WASHINGTON, QUEBEC 12—16 SEPTEMBER 1944
‘I have not the faintest recollection of this at all!’
ROOSEVELT
HENRY MORGENTHAU, the American Treasury Secretary since 1934, was a professorial-looking, fifty-three-year-old with a domed, bald head and pince-nez who owed his position to his long acquaintance with the President. Shy, sometimes inarticulate, generally uncharismatic, and a sufferer from migraine attacks, he was referred to in private by Roosevelt as ‘the Morgue’. His father had been a successful real-estate developer, but Henry Jr had preferred a quieter life running his farm close to the Hyde Park estate before being appointed to the Treasury. A prominent New York Jewish political donor commented that the President had found ‘the only Jew in the world who doesn’t know a thing about money
But Morgenthau proved to be an efficient manager, and Roosevelt valued his loyalty. ‘You and I will run this war together,’ he told his neighbour in 1942. Given the advanced ages of Hull and Stimson, the Treasury Secretary could nurture the ambition of rising to an even higher post. He was adept at dealing with the vagaries of the Roosevelt court, and knew how to protect himself—he used a recording machine in his office to capture conversations. He also had powerful assistance in the shape of his driving number two for international affairs, the stout, abrasive, ping-pong-playing Harry Dexter White, son of Lithuanian Jewish refugees, who had changed his name from Weit and added Dexter. White was the Morgenthau’s intellectual motor, and an expert at soothing his boss’s self doubts with flattery. Morgenthau said he wanted
International financial policy to be ‘all in one brain, and I want that brain to be Harry White’s’.
Morgenthau and White achieved great success in July 1944, at the conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which established the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later the World Bank) to encourage post-war global recovery and mould the future international financial system. Though forty nations attended, it was mainly an Anglo-American meeting. Under White’s leadership the American team showed itself a better bureaucratic operator than the British under the sickly, less focused John Maynard Keynes. The United States put up a third of the $9.1 billion subscribed to the fund, and its corresponding share of the votes made it dominant, enabling it to press its agenda of convertible currencies, fixed exchange rates based on gold, and free trade. Much to White’s satisfaction, a Soviet delegation took part in the talks, but Stalin decided not to join the new system or its institutions.
What Morgenthau did not know was that White was a Soviet agent, passing classified information to Moscow. He acted out of genuine admiration for the USSR and from a belief that it should be helped in the search for a better world. But, however much White was driven by idealism, or resentment at the anti-Semitism he encountered in America, there is no doubt he committed treason, even letting the Russians have the printing plates for US occupation currency in Germany.2
The only Jew close to Roosevelt, Morgenthau had been brought up in a secular environment, and prided himself on being ‘one hundred per cent American’. But the growing evidence of the Holocaust strengthened his Jewish identity. He held the German people as a whole responsible, and, in the words of his son, became ‘the avenging angel for the remnant of world Jewry’. The rise of Hitler, he decided, had been made possible by the weak behaviour of the Allies in the 1920s. Germany must not be allowed to escape maximum punishment this time.3
Morgenthau faced a sceptical Washington establishment. Nazi killing of Jews was still seen as part of general ‘German criminality’. When first informed of the Final Solution in September 1942, Roosevelt did not believe it, telling the Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter that Jews were being sent to the east to build fortifications. At the War Department, Stimson and his assistant, John McCloy, felt strongly that military resources should not be diverted to saving them—the way to help the Jews, they said, was to defeat Hitler. The State Department actively obstructed moves to draw attention to what was happening, blocking attempts to help Jews escape Europe. Breckinridge Long, the Assistant Secretary of State responsible for refugees, was an anti-Semite who urged steps to stop entry into the USA of those fleeing Nazi persecution. He argued that ‘the absorption of new arrivals will have to be kept to a small scale or resistance will develop and spread rapidly, thus inviting attacks on the position of Jews already established’. Hull’s wife was half Jewish, something he tried to conceal; he had been attacked in the past for being a ‘slave’ of the Jews and using his office to ‘satisfy the greed of the moneychangers’. As a result, he preferred to avoid the issue.
While Roosevelt declared himself no anti-Semite and attracted most Jewish votes, his attitude could be ambivalent as shown by his remarks to the Vichy official at Casablanca about Jewish professional quotas, and the ‘understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews’. At a lunch with Churchill and Hopkins in 1943, he remarked on his success in adding four or five Jewish families to Hyde Park and the area round the hot springs he used in Georgia. The locals ‘would have no problems if there were no more than that’, he added. Just after Pearl Harbor, he told Morgenthau and a Catholic official that the United States was a Protestant country and ‘the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance’. Until 1944, he refrained from referring to persecution of the Jews when denouncing Nazi oppression. The matter had not come up at Allied summits; Churchill suppressed news of the Holocaust ‘lest this incite an increase in anti-Semitic feeling’.
But Morgenthau got a concerned official from his department appointed to head a newly created Refugee Board and, in March 1944, confronted Roosevelt with a demand to take action against the ‘plain antiSemitism’ at State. This drew a presidential statement denouncing ‘one of the blackest crimes in all history... the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe [which] goes on unabated every hour’. The United Nations, he vowed, would pursue the guilty and deliver them up to justice.
Four months later, he finally agreed to authorise European Jews to enter the United States —just 1,000 to a camp in New York State. But he turned down pleas to bomb Auschwitz. As John McCloy recalled, in an exchange with Morgenthau’s son, the President was ‘irate’ at the suggestion. ‘Why the idea!’ he exclaimed when McCloy took it to him. ‘They’ll say we bombed these people, and they’ll only move it down the road a little way and [we’ll] bomb them all the more. If it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative, and I won’t have anything to do [with it]’.
* * * *
The month after Bretton Woods, Morgenthau and White went to London and France. Unknowingly, they were about to set off a multi-layered alliance drama. At the time, the War Department was pressing for Lend-Lease to be cut back heavily after Germany’s defeat; in particular, it wanted to halt civilian assistance and anything else that could help Britain to compete economically in the period before Japan was also beaten. Aware of the concern this aroused in London, Hopkins suggested to Churchill that he raise the issue with Morgenthau.4
The Prime Minister told the visitor his country was completely bankrupt and could only produce half the food it needed. Despite his plea to Roosevelt during their second conference at Cairo, Bretton Woods had limited Britain’s dollar holdings to one billion, increasing its dependence on the United States. Hull and Hopkins saw the makings of a deal. In return for giving London help, they would insist on the victory of free trade over imperial preference. Hopkins advised the President it was important for him to ‘tell the Prime Minister how strongly you feel about knocking down some of the trade barriers... I rather think that he thinks that...this program in America lies with Secretary Hull, while the truth of the matter is that it is a program that, from the beginning, has been pushed by you.’ When Morgenthau told him of Britain’s problems, Roosevelt replied: ‘This is very interesting. I had no idea that England was broke. I will go over there and make a couple of talks and take over the British Empire.’
On the flight to London, White had handed the Treasury Secretary a memorandum from the State Department arguing that Germany would be needed for the revival of Europe; so its industry must be preserved and supported. White, probably motivated in part by a desire to help the Soviet Union, wanted a weak Germany. He judged, rightly, that the memo would stir up his boss. By the time their converted bomber landed, Morgenthau was, indeed, convinced something had to be done to head off the State Department.
His concern was heightened when he read the draft of a handbook for US occupation forces emphasising the establishment of efficient and orderly administration under German supervision. What he did not know was that the planners in Washington were working in the dark since Roosevelt had not informed anybody about the Teheran discussions on Germany. On the trip to Britain, he became the first Cabinet official to find out about this. At a Sunday afternoon tea party on the lawn of Eden’s country home, also attended by White, the Foreign Secretary referred to the agreement for dismemberment of the enemy. Morgenthau asked if he could see the Teheran papers. Knowing the importance of gaining support on Lend-Lease, Eden felt he could not refuse.
At the Foreign Office two days later, he read the record of the summit to the two Americans. He was clearly embarrassed at what he had blundered into. He asked Morgenthau to tell Roosevelt he had not meant to discuss Germany with the visitors. Morgenthau replied that he had not come to Britain to talk about Germany, but would raise the matter when he got home. State Department plans for a unified, reviving Germany were clearly in breach of Teheran. He could use this to press Roosevelt into the much tougher policy he wanted towards the enemy.
The first priority, Morgenthau decided, was to demolish the industrial heartland of the Ruhr. ‘Just strip it,’ he told White. ‘I don’t care what happens to the population... I would take every mine, every mill and factory and wreck it... Steel, coal, everything, just close it down... I am for destroying first and we will worry about the population second.’
The argument that Germany might be needed as a buffer to Russia’s expansion carried no weight with him. He had, his son added, ‘a rather romantic view of the Soviets as liberators of the Russian people from czarist tyranny’. Paying no heed to the Keynesian analysis of the harm done by reparations on Germany after the First World War, Morgenthau and White waved aside arguments from Whitehall about the importance of Germany for a healthy European economy as an attempt to safeguard British exports.
Henry Stimson felt very differently. The Secretary for War believed that the harsh treatment of Germany after 1918 had helped the advent of the Nazis. What he termed ‘mass vengeance’ after Hitler’s defeat would lead to a similar result. While recognising that Morgenthau was ‘understandably very bitter’, he felt his colleague was letting personal resentment lead him down a dangerous path. A weak Germany, he thought, would leave a vacuum for Moscow to fill.
At seventy-six, Stimson was a much respected Republican, an old-fashioned figure who refused to have divorced people in his house. His presence in the Cabinet was particularly important in establishing the bipartisan nature of the war effort. Alongside Marshall, ‘the Colonel’, as he was known from his service in the First World War, was one of the few people with whom Roosevelt did not dare to trifle. This made his opposition a major threat to Morgenthau’s plans.
However, the Treasury Secretary scored an opening point on Stimson’s own turf by bringing the army handbook to the attention of the President who said it was ‘pretty bad’, and sent the War Department a ‘spanking letter’. (The book was subsequently rewritten to sound tougher, but the War Department included loopholes which would enable it to appoint local figures to administer the first cities to be occupied, such as Aachen.)
On the broader question of the treatment of Germany, Roosevelt asked Hopkins to chair a committee of Morgenthau, Stimson and Hull to produce a recommendation on US policy. Its deliberations produced a vivid example of how top-level policy-making was conducted in the administration, as senior figures battled for the approval of a President who chose to dodge and weave for weeks.
Though Stimson was implacably opposed to his ideas, Morgenthau believed he had Hull’s backing. On his return to Washington, he had told the Secretary of State what he had learned from Eden. ‘Henry, this is the first time I have heard this!’ Hull gasped. Morgenthau said he did not want to intervene in a field that was not his, but noted that nobody was working along the lines agreed in Teheran.
‘I am not told what is going on,’ Hull explained. ‘When they talk about Germany, I am not consulted.’
Where did Hull stand? Morgenthau asked. In reply, the Secretary of State recalled his proposal at the Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Moscow for a secret trial of ‘Hitler and his gang’ before shooting them.
The fourth member of the committee, Hopkins, disliked Morgenthau, whose closeness to the President had increased while the aide was recuperating from his operation. But Hopkins seemed to be on the side of toughness, and would, in the end, do whatever his boss wanted. It was difficult to read the Roosevelt runes. After Teheran, the President had said that the United Nations had no intention of enslaving the German people, who would be given a chance to develop in peace as ‘useful and respectable members of the European family’. But, in August, he told the Cabinet Germans should have only ‘a subsistence level of food’ after defeat. There was, he added, no reason the country could not go back to 1810 ‘where they would be perfectly comfortable but wouldn’t have any luxury’. On a visit to the Morgenthau farm, Roosevelt told his host that Germany should not be permitted to keep a single plane, ‘not even a glider’, that ‘nobody should be allowed to wear a uniform’, and that no marching would be permitted. How serious he was is a matter for debate; the Treasury Secretary lapped it up.5
Roosevelt’s administration was always marked by departmental rivalries, but this reached a particularly high pitch as the State, Treasury and War departments battled over the plans for post-war Germany. Stimson found the committee meetings the most difficult and unpleasant he had attended in the three years since he returned to government. At times, the discussions grew so frosty that participants dropped their habit of calling one another by first names and reverted to titles. The War Secretary did not help matters by telling Morgenthau that the reconstruction of Germany would require ‘kindness and Christianity’. When the proposal to destroy the Ruhr came up, he insisted: ‘I cannot treat as realistic the suggestion that such an area in the present economic condition of the world can be turned into a nonproductive ghost territory.’ He could not conceive of reducing ‘such a gift of nature into a dust heap’. Europe, he stressed, would need speedy reconstruction if it was to avoid further convulsions.
The President kept all balls in the air. When he met the foursome, he began by looking at Stimson and saying that Germans could be fed from soup kitchens, before rambling on about how his ancestors had lived without luxuries. When the War Secretary impatiently turned the discussion to the Ruhr, Roosevelt said there was no particular hurry to reach a decision, and added that the region might be used to provide raw materials for Britain. Though he told his close staff he was heartbroken at not getting his way, Morgenthau vowed: ‘I’m not licked.’ At a subsequent tete-a-tete, Roosevelt told him: ‘Don’t be discouraged.’ The Treasury Secretary had White draw up a fourteen-point memorandum, which became known as the Morgenthau Plan. When White’s treasonable contacts with Moscow were later revealed, one obvious conclusion was that he was acting to boost the Soviet post-war position. He certainly backed harsh treatment of the defeated enemy, but he hardly needed to egg on his boss. When White suggested introducing some vagueness into the paper, the Treasury Secretary replied: ‘I am not going to budge an inch. I don’t know any other way than going to the heart of the thing which is the Ruhr.’
The plan provided for immediate dismantling of all factories and equipment which would be transported to Allied nations as restitution.
Germans were to be liable to forced labour abroad. Schools and universities were to be shut—elementary schools would be reopened when suitable teachers and books had been located, but higher education bodies were to stay closed ‘for a considerable period of time’. The media were to be shut down until the right people could be put in to run them. The victors would control Germany’s trade and capital flows for at least twenty years. East Prussia would be split between Russia and Poland; the Saar would go to France; the Ruhr would be put under international control; the rest of Germany would be split into two zones. Even Roosevelt’s remark about banning gliders, parades and uniforms was included.6
Copies were distributed to the President and members of the committee in black, loose-leaf books for a meeting on the morning of Saturday 9 September. There was no time to digest it in advance.
Looking grey and exhausted, Roosevelt read out one heading: ‘It is a Fallacy that Europe Needs a Strong Industrial Germany’. He agreed with this.7
‘It would breed war, not peace,’ Stimson said of the plan: ‘It would arouse sympathy for Germany throughout the world.’
Hull began to shift ground. He was concerned that the Treasury was making the running on a major issue he regarded as State territory. Hull had made it known that he would not attend a conference with Churchill which had been fixed for Quebec later in the month because of his health and because it was meant to be confined to military matters— not that Roosevelt had invited him along. But the President noted that, if financial matters emerged at the summit, ‘I will want Henry to come.’ This increased I lull’s worry as it would enable Morgenthau to push himself and his ideas on Germany. The Treasury Secretary’s position would be all the stronger since, in deference to a complaint from State about how he took Hopkins and Harriman to international meetings rather than professional diplomats, Roosevelt had decided not to invite them to the summit.
Hull’s irritation deepened when he learned that Churchill insisted on Cadogan coming to Quebec from the Dumbarton Oaks discussions. He called this a ‘tragic mistake’, fearing that Stalin would think Roosevelt and Churchill were plotting to turn the global organisation to their own ends. On top of this, it then transpired that Eden was also going to Quebec, supposedly only in his role as Deputy to Churchill as the Minister of Defence.
* * * *
‘The Conference has opened in a blaze of friendship,’ the Prime Minister cabled the War Cabinet from Quebec on 13 September. The tide of the war in Europe was clearly with the Allies though there was a set-back when Montgomery launched a parachute drop to try to seize the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem in Holland. This led to a defeat in which more than 7,000 men were killed or taken prisoner. But, in the Pacific, the American advance captured islands from which Japan could be bombed.8
Roosevelt was the first to arrive in Quebec for the conference, codenamed Octagon. He was waiting at the station in an open Phaeton to greet Churchill, who swung his cane as he walked from the train in a blue uniform and naval cap. Neither man was in the best of health. Before leaving for Canada, the President told Margaret Suckley he felt ‘like a boiled owl’. He was suffering from stomach trouble, fell into dozes and had an alarmingly low haemoglobin count. Churchill found him very frail. Noting his loss of weight, Moran noted in his diary: ‘You could have put your fist between his neck and his collar.’
Churchill had again contracted pneumonia before leaving Britain on the Queen Mary, and was in a bad mood on the voyage across the Atlantic, accusing the Chiefs of Staff of misleading him, alleging that they were scheming with their US counterparts and talking obsessively of a landing in the Adriatic, spouting what Brooke described in his diary as ‘absurdities’.
Sitting with his head in his hands on the ship, Churchill looked old, unwell and depressed—Brooke blamed the after-effects of the M&B drugs Churchill had taken for pneumonia. After one session, the general noted: ‘It was hard to keep one’s temper with him, but I could not help feeling frightfully sorry for him. He gave me the feeling of a man who is finished, can no longer keep a grip of things, and is beginning to realize it’. [In the published version of his diary, Brooke noted that part of his criticism of Churchill was ‘unnecessarily harsh’ and had been written in exasperation and desperation. (Alanbrooke, pp. 590— 1)]
For the only time, both leaders were accompanied by their wives. Mrs Churchill took the occasion to buy some nylon stockings, which, if available at all, were strictly rationed in Britain.
On the second day of the meeting, Churchill sent Roosevelt a note saying they should discuss the issue of continuing American aid to Britain after the defeat of Hitler, known as Lend-Lease Two. ‘In which case I hope you could have Morgenthau present,’ he suggested. The President cabled the Treasury Secretary to fly in, which he promptly did, accompanied by White.9
Learning this, Hull exploded. ‘In Christ’s name,’ he exclaimed, ‘what has happened to that man?’ Stimson found it ‘outrageous’ that Roosevelt had taken with him ‘a man who really represents the minority and is so biased by his Semitic grievances that he is really a very dangerous adviser to the President at this time’.
Churchill wanted a commitment to fund the reconstruction of his country. The British thought that their early resistance to Hitler merited consideration beyond strict accounting or congressional reservations. Outlining the scale of spending since 1939 to Morgenthau, Keynes had written that it ‘no doubt makes up collectively a story of financial imprudence which has no parallel in history. Nevertheless, that financial imprudence may have been a facet of the single-minded devotion without which the war would have been lost. So we beg leave to think that it was worthwhile—for us, and also for you.’
When Churchill pressed the matter, Roosevelt rambled off into a string of anecdotes which so irritated the Prime Minister that he burst out: ‘What do you want me to do? Get up on my hind legs and beg like Fala?’ In the end, the President agreed verbally that Britain should continue to receive aid to cover ‘reasonable needs’. But the $5.5 billion package sent to Congress was linked to the war, not to reconstruction. White summed up American concerns when he wrote that ‘a vague commitment to England’s future prosperity would threaten both the financial and political position of the United States in the post-war world.’
Roosevelt sent Hull a memorandum saying London should be told that aid would depend on ‘the soundness of the course adopted by the British Government with a view to restoring its own economy, particularly with regard to measures taken to restore the flow of international trade.’ But, when State and Treasury issued a joint statement on the extension of Lend-Lease into 1945, they stated specifically that they had not covered ‘problems of post-war foreign trade’.
* * * *
At a three-hour summit dinner on 13 September, Churchill slumped in his
Chair in an irascible mood. Roosevelt suggested that Morgenthau outline his ideas on Germany. When he complied, the Prime Minister burst out: ‘Unnatural, un-Christian and unnecessary.’10
‘You cannot indict a whole nation,’ he added in a vitriolic tone. ‘Kill the criminals but don’t carry on the business for years.’
As the talk veered off to another subject, Roosevelt steered it back to Germany. Churchill did not want any of this. Truculently, he said the plan would mean ‘chaining himself to a dead German’.
‘Is this what you asked me to come all the way over here to discuss?’ he grunted. Talking to Stimson on his return to Washington, Morgenthau said the Prime Minister had been even angrier than the Secretary of War about his plan.
The Treasury Secretary spent a sleepless night. In the morning, he found an ally in Churchill’s violently anti-German adviser, Cherwell, who saw how the proposal could be presented to appeal to his master.
The destruction of German industry could save Britain from the spectre of postwar bankruptcy as former German markets opened up for British goods. Leaving Morgenthau, the Oxford scientist turned prime-ministerial adviser went to see Churchill and explained the advantages of eliminating German competition—later, Stalin would remark to the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov that the British were bombing Germany so heavily in order to ‘destroy their competitor’.
‘Somebody must suffer for the war,’ the ‘Prof’ added. ‘It is surely right that Germany and not Britain should fit the bill.’
When the summit reassembled at noon, Churchill said Britain could step into Germany’s economic shoes after the war. But he still insisted on confirmation of a second phase of Lend-Lease. Cherwell told a Treasury official that Britain was ‘very much more likely to get the loan if he got Winston to sign the [Germany] document’. From the US side, White saw a definite link.
Given Churchill’s awareness of the need to maintain a balance in Europe, it is unlikely that his change of heart was genuine. Rather he calculated that he would get the aid while Morgenthau’s proposals would prove too radical to be put into practice. This was in line with the way he had handled the US plan to land in France in 1942, opening the door for the President to adopt a strategy different from the one he had originally agreed with those around him.
When he came to write his war memoirs, Churchill again felt a need to be extremely guarded. As the apostle of the unity of the Englishspeaking peoples, anxious to hold up his partnership with Roosevelt as a shining example, all he could include was a pregnant subordinate clause on the plan: ‘At first, I was violently opposed to this idea. But the President, with Mr Morgenthau—from whom we had so much to ask— was so insistent that in the end we agreed to consider it.’
Having made his switch, Churchill took command, dictating a paper that went further in some ways than Morgenthau and White. The document began by saying that the two leaders had agreed that the future of the Ruhr and the Saar were an essential element in preventing German rearmament. (Morgenthau was pleased to hear Roosevelt say in an aside that he didn’t just have those two regions in mind, but the whole of Germany.)
‘The ease with which the metallurgical, chemicals and electric industries in Germany can be converted from peace to war has already been impressed upon us by bitter experience,’ Churchill went on. ‘It must also be remembered that the Germans have devastated a large portion of the industries of Russia and other neighbouring allies, and it is only in accordance with justice that these injured countries should be entitled to receive the machinery they require in order to repair the losses they have suffered.’
Their industries closed down, the Ruhr and the Saar would come under a United Nations body, he said, before adding a flourish of his own. Morgenthau and White had provided for the break-up of big landed estates and their redistribution. Churchill provided the words which were to be associated with the Morgenthau Plan for ever—‘The program for eliminating the war-making industries in the Ruhr and the Saar is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.’
As he was dictating, Eden came into the room. Morgenthau, wrongly, saw the Foreign Secretary as an ally in view of his help in London. But he had been advised by Whitehall that the plan would hurt world trade and British exports.
‘You can’t do this,’ he objected.
Britain would take over Germany’s export trade, Churchill replied.
‘How do you know what or where it is?’ Eden asked, suggesting that Hull should be asked to comment, an idea that irritated Churchill, who rarely took issue with the Foreign Secretary in front of third parties.
‘Well,’ the Prime Minister said testily. ‘We will get it wherever it is. Now I hope, Anthony, you’re not going to do anything about this with the War Cabinet. After all the future of my people is at stake, and when I have to choose between my people and the German people, I am going to choose my people.’
When the typed-up, 226-word ‘Program to Prevent Germany from Starting World War III’ was brought back, Roosevelt leaned forward, and scrawled ‘OK’. Churchill added his initials with the date.
Some writers have argued that the President could not have believed in such an extreme scheme, and signed only to try to convince Stalin of his toughness towards Germany. That may have been in his mind but, at Teheran, and in other conversations, Roosevelt had made plain his strong views about the treatment of the enemy. The Morgenthau Plan was the logical extension of his line of thinking, though, as so often, it is hard to gauge if he knew quite how he intended to proceed. Another explanation may have lain in his health; how far he knew what he was doing at times must be open to question.
On other matters, as well, the two leaders were in accord.
Roosevelt agreed to the British occupying northern Germany while the US took a zone in the south. Churchill sweetened the pill by offering the US access to the sea through Bremen and Bremerhaven.11
As Hull had feared, the two leaders did talk about the United Nations. However, their discussion ‘rambled’, Cadogan wrote in his diary. Churchill was now tending to side with Stalin on the primacy of the Big Three veto while Roosevelt would warm to a compromise dreamed up by Cadogan which would have limited their ability to block the first stages of investigation of disputes. Anyway, nothing could be done until they met Stalin. ‘It’s quite impossible to do business this way,’ the diplomat noted.
China was a matter of concern once again. Roosevelt’s decision at the second Cairo conference to cut back on the Burma offensive had, in effect, scuppered Stilwell’s grand plan for an offensive in southern China.
When the Japanese launched a major sweep from the north, codenamed Ichigo, the Chinese crumbled, and the Americans were forced to abandon their airbases. A pitched battle raged over supplies between Stilwell and Chennault of the air force, who accused Vinegar Joe of precipitating the defeat of the one Nationalist army which put up a good fight by withholding fuel from the air force to fly in its support.
Marshall drew up a message to Chiang Kai-shek, which Roosevelt signed, telling the Generalissimo to let Stilwell command the Chinese army. Though the American exulted when he delivered it, this proved a step too far. Chiang was worried that Stilwell would undermine his military power base, and that the Americans would send aid to the Communists in northern China. After biding his time for a few weeks, the Generalissimo played the sovereignty card. How could Roosevelt proclaim his anti-imperialist sentiments if he was trying to dictate to China’s legitimate government? Since he could not get rid of Chiang, removing Stilwell was the only way for the President to seek a new start. At a dinner in Washington, Chiang’s brother-in-law gathered from Hopkins that Roosevelt might be ready to drop the adviser. Stimson noted bitterly that the President’s envoys to China had ‘filled his head with poison on the subject of Stilwell’. In October, the axe fell; Vinegar Joe was recalled, and replaced by the more emollient Albert Wedemeyer.
* * * *
After the summit, Roosevelt and Churchill spent the weekend at Hyde Park, where they talked over sharing the results of research into atomic weapons - three months earlier they had signed an agreement to establish the innocuously named Combined Development Trust, which contracted to buy 3.4 million pounds of uranium oxide from Belgium’s Union Miniere du Haut Katanga. An aide-memoire by Roosevelt recorded agreement to continue Anglo-American cooperation after the war. It also raised the prospect of the bomb being used against Japan ‘after mature consideration’. The work was to stay under heavy wraps—Stimson, who was one of the few informed, called it ‘the best kept secret I ever knew’. Roosevelt would not inform Truman, and Churchill kept Attlee in the dark.12
The third paragraph said that enquiries should be made into the activities of the prominent nuclear scientist Niels Bohr, who had been smuggled out of his native Denmark. Seeing how the atom bomb would change warfare, Bohr believed it should be subject to a global agreement. During the summer, he had met Democratic elder statesman Felix
Frankfurter, subsequently sending him a memorandum which included the information that he had been invited by a fellow scientist to go to Moscow. Frankfurter had already discussed the question with Roosevelt who, he recalled, had been receptive to sharing atomic secrets with the USSR. Bohr saw Churchill in London. The two men did not get on. Churchill believed America and Britain should keep their monopoly on atomic weapons, and cabled Cherwell, who was in Washington, that the Dane ‘ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes’.
Bohr then called on Roosevelt who treated him with greater respect. According to historian Robin Edmonds the President ‘seems to have agreed that Stalin must be approached in this matter’. Frankfurter sent him a handwritten letter arguing that Moscow should be told of the research. Since its atomic work was far behind what was being done in the West, ‘appropriate candor would risk very little,’ he wrote. ‘Withholding, on the other hand, might have grave consequences.’ But, at Hyde Park, Roosevelt swung behind Churchill. The last sentence of his aide-memoire said steps should be taken to ensure that Bohr ‘is responsible for no leakage of information, particularly to the Russians’.
There were two other visitors to the Roosevelt estate. The Duke of Windsor, the monarch to whose cause Churchill had nailed his colours in the abdication crisis of 1936, came to lunch, and Harry Hopkins also turned up. The aide confided to Churchill that he was not what he had been; Morgenthau had taken his place as the man to whom the President spoke most. Roosevelt turned down his proposal that he should become High Commissioner in Germany on health grounds—sensible enough, but a blow to somebody who had done so much despite his continual stomach problems. When Hopkins arrived for lunch a little late, Churchill noted that the President did not greet him. But then the atmosphere grew more cordial, and the Prime Minister felt it was ‘like old times’.
‘It was remarkable how definitely my contacts with the President immediately improved and our affairs moved quicker as Hopkins appeared to regain his influence,’ he wrote in a passage that implies that he was finding it more difficult to deal with Roosevelt. For his part, the President may have begun to view his aide as a man of the past, even sicker than himself and not quite up to the historic, global role he saw himself fulfilling.
After Churchill left Hyde Park, to sail home on the Queen Mary from New York, Roosevelt slept round the clock. Getting up, he practised walking with his braces and then took the train back to Washington to plunge into campaigning for a fourth term.
* * * *
At 9.30 a. m. on 20 September, Morgenthau, accompanied by White, met Hull and Stimson in the State Department to brief them on the Quebec summit. He had returned to Washington feeling ‘terrifically happy’. ‘We got just what we started out to get,’ he told his staff. The summit had been ‘unbelievably good...the high spot of my entire career in government.’13
When Stimson asked about a connection between the acceptance of the plan for Germany and the extension of Lend-Lease, Morgenthau denied any link. He stressed that, while Roosevelt had been ready to agree there and then, he had insisted on a committee being set up to consider the aid issue. According to White’s note, Hull was ‘very disturbed that the President made the decision on lend-lease with Britain without prior consultation with the men who had been working on the problem for a long time.’ The State Department memorandum on the meeting recorded that Hull ‘expressed his shocked feelings at the way such vital matters were settled without any consultation with our Government experts or regard for what has gone before’. Not only had the summit produced yet another incursion into his territory by a fellow Cabinet member, but the accord meant the continuance of aid could not be used as ‘bait’ to get the British in line on free trade.
When the conversation came back to Germany, Hull pointed out the danger that Stalin would think Roosevelt and Churchill were hatching policy without him. Sounding bitter, the Secretary of State said he was rapidly losing interest in the whole matter since he was being kept out of discussions and decisions. His health was getting worse, and he had held his job for a record twelve years, he remarked. Given his own ambitions, Morgenthau could only take note.
Stimson was celebrating his seventy-seventh birthday—Roosevelt sent him a bouquet of roses. Deeply troubled by what had happened and what it said about the decision-making process, the old-school Republican felt it was terrible to ‘think of the total power of the United States and the United Kingdom... in the hands of two men, both of whom are similar in impulsiveness and their lack of systematic study.’ He dismissed Churchill’s ‘Prof’ as ‘an old fool... a pseudo scientist.’ Morgenthau, he thought, was driven by ‘Semitism gone wild for vengeance and, if it is ultimately carried out (I cannot believe that it will be), it as sure as fate will lay the seed for another war in the next generation.’
With a ‘heavy cloud’ over his head, the War Secretary sat down to write a letter to the President calling the Morgenthau Plan ‘a crime against civilization’ comparable to what the Nazis wanted to do to their victims. Under the Atlantic Charter, the vanquished, as well as the victors, were entitled to freedom from want, he added. ‘The sum total of the drastic political and economic steps proposed by the Treasury is an open confession of the bankruptcy of hope for a reasonable economic and political settlement of the causes of war,’ the letter charged.
Then the Treasury Department shot itself in the foot. Exultant, and seeking to tie the President publicly to its plan, it leaked the contents of the Quebec document. A column in the Washington Post portrayed Morgenthau as the winner against Stimson and Hull. That was too much for the Secretary of State. His department called in the senior New York Times writer, Arthur Krock, for a briefing. The resulting column depicted the Treasury Secretary as ‘the central civilian government official’ concerned with post-war Germany. This made Morgenthau vulnerable to charges of overreaching himself, and pinned down his department’s responsibilities. Krock dug in the knife by reporting that, at Quebec, the British had been interested in the advantages they could gain from the deindustrialisation of Germany, and making points about what Lend-Lease had cost. The suggestion was that Morgenthau had been ensnared by the wily ally.14
The press war escalated. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Treasury plan entailed 30 million Germans leaving their country. An Associated Press despatch detailed the split in the administration. Seeing the political danger, particularly in an election year, Roosevelt dissolved the four-man Cabinet committee. But the New York Times threw further fuel on the fire with a report that the President and Morgenthau had ‘bribed’ Churchill to accept the plan with the promise of new Lend-Lease aid.
In London, the War Cabinet reacted negatively, and Churchill did not formally table the scheme for discussion. The British Treasury Representative in Washington called it ‘lunatic’. As the Prime Minister recalled in a post-war speech, it ‘just dropped on one side’ as far as Britain was concerned. In a conversation in 1947, John McCloy recorded, Churchill ‘damned Morgenthau and the Prof. Said they were Shylocks.’
In Moscow, according to the police chiefs son, Beria detected an unreasonable ‘act of vengeance by the Jews against the German people’. In Berlin, Goebbels brandished the scheme to show what lay in store if the Nazis fell. ‘Roosevelt and Churchill Agree to Jewish Murder Plan’, one German headline read. Picking this up, Dewey said it was as valuable to Hitler as 10 fresh divisions, and cost American lives by stiffening German resistance. Privately, Marshall agreed.15
Deeply troubled, Morgenthau tried to telephone Roosevelt at Hyde Park. The President declined to take his calls for three days. Eventually, the Treasury Secretary got Hopkins to ring for him, but Roosevelt rebuffed his suggestion of a statement saying he was mulling over advice.
Returning to Washington, the President spoke to Stimson, and backed off from the plan. Morgenthau prepared another line of attack by telling White to look in the records for dirt on Stimson’s attitude to German reparations and Mussolini when he had been Secretary of State.
On the morning of 29 September, Morgenthau walked to the White House and took a seat outside Roosevelt’s quarters. The President was in bed, with a high temperature. His daughter-chatelaine Anna, who disliked the visitor, came out into the hall. Morgenthau produced press clippings favourable to his scheme, but recognised the storm was ‘bad politically and bad from the Jewish angle’.
‘I think [the President] ought to get Hull, Stimson and me together,’ he said, ‘and stop us talking.’ He would wait while Anna went to see her father with the idea.
‘All I know is that the President definitely doesn’t want to see you,’ she said when she returned. Putting her hand on Morgenthau’s arm, she moved him out.
Later that day, Roosevelt sent Hull a memorandum saying that ‘the real nub of the situation is to keep Britain from going into complete bankruptcy at the end of the war...I just cannot go along with the idea of seeing the British Empire collapse financially, and Germany at the same time building up a potential re-armament machine to make another war possible in twenty years. Mere inspection of plants will not prevent that.’
He blamed the mess on press leaks, telling Hull that he wished he could catch whoever was responsible ‘and chastise him’. Despite what had been said at Quebec, he added that ‘no one wants to make Germany a wholly agricultural nation again’ and that ‘no one wants the complete eradication of the German industrial productive capacity in the Ruhr and the Saar’.
‘Henry Morgenthau pulled a boner! ’ the President exclaimed at a particularly friendly lunch with Stimson at the beginning of October, as if the whole thing was nothing to do with him. All he had wanted was to help Britain financially, he added. When Stimson read the Quebec document to him, Roosevelt replied: ‘Henry, I have not the faintest recollection of this at all!’
Despite everything, Roosevelt followed his usual pattern of taking Morgenthau on a drive along the banks of the Hudson River on the eve of the election, and invited him to Hyde Park as the results came in the following night. He got 53.4 per cent of the popular vote and a 439 to 99 margin in the electoral college. [Compared to 54.7 per cent and 449 to 82 in 1940 and 60.8 per cent and 523 to 8 in 1936.]
The row over the plan chipped away at Morgenthau’s status, and opened the door for Hopkins to return to favour. The Iowan’s position was strengthened when Hull resigned in November, and was replaced by Edward Stettinius. Still only forty-four years of age, but with a distinguished thatch of white hair, he had gained high-level business experience as a senior figure at both General Motors and US Steel before becoming the Lend-Lease administrator, where he worked well with Hopkins. In foreign affairs, however, he lacked authority or depth of knowledge. Roosevelt had shown the kind of successor to Hull he wanted when he rejected the powerful Democratic politician James Byrnes as ‘too independent’. Charles Bohlen, the interpreter at Teheran, was appointed as liaison between the State Department and the White House, reporting to Hopkins. The aide now had a twin power base from which to pursue his role as the President’s prime alliance agent and was the one senior figure in Washington who could rise above departmental divisions.
Morgenthau did not relent. He castigated a British draft of policy towards post-war Germany for failing to deal with ‘the elimination or destruction of heavy industry in Germany’. The State Department commented that the note would be ‘most disturbing if there was any prospect of its being taken seriously by the British’.
Roosevelt remained ambivalent. ‘We should let Germany come back industrially to meet her own needs, but not to export for some time until we know better how things are going to turn out,’ he told the State
Department. But he also spoke to Keynes of going ‘pretty far in deindustrializing the Ruhr and eliminating many... basic industries’. A State memorandum in November provided for ‘a rock-bottom standard of living for Germans’, but said the economy ‘should be operated as nearly as possible as a unit during the occupation period’. The first part of the document played to the gallery; the second put forward a very different approach that would affect the shape of Western Europe for decades to come.
The real test came when Anglo-American troops surrounded the Ruhr in the spring of 1945. Eisenhower told Stimson he did not have enough men both to deal with the region and to press on with winning the war. Marshall advised him to make his decision without taking into account the argument for turning Germany into a pastoral state. Eisenhower got on with the war.
But Morgenthau was unyielding. In his last conversation with Roosevelt in 1945, he said he was going to continue to fight for his ideas because ‘a weak economy for Germany means that she will be weak politically, and she won’t be able to make another war... I have been strong for winning the war, and I want to help win the peace.’
‘Henry, I am with you one hundred per cent,’ the President replied.
World History
