelt wrote: “I did not suggest to UJ that we meet alone but he told Davies that he assumed (a) that we would meet alone and (b) that he agreed that we should not bring staffs to what would be a preliminary meeting.”

To underline the importance of a meeting of just the two of them to Stalin, the president had Joseph E. Davies deliver his message in person. Davies, his good friend, who had established a good relationship with Stalin when he had been American ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938, arrived in Moscow in late May 1943.

In his letter Roosevelt demonstrated his fine geographic knowledge:

My Dear Mr. Stalin: I am sending this personal note to you by the hands of my old friend…It relates solely to one subject which I think it is easier for us to talk over through a mutual friend…I want to get away from the difficulties of large Staff conferences…Africa is almost out of the question in summer, and Khartoum is British territory, Iceland I do not like because for both you and me it involves rather difficult flights, and in addition would make it, quite frankly, difficult not to invite Prime Minister Churchill at the same time. Therefore I suggest we meet either on your side or our side of the Bering Straits.

Roosevelt hoped to cut through Stalin’s anger and disappointment at the lack of concrete plans for the second front, which he had led Molotov to believe was going to happen that summer.

Stalin accorded Davies a special welcome when he arrived in Moscow in 1943. He met with him for two and a half hours on May 20 and three days later threw him a formal dinner in the Kremlin. Virtually all of the Politburo were at the dinner, at the conclusion of which Mission to Moscow was shown. The movie, produced by Warner Brothers, based on Davies’s book of the same title, was essentially a Hollywood propaganda film designed to whip up sympathy for the hard-pressed Russians. It purported to give “the facts as I [Ambassador Davies] saw them.” The all-star cast featured Walter Huston, Roosevelt’s “favorite of favorites” actor, as Davies, Ann Harding as his wife, Marjorie Merriwether Post Davies, and Oskar Homolka as Maxim Litvinov. Other actors played Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden. The film was a great paean to Soviet courage, to Soviet grit, and to the heroic struggle by Soviet civilians and soldiers against the onslaught of the German army. The movie suggested that Soviet workers who fulfilled their factory quotas and were rewarded with extra rubles had a great deal in common with American workers. Collective farms were depicted as producing mountains of food. There were dramatic photographs of sabotaged Russian factories being blown up, as justification for the Moscow show trials of 1936–38. That was followed by a dramatization of a show trial during which high Soviet officials confessed to taking orders from the traitor Leon Trotsky, who, aided by the German government, was seeking to overthrow the Soviet government. The movie couldn’t have been more laudatory to the Soviet cause if it had been directed by the Kremlin.

When it was over, after the lights were turned on, after the clapping, everyone turned to see Stalin’s reaction. He looked quite stunned, remembered a British diplomat, who reported that at length he said, “Let’s all get a drink.” Pleasantly amazed as he must have been by the enthusiastic, simplistic portrayal, he decreed that it could be shown all over the Soviet Union. (It pleased him so much that in later years it became one of the films he most enjoyed watching.)

Davies thought Stalin had agreed to a meeting with FDR. “As to the particular mission I was engaged upon, I believe that the result thereof has been completely successful,” he advised Roosevelt. Stalin cabled FDR that he thought they could meet in July or August, saying he would give the president two weeks’ prior notice of the exact date: “I agree with you that such a meeting is necessary and that it should not be postponed.” But he also warned that “the summer months will be extremely serious for our Soviet armies.” Unusually, this message closed with Stalin’s writing, “With sincere respect.”

Then, on June 11, 1943, Stalin wrote to Roosevelt to tell him of his disappointment in learning that at the Trident Conference just concluded in Washington, “you and Mr. Churchill made the decision, postponing the British-American invasion of Western Europe until Spring of 1944…This decision creates exceptional difficulties for the Soviet Union.”

Roosevelt did not directly respond to this. Instead, he wrote that he was stepping up the shipments of aluminum that the Soviet Union so desperately needed, and “in addition to our new protocol agreement I have directed that six hundred additional fighters be sent to you during the balance of 1943…the most maneuverable fighter we have…I have also directed the shipment of seventy eight additional B-25s.”

Stalin sent another angry message regarding the postponement of the invasion to the president on June 24, in the form of relaying the message he had sent to Churchill:

You write to me that you fully understand my disappointment. I have to tell you that this is not simply [a] matter of disappointment of the Soviet Government, but a matter of preservation of its confidence in the Allies which confidence is subjected to hard trials.

One must not forget, that it is a question of preservation of millions of lives in occupied regions of Western Europe and Russia, and reduction of the tremendous sacrifices of the Soviet armies in comparison with which the sacrifices of the Anglo-American forces constitute a small quantity.

Two days later, however, certainly influenced by a laudatory message Roosevelt sent him on the second anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union (which took two days to get to him), in which the president mentioned the “act of treachery,” the “history-making exploits of the armed forces of the Soviet Union,” the “almost incredible sacrifices which the Russian people are so heroically making,” and “approaching the challenging tasks of peace which victory will present to the world,” Stalin sent the president a friendly message that expressed his mind-set at the time, ascertainable because, unusually, he took the trouble to cross out the original “vrajeskiy” as describing the Germans and replace it with “zatvernik,” which translates as “brigands”:

I thank you for the high evaluation of the determination and courage of the Soviet people and of their armed forces in their struggle against the German brigands.

As a result of the two-year struggle of the Soviet Union against Hitlerite Germany and her vassals and as a result of the serious blows which have been delivered by the Allies to the Italian-German armies in North Africa the conditions for the final destruction of our common enemy have been created.

In July, Roosevelt impatiently reminded Stalin that he was still waiting for a firm meeting date. But the German counterattack that Stalin had been waiting for had finally begun. Hitler had amassed huge numbers of tanks and guns in preparation for a battle at Kursk, southwest of Moscow, counting on the German army’s winning a decisive victory there that would fire up the world. The battle involved four thousand planes, six thousand tanks, and more than two million soldiers. The Red Army fought the Germans to a standstill, then gradually pushed them back and overwhelmed them. By the fifth day the battle was finished; the Red Army was in control. It was a decisive time: the end of Hitler’s penetration of the Soviet Union. Almost immediately the Red Army regrouped and began marching, quickly retaking Orel and Belgorod, then advancing in force toward the Dnieper River and beyond.

On August 8, Stalin finally responded to Roosevelt’s message. He explained that he couldn’t take a long journey: “The battles are in full swing…the Soviet Armies repelled the July offensive, recaptured Orel and Belgorod and now is putting the further pressure upon the enemy…I…shall not be able, unfortunately, during this summer and autumn to keep my promise given to you through Mr. Davies.” Unless, he continued, Roosevelt came all the way to him: “Under the present military situation, it could be arranged either in Astrakhan or in Archangel.”

As to Roosevelt’s suggestion that they meet à deux, Stalin seemed to think it was a trick: “I do not have any objections to the presence of Mr. Churchill at this meeting, hoping you will not have any objections to this.” Although there was no way for Roosevelt to know it, Stalin had taken great care with this message; it is one of the few written in his own hand.

Roosevelt took this as a cue that Stalin wanted Churchill present, and his next two cables asking for a meeting were co-signed by Churchill. He followed these up with another on September 4 mentioning Churchill as the third conferee. “I personally could arrange to meet in a place as far as North Africa.” Finally, on September 8, Stalin agreed he could now take the time to meet, but he dismissed North Africa as a location: he would only travel as far as Iran.

Roosevelt didn’t want to go there with good reason. As he wrote to Stalin on October 14, Tehran presented a problem because the U.S. Constitution stipulated that “new laws and resolutions must be acted on by me after their receipt and must be returned to Congress physically before ten days have elapsed…. The possibility of delay in getting over the mountain—first, east bound and then west bound—is insurmountable.”

Stalin replied, “Unfortunately, not one of the places proposed instead of Tehran by you for the meeting is suitable for me.”

The end of October found Roosevelt as upset as he ever got because of Stalin’s insistence on Tehran. In a long, impassioned message, he pulled out all the stops, writing, “I would gladly go ten times the distance to meet you were it not for the fact that I must carry on a constitutional government more than one hundred and fifty years old…It would be regarded as a tragedy by future generations if you and I and Mr. Churchill failed today because of a few hundred miles…I repeat that I would gladly go to Tehran were I not prevented from doing so because of limitations over which I have no control…Please do not fail me in this crisis.”

His message was timed so that Hull, in Moscow for the conference of foreign ministers, could personally deliver it to Stalin. The strain of not knowing and keeping up appearances was telling on the president. He came down with the flu on October 19, running a temperature that went as high as 104 degrees for days.

On October 25, Hull, accompanied by Harriman, met with Stalin in the Kremlin, where Stalin had his office in the yellow palace, the stunning yellow and white palace built by Tsar Nicholas I along the Moscow River. They walked through the long green-carpeted corridors to Stalin’s large and simply furnished office on the second floor overlooking the river. The windows were lined with heavy drapes and the walls with Russian stoves, both testaments to the bitter cold of the Russian winters that Stalin felt so acutely. On the floor was a thick red carpet. Portraits of Lenin, Marx, and Engels stared down from the walls. In one corner in a glass case was a white death mask of Lenin.

As Hull and Harriman sat across the large conference table from Stalin in hard, uncomfortable chairs, Hull emphasized how important the still unscheduled meeting was to FDR. Stalin said that he was unable to understand why a delay of two days in the delivery of state papers should be so vital a matter as to preclude Roosevelt’s presence in Tehran, whereas a false step in military operations might cost tens of thousands of lives. Hull tried to explain, and while suspicious of Stalin’s sincerity he was at least reassured by Stalin’s remark that he was not against the meeting “in principle” and his further explanation that he had put off the meeting because he couldn’t miss the present opportunity to aid in the decisive defeat of the Germans, “an opportunity which might occur only once in fifty years.”

Three more days passed. Hearing nothing from Stalin, on October 28 Roosevelt cabled Hull that he should suggest to Stalin that he fly “as far as Basra even for one day,” that the rest of the time Molotov could sit in with Churchill and him. Hull cabled back that such an arrangement was “doubtful.” Another day passed with no meeting set up. Sufficiently recovered from the flu to hold a press conference, FDR found himself pressured by reporters about the Moscow Conference. One reporter asked, “You are now confident of Russia’s willingness to cooperate with us in maintaining peace?” Roosevelt answered, “I wouldn’t put it that way. I always have been personally. This confirms my belief.”

Q: “It has been confirmed—strengthened?”

ROOSEVELT: “Yes, yes.”

Later that day Roosevelt called his good friend Daisy Suckley, who was home in Rhinebeck, New York, and vented his frustration to her. “Things are ‘in a mess,’ ” he complained.

“I can’t ask questions over the phone,” she wrote in her diary, “He ‘expects’ to go on the Long Trip, ‘thinks’ it will go through, but it is not entirely certain, yet.”

Suckley, ten years younger than the president, was Roosevelt’s sixth cousin and his closest companion during the war years. Her important role in Roosevelt’s life is little known because it was only after she died in 1991 that her diary, thousands of pages long, her letters to the president, and thirty-eight handwritten letters to her from him were discovered in a suitcase under her bed. Her diary was published as Closest Companion, edited by Geoffrey Ward, in 1995. She had first laid eyes on Roosevelt at a New Year’s Eve ball when she was an impressionable eighteen and he twenty-eight. She never forgot the sight of him, she told a confidant, “tall and laughing as he whirled one partner after another around and around the dance floor.” He was the love of her life. She lived at Wilderstein, her family’s large but run-down five-story turreted Queen Anne Hudson River mansion that was upriver from Springwood, the Roosevelt compound in Hyde Park built by FDR’s father and rebuilt by him, which FDR considered his real home. She was smart, well-read, and thoughtful. At this point in the president’s life, she was probably his best friend. She spent more leisure time with him than anyone else. In addition, she was working with him, using her intimate knowledge of FDR’s life, to arrange the large photograph collection in his new presidential library, the first presidential library in the country, which he had built on the grounds of his Hyde Park estate and had given to the nation.

Suckley was slender, prim looking, always dressed in slightly old-fashioned clothes. Whether they ever had an affair is not known, although something happened one day when they were at Top Cottage, the president’s strictly private getaway cottage that he had designed and built on his property in Hyde Park. Whatever it was, it sufficed for Daisy, binding her to Roosevelt through thick and thin.

She managed to be the most nonthreatening of the women that the president surrounded himself with and was accepted resignedly by Eleanor, who told her friend and biographer Joseph P. Lash that Franklin’s eye had wandered from the very beginning—while they were on their honeymoon: “There always was a Martha for relaxation and for the non-ending pleasure of having an admiring audience for every breath.” Daisy gave Roosevelt Fala, the black Scottie that became famous after the president, responding to a Republican charge that he had wasted taxpayer dollars on transportation for Fala (which he showed was untrue), made the brilliant countercharge that, as low as it was to attack him, attacking a dog that couldn’t defend itself was beyond the pale: “His Scottish soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.” He must have been half in love with her himself, for he kept her letters to him with him always, secreting them among the volumes of his stamp collection that traveled with him wherever he went.

Roosevelt arrived at Hyde Park on October 29 still unable to shake the flu, according to Daisy’s diary entry: “He is preparing for the Long Trip—Hopes he won’t have to go to Teheran, which is full of disease, and involves a flight over the mountains of up to 15,000 feet. He dreads both things for himself and his whole party.” The worst of it was that he still didn’t know if the meeting was even going to take place, as he wrote to Mackenzie King on November 1: “I still hope that we can see ‘Uncle Joe.’ Apparently, however, my constitutional problems weigh lightly with him though I have tried a dozen times to explain to him that while my Congress is in session I must be in a position to receive bills, act on them, and get them back to Congress physically within ten days.”

Another cable came from Stalin: “The possibility of traveling farther than Tehran is excluded. My colleagues in the Government consider…that my traveling beyond the borders of the USSR at the present time is impossible…I could be successfully substituted at this meeting by Mr. V. M. Molotov.”

That same day Roosevelt also received some good news: the Senate overwhelmingly, 85 to 5, passed a measure dear to his heart, the Connally resolution approving of the United Nations: “That the Senate recognizes the necessity of there being established at the earliest practicable date a general international organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security.” He had jumped the first hurdle—a hurdle Wilson had failed to clear: he had the backing of the legislative branch of government. The Senate would be behind him for his postwar organization for peace.

The next morning Roosevelt had breakfast with Sumner Welles, until very recently, as undersecretary of state, the second-ranking person in the State Department, who had headed the prewar State Department planning group working on the international peace organization. It was a warm gray November day, recalled Welles. Roosevelt was propped up in bed amid a pile of papers, a dark blue cape over his shoulders, smoking a cigarette through his long, uptilted ivory holder, the windows half-open in spite of air heavy with mist. They talked for two hours on the general nature of the organization that he would present to Stalin when they finally met. “We won’t get any strong international organization unless we can find the way by which the Soviet Union and the United States can work together to build it up as the years go by,” FDR told him. “That to him was the key issue,” Welles would write. Later in the morning the president set off for Shangri-La, taking along, for distraction, the Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller—and Daisy.

The next afternoon, according to her diary, when Daisy walked onto the enclosed porch of the cottage, Roosevelt greeted her with his latest thoughts about Stalin, saying that because he was commander of the Russian forces he “cannot be away from Moscow beyond a certain number of hours…The P. suggested that Stalin may be suffering from an inferiority complex…It has to do with his ‘strategy’ toward the outside world—Russia is now so big, and so strong, that she can impose her will, and must be treated at least as an equal—this is such a change from, shall we say, ten years ago, that Stalin may be self conscious about it.”

It was never far from Roosevelt’s thoughts that the time to make postwar plans was before the fighting ended. He had a private fear that that might be sooner than anyone expected. “It was quite possible Germany might crumple up at any moment,” he had said to Mackenzie King the previous December, as Zhukov began tightening the noose around Stalingrad, explaining that he had been getting many reports from Germans “as to the shortage of food, as to the discontent of the people.” He had to get a meeting scheduled.

Observant Daisy noticed that his hands were shaking more than usual, which he attributed to drinking too much coffee, but his ankles were swollen, which he couldn’t explain away—even appearing, Daisy wrote, “a little worried about swelling in his ankles which comes when he is tired. Fox [Lieutenant Commander George Fox, the president’s physical therapist] rubs them before dinner and he puts an electric vibrator on them at bedtime.”

FDR had presented his travel problem to Attorney General Francis Biddle, a product, as he was, of Groton and Harvard, who solved it by writing up a memo emphasizing that wherever the president might be, he had ten days excepting Sundays, which were not counted, to return a bill to Congress from the time it had been presented to him. That problem solved, he decided to go. On Monday, FDR cabled a message to the U.S. embassy in Moscow for Harriman to deliver to Stalin. Stalin, however, was not available; Molotov received the message. Molotov told him that the premier had a light case of the flu and could not receive him, whereupon Harriman had the message translated for Molotov so that, as he explained, in case there were any questions, he could clarify them. “I have worked out a method so that if I get word that a bill requiring my veto has been passed by the Congress…I will fly to Tunis to meet it and then return,” wrote FDR. Roosevelt’s message continued, “It is my thought that the Staffs begin their work in Cairo on November 22, and I hope Mr. Molotov and your military representative, who I hope can speak English, will come there at that time.”

Molotov queried Harriman as to what was involved in the preliminary negotiations in Cairo, because he would be the Soviet representative. Harriman admitted he did not know, at which point Molotov frostily asked whether the president had taken note of Marshal Stalin’s comment in his November 5 cable that the marshal’s colleagues “consider it generally impossible for him to travel outside the borders of the USSR.” Harriman answered that he would inform the president about that but that the president “is assigning high priority to this meeting.”