Roosevelt had planned to stay in Tehran through Thursday, December 2, but the weather was taking a turn for the worse; snow was falling in the mountains. He decided to leave late Wednesday and notified everyone.
He spent the last morning catching up with official, time-sensitive mail that had to be dispatched. The plenary session with Stalin and Churchill would begin at noon in the conference room, continue through lunch in the president’s quarters, and resume in the conference room in the afternoon, and into the evening as well if necessary, until all issues had been resolved.
FDR certainly didn’t know how obsessively Stalin monitored his private conversations, but he did know that Stalin had developed a habit of dropping by his rooms to make sure he was being well taken care of. William Rigdon, FDR’s press secretary, and Zoya Vasilyevna Zarubina, a Soviet intelligence officer who spoke English and was charged with watching out for FDR’s well-being, both attest that Stalin quite a few times took it upon himself to arrive, unannounced, at FDR’s quarters. According to Rigdon, sometimes Stalin arrived with Pavlov, once asking “if we had everything we needed,” and through Pavlov he explained the Russian knickknacks on FDR’s desk, “all the while smiling and showing great deference for his guest…Stalin would insist that the President go right ahead with whatever he was doing. ‘Don’t let me interfere with your work,’ he’d say through Pavlov.”
Zarubina remembered that she saw Stalin for the first time one morning when he was somewhere near FDR’s suite and obviously intent on visiting the president. She translated as Stalin asked, “May I come in?” Roosevelt said, “Welcome.”
“The conversation began with Stalin’s simple questions to Roosevelt: ‘How are you? Did you have a good sleep?’ The President replied, ‘Yes, I had a good sleep. I like it here; however, the frogs kept croaking in the pond and I could not fall asleep.’ I turned around, looking at Stalin, and in agitation I forgot what was the Russian for ‘a frog.’ I said, ‘Iosif Vissarionovich, those little yellow animals croaking in the pond did not let the President of the USA sleep.’ I always begin my recollections with that moment, for it was a kind of shock and failure.” (According to the Russian account, all the frogs were killed so FDR’s sleep would not again be disturbed.)
Now, on the last morning, after disposing of his mail, Roosevelt decided to approach Stalin as informally as Stalin had, in private, approached him. If he could draw him out, he believed, have a meeting of minds, Stalin might begin to rely on him. FDR felt he needed that intimacy to make Stalin accept his plans, which included an acceptance of power restraints. The United Nations that Roosevelt envisaged, able to enforce peace and face down rogue nations, would draw power from its constituent members. That meant some measure of power had to be ceded by each nation to the overall organization. Ceding power was going to be hard to sell to Stalin. FDR needed his full cooperation in setting up the UN; anything less would spell defeat. He went about getting it in his own peculiar way.
This day Roosevelt was at his most devious. He had a propensity for playing games with people’s minds—which he got away with because he was so sharp and such an uncanny judge of character. He played, for instance, with General Douglas MacArthur, whom he viewed as a talented general but a dangerous prima donna who needed to be kept off balance: he baffled and stroked him at the same time, as noted by MacArthur’s biographer William Manchester. Roosevelt once stated that he viewed the general as one of the two most dangerous men in the country. (The other was Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, an unprincipled demagogue who was assassinated in 1935. These two men had in common the fact that they were both possible presidential contenders.)
MacArthur had done the unforgivable thing for a soldier: he had disobeyed orders. Instead of dispersing the Bonus Army, the assembled penniless World War I soldiers camped with their families near Washington in the summer of 1932, as he had been ordered to do, he torched their encampment. Innocent people—children—died. As president, Roosevelt would give him his dues as a general but otherwise treated him as a bellwether of conservative political thought.
During a White House dinner some years later, MacArthur asked Roosevelt, “Why is it, Mr. President, that you frequently inquire my opinion regarding the social reforms under consideration…but pay little attention to my views on the military?” Roosevelt had answered, with Machiavellian honesty, “Douglas, I don’t bring these questions up for your advice but for your reactions. To me, you are the symbol of the conscience of the American people.”
Now, faced with Joseph Stalin, whose reserve he wanted to break down, he put into operation one of his games. As Roosevelt later told Frances Perkins, he felt drastic measures were called for, because otherwise “what we were doing could have been done by the foreign ministers.”
His campaign to get personal with Stalin, done at Churchill’s expense, commenced just before the last plenary session began. Churchill was in a bad mood. As they entered the conference room, FDR recounted, “I had just a moment to say to him, ‘Winston, I hope you won’t be sore at me for what I am going to do.’ ” Churchill’s reaction had been to shift his cigar in his mouth and grunt. As soon as they were seated around the table, Roosevelt recounted to Perkins,
I talked privately with Stalin. I didn’t say anything that I hadn’t said before, but it appeared quite chummy and confidential, enough so that the other Russians joined us to listen. Still no smile from Stalin.
Then I said, lifting my hand up to cover a whisper (which of course had to be interpreted), “Winston is cranky this morning, he got up on the wrong side of the bed.”
A vague smile passed over Stalin’s eyes, and I decided I was on the right track…I began to tease Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits. It began to register with Stalin. Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light. I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him “Uncle Joe.” He would have thought me fresh the day before, but that day he laughed and came over and shook my hand.
From that time on our relations were personal, and Stalin himself indulged in an occasional witticism. The ice was broken and we talked like men and brothers.
Roosevelt’s teasing of Churchill was undoubtedly meant to show Stalin that he now felt as comfortable and intimate with Stalin as he did with the prime minister. If nothing else, he had put Stalin and certainly himself in a better mood. In June, Litvinov had reported that Roosevelt “was entirely convinced in the need of opening a second front as soon as possible, and surely in Western Europe,” but that he was “gradually deviated from this conviction by his military advisers, and, particularly by Churchill…It is possible to suppose, without the fear of making a mistake, that as far as the military policy is concerned, Churchill is towing Roosevelt.”
Davies had told FDR at roughly the same time that Stalin had accused FDR of supporting “the classic British foreign policy of walling Russia in, closing the Dardanelles, and building a countervailing balance of power against Russia.”
If Stalin still had doubts about Roosevelt’s foreign policy goals, Roosevelt wanted to put them to rest.
THE PLENARY SESSION BEGAN. Hopkins and Harriman sat on either side of the president, Eden and the British ambassador Clark Kerr sat on either side of Churchill; Molotov sat with Stalin. Roosevelt opened the meeting on the subject of what it would take to induce Turkey’s president, I˙smet I˙nönü, to enter the war. Both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Roosevelt himself thought Turkey’s entry basically inadvisable because it would be too costly, involving compensation to the Turks in war matériel and supplies, particularly landing craft, already earmarked for Overlord. Churchill, however, knowing it would sabotage Overlord, argued that a motivated Turkey, supplied with landing craft, could make a successful assault on Rhodes, which he still considered strategically important. He suggested moving landing craft from the Pacific. Hopkins said firmly that there were no landing craft available. Roosevelt called it “absolutely impossible” to pull landing craft from anywhere. Stalin downplayed the disagreement, because the subject had been dismissed.
Discussion continued during the lunch, which was served in Roosevelt’s quarters by the Filipino staff.
Roosevelt next brought up the subject of Finland. He had been furious at Stalin’s invasion of Finland in 1939, calling it “this dreadful rape” in a letter. At a cabinet meeting following the invasion, FDR had decreed that no supplies or munitions be sent to the Soviet Union. Since then the situation had, of course, drastically changed: Finnish troops were now part of the German forces ringing Leningrad. Roosevelt thought he knew what was on Stalin’s mind now: Litvinov had told Hopkins in June 1942 that Stalin had decided to keep his hands off Finland. Roosevelt hoped that Litvinov had reported Stalin’s mind-set correctly, but he wasn’t counting on it: he was ready for anything. As he had gloomily written to Cardinal Spellman, New York’s archbishop, in September, he thought there was a good chance Stalin would claim Poland, the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and Finland, “ ‘so better give them gracefully…What can we do about it?’ Within ten or twenty years…‘European influence would bring the Russians to become less barbarian.’ ”
Now Stalin reassured the president. He began by criticizing Finland, pointing out that there were twenty-one Finnish divisions fighting on the Soviet front and that for the twenty-seven months Leningrad had been under siege, Finnish troops had been serving with the German soldiers. But he next stated that Russia had “no designs” on the independence of Finland. Roosevelt had to have been extremely pleased.
The conversation then turned to the specifics of Russian territorial demands in Finland. Stalin said he wanted one of two ports: Hangö on the south coast of Finland or Petsamo in the far north: “If the cession of Hangö presents a difficulty I am willing to take Petsamo.” Roosevelt, relieved, had no objection. “A fair exchange,” he volunteered.
The meeting broke up.
Roosevelt had asked Stalin to meet him without Churchill one last time.
Stalin arrived at Roosevelt’s quarters at 3:20 p.m., accompanied by Molotov; Harriman was with the president.
As always, Roosevelt set the agenda. Two subjects were on his mind as he and Stalin sat across from each other. The first was Poland.
Roosevelt was prepared to accept the Soviet Union’s control of Poland as long as it was peaceful and its institutions preserved. Roosevelt entertained a notable lack of enthusiasm for the Polish government in exile in London, even though the United States as well as Britain recognized it as the official government of Poland. He thought as a group they were not representative of their country, were unrealistic in their expectations, and, even more important, were strongly anti-Russian. Just before he left for Tehran, he had vented his feelings to a young English friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, saying, “I am sick and tired of these people. The Polish Ambassador came to see me a while ago about this question.” He then mimicked the ambassador’s request for help in dealing with the Russians and continued, “I said [to him], do you think they will just stop to please you, or us for that matter? Do you expect us and Great Britain to declare war on Joe Stalin if they cross your precious frontier?”
Harriman also had serious reservations about the Polish government in exile. He described them as a group of aristocrats who expected the Americans and the British to restore their position and their landed properties, which were extensive, and prop up the feudalistic system that had existed in Poland earlier in the century.
Now Roosevelt, talking to Stalin, brought up none of these issues. He made clear that he viewed the future of Poland through the lens of the next presidential election: if the war was still in progress in 1944, he would run for a fourth term, and if he ran, which he had not yet announced he would do, he needed the votes of the six to seven million Americans of Polish extraction. (It should be noted that FDR grossly exaggerated the Polish population in America. According to the 1940 U.S. census, there were just under a million native-born Poles in the United States, just under two million citizens of Polish extraction.) FDR then underlined that he would take no part in any discussion of Poland’s borders because of his need for the Polish vote but that he agreed with Stalin that Poland’s eastern border should be moved to the west and the western border moved to the Oder River. Such a westward move would at one and the same time give the Soviet Union what it wanted in the way of Polish territory—regained Russian territory—and enlarge Poland at the expense of Germany.
Stalin replied that now that the president had explained, he understood.
Roosevelt next brought up for discussion the Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which lay between the Soviet Union and the Baltic Sea. They had been provinces of Russia until Germany seized them during the Bolshevik Revolution, had been freed as a result of World War I, and were admitted to the League of Nations in 1939. In 1940, Stalin had sent in the Red Army and claimed them by force—reclaimed them, in his eyes. Roosevelt had been furious at this action, complaining to Sumner Welles of Moscow’s “downright rudeness…[He] honestly wonders whether the Soviet Government considers it worthwhile to continue diplomatic relations.” He had been so furious he had almost broken off relations and closed all Soviet consulates and finally took the less drastic step of freezing Soviet assets. Hitler’s invasion had, of course, wiped out all other considerations, and good relations had immediately been restored.
Roosevelt still thought the Baltic States should be free. The previous March he had told Anthony Eden that he didn’t like the idea of turning the Baltic States back to Russia, that the Soviet Union would lose “a great deal of public opinion if she insisted,” and that “the old plebiscite was probably a fake.” In October, FDR told Hull he intended to appeal on grounds of high morality to Stalin and point out to him that from the viewpoint of Russia’s position in the world it would be a good thing if the Soviet Union would agree to hold plebiscites in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia two years after the war was over. But by the time November rolled around, FDR’s position had changed to one of resigned acceptance. “All those Baltic republics are as good as Russian,” he had told Eleanor’s friend Lieutenant Miles.
Roosevelt now delicately approached the subject. In what Bohlen described as a joking manner, he said that although there were Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians in America (who also voted), “when the Soviet armies re-occupied these areas, he did not intend to go to war with the Soviet Union on this point.” Because this was no joking matter, one must conclude that Roosevelt was uncomfortable, indeed embarrassed, at having to cede such a point to Stalin. Reduced to explaining the importance of appearances, he spoke to Stalin of the role of public opinion in the United States, explaining that the big issue would be the question of referendum and the right to self-determination for these three countries and that “world opinion would want some expression of the will of the people, perhaps not immediately after their re-occupation by Soviet forces, but some day.”
Stalin already knew that FDR did not feel strongly about the status of the Baltic States but that he was interested in appearances, because Litvinov had told him exactly that the previous summer. “The USA does not have even a slight economic or foreign policy interest in the problem of the Baltics or in the controversial border issues between us and Poland…[However,] Roosevelt, in view of the forthcoming presidential election campaign, has to court the votes of the descendants from the Baltics and Poland, as well as American Catholics, and for this reason he is unwilling to support our demands publicly,” he had reported.
Therefore, as he stood up to Roosevelt, Stalin knew he was on firm ground. He stated that the three countries had had no autonomy under the last tsar, that no one then had raised the question of public opinion, and that he did not see why it was being raised now. He added that he would not agree to any form of international control. He suggested that some propaganda work be done.
Roosevelt pushed; he said that “it would be helpful for him personally if some public declaration in regard to the future elections to which the Marshal had referred, could be made.”
Stalin replied, “There would be plenty of opportunities for such an expression of the will of the people.”
It goes without saying that in Roosevelt’s eyes Stalin had no right to rule the Baltic States. But Roosevelt was having a similar problem with Churchill on the subject of England’s right to rule India. Roosevelt had forced Churchill to let India sign the United Nations charter on January 1, 1942, as a separate country, like Canada, something the prime minister had had no intention of letting happen (“Churchill instantly reacted against it, shrugged his shoulders and held back,” FDR had observed), but he was making no progress on loosening Britain’s grip on India, even though Indians were on the point of rebellion and British policies were causing millions of Indians to die of starvation. As strongly as Roosevelt felt in both cases, there was a point beyond which he could not go. He knew if he pushed Stalin further now, he might materially jeopardize their relationship.
He brought the conversation back to the United Nations, intent on converting Stalin to his idea of an organization truly international in character and form. Roosevelt felt strongly that regional blocs would not work. In 1942, when he had broached the subject to Molotov in Washington, Stalin had directed Molotov to advocate regional blocs; he was still toying with this concept. Churchill also favored an organization shaped into spheres of influence. Intent on convincing Stalin of the rightness of his worldwide organizational plan without hectoring, FDR now said he “felt that it was premature to consider them here with Mr. Churchill.”
He explained that the UN would be three separate organizations under one umbrella. First, a large assembly of all the member nations. Second, an executive committee that would deal with nonmilitary matters composed of Russia, the United States, Great Britain, China, two additional European states, one South American, one Near Eastern, one Far Eastern country, and one British dominion. Third, the four policemen.
He put the emphasis “particularly” on the four great nations, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, policing the world in the postwar period, adding that “it was just an idea, the exact form would require further study.” Roosevelt was indicating that he wanted input from Stalin, but he was also indicating that he and Stalin, America and Russia, would be the two most powerful policemen.
Once Roosevelt had tried to discuss the problem of an annual wage for workmen with Henry Ford. Roosevelt described how he edged him up to the subject, and when Ford saw what he was leading up to, he would draw back, then FDR would work him up to it from another angle and Ford would draw back, and he said he spent a whole luncheon hour playing chess with “Uncle Henry,” as he called him, trying to get him up to the subject. But, Roosevelt said, “I never got him to it.” He was doing the same now with Stalin, but with better results.
His argument was that an organization so constituted would have the best chance of enforcing world peace. Stalin, listening, obviously grasped the ramifications.
Molotov certainly did. In a rare interjection he noted that at the Moscow Conference they had agreed to discuss how to assure the continued dominance, “the leading role,” of the four great powers.
Stalin replied that “after thinking over the question of the world organization as outlined by the president, he had come to agree with the president that it would be world-wide and not regional.”
Their meeting ended on that note.
Roosevelt took “tremendous” encouragement, according to Harriman, who was present, from this statement by Stalin. As Sumner Welles observed, nothing, for Roosevelt, was more important than getting the United Nations and Russia’s place in it right: “To Franklin Roosevelt a firm agreement with the Soviet Union was the indispensable foundation for peace in the future.” Ceding the Baltic States to the Soviet Union was a small price to pay for a peaceful postwar world, particularly because there were really only two options: to agree gracefully or ungracefully.
Stalin, too, was encouraged by the thrust of the conversations. He believed he was setting the Soviet Union on a new, uncharted course, one that even Lenin could never have envisioned. Lenin, he would tell a Yugoslav Communist later, believed that “everyone would attack us…whereas it turns out that one group of the bourgeoisie was against us but the other with us. Lenin did not think it would be possible to ally with one wing of the bourgeoisie. But we managed it.”
At 6:00 p.m., Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill sat, for the last time, in the silk armchairs around the green baize table in the conference room under the eyes of the Soviet guards on the balcony above. Roosevelt opened this final plenary session by stating that there were two questions still to be discussed, the question of Poland and the treatment of Germany.
Molotov spoke next, however, on a subject that had not yet come up: the Soviet Union’s expectation that it was going to receive a portion of the captured Italian fleet. The fleet consisted of a large number of merchant ships and a smaller number of warships. Molotov said the Soviet Union needed and could use the ships right away, “in the common cause until the end of the war,” after which they could be divided up. Stalin said he felt the Soviet request was moderate. Churchill suggested the possibility of mutiny in the Italian fleet that could lead to the scuttling of ships, if the ships were suddenly transferred to Russia. After a short discussion it was agreed that the Soviet Union would get the ships “around the end of January.”
Roosevelt then turned the conversation to Poland. The Soviet Union had broken off relations with the Polish government in exile in London the previous April, when the latter tried to investigate German charges that the Soviet Union in 1940 had murdered thousands of Polish officers who had been prisoners of war. It was a situation fraught with problems because the charges were true: as part of the centuries-old conflict between the two countries, Stalin, it would later be revealed, had concurred in the execution of the officers, who were considered pro-German, and they had been buried in a mass grave in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. Roosevelt refused to be concerned with the probability that the Soviets had executed the officers or to be drawn into any sort of investigation. Stalin was his ally, and investigation could do nothing except roil their relationship; under the circumstances, guilt or innocence was irrelevant. He simply voiced his expectation that the Soviet Union would reestablish relations with the Polish government in exile, for then the questions at issue “would facilitate any decisions.” However, Stalin continued to make a distinction between the Polish government in exile that was “closely connected with the Germans” and the Polish Provisional Government that the Soviet Union backed.
It was a stalemate. Churchill turned the conversation to the less confrontational question of Poland’s borders.
Stalin again said that Russia was in favor of the reconstitution and expansion of Poland, “at the expense of Germany,” a position Churchill and Roosevelt could both agree with. The Curzon Line, the exact location of which was ascertained on a map supplied by Bohlen, was informally agreed upon. Stalin marked up the map with a red pencil to show the areas east of the 1941 Soviet-Polish frontier and west of the Curzon Line that he expected would go back to Poland, which he stated was agreeable to him as long as the Soviet Union was given the Prussian ports of Königsberg and Tilsit.
Roosevelt then brought the conversation back to Germany; the question, as he saw it: whether or not to split it up.
Stalin replied unequivocally that Russia was in favor of its dismemberment.
Churchill, who looked forward to the reemergence of Germany as a viable power able to balance the Soviet Union on the Continent, said he was more interested in seeing Prussia, “the evil core of German militarism,” separated out but that the southern states could become part of a Danubian confederation.
Roosevelt then presented his plan, which divided Germany into five autonomous parts: (1) Prussia rendered as small and weak as possible; (2) Hannover and the northwest section; (3) Saxony and Leipzig; (4) Hesse-Darmstadt; (5) Bavaria, Baden, and Würtemberg. The Kiel Canal and Hamburg, the Ruhr and the Saar, were to be under United Nations control.
Stalin liked Roosevelt’s plan better than Churchill’s because it was tougher on Germany but thought that neither went far enough. Stalin said that it would be the job of “any international organization” to neutralize the tendency of Germany to reunite and that the victorious nations “must have the strength to beat the Germans if they ever start on the path to a new war.” This statement elicited from Churchill the question, reflecting his deep mistrust of Stalin, “whether Marshal Stalin contemplated a Europe composed of little states, disjoined, separated and weak.” Stalin answered, not Europe, only Germany.
Churchill didn’t believe him. He was firmly convinced that Stalin was out to weaken and perhaps occupy Western Europe. He would write to Anthony Eden within the month, “Although I have tried in every way to put myself in sympathy with these Communist leaders, I cannot feel the slightest trust or confidence in them.”
Roosevelt, in contrast, did not doubt that Stalin’s true aim in this case was, as he said, to weaken Germany but leave the rest of Western Europe as it was. In fact, he was correct: Stalin had no military designs on Western Europe. In contrast to German and Japanese racial pronouncements, Stalin did not believe that the Slavs were a master race destined to rule the world. He believed Communism was the economic model of the future and that eventually Communism would be adopted by the West because it was a more efficient form of government, but the task at hand was to win the war and secure the Soviet Union’s borders, and that meant controlling Germany.
So obsessed was Stalin with the future of Germany that after he returned to Moscow, he meticulously edited the Russian part of the Tehran discussion to reflect what he said, marking changes in his own hand. The final Soviet document reads as follows: “Comrade Stalin declared that in relation to the aim of weakening Germany, the Soviet government preferred to dismember her. Comrade Stalin positively favoured Roosevelt’s plan but without predetermining the number of states into which Germany is to be split. He came out against Churchill’s plan for the creation after the splitting up of Germany of a new, unsustainable state like the Danubian Federation.”
As the discussion wound down, Roosevelt threw in the hardly neutral information, given the discussion of dismemberment, that when Germany had been made up of 107 provinces, it had been less danger ous to civilization. Churchill confined himself to the response that he “hoped for larger units.”
Winding up the session, following a statement from Churchill that the matter of Polish borders should be absolutely settled, Stalin once more declared that if Russia was given the northern part of East Prussia, running along the left bank of the Neman River and including Tilsit and Königsberg, he would accept the Curzon Line as the Polish-Soviet border.
They disbanded, to meet again at dinner. Roosevelt had asked to host the dinner because he knew he could rely on his efficient Filipino staff to make short work of it; Stalin and Churchill agreed.
At this last dinner, the final draft of the Iran Declaration proclaiming their goals was presented to them to read. The declaration on Iran that Roosevelt had insisted upon, drawn up by Hurley, which acknowledged Tehran’s contribution to the Allied cause and its future right to be independent, was also presented. The three leaders studied the documents.
At the Moscow Conference a few weeks earlier, Stalin had opposed the issuance of any statement regarding policy toward Iran. Now, after a request for a proposal by the Iranians themselves, plus a personal appeal from the president, Stalin changed his mind and agreed to just such a statement.
All the arguments and changes had evidently been a strain on Stalin. As this last dinner drew to a close, Bohlen observed that he looked exhausted. As Stalin was reading the Russian text of a document, Bohlen briskly approached him from behind with a message from FDR. Stalin turned and snapped in irritation, “For God’s sake let us finish this work.” When he saw it was Bohlen, “for the first and only time he showed embarrassment.”
The signing of the declaration on Iran provides an interesting glimpse into Stalin’s reliance on Roosevelt. The official text for the three to sign was ready only in English. Harriman presented it to Stalin and asked him if he wanted it to be translated. Stalin indicated that that wasn’t necessary and asked Pavlov to verbally translate it to him. After listening to Pavlov’s translation, according to Harriman, “in my presence and Mr. Bohlen’s [he] said that he approved the Declaration” and that because of the shortness of time he would agree to sign the English text. But he insisted Churchill sign first. Nor would he be second to sign. “He said he would do so after the president. I then took the Declaration to the president, who signed it. Thereupon Stalin signed it forthwith.”
That Churchill and Stalin signed it at all must have given the Iranians great hope for the future, because it called for “the maintenance of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iran,” which both Great Britain and the Soviet Union had been ignoring for years. When the two countries had invaded Iran in August 1941, just two months after Barbarossa, the code name for the German invasion of Russia, the shah had cabled FDR asking for his help. FDR had waited until the invasion was a fait accompli and then had soothed the shah with statements to the effect that the invasion was a temporary wartime measure designed to forestall seizure of the country by Hitler. He had then pushed Britain and Russia to make a statement (which they had done) that they would leave after Hitler was beaten. Iran then became eligible for Lend-Lease, which was liberally dispensed. The country was now relying on the United States for administrative as well as economic aid. The president took home from Tehran a carpet from the grateful shah and had it laid in his study.
The dinner broke up promptly at 10:30, by which time the evening had turned cold. Roosevelt was wheeled out onto the porch in his wheelchair and put into a car. The president undoubtedly left Tehran as he had come, in a nondescript limousine following a nondescript jeep, his destination Camp Amirabad, in the desert on the outskirts of Tehran, where American troops of the Persian Gulf Service Command were bivouacked. He and Hopkins spent the night there as guests of General Donald Connolly, an old friend of Hopkins’s.
Of the final day, Roosevelt wrote in his diary, “The conferences have been going well—tho’ I found I had to go along with the Russians on military plans. This morning the British came along, too, to my great relief.”
The next morning Roosevelt toured the desert camp and gave rousing speeches to the sun-scorched troops and the soldiers in the post hospital:
I have had conferences with Marshal Stalin and Mr. Churchill during the past four days—very successful too—laying military plans for cooperation between the three nations looking toward the winning of the war just as fast as we possibly can…
The other purpose was to talk over world conditions after the war—to try to plan a world for us and for our children when the war would cease to be a necessity. We have made great progress in that also.
At the Soviet legation at roughly the same time in the morning as FDR was addressing the soldiers, Valentin Berezhkov witnessed what he thought was Roosevelt’s very dramatic leave-taking. He wrote that clad in a black cape and hat, wearing his pince-nez, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, “he,” possibly the same Secret Service agent as before, was lifted into a waiting jeep. As the car began moving, continued Berezhkov’s narrative, four detectives leaped onto the running boards, then two pulled submachine guns out of their jackets and lay on the front wings of the car. Berezhkov commented disapprovingly, “It seemed to me that the deliberate demonstration put on by the detectives could only attract the attention of any malefactors.”
If Mike Reilly had known he had fooled someone as knowledgeable as Berezhkov, he would have been pleased.
Stalin and his party drove to Gale Morghe airport later in the morning, where two twin-engine passenger planes waited to take him and his party to Baku. Stalin left in the second plane. Upon arrival in Baku, he changed out of his smart marshal’s outfit and into an ordinary soldier’s greatcoat and cap with no markings or badges of rank. Within a short time a file of limousines appeared at the airport. Stalin got into the second car and sat next to the driver, his personal bodyguard got into the backseat, and the cortege sped off to the railroad station. There Stalin’s special train, with its long saloon cars, waited to take him back to Moscow.
Stalin made one stop, to see for himself the unbelievable devastation of Stalingrad: lumps that had been walls, piles of rubble, isolated chimneys, charred ground, pockmarked holes—cellars—that marked where a building had stood; the remains of what had once been a thriving city. The train arrived back in Moscow the morning of the fourth day.
Stalin had to have been gratified by the conference. It was the first time since the revolution that he had attended an international conference outside the Soviet Union. Ten years earlier, Roosevelt’s recognition of the Soviet Union had changed his pariah government into a legitimate, recognized member of the international community. Now he sat with Roosevelt and Churchill as an equal discussing the future of the world.
And he had found himself on the same wavelength with the president on a number of issues, something that he could not have anticipated. Roosevelt felt as he did that the dismemberment of Germany was necessary, that France should be stripped of its colonies, and that the Polish borders should shift westward to roughly the Curzon Line, in the process taking territory from Germany. Roosevelt’s United Nations organization, as envisioned, with power residing in the four policemen, would make the Soviet Union one of the great powers of the world. It amounted to a new world order. Plus Overlord was about to be a reality.
AFTER ARRIVING IN CAIRO, Roosevelt sent two friendly cables to Stalin to thank him for his hospitality: “The conference, I consider, was a great success and I feel sure that it was an historic event in the assurance not only of our ability to wage war together but to work for the peace to come in the utmost harmony. I enjoyed very much our personal talks together.”
Stalin cabled back to the president an unusually expansive message: “I agree with you…that our personal meetings were, in many respects, extremely important…Now there is confidence that our peoples will harmoniously act together during the present time as well as after the war is over…I also hope that our meeting in Tehran should not be regarded as the last one, and we shall meet again.”
Roosevelt had told Stalin that he would make the appointment of the supreme commander of Overlord within three or four days or immediately after he and Churchill returned to Cairo.
Marshall, in Cairo, waiting expectantly to be named commander, cabled Secretary of War Stimson, one of his champions, on Friday that he was “probably going to take command very soon.”
General Dwight David Eisenhower, Ike, as he was known, had been jumped by Marshall the year before over 366 officers to command the Anglo-U.S. forces in North Africa and Italy. During the time they spent together touring the battlefields, Roosevelt had made an intriguingly ambiguous statement: “You and I know who was the Chief of Staff during the last years of the Civil War but practically no one else knows…I hate to think that fifty years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was. That is one of the reasons why I want George to have the big Command—he is entitled to establish his place in history as a great General.”
When he had decided to appoint Marshall chief of staff, FDR had asked advice of no one. Now he proceeded to ask everyone. Among those he consulted were General Pershing, hero of World War I, Admiral Leahy, Admiral King, General Arnold, Henry Stimson, and Harry Hopkins. The first four so respected General Marshall’s effectiveness as leader of the competing Allied forces and services and his handling of the complexities of command that they thought he should stay doing just that instead of running Overlord. Hopkins and Stimson, on the other hand, wanted him to have the command. So did Stalin and Churchill.
Roosevelt, without explicitly saying so, had decided against it. According to Stimson, the matter came down to Roosevelt’s wanting to appoint Marshall as commander while keeping him as chief of staff, simply detailing another man to work in Washington pro tem, therefore addressing the concerns of Leahy, King, and others. But Marshall insisted that if he took command, he would resign, on the grounds that the position of chief of staff “must be full and permanent in fairness to the man so chosen.”
FDR decided to put the decision to Marshall. He sent Harry Hopkins to do the deed. Hopkins went to see Marshall before dinner the day after their arrival in Cairo. Wrote Marshall, Hopkins
told me the President was in some concern of mind over my appointment…I merely endeavored to make it clear that I would go along wholeheartedly with whatever decision the President made…I declined to state my opinion. The next day the President had me call at his villa…In response to his questions, I recalled saying that I would not attempt to estimate my capabilities; the President would have to do that; I merely wished to make clear that whatever the decision, I would go along with it wholeheartedly…The President stated in completing our conversation, “I feel I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.”
Roosevelt’s cable to Stalin of his selection of Eisenhower as commander of Overlord went as usual via the Map Room in Washington, where it was coded and sent to the American embassy in Moscow, where it was decoded and retyped. Realizing its importance, Harriman, taking Bohlen with him so he could translate the message immediately, personally delivered it to Molotov at the Kremlin. As Harriman listened, Molotov called Stalin to tell him the news. After Stalin hung up, Molotov put down the receiver and announced to Harriman rather stiffly, “Marshal Stalin is satisfied with this decision. He considers Eisenhower a general of experience, especially in directing large forces and amphibious operations.”
In fact, Stalin was so pleased that the final piece in the puzzle—the commander of the second front—had finally been decided upon that he edited the cable that went out to Roosevelt, writing, in his own hand, “I welcome the appointment of General Eisenhower.”
The final night in Cairo, Elliott wrote, the only thing his father wanted to talk about was the cornerstone accomplishment of his month away from home: the United Nations: “People at home, congressmen, editorial writers, talk about the United Nations as something which exists only on account of war. The tendency is to snipe at it by saying that only because we are forced into unity by war are we unified. But war isn’t the real force to unity. Peace is the real force. After the war—then is when I’m going to be able to make sure the United Nations are really the United Nations.”
On the way home the president took pen to paper to write to Daisy Suckley: “The trip was almost completely satisfactory, specially the Russians.” Another satisfaction was that during the trip forty-four congressional bills had been presented to Roosevelt for his signature. He had vetoed two. All had been returned to Congress within the stipulated time. When Roosevelt saw Stimson, who had been so worried that Churchill might talk him into delaying Overlord, he told him, “I have thus brought OVERLORD back to home safe and sound on the ways for accomplishment.” Stimson, as a result, told journalists at a press conference that having just read the minutes of the conference, he was thrilled at what had been accomplished: “While of course, the nature and details of those decisions cannot be made public, I can say that the presence of Premier Stalin and of his companion at the conference, Marshal Voroshilov, has contributed mightily to the success of the conference. Marshal Stalin’s power of lucid analysis and the fairness of his attitude contributed strongly to the solution of several long-standing problems.”
Stimson almost always agreed with Roosevelt’s decisions, although he could never figure out how the president ever reached a correct decision because his mental procedure was intuitive rather than logical. In addition, Stimson was not a politician; he did not understand the subtleties of Roosevelt’s handling of people. His diary, therefore, is full of criticism of the process by which Roosevelt got from A to B, even though B was usually the result Stimson had hoped he would reach.
After reading the minutes of everything that had taken place in Cairo and in Tehran, Stimson missed the fact that Roosevelt had let Churchill go on at such length because it suited his purpose of exposing Churchill’s strong anti-Soviet bias. Thus Stimson wrote,
I thank the Lord Stalin was there. In my opinion he saved the day. He was direct and strong and he brushed away the diversionary attempts of the Prime Minister with a vigor which rejoiced my soul. Up to the time of his arrival, our side were at a disadvantage. First, because of the president’s rather haphazard grasp of the situation and, second, because Marshall, who has been bearing the whole burden of it, has now been insistent about keeping himself more or less aloof because he feels he is an interested party. Therefore the first meeting before Stalin came in was shown by the minutes to have been a rather discouraging one without any very strong coordinated results being put forwards by our people. But when Stalin came in with his General Voroshilov they completely changed the situation and took the offensive for OVERLORD. They favored a supporting attack in the south of France and they strongly opposed the diversionary attacks in the eastern Mediterranean. In the end Stalin carried the day and I was delighted with it.
Stimson’s worry over Roosevelt’s casualness and seeming lack of direction, reflected in his diary entries, was a rather common complaint among those who worked for the president. But then, no one could ever quite follow the seeming vagaries of Roosevelt’s mind.
Ambassador Harriman learned that in the aftermath of the meeting the Soviet government went to great pains to explain the importance of the conference conclusions to ordinary workers who might not otherwise learn of Russia’s new world role and its new allies. The Yugoslav ambassador told him a factory worker described to him how “every brigade in the factory had been called together and a ‘political’ had explained the declaration and its significance. The workers had been encouraged to ask questions.”
Groups of Americans wrote to FDR to register their enthusiasm. “Stupendous task you, our President, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Premier Stalin have undertaken to obviate the Fascist powers…will be immortalized in the future pages of history,” wrote the crew of the USS George Woodward. Local 155 of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers wrote, “We greet with joy the decisions of that conference which spells quick and decisive victory.”
The Big Three achievements at Tehran were front-page news all over America.
“A coordinated three-power multi-front attack designed to attain the Allies’ first war aim, the destruction of the German Army, and the organization of peace after the war seemed one step nearer tonight after the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin meeting at Teheran,” wrote James Reston in The New York Times on December 6. The previous January, Time magazine had anointed Stalin Man of the Year. If it had not been for Stalin, “Hitler would have been undisputed master of Europe.” Of Stalin now Time magazine wrote, “Over the dead bodies of thousands of Germans he had guided the Soviet armies to the reconquest of some 325 thousands of square miles of Russian ruins since the winter offensive began in November 1942. His shadow spread longer over Eastern and Southern Europe. But no longer was Stalin the lone winner he had been in 1942. He now sought and acknowledged partnership with the other great powers.”
Stalin’s comment the night of Churchill’s dinner regarding the might of American machines made it into the headlines of American papers even before Roosevelt had returned. “The greatest tribute possibly ever paid American industrial production came from Premier Stalin…in a toast…Without American machines the United Nations never could have won the war,” enthused The New York Times on the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
The Soviet press gave wide and favorable publicity to the conference. Izvestia said the decisions taken had “historical importance for the fate of the entire world.” Pravda called the Tehran Declaration “the harbinger not only of victory but of a long and stable peace.” Stalin, an inveterate micromanager, not satisfied with the Tass headline “Conference of the Heads of the Governments of the Soviet Union, USA and Great Britain,” changed it to “Conference of the Leaders of the Three Allied Powers.”
Tass also published comments from the London Times, although after heavy editing by Molotov, who cut out signs of discord: “The road to this meeting for the three leaders was not an easy one. But have parted temporarily as real friends in spirit and in their goals.”
Dr. Edvard Beneš, president of Czechoslovakia, who was in Moscow to sign a mutual assistance and defense treaty with Stalin when he returned from Tehran, told Ambassador Harriman that Stalin was “transformed” from the person he had last seen in 1935. Harriman transmitted Beneš’s impressions in a cable to Washington:
Modesty and calm have taken the place of the previous aggressiveness and excitability of the Soviets…There has emerged a vigorous nationalism, linked with Russia’s past—Russia for the Russians, and not a base for international revolution. The Bolshevizing of other countries had been replaced as an objective by the determination to participate as a powerful nation in world affairs. Great satisfaction in the new relationships…was expressed by Stalin, who had been much impressed with the president and who felt that complete agreement on all questions, not of course in detail, but in approach, had been reached with him at Tehran.
U.S. embassy personnel in Moscow reported there was an almost “revolutionary change” in attitude toward America and Great Britain and that the papers almost daily mentioned the historic decisions taken. Tass gave prominent space to British Reuters: “Stalin’s signature that signifies his complete approval of the English and American plans of cooperation in the military operations from the west and south, drives the final nail into the coffin of the German hopes to sow discord between the three great powers in the matter of waging war.” Observed Harriman, “The new association with the United States and Great Britain has been woven into the fabric of the people’s consciousness as a basic policy of the Soviet government.”
To Marshal Georgi Zhukov, deputy supreme commander of the Red Army, Stalin commented, “Roosevelt has given his word that large-scale action will be mounted in France in 1944. I believe he will keep his word.” He added, though, quite in character, “But even if he doesn’t we have enough of our own forces to complete the rout of Nazi Germany.”
ROOSEVELT’S SEVENTEEN-THOUSAND-MILE journey finally drew to an end on December 16, when the Potomac met the Iowa in Chesapeake Bay. As he wrote in his diary on that day, “The little Potomac has loomed 6 miles ahead at the mouth of the River and at 4:30 I will transfer to her…And tomorrow we should get to the Navy Yard in Washington at 9:30 & soon afterwards I will be at the W.H. & using the telephone. So will end a new Odyssey.”
Later in the afternoon, aboard the Potomac and going through the mail pouch delivered by the Map Room watch officer, Lieutenant R. H. Myers of the U.S. Naval Reserve, he came upon a most intriguing item: up-to-the-minute blueprints of the German fortifications on the French coast. SIS, the acronym for the U.S. Signals Intelligence Service, was responsible for this brilliant coup. In 1940, SIS cryptanalysts had broken the Japanese diplomatic code. U.S. intelligence had been reading the Japanese diplomatic mail ever since. Of particular importance were the cables sent by Ōshima Hiroshi, the Japanese ambassador to Germany, who was a friend of Adolf Hitler’s and various members of Hitler’s circle and who carefully cabled home everything he heard in Berlin. Ōshima, son of a Japanese minister of war and a graduate of the Japanese military academy, who wanted the Japanese military establishment to join the war against the Soviet Union, regularly transmitted what he had learned about German war plans and military operations to Tokyo.
The detailed information Ōshima sent was transmitted in a Japanese code given the code name Purple by U.S. cryptanalysts. Frank B. Rowlett, a brilliant former schoolteacher, was in charge of the SIS team at Arlington Hall, Virginia, that broke the code after eighteen months of intense work on the Japanese machine cipher. Even though this seemed like a long time, Rowlett’s boss, Major General Joseph Mauborgne, the head of SIS, so impressed that Rowlett and his team had pulled it off at all, began referring to the group as “magicians.” As a result, Magic became the code word by which the decrypts were known.
Through Ōshima’s cables a wealth of information was uncovered. Not only was Ōshima privy to the latest German war plans as told to him by the German high command, but he frequently inspected German military installations, and he always sent his government everything he had learned. General Marshall relied on Ōshima’s reports as one of his main sources of information for learning of Hitler’s plans.
Fortuitously for Roosevelt and the Allied cause, Ambassador Ōshima had toured the German defense installations on the French coast in October, discussed defense preparations with Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt and other high-ranking German officers, and written up the information for his superiors in Tokyo: the order of battle of all German armies engaged in coastal defense, the details of German defense installations from the Netherlands to the French Mediterranean coast. He sent it all.
The cable went on for pages. One section began,
All the German fortifications on the French coast are very close to the shore and it is quite clear that the Germans plan to smash any enemy attempt to land as close to the edge of the water as possible…Even the smallest forts are invested so that they can hold out independently for a very long time…This overall scheme is similar to defenses evident at the West Wall behind the Franco-German border, but the quality of the Atlantic Wall fortifications is ever so much better…The Strait of Dover area is given first place in the German Army’s fortification scheme and troop dispositions, and Normandy and the Brittany peninsula come next.
Roosevelt read the detailed cable and sent it on to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Just what they needed.
Having the blueprint was an incredible strategic and psychological asset; it virtually guaranteed the success of Overlord. If Roosevelt had had this information in hand at Tehran, he would have had an easier task demolishing Churchill’s negative vibes, but still, to have it at all, to be able to lay plans with certainty, was a great triumph for the Allied cause. Churchill, too, was given access to Ōshima’s material, and it made him more optimistic for the success of Overlord.
Also in the pouch was a communication from Churchill informing the president that the prime minister was in Carthage, sick, which Roosevelt promptly answered: “I am distressed about the pneumonia, and both Harry and I plead with you to be good and throw it off rapidly. I have just left the Iowa and am on my way up the Potomac.”
The Potomac docked at Quantico the next morning. When Roosevelt appeared at the White House at 9:35, he was met by the entire cabinet, the heads of most of the alphabet agencies, Democratic congressional leaders, and a sprinkling of Republicans, all of whom were waiting in the diplomatic reception room.
FDR was dressed in a gray suit, sweater, and plaid shirt. “I would have dressed for the occasion if I had known [about] this,” he quipped on viewing the large crowd.
“I do not remember ever seeing the president look more satisfied and pleased than he did that morning,” recalled Sam Rosenman, speechwriter, good friend, and biographer. “He believed intensely that he had accomplished what he had set out to do—to bring Russia into co-operation with the Western powers in a formidable organization for the maintenance of peace—and he was glad…He was indeed the champ come back with the prize.”
Roosevelt met with congressional leaders as his first order of business. He discussed his agenda with them—the major speech he was planning that would be his report to the American people on the conference. Not surprisingly, they suggested he make his report to a joint session of Congress. Roosevelt, so media conscious, so aware that not just America but the world would be listening to him, wanting to gather support for his vision of the postwar world, did not commit himself. By noon he had decided that he would not address Congress, that he would get maximum clout by giving a speech in the form of a fireside chat.
But that took a bit of planning; he could hold a press conference immediately to generate interest and support, and later in the day he did just that. By the time reporters saw him, he had changed into a gray tweed suit, green four-in-hand tie, and white shirt. As the journalists, more than a hundred strong, crowded around his desk in the Oval Office, Roosevelt opened his remarks by saying, “The discussions I hope will have definite and very beneficial effects for the postwar period, based on the general thought that when we win the war we don’t want to have another one as long as this generation is alive.”
He was smoking a cigarette “in the inevitable long holder,” a journalist noted.
Asked what he thought of Stalin, Roosevelt answered, “I would call him something like me. He is a realist.”
Asked whether Stalin shared the president’s hope of preventing another war in this generation, Roosevelt answered, “Very definitely, if the people who want that objective will back it up.”
Asked by May Craig, a reporter for some Maine newspapers, if he could tell them something more about Stalin, Roosevelt replied, “May, I don’t write no social column,” which elicited much laughter.
The press conference ended on a light note, with a reporter asking how he had withstood all the toasts at the dinners. Roosevelt replied, “We had one banquet where we had dinner in the Russian style. Very good dinner, too. Russian style means a number of toasts, and I counted up to three hundred and sixty-five toasts. And we all went away sober. It’s remarkable what you can do, if you try.”
Roosevelt chose to give his “summing up” speech as a fireside chat on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. That way he could tie in the objective—permanent peace—with the natural message of Christmas: peace on earth, goodwill to men.
He decided quite abruptly to give the speech at Hyde Park. It was the first Christmas in eleven years that the Roosevelts spent at Hyde Park. But on December 21, Harry Hopkins and his wife, Louise, moved out of the White House and into a town house at Thirty-Third and N Street in Georgetown. Losing Hopkins was a blow to Roosevelt, even though his daughter, Anna Boettiger, would within a short while move into the Lincoln suite in place of the Hopkinses.
Louise Hopkins at first had been enchanted to be so intimate with the Roosevelts, so at the center of things, but as the reality of living in such a small space sank in—all she and Harry had with them were books, a radio-phonograph, a bit of glassware, and a cocktail shaker that stood on top of a bookcase—her nesting instincts came to the fore. She also wanted more time with her husband.
She was jealous at the way FDR preempted her husband at all hours of the day, starting with breakfast and continuing on through dinner in the evening. Hopkins seemed happy to leave. “It is the first time I have had Christmas in my own house for years, and Louise made it the pleasantest that I think I ever had in my life,” he wrote to his son Stephen, a marine in the South Pacific. (Sadly, within a few weeks Hopkins collapsed and spent the next year being treated for his stomach problems in various hospitals.)
Roosevelt acted impulsively but never by chance: it was the combination of Hopkins’s departure from the White House and the added emotional value he perceived might be gained in delivering a speech from his true home that moved him to return to Hyde Park in the freezing twenty-degree weather.
This Christmas Eve speech was one that the president took extra care with. Robert E. Sherwood, Sam Rosenman, and Hopkins were the chief contributors. After the usual six or seven drafts, Roosevelt might say, according to another speechwriter, John Gunther, “We’re getting along fine now. Let’s go back to the beginning and start all over.” This Christmas Eve speech went through eight drafts, remembered Rosenman; it took intense work.
Roosevelt gave the speech sitting at his desk in his study, a small, cluttered room off the back hall that had been his schoolroom as a boy. Cameras with accompanying klieg lights faced the president from every direction, microphones and telephones covered his desk, wires for everything snaked all over the floor. Watching, crowded into one corner of the study, were his sons Franklin and John, who had secured leave from their units, various grandchildren, neighbors including Henry Morgenthau and his wife, Elinor, and Daisy Suckley. Eleanor Roosevelt found a space on the floor behind the desk with her daughter, Anna. Newsreels of the speech would be shown that week in movie theaters across the country.
Precisely at 3:00 p.m., Roosevelt began. He underlined the milestones reached during his recent trip:
To use an American and somewhat ungrammatical colloquialism, I may say that I “got along fine” with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.
Then he introduced his concept of the four policemen:
Britain, Russia, China, and the United States and their allies represent more than three-quarters of the total population of the earth. As long as these four Nations with great military power stick together in determination to keep the peace there will be no possibility of an aggressor Nation arising to start another world war.
But those four powers must be united with and cooperate with all the freedom-loving peoples of Europe, and Asia, and Africa, and the Americas. The rights of every Nation, large or small, must be respected and guarded as jealously as are the rights of every individual within our own Republic.
The Cairo and Teheran Conferences, however, gave me my first opportunity to meet the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, and Marshal Stalin—and to sit down at the table with these unconquerable men and talk with them face to face. We had planned to talk to each other across the table at Cairo and Teheran; but we soon found that we were all on the same side of the table. We came to the Conferences with faith in each other. But we needed the personal contact. And now we have supplemented faith with definite knowledge.
Nor did he forget the prime minister:
Of course, as you all know, Mr. Churchill and I have happily met many times before, and we know and understand each other very well. Indeed, Mr. Churchill has become known and beloved by many millions of Americans.
For the first time he tempered his “unconditional surrender” ultimatum, as The New York Times noticed, saying,
We wish them [the German people] to have a normal chance to develop, in peace, as useful and respectable members of the European family. But we most certainly emphasize the word “respectable” for we intend to rid them once and for all of Nazism and Prussian militarism and the fantastic and disastrous notion that they constitute the “master race.”
In private he was not quite so optimistic. He admitted to Hopkins that he had found Stalin tougher than he expected, although, coining a word, he said he was “getatable.” Bill Hassett, Roosevelt’s assistant secretary, a discreet ex-newspaperman, asked him what impression of Stalin he would permanently retain. He replied, “A man hewn out of granite.”
As Roosevelt was aware, Stalin had accommodated him on three important issues before the meeting was even scheduled: religion, the Comintern, and China. His about-face on China, at the Moscow Conference, agreeing that it could be the fourth policeman, had been particularly gratifying because Stalin had written specifically to Roosevelt before it began, “It can be considered as agreed upon, that the question of the declaration of the four nations is not included in the agenda of the conference.”
Hopkins had told Andrei Gromyko, when he was Soviet chargé d’affaires in Washington, that Roosevelt had had reservations about Stalin and the future of Soviet-American relations. Roosevelt expected to size up the Soviet leader at Tehran and explore the possibilities of coexistence: “It depends on many factors—the main one being the stance the USSR adopts as a great world power.” Then Hopkins had assured Gromyko that “he [FDR] obviously believes that the USA ought to do everything possible to lay the foundations of good future relations with the USSR.”
Roosevelt’s comment to Eleanor Roosevelt afterward suggests that he wasn’t actually sure he had succeeded: “My husband told me that he felt there was a great distrust on the part of Marshal Stalin when they first met, and he had no idea, on leaving, whether he had been able to dissipate any of it or not. He added that he intended to see that we kept our promises to the letter.”
Roosevelt continued to worry whether Stalin remained convinced. Did Stalin really believe that Roosevelt’s insistence on an international basis for United Nations actions was the best solution? He feared that Stalin might fall back to his original position, similar to Churchill’s regional plan. He confided to Senator Tom Connally that neither Stalin nor Churchill was entirely convinced of the rightness of his vision. “I’ll have to work on both of them,” he advised the senator.
But to Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, FDR had been more upbeat. “You know,” he said to her, “I really think the Russians will go along with me about having no spheres of influence and about agreements for free ports all over the world…ports which can be used freely at all times by all the allies. I think that is going to be the solution.” He thought with her wide range of labor and business acquaintances she could provide input: “I don’t know a good Russian from a bad Russian. I can tell a good Frenchman from a bad Frenchman. I can tell a good Italian from a bad Italian. I know a good Greek when I see one. But I don’t understand the Russians. I just don’t know what makes them tick…find out all you can and tell me from time to time.”
Roosevelt held another press conference on December 28 in which he summed up the years before the war and the danger of retreating back into isolationism. Interestingly, his imagery was of a country finally standing on its own two feet, something he must have psychologically talked himself into believing he too did on his own. “Old Dr. New Deal” dealt with internal problems such as saving the banks, aiding the farmers, putting in unemployment insurance. Then it was time for “Dr. Win-the-War.” Now “the result is that the patient is back on his feet. He has given up his crutches. He isn’t wholly well yet, and he won’t be until he wins the war. And when victory comes, the program of the past, of course, has got to be carried on, in my judgment, with what is going on in other countries—postwar program—because it will pay. We can’t go into an economic isolationism, any more than it would pay to go into a military isolationism.”
Clearly the job now was to work out the steps necessary to structure the postwar world. But the time wasn’t ripe nor the plans sufficiently jelled for Roosevelt to discuss them yet with the American people.
Stalin rarely gave speeches. Mikhail Kalinen, president of the Soviet Union, gave a celebratory New Year’s Day speech. He called the Tehran Conference “in reality, the greatest event of our times, a historical landmark in the struggle with the German aggressor. All effort of the Germans to separate freedom loving nations failed. The leaders of the three great powers reached full agreement on questions of war and peace.”
Certainly he felt reassured by Roosevelt. In fact, from Stalin’s point of view, Roosevelt was the dream American president. Actually, he always had been. What Stalin saw was that he was offering the Soviet Union a partnership. Russia, so lately the sick man of Europe, was going to emerge from the war “a powerful nation in world affairs.” That made him one of the two most powerful men in the world.
Some weeks after Tehran, Roosevelt chatted up Andrei Gromyko when they met. Here is Roosevelt, as recorded by Gromyko, very aware of his words, once again carefully distancing himself from Churchill: “He began by emphasizing the good terms he was on with Stalin. He then summarized how the conference had gone, and finally he told me: ‘To achieve agreement, it was often necessary to put pressure on Churchill. He turns towards compromise rather slowly, I’m afraid. But turn he did, and we reached some pretty useful understandings.’ ” As he talked about Churchill, Gromyko noted, “the President bestowed on me one of his charming ‘Roosevelt’ smiles and made it plain that the British prime minister was a partner who gave him plenty of trouble.”
In early February there was a flurry of worry in Washington when suddenly Pravda made a savage attack on Wendell Willkie, FDR’s Republican opponent in the 1940 election. Willkie was on a campaign swing through the western states in search of the Republican nomination for 1944, which was getting quite a bit of media attention. The Pravda attack didn’t have much to go on, except that when Willkie and Stalin had met the previous year, they had discussed Eastern Europe. Now Pravda harrumphed, “It is high time it was understood that the question of the Baltic States is an internal Soviet matter which is none of Mr. Willkie’s business.” Willkie had been stunned by the attack, according to Clark Kerr, the British ambassador, who had talked to him during a visit to the United States, because he had always been a strong supporter of Soviet aid and the Pravda article made him look “ridiculous.” However, calm was restored after Clark Kerr informed Harriman that when he told Stalin of Willkie’s reaction, Stalin had remarked that he “liked Willkie, regretted the incident and would send him a cable,” possibly saying in the cable, “I like you but I don’t want you to be President.” His popularity had evidently worried Stalin.
Churchill, continuing in his effort to postpone D-day, also needed dealing with. Writing from Marrakesh, Morocco, he had a fistful of new reasons to postpone Overlord. He wrote FDR that to be on the safe side, the initial cross-channel assault should be made with heavier forces, and because it would take more time to assemble them, he wasn’t alone in thinking the operation should be delayed. Churchill continued, “The Commanders feel they would have a better chance…The ground will be drier for U.J.’s great operations.”
Roosevelt answered him very coolly: “In Teheran U.J. was given a promise that OVERLORD be launched during May and supported by the strongest possible Anvil at about the same time and that he agreed to plan for simultaneous Russian attack.”