SUEZ CANAL, WASHINGTON, LONDON, WARM SPRINGS 13 FEBRUARY - 12 APRIL 1945
‘Be careful.
ROOSEVELT
ROOSEVELT AND THREE AMERICAN ADMIRALS stared out from the cruiser Quincy across the Great Bitter Lake on the Suez Canal as the destroyer USS Murphy sailed into view. On the deck sat King Ibn Saud on a great throne guarded by Nubians bearing drawn sabres. The sixty-eight-year-old monarch, who dyed his beard black, had ruled the desert kingdom since 1927. The war had increased the interest of the United States in its oil reserves; though its position on supply routes to the Pacific was cited when Roosevelt had declared it eligible for Lend-Lease in 1943. The following year, he told Churchill he was disturbed by ‘rumours that the British wish to horn in on Arabian oil reserves’. For his part, the Prime Minister was worried that his country might be ‘hustled’ out of its oil interests in the region; Roosevelt assured him that America was not ‘making sheep’s eyes at your oil fields in Iraq and Iran’. Anglo-American oil talks in Washington then worked out an agreement that gave US firms the leading role in the kingdom—by 1946 Aramco was lifting a hundred times as much crude as before the war.1
With the King on the Murphy were his astrologer, a coffee server, and what the US record described as ‘nine miscellaneous slaves, cooks, porters and scullions’. A sheep was slaughtered as the destroyer crossed the lake, the monarch sleeping in an improvised tent on deck.
Roosevelt, who had met the rulers of Egypt and Ethiopia earlier, treated the King with great respect. Considering it impolite to smoke in
Royal company, the President stopped the lift taking him down to lunch to give himself time to have two cigarettes before the meal. When the visitor admired his wheelchair, the American leader handed over a spare one he had with him, and also offered a gift of a plane with an American crew. (Churchill’s gift was a ?6,000 Rolls-Royce. His meal with Ibn Saud produced one of his celebrated remarks about alcohol when he said that, if Islam imposed prohibition, his own religion prescribed an absolute sacred rote of drinking before, during and after meals and in the intervals between them.)
At his lunch with the monarch, Roosevelt said he hoped Arab countries would accept 10,000 Jews from eastern Europe and Germany. Ibn Saud responded with a long speech about the trouble caused by emigration of European Jews, who were technically and culturally more advanced than Arabs. When Roosevelt mentioned their suffering, the ruler said he did not see why Arabs should expiate the sins of Hitler. Arabs, he added, ‘would choose to die rather than yield their land to Jews’. The reason the newcomers made the desert bloom was the funds they received from the United States and Europe. If the Arabs had been helped in that way, they would have done as well. Roosevelt persisted, but each time he raised the issue, the opposition grew more determined.
The President noted that he could not stop Zionist press articles, speeches and legislative resolutions. But he said he would never make a move hostile to the Arabs. After lunch, the two men took coffee on the deck, a uniformed interpreter kneeling before them. The Saudis agreed to let the Americans have a base on their territory as part of the supply chain to the Far East. Impressed, Roosevelt told Congress that he had learned more in five minutes conversation with Ibn Saud than he could have done from three dozen letters. But the monarch was disappointed when, on his return to Washington, Roosevelt assured Jewish leaders he still supported Zionism. Writing to Daisy Suckley, he described the shipboard encounter as ‘a scream’, adding: ‘All goes well but I still need sleep.’
On 5 February, he had lunch with Churchill on the Quincy. The Prime Minister noted that the President looked ‘placid and frail’. ‘I felt he had a slender contact with life,’ he wrote. ‘I was not to see him again. We bade affectionate farewells.’2
* * * *
On his homeward trip, Roosevelt encountered irritation from a familiar quarter when de Gaulle turned down a meeting they had scheduled for
Algiers because of his umbrage at Yalta. Furious, Roosevelt dictated a terse reply that attacked France as well as its leader. The sick Hopkins sent Bohlen to reason with the President.
Roosevelt insisted that the United States had been insulted, and that a response had to be made. Bohlen said he agreed that de Gaulle was ‘one of the biggest sons of bitches who ever straddled a pot’. The phrase amused Roosevelt who told him to go and cook up a new draft with Hopkins, which they duly did in diplomatic language.
The journey was marked with mortality. Roosevelt’s long-time White House aide, ‘Pa’ Watson, had a stroke and died. Hopkins was too ill to make the sea voyage, and went to the villa in Marrakech used by Roosevelt and Churchill to rest before flying home in the ‘Sacred Cow’. His parting from the President was not amiable—Roosevelt wanted his company on the voyage. As with Churchill, it was the last time they would see one another.3
* * * *
When he got home, Roosevelt was very weary indeed, his hands shaking, his eyes sometimes vague. Reporting to Congress on the summit, he said he had returned to Washington ‘refreshed and inspired’ and denied that he had suffered any ill-health at Yalta. That was far from the truth. Robert Sherwood found him in worse condition than ever—‘unnaturally quiet, and even querulous’. The poet Archibald MacLeish, who was working at the State Department, detected ‘death in his eyes’. Churchill continued to send messages to the White House as if all was as before, but recalled ‘I was no longer being fully heard by him’.4
Roosevelt told Frances Perkins that, when he left the White House, he would make a visit to Britain; then he and Eleanor would go to the Middle East to mount the equivalent of the New Deal Tennessee Valley Authority to bring irrigation and greater prosperity. ‘We could do wonders,’ he mused, leaning back in his chair. There was plenty to be done at home, she said.5
‘Well, I can’t be President for ever,’ Roosevelt replied.
Reporting on Yalta to Congress on 2 March, he sat for the first time for such a speech, explaining what a relief it was not to have ten pounds of steel on his legs to stand up. Ad-libbing much of the speech, he revealed little of the substance of the summit. He hoped for an end to unilateral action on the international stage, exclusive alliances and spheres of influence, balances of power ‘and all the other expedients which have been tried for centuries and have always failed’. ‘It has been a long journey,’ he went on. ‘I hope you will agree that it was a fruitful one.
As he spoke, American bombers were attacking Tokyo, and US forces were engaged in the six-week battle for the island of Iwo Jima, which killed 7,700 Americans and more than twice as many Japanese. In Germany, US troops reached the Rhine at the town of Remagen. Visiting the area at the time, Churchill declined an offer of the use of a lavatory before being driven to the front. Once he arrived, he undid his fly buttons and urinated, telling the photographers: ‘This is one of the operations connected with this great war which must not be reproduced graphically.’ ‘I shall never forget the childish grin of intense satisfaction that spread over his face as he looked down at the critical moment,’ Brooke recalled.
To the north, Montgomery’s troops advanced on Bremen, and the concentration camps at Belsen and Buchenwald were discovered. In Italy, Alexander successfully launched his delayed offensive. The Red Army reached both the Baltic and Vienna. Goebbels warned the Germans that, if they stopped fighting, ‘an iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered.’6
Despite this good military news, the Yalta aura quickly dissipated. In Romania, Vyshinsky showed how little the Declaration on Europe counted—and what he had meant by telling Bohlen that people should do as they were told. When King Michael resisted his demands to appoint a government chosen by Moscow, Vyshinsky gave him ‘two hours and five minutes’ to change the administration, banged his fist on the table and slammed the door as he stalked from the room. Soviet tanks took up positions in the streets of Bucharest. On 6 March, the administration Stalin wanted was installed. This was bad, Cadogan noted in his diary.7
Harriman protested on behalf of Washington in the name of the Atlantic Charter and the Yalta Declaration on Europe, but Molotov brushed this aside. Roosevelt told Churchill Romania was not a good place for a test case given its strategic importance for the USSR. Eden insisted on giving the deposed Prime Minister asylum in the British Embassy, but Churchill felt that his percentages plan and Stalin’s noninterference in Greece meant he could not protest too vigorously. Nor did he want the Kremlin to take offence and upset the negotiations on Poland in Moscow. He favoured British disengagement from Yugoslavia, leaving it to the Soviet Union, and concentrating rather on preventing the powerful Italian Communist Party from gaining power.
There were also domestic political flurries. Labour members of the War Cabinet, Ernest Bevin in particular, were looking to the coming general election and asserting their party roots. At a Cabinet meeting on 22 March, Churchill talked of the danger of the government breaking up before Germany was beaten. Across the ocean, there was a fuss when a briefing to congressional leaders led to a leak of the Soviet call for three seats in the new global body. This gave rise to speculation about secret deals at Yalta. What else was being hidden? Roosevelt’s critics demanded.
But it was Poland that was the key test. Meeting Harriman and Clark Kerr, Molotov said the Yalta accord meant the addition of only one or two non-Communist ministers with the Lublin group determining who would be in the government.8
When the Western ambassadors submitted eight names for ministerial posts in Warsaw, the Kremlin rejected seven, declaring Mikolajczyk unacceptable. Churchill sent Roosevelt a four-page list of murders, arrests and deportations in Poland. He proposed that they protest to Stalin, but the President declined. He feared the shadow that a major rupture over Poland would throw on the forthcoming United Nations conference in San Francisco. Instead, he suggested a truce under which the London Poles would stop awned attacks on the Red Army and the Lublin group. Talks should be continued through the ambassadors, he added.
‘I feel that our personal intervention would best be withheld until every other possibility of bringing the Soviet Government into line has been exhausted,’ he told the Prime Minister. Churchill agreed, though ‘with much reluctance’, as he recalled in his memoirs. Committed to inform Parliament about Poland, he feared having ‘to make it clear that we are in the presence of a great failure and an utter breakdown of what was settled at Yalta’. If Molotov got away with blocking consultations on the new government in Warsaw, ‘he will know that we will put up with anything’, he warned the President.
That produced a lengthy reply from Washington, which Churchill reckoned had been brewed by the State Department for Roosevelt to sign, expressing concern at any suggestion of transatlantic divergences.
Roosevelt said he could not agree that the Yalta process had broken down so long as the ambassadors went on talking. In his response, Churchill wrote: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviets fear very much our seeing what is going on in Poland.’ Surmising that others were writing Roosevelt’s messages for him, he sent a personal cable recalling their work together during the war—their friendship was ‘the rock on which I build for the future of the world’.
By the end of March, the British were near breaking point—a phrase Harriman also used in a cable to Washington. Public and parliamentary concern was sharpened by the disappearance of sixteen non-Communist Polish figures who had gone to Moscow. A note from Eden to Churchill suggested that he should cut his messages to Stalin to a minimum since ‘the Russians are behaving so badly’—the Foreign Secretary crossed out the adverb on the typescript and replaced it with ‘abominably’. He believed Molotov sought ‘to drag the whole business out while his stooges consolidate their powers’. ‘Is it of any value to go to San Francisco in these conditions?’ he asked. ‘How can we lay the foundation for any New World Order when Anglo-American relations with Russia are so completely lacking in confidence?’ Apart from anything else, the danger loomed that Poland could become a destructive election issue, suggesting disturbing parallels with the way Chamberlain had written off Czechoslovakia.
Still Roosevelt could not bring himself to admit the effect of the fundamental differences between the Western and Soviet systems. He squirmed when asked by reporters how the Yalta decisions conformed with the Atlantic Charter, at one point calling the 1941 accord ‘some scraps of paper’, virtually denying that it existed and portraying it more as an aspiration akin to the Ten Commandments. He could not give up on his hope of keeping the alliance together for the post-war world. On his return from Yalta, he had speculated that, during Stalin’s early religious training, ‘something entered into his nature of the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave’.9
Washington and London knew that, if the Moscow talks collapsed, they would lose their last hope of influencing developments in Warsaw. ‘The Polish question is, and must remain, one of the utmost consequence, for upon its satisfactory solution rests a great part of our hope and belief in the possibility of a real and cordial understanding between the Soviet people and our own,’ Clark Kerr wrote to the Foreign Office.
Yet Stalin was upping the game by the week. He insisted that the
Lublin group alone should represent Poland at San Francisco, and, when this was refused, said Molotov would not attend the UN conference. In hospital with pneumonia and a low blood count, Hopkins found the Soviet attitude ‘bewildering’. In London Cadogan agonised that ‘our foreign policy seems a sad wreck’. In Moscow, Harriman attributed the stiff line to Stalin’s realisation that the Lublin group would lose a free election, while a democratic leader such as Mikolajczyk would rally
10
Voters.
Eden drafted a message to tell Molotov Britain was withdrawing from the Moscow talks. ‘We should not accept to continue in a Commission that has become a farce,’ he wrote in a covering note to Churchill. ‘It is in the interests of future relations between the Russians, the Americans and ourselves that we should speak plainly. I hope the Americans will also take this view.’11
‘Surely we must not be manoeuvred into becoming parties to imposing on Poland—and on how much of Eastern Europe—the Russian version of democracy?’ Churchill cabled the President on 27 March. Roosevelt replied that he had been watching ‘with anxiety and concern the development of the Soviet attitude’. But he wished to address Stalin directly.
‘I cannot conceal from you the concern with which I view the development of events of mutual interest since our fruitful meeting at Yalta,’ his lengthy message to the Kremlin on 29 March began. He drew attention to what had happened in Romania, saying he did not understand why no account had been taken of the Declaration on Europe agreed at the summit. Blaming the lack of progress on Poland on the way Moscow was interpreting the Yalta decisions, he proposed a truce and the admission of observers. Otherwise Allied unity would be at risk. Stalin should not underestimate the strength of US public opinion, he warned.
Two days later, Churchill followed up with a cable taking the Soviets to task on everything from the veto Molotov claimed for Lublin to the refusal to admit observers. A week later, Stalin, who had just received Clementine Churchill on a visit to Moscow, replied that a dead end had been reached. At Yalta, there had been agreement to use the Lublin Committee as a nucleus for government, but Clark Kerr and Harriman were trying to abolish it and create a new administration, he charged. Only Poles friendly to Moscow who accepted the Yalta decisions and the Curzon line could take part in the process.
In a separate message to Churchill, Stalin repeated that observers would be seen as an insult, and Lublin must be the first to be consulted. ‘I think that if the above observations are taken into account an agreed decision on the Polish question could be arrived at in a short time,’ he said. Churchill thought the reply offered some hope. Only now did he start to inform the London Poles what had gone on at the summit in the Crimea. Mikolajczyk told a London newspaper his suggestions had not been taken into account, and proposed a round-table of Polish resistance groups. His successors in the London government called Yalta ‘a contradiction to the elementary principles binding the Allies [which] constitutes a violation of the letter and spirit of the Atlantic Charter and of the rights of every nation to defend its own interests.’
As Roosevelt came closer to Churchill on Poland, a major difference opened up on military strategy. A running battle had broken out between the assertive, individualistic Montgomery and Eisenhower, the team player dedicated to advance on a broad front. Brooke still despaired of Eisenhower as a strategist. Churchill’s growing concern was that, ‘Soviet Russia had become a mortal danger to the free world’. He believed a new front should be created as far east as possible to stem Moscow’s onward sweep and race to Berlin. But the Red Army was only thirty-five miles from the city while the Anglo-American forces were more than 200 miles away. Getting there ahead of the Soviets would require an enormous effort and a radical change in strategy. This could entail 100,000 additional casualties, the Americans warned.12
Eisenhower believed that going for the German capital would be seen as an enormous slap in the face by the Soviet Union after all its losses fighting Hitler. The division of Berlin between the Allies had been agreed, and if Western troops did manage to reach the capital, they would have to withdraw subsequently since the city was not in their zones. So the Supreme Commander proposed to order his troops to head for the Elbe, further south, to link up with the Red Army there. On 28 March, he cabled Stalin informing him of this. Naturally, the dictator agreed. ‘Berlin has lost its former strategic importance,’ he wrote, even as he set two Soviet marshals lo compete to get to the city first.
Churchill was annoyed. Not only had Eisenhower taken no account of his strategic ideas, he had also acted without having informed his British subordinates, and told Downing Street only after getting Stalin’s agreement. Though Marshall and his colleagues argued that Eisenhower was acting from operational necessity, Churchill did not give up. He sent a note to the Supreme Commander calling for an advance pitched further east, adding that he did not consider Berlin had lost its military and political significance—the idea that taking Dresden and connecting with the Russians there would be a greater gain ‘does not commend itself to me’, he wrote.
Eisenhower was polite, but unyielding. So Churchill moved up a rung with an eight-point message to Roosevelt, warning that, if the Red Army took Berlin, the Soviet Union would appear as the overwhelming contributor to victory, with grave implications for the future. The President’s reply, drafted by Marshall, again backed Eisenhower. The important thing, the Americans stressed, was to ensure that German forces were completely broken up and destroyed in their separate parts. Churchill had to accept defeat.
This last strategic dispute came amidst the rawest exchange between Roosevelt and Stalin as the dictator accused Washington of seeking a secret peace with the Germans. The row sprang from an approach in February by German commanders in Italy to Allen Dulles, the OSS chief in the Swiss capital of Berne. Discussions followed at which the Americans insisted on unconditional surrender, but did not close the door to further contacts.13
Roosevelt informed Stalin. He and Churchill said Soviet officers would be welcome at any subsequent talks but first, the Americans wanted to establish the Germans’ credentials—there were fears that the Nazis might shy away if Russians were present at preliminary talks. Churchill says in his account that it proved impossible for the Soviet representatives to get to Berne in time. The negotiations dropped away, but the episode revived old Soviet suspicions about the West being ready for an accord to leave Hitler free to throw all his forces into the battle against the Red Army.
A letter from Molotov inveighed against the ‘entirely inexplicable and incomprehensible’ attitude in allegedly not facilitating Soviet participation in the Berne contacts. On 3 April, Stalin wrote to the President that his military colleagues had no doubt that negotiations had led to an agreement by which the German command in Italy let Allied forces advance. That was why Alexander was doing so well. Germany was now no longer at war with Britain and America, only with Russia, the dictator went on. As if that was not enough, he ended by reading Roosevelt a homily about the ‘momentary advantage... fading before the principal advantage of the preservation and strengthening of the trust among the Allies.’
The President grew furious as he read this, sitting at his desk, his eyes flashing, his face flushed. Harriman wrote that it jarred Roosevelt into recognizing that the postwar period was going to be far less pleasant than he had imagined. The President was deeply hurt. It made him realize what we were up against.’
‘We can’t do business with Stalin,’ Roosevelt told a lunch guest. ‘He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.’
But the Kremlin was true to its word as regards Japan. On 5 April, Molotov called in Tokyo’s ambassador to denounce the neutrality pact between the two nations. The news was given out on Soviet radio that night. A troop build-up began in the Far East which would unleash a million men across the border with Siberia four months later.
This did not assuage Roosevelt’s anger at Stalin’s accusations. He replied that he had received the Soviet leader’s message with astonishment. He denied any deal, and recalled that he had said Red Army officers would be welcome if talks were held. ‘I must continue to assume that you have the same high confidence in my truthfulness and reliability that I have always had in yours,’ he added, attributing the stories Stalin had put to him to German disinformation. ‘Frankly, I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentation of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.’
Churchill associated himself with this. Stalin was unabashed. He told Roosevelt that the Russians would never have denied the West access to any contacts it might have with the Germans, but that this was what had happened in Berne. He contrasted the hard fighting in the East to the German surrender of towns on the Western front. His informants were ‘extremely honest and modest people who discharge their duties conscientiously’, he added. For Churchill, Stalin saved a special reproach. He wrote that his messages were personal and strictly confidential. But if ‘you are going to regard every frank statement of mine as offensive, it will make this kind of communication very difficult.’
* * * *
Roosevelt’s command of business in Washington was growing ever more fragile. He signed a document on post-war Germany put forward by a State Department official who favoured a soft approach, and then reversed course after pressure from Morgenthau, telling Stimson afterwards: ‘I have no idea what I signed.’ On Poland, Leahy’s advocacy of a calm approach provoked Churchill to warn of a second Romania, with Britain and the United States losing any influence.14
Anna and John Boettinger tried to act as a White House praetorian guard, keeping at bay those they did not approve of. Infuriated by presidential indecision and back-tracking, Stimson wrote in his diary. ‘Never has anything I have witnessed in the last four years shown such instances of the bad effects of our chaotic administration and its utter failure to treat matters in a well organized way.’ Leaving a White House meeting to appoint him to run the US zone in Germany, General Lucius Clay told James Byrnes: ‘We’ve been talking to a dying man.’
After a Cabinet session on 23 March, Roosevelt collapsed. ‘He really sank down and couldn’t stand up,’ Frances Perkins recalled.
Resting at his cottage at the treatment centre of Warm Springs, he dictated drafts of the address he would give two days later on Jefferson Day, and of his speech to the inaugural United Nations conference. In the first, he declared that the aim was ‘an end to the beginnings of all wars’. Echoing his remark about the only thing America had to fear in the Great Depression was fear itself, he went on: ‘I say: The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.’ He also drafted a message to Churchill on 11 April turning down his suggestion of a fresh demarche to Moscow.
The wording, style and sentiments were redolent of the basic Rooseveltian approach. ‘I would minimise the general Soviet problem as much as possible, because these problems... seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out, as in the case of the Berne meeting,’ he wrote. ‘We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.’
A cable for Stalin was in similar vein. The Berne incident appeared to have ‘faded into the past’, it said. ‘There must not, in any event, be mutual mistrust and minor misunderstandings of this character should not arise in the future.’ They were the last messages he wrote to the other two Allied leaders.
At Warm Springs, Roosevelt was joined by Lucy Rutherfurd, Margaret Suckley, Polly Delano, another cousin, and an Amazonian painter of Russian extraction who was doing his portrait. When Morgenthau visited, he talked of the speech he would make at San Francisco. The Treasury Secretary spoke at length about Germany, and the President made his remark that he was ‘hundred per cent’ behind him. When Morgenthau left, Roosevelt seemed happy.
The next day, 12 April, he woke with a headache and stiff neck. Putting on a grey, double-breasted suit and crimson tie, he worked on his UN speech. The scene in the cottage was thoroughly domestic.
Rutherfurd sat on a sofa, alongside Suckley, who crocheted. Polly Delano arranged the flowers. As she worked her watercolour, the painter asked Roosevelt if he liked Stalin; he said he did, but thought the Soviet leader had poisoned his wife. The war might end ‘at any time’, he added.
At 1.15, Roosevelt’s head slumped forward. It seemed as if he was searching for something. Daisy asked if he was looking for his cigarettes. Putting his hand to his skull, he said in a low but distinct voice, ‘I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.’
Lucy and Polly tilted his chair back, while Daisy telephoned for the doctor. Two staff carried the President to his adjoining bedroom. As they did so, Polly understood him to say, semi-conscious, ‘Be careful.’
Daisy held his hand. Lucy waved camphor under his nostrils. Polly fanned him. Two or three times he rolled his head from side to side, but there was no recognition in his eyes. Dr Bruenn arrived to administer an injection. His patient had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. His breathing was loud. Even adrenaline direct into the heart failed to revive him. At 3.55 p. m. Franklin Roosevelt died. His name headed the list of American war dead the next day.
On 13 April, the body was taken by train in a flag-draped coffin 800 miles to Washington. The coffin was raised so it could be seen from outside. At night, it was illuminated. Eleanor, who had arrived in Warm Springs on the night of the 12th, looked out of the window of her compartment at the crowds along the way—2 million people are estimated to have stood in homage. Roosevelt’s admirers wept across the nation; even his long-standing opponents paid tribute to the man who had headed the nation for a dozen years, pulled it out of depression and led it to the brink of victory in the greatest war it ever fought.
Harry Truman and the Cabinet waited at the Union Station, from where the coffin was taken to the White House on a horse-drawn carriage, a riderless horse following with stirrups reversed in the traditional symbol of a fallen warrior. In the presidential mansion,
Eleanor asked for the coffin to be opened so that she could spend a few minutes alone with her husband. She slipped a gold band from one of her fingers to put it on one of his.
The White House funeral was held at 4 p. m. on 14 April. Harry Hopkins, who had flown in from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, sat on a small chair, weeping uncontrollably through the short, simple service.
The aide looked ‘like death, the skin of his face a dreadful cold white with apparently no flesh left underneath it,’ Robert Sherwood recalled. ‘I believed that he now had nothing left to live for, that his life had ended with Roosevelt’s.’ In a telephone conversation with Sherwood he had reflected: ‘You and I have got something great that we can take with us for the rest of our lives...we know it’s true what so many people believed about him and what made them love him. The President never let them down... In the big things—all the things that were of real, permanent importance—he never let the people down.’ Later in the day, Hopkins seemed to revive as he talked of working on. Since Roosevelt was no longer there, he told Sherwood, ‘we’ve got to find a way to do things ourselves.’
That night, the body was taken by train to Hyde Park. Anna recalled looking out of the window of her carriage at ‘little children, fathers, grandparents. They were all there... at all hours during that long night.’
At the estate, the coffin was lowered into a grave in the garden. A bugler played ‘Taps’, Cadets from West Point fired three rifle volleys; Fala barked after each.
* * * *
In Moscow, Harriman telephoned Molotov with the news in the middle of the night. Coming to the embassy at 3 a. m., the Foreign Minister seemed deeply moved and disturbed. He spoke of Stalin’s respect for Roosevelt, and said Moscow would have confidence in Truman because he had been selected by the late leader.15
The following night, Harriman called at the Kremlin. Stalin held his hand for thirty seconds in silence before they sat down. The dictator said he did not believe there would be any change in US policy. Not in areas where Roosevelt had made his plans clear, Harriman replied. But, he went on, his successor would not have the same prestige.
‘President Roosevelt has died but his cause must live on,’ Stalin broke in. ‘We shall support President Truman with all our forces and all our will.’
Harriman then moved on to his main purpose. The most effective way for Moscow to show its desire for continued cooperation would be for Molotov to visit the United States, meet Truman and attend the San Francisco conference. Stalin agreed.
* * * *
In Chungking, Chiang Kai-shek noted that ‘Roosevelt had at times shown a tendency to appease the Communists. But he set a limit to that...After his death, I am afraid that the British will exert a greater influence on Anglo-American policy. As to Sino-Soviet relations, we should all the more be vigilant.’ In Paris, de Gaulle declared a week of national mourning, and sent Truman a message which spoke of the ‘imperishable message’ Roosevelt had left. In Berlin, Hitler said that ‘fate has removed the greatest war criminal of all time’. Goebbels called for champagne, declaring that the stars foretold a turn in the fortunes of war. Tokyo Radio, on the other hand, spoke of ‘the passing of a great man’.16
Addressing Parliament, the nation and the Empire, Churchill hailed ‘the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old.’ The news of Roosevelt’s death had reduced him to tears in the night, and he immediately made arrangements to fly to Washington. Then he decided he could not leave London at ‘this most critical and difficult moment’. Too many ministers were out of the country for him to go, too, he argued. This was nonsense. His real motivation remains unclear. He may have feared breaking down in public at the funeral, or that the long flight and the emotion would bring on one of his recurrent attacks of depression. In his place, Eden made the trip while Gromyko represented the Soviet Union.
* * * *
The new President was an unlikely heir to the Roosevelt heritage. A haberdasher by trade, he had risen through the machine politics of Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast to win election to the Senate where he joined a convivial group of whisky-drinking, poker-playing legislators. ‘I felt like the moon, the stars and all the other planets had fallen on me,’ he said of becoming President. A month off his sixty-first birthday when he moved into the White House, the short, brisk Truman was totally inexperienced as far as the rest of the world was concerned—he had served in France in the First World War but had not been abroad since. Roosevelt had told him nothing about Yalta or his dealings with the Allies—or the atom bomb.
The day after the White House funeral, Truman spent two hours with Hopkins. Pale and thinner than ever, the aide passed on his views of the other two Allied leaders. Stalin, he said, was a ‘forthright, rough, tough Russian... a Russian partisan through and through, thinking always first of Russia.’ But one could have a frank conversation with him. The aide urged Truman to work closely with Churchill. Above all, he thought Roosevelt’s policies must be continued. As the meeting drew to a close, Hopkins said he was going to resign. Truman urged him to stay if his health permitted. The aide said he would think it over.
As he read through secret documents in the Map Room, for the first time, Truman was startled by the hostile character of Stalin’s messages. The day after taking office, he cabled Churchill that Poland was a ‘pressing and dangerous problem’. Meetings in Washington produced tough talk, particularly from Harriman. It was as if Roosevelt’s death had removed inhibitions about speaking frankly.
James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy, warned of an ideological war with the USSR. Truman said that any treaty binding America to the new world organisation would fail unless Moscow kept its word on Poland. Agreements with the USSR had been a one-way street, he added; that could not continue. Stimson worried they might be heading into uncharted waters.
Meeting Molotov on 22 April, as the Red Army began to fight its way through the suburbs of Berlin, Truman said he stood by the deal Roosevelt had promised at Yalta for Moscow entering the war against Japan. But he added that the United States had gone as far as it could on Poland. He emphasised the importance of US public opinion, and said Washington was getting tired of waiting for Moscow to carry out its undertakings to allow free elections in eastern Europe. Molotov repeated Soviet complaints about non-Communist Poles attacking the Red Army. Truman responded that he was not interested in propaganda. ‘An agreement had been reached on Poland and it only remains for Marshal Stalin to carry it out in accordance with his word,’ he went on, his voice Rising.
‘I have never been talked to like that in my life,’ Molotov objected.
‘Carry out your agreement, and you won’t get talked to like that,’ Truman replied.
When the Foreign Minister tried to turn the talk back to the Far East, Truman broke in to say: ‘That will be all, Mr Molotov, I would appreciate it if you would transmit my views to Marshal Stalin.’ Molotov told Stalin Roosevelt’s policies were being abandoned. Two days later, in a message to Churchill, the Soviet leader accused Britain and America of working together ‘to put the Government of the USSR in an intolerable position by attempting to dictate their demands to it’. The following day, Truman spoke by telephone to the Prime Minister about an approach for peace to the Western Allies by Heinrich Himmler. While Churchill expressed concern that the SS chief might also be trying to cut a deal with Stalin, the President insisted that surrender must be to all three powers together. Absolutely sound, the Soviet leader replied when told of this. That day, Truman was briefed for the first time on the atom bomb. Three days later, US and Red Army troops met in Germany, inside the Soviet occupation zone. In keeping with their agreements, the Americans pulled back after the celebrations.
World History
