PART 1:ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA, "AND BY ME",THE SECRET IN THE CLOSET

ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA

By GEORGE N. CROCKER

Earth is sick And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words Which States and Kingdom! utter when they talk Of truth and justice. 

WORDSWORTH

INTRODUCTION 

RANDOLPH BOURNE, one of the critical commentators of the Woodrow Wilson period, once wrote that war is like a wild elephant: it carries the rider where it desires, not where he may desire. Perhaps the historian predilected to spare Franklin D. Roosevelt an unfavorable judgment at the bar of history will find in this simile his best expedient for divesting Roosevelt of responsibility for the tragic epilogue which followed World War II. By conjuring up the vision of the savage beast uncontrollable by the man, one can reduce to irrelevancy the qualities of the man. In the psychological climate thus engendered, a bold assumption that the man's intentions were virtuous, his motives pure, and his competence abundant becomes easy to propagate. History bows to a legend. 

There is no longer any doubt that World War II led to consequences so at variance with the purpose of the war as proclaimed by President Roosevelt that some explanation must be produced and made plausible to multitudes of baffled and disillusioned people, for it will be remembered that Roosevelt sold the war, or at least American participation in it and his own indispensability·for conducting it, with the avidity and cock sureness of a huckster.

The explanation can he realistic or it can he fanciful. The demagogue, of course, is tempted to offer one which will meet the empiric test of mass acceptability; the sentimentalist will embrace the one which is least disturbing to his memories, which, in turn, have been shaped and colored by his emotions; the participant, in his memoirs, strains to shield his own reputation and that of those with whom he has been linked. It remains for the historian, or rather many historians, each in his own way, to cull the truth from a melange of fact, fancy, and propaganda. To do this, he must, of course, be not awed by the ephemeral glamour of popular heroes and undismayed by the disparity between the words and the deeds of men, for he will know that the guises of guile are many and that the words used by men of power are often chosen to conceal rather than to reveal the truth. 

It is "the secret motives," wrote Elie Faure, "which, in men's intentions, determine historical events and by that fact make history half unintelligible to us." The same thought impelled Napoleon, in the wane of his brilliant career, to complain that historical truth "is too often merely a phrase ... a story that has been agreed to tell." 

Perhaps psychoanalysis will rewrite history. It will, eventually, predicts Dr. Raynmond de Saussure in his contribution to Geza Roheim's symposium under the title Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences. While the task is an enormous one and methods of investigation will need to be greatly improved, psychoanalytic understanding of the motives that spur men to action will throw new light on events whose cause and meaning have otherwise been obscure. It is banal to say that only a psychoanalytical approach can explain Hider's appeal to the German people. Is it not as likely that the roots of Franklin D. Roosevelt's curious relations with·the Soviet Russians abroad and their minions in this country will be reached through similar psychological explorations? Of Roosevelt, Harold Ickes once said that it was "impossible to come to grips with him." Indeed, his mind was a perfect exemplification of the "feeling" and "intuitive" types of extroversion described by Jung and van der Hoop, so his analyst will not expect to find logical consistency as he follows the threads of motivation through a tortuous course of behavior that is at once masterly and preposterous. In the case of the intimate assistant and confidant, Harry Hopkins, a more transparent man and one whose brooding antipathies and wanton enthusiasms were as passionate as they were often fatuous, the psychopathology is already dimly visible to the observant layman.* Later generations of savants, far removed from the political considerations which now discourage such projects and aided by the testimony of secrets yet untold, will undoubtedly write of these "cases" in books which men now living will never have an opportunity to read. 

* General John R. Deane, head of the United States Military Mission in Moscow during the war, writes that Harry Hopkins carried out the Russian aid program "with a zeal which approached fanaticism." Hopkins' "enthusiasm became so ingrained that it could not be tempered." (John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance [Viking, 1947], 90)

Randolph Bourne's simile of the wild elephant will not do. The story of Warid War II and its aftermath is a drama of human will. The denouement, so full of irony, was not fortuitous. It is too easily forgotten that conscious, deliberate choices between specific alternatives were made time after time. While armies were clashing all over the world, important men met and made decisions and compacts. In varying degrees, these men were either clothed with legal authority to do what they did or they arrogated the. power to themselves. The lives and fortunes of millions of living human beings and the futures of those yet unborn were admittedly to be affected by what these high personages decided to do or not to do. The legality of their actions under national and international law is perhaps now academic; the results are not. The travail and violence that must inevitably be faced in order to undo much that these men did remain the burden of the present and the future. 

In August, 1941, while war was raging in Europe but before the United States formally became a belligerent, President Roosevelt met with Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a battleship off the coast of Canada. The Atlantic Charter was pronounced at the end of this conference. Later, when the United States was at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan, Roosevelt left American soil to engage in conferences with Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, Stalin, and others at Quebec, Casablanca, Cairo, Tehran, and Yalta. The finesse of master politicians in dramatizing their movements, the subtle art of pressagentry, and the natural susceptibility of most human beings to the appeal of the spectacular all united to glamorize these parleys. Roosevelt's treks across the world led him closer, ever closer, to Russia until finally, at Yalta, Stalin received him on Russian soil. 

Stalin received much at Yalta besides the effusive company of a still garrulous, though ill, American President-as the world was later to learn. Harry Hopkins was, of course, in Roosevelt's entourage when the President met with the Soviet dictator in the winter palace of the Czars on the shores·of the Black Sea; he busied himself passing little notes to Roosevelt" prompting him. Also there was Alger Hiss, as a special adviser from the State Department..One can imagine his inner jubilation. 

After each conference, communiques were issued. They seldom told the story fully. It would be presumptuous, indeed, for this volume to purport to do that. Fragments yet unsuspected are undoubtedly locked in the memories or files of persons still alive, or may be written down in papers hidden in the vaults of the heirs of men now dead, not to be brought forth until still later generations have come upon the scene. The political party of Franklin D. Roosevelt remained in control of the State Department and its files for seven years after his death. Much material that found its way to Hyde Park during the Roosevelt and Truman regimes has been seen only by a few trusted eyes, and its disclosure has been stubbornly refused. The line that must be drawn between private papers of a President, on the one hand, and papers of public interest which come into a President's possession but which in good faith belong to the nation, on the other, is a tenuous one at best, and it is not to be expected that a family as politically minded as that of the late war President will always draw such a line in a manner to please inquisitive historians. 

As a result, many details concerning Roosevelt's foreign conferences have never seen the light of day. This volume will have served its purpose if it can marshal, in some clear form, the tangled mass of facts which have already become known and if it can help to dissipate the fog with which propaganda has shrouded these important historical events. Enough has come to light to warrant some inescapable conclusions. 

It is a sad, at times a sordid story. The United States had no Talleyrand- Iearned, philosophical, combining adroitness with a passionate patriotism for his country-to send to Cairo, Tehran, Yalta. Or if it had a Talleyrand, it did not send him. Nor was there a Woodrow Wilson to blush with shame at the mass dislocations of helpless populations, the sugar-coated acquiescence in slave labor, the secret agreements, the hypocritical communiques; nor a Theodore Roosevelt ever to call a spade a spade, in talking to Stalin or in talking to the American people. 

Writing of the cause of the Peloponnese War, Thucydides said: "The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight." Obliquity on the part of rulers of nations is not a lost art two and a half millennia later. That Franklin D. Roosevelt was a master of it, his champions even boast. To them it was simply his clever way of outflanking political opposition. One is struck by the nonchalance with which Professor Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford University, in his book The Man in the Street, a generally sympathetic work, writes that "Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor," going on to say that "if he came out unequivocally for intervention, he would be defeated in 1940."(1) Perhaps in the view of the good professor this would have been a terrible calamity. In any event, if a bit of skillful duplicity was needed, Roosevelt was equal to it, both before and after Pearl Harbor.** 

** Professor Bailey's assertions that "Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor" and that if he had not done so he would have been defeated in 1940 drew no dissent, even from that ardent biographer of Roosevelt, Harvard Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who reviewed the Bailey book for the New York Times. Said he, with approval: "If he [Roosevelt] was going to induce the people to move at all, Professor Bailey concludes, he had no choice but to trick them into acting for what he conceived to be their best interests." (New York Titnes Book Review, May 9, 1948) He also used this review to scold Charles Austin Beard for having laid Roosevelt's deceptions out on the table for all to see, grumbling that this was "in the manner of a prosecuting attorney." 

It was frightening to observe that the pretension of omniscience and the usurpation, by "trickery," of the power of making vital decisions by the chief executive of a democratic country aroused no moral indignation in many educators in the United States, for this reflected a widespread, basic contempt for the democratic concept in academic circles; and, as Beard had pointed out, it was a symptom of the intellectual chaos of the times that self-styled "liberals" were so often found to have this fundamentally reactionary bent. 

In subsequent national political campaigns in which Professor Schlesinger co-worked with Mrs. Roosevelt and in which he served as a top adviser and ghost writer for the candidates, the subject was dropped. A study of his later writings finds no indication that he would accord to all Presidents the prerogative of perpetuating themselves in office and moving the country into war by "tricking" the people. As the record now stands, one could do no more than to infer that Professor Schlesinger accords the prerogative to Presidents whose re-election Professor Schlesinger would favor and with respect to wars which Professor Schlesinger would wish the United States to enter.

Whatever we may think of the ethics of this tactic in a democracy, at the least it precludes the historian from ever taking Roosevelt's public attitudes at face value In the perspective of time, we know now that his words and his deeds often galloped off in opposite directions. An editor of the Saturday Evening Post was once moved to remark that when listening to Roosevelt's speeches, he was reminded of two people going through a revolving door in opposite directions without touching. For a man of Roosevelt's mental habits, semantics is more than just an interesting branch of the science of philology; it is the arsenal from which the practical politician procures his sharpest weapons. 

For this reason, a broad view and an uninhibited inquisitiveness are necessary when one approaches the foreign conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt. They cannot be understood if sealed off from the stream of history, and they are utterly incomprehensible if one overlooks at any point in the narrative the psychological characteristics, in particular the inordinate political ambitions, of this man who ran successfully for the Presidency of the United States four times. 

Accordingly, Part One of this book will touch upon some of the more general aspects of the subject. These, it is felt, are essential in preparing us to see in truer proportion and to integrate the details of the conferences when they are examined individually. It may prove helpful to look at the canvas as a whole before studying the brush strokes. 

One more word as prelude.... It will be said, in a critical vein, that this is an unfriendly, opinionated book. The author does not pretend that his researches have hatched no convictions. Nor would he deem it a literary virtue to be insensitive to hypocrisy and misprision when they are uncovered in the search.for facts. 

Truth is always the first casualty in war. In later years, there are always those who stubbornly resist its resurrection. Among them are the hero-worshipers, intellectually supine or sentimental, but many have a gnawing sense of guilt, for they either participated in the thought manipulation of the war period or were its dupes. People who scrambled onto the propaganda bandwagon like jack rabbits do not enjoy having their own folly shown up, even to themselves. Let anyone seek to correct the historical record, by dredging up what William James called "the irreducible brute facts," and they will quickly brand him as "one-sided" or "biased" or "extreme." They have a vested interest in the delusions of the past. 

In the post-World War II period, this phenomenon has, in some academic and literary circles, approached the level of Orwellian farce. Squirming in a dilemma, these people resort to a characteristically twentieth-century device with which to extricate themselves: semantics. Impervious to revealed facts which they cannot controvert, retreating not an inch, they arrogantly and in chorus-appropriate to themselves a word to use as a shield. This word is the adjective "impartial." They-they would have it known-"see both sides." They wish to hear no more. 

Obviously, the truth does not flourish in such a climate. World War II is not exempt from the impulse of inquisitive researchers to probe and to set the record straight; nor is Franklin D. Roosevelt, unless we have already been catapulted into the forced conformity of George Orwell's 1984 or the nightmarish scientific dictatorship of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Revisionism has been going on ever since Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) exposed the forged Donation of Constantine. But the job is never done by those genial purveyors of the pleasantly orthodox, who write histories and biographies with one eye on the currently fashionable sources and the other on the book of etiquette. 

Oscar Wilde strained for his epigram when he wrote: "A man who,sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all." But he had a point. The man who sees nothing at all is, with perverse frequency, the man who prides himself on seeing both sides of a question. In history-writing, impartiality is sometimes· a pose, sometimes a cover for obtuseness. If a reader wishes really to dig into a subject, he must 

Beware the middle mind 

That purrs and never shows a tooth. 

Who are they who lay such pompous claim to impartiality? Actually, we should suspect them. This has never been better said than by Gaetano Salvemini, who, while teaching at Harvard in 1954, published a book entitled Prelude to World War II, which he dedicated to his colleagues and students. It dared to challenge some of the pithless platitudes which had been passing as "objective" history in those hallowed halls. Anticipating, no doubt, a charge of bias, he wrote in the Preface: 

There are certain historians and critics sincerely convinced that they are unbiased, impartial, "scientific," who reject as "biased" any opinion that clashes with their own bias: they are fools endowed with a God Almighty complex. A second group consider themselves "unbiased" because they understand all principles and have none themselves; opportunism is no more admirable in historiography than in daily life. Then there are the wolves in sheep's clothing-the propaganda agents who boast of their lack of bias. Finally, there are those who frankly admit their bias, but do their utmost to avoid being blinded or side-tracked by it. Impartiality is either a delusion of the simple-minded, a banner of the opportunist, or the boast of the dishonest. Nobody is permitted to be unbiased toward truth or falsehood.

PART ONE 

Two Men and a Secret 

... for that nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise. 

SIR FRANCIS BACON

Chapter 1 

"AND BY ME."

 

LORD ACTON'S famous dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely may have come to the minds of many Americans as they sat before their radios on March 1, 1945. President Roosevelt was addressing Congress, reporting on his trip to Yalta. Poland had been partitioned, and the Lublin Committee, the coterie of Polish Communist puppets, coached by Stalin, had in effect been made masters of the remnants of that unhappy country. To veil this outrage, Roosevelt pretended that what had occurred was a harmless compromise by men of good will. But in expressing this thought, he gave his listeners a glimpse into the workings of his mind by means of a peculiar choice of words, carelessly ad-libbed (and later expurgated from the authorized Roosevelt Public Papers). The solution to the Polish question, said he, had been "agreed to by Russia, by Britain and by me." Explaining further, he added that "we couldn't go as far as Britain wanted to go in certain areas, as far as Russia wanted in certain areas, and as far as I wanted in certain areas."(1) 

L'etat c'est moil Had a creeping megalomania eaten into the mind of this failing man, who was now in his thirteenth year as President of the world's mightiest nation and who had been giddily consorting with kings, potentates, and dictators? Had  the plenitude of power which had been entrusted to him to distribute vast American resources throughout the world led him gradually to identify himself personally as the source of this largesse and to project this conception to the whole field of foreign affairs? Or was he trying to be meticulously Constitutional, being aware that treaties may be entered into by the sovereign United States only with the consent of the Senate ? 

Roosevelt did not then, or ever, present the Yalta agreement to the legislative branch of the government as a treaty.(2) He obviously did not care to treat it as such. What was it, then? An "executive act" within any Constitutional area of jurisdiction of the President? It was never made clear what Roosevelt considered it to be from the legal standpoint, either under national or international law-if he ever gave the matter a thought. In essence, it was a personal agreement by Roosevelt with the Prime Minister of Great ·Britain and Stalin of Russia changing boundaries of Poland and other nations and determining the nationality of some millions of non consulted human beings. Manifestly seeing neither the comedy nor the tragedy in such a performance and as unabashed as he would be if announcing a plan for the exchange of some grain and timber, Franklin D. Roosevelt had it within his nature to say to the world that all of this had been agreed to by Russia, by Britain, "and by me." 

It was this agreement that Arthur Bliss Lane[L], our Ambassador to Poland, branded "a capitulation on the part of the United States." Horrified and saddened, he resigned and wrote· a book entitled I Saw Poland Betrayed.(3) A secret document concerning the Far East had also been signed "by me" at Yalta. Of it, William C. Bullitt[R], who had been American Ambassador to Russia and to France, later wrote: "No more unnecessary, disgraceful and potentially dangerous document has ever been signed by a President of the United States."(4) 

The "by me" spirit pervaded all of Franklin D. Roosevelt's conduct of foreign affairs. With the pushy Harry Hopkins[L] at his side,and with a powerful government war information agency under his thumb, he made foreign policy his private province. His Secretary of State, the conscientious Cordell Hull[R], became a figurehead. Both the President and Hopkins, who saw alike on all important issues, including the desirability of getting Franklin D. Roosevelt re-elected ad infinitum, were pertinacious men and were not tolerant of opposition or interference. 

When Hull resigned his cabinet post right after the election of 1944 (Roosevelt having persuaded him to stay until the election was over), James F. Byrnes[L] was a possible choice to succeed him. Hopkins opposed Byrnes on the ground that Roosevelt was going to be his own Secretary of State, particularly in direct dealings with Churchill and Stalin, and Byrnes (who had once told Hopkins to "keep the hell out of my business") was not one to fit himself placidly into the role of a mere mouthpiece. So the obliging Edward R. Stettinius[R], who already had a perfect record in taking orders from Hopkins as Lend-Lease Administrator* and as Under Secretary of State, was selected to be the "mouthpiece."(5) 

*On lend-lease see here

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2017/10/part-1-from-major-jordans-diaries.html

At the close of World War I, Woodrow Wilson had gone abroad to negotiate a treaty of peace. Franklin D. Roosevelt, both before and during World War II, traveled far and wide as no American President had ever done before. On those trips he made vast commitments of a military and political nature, some of which were long kept secret. The Congress, first on his pretension that he would keep the country out of war and later on his assurance that his policies would "win the peace," made available to him, for disposal at his almost unlimited discretion, billions upon billions in dollars and resources. No President of the United States ever exercised such enormous powers nor in so autocratic a manner. Therefore, a heavy responsibility must inevitably overshadow his memory. The tragic consequences which have followed so many of his acts, and so many of his almost incredible omissions, cannot justly be laid at the door of fate or charged alone to the wickedness or intransigence of other men. 

It was Roosevelt who impetuously blurted out the "unconditional surrender" ultimatum at a press conference in Casablanca, to the surprise of Winston Churchill, who was sitting at his side and who had no alternative but to nod approval.(6) This ill-considered policy has been branded by Hanson W. Baldwin and other sober authorities in this country and in England as one of the blunders that prolonged the war and lost the peace.(7) It was Roosevelt who, at Quebec, put his initials to the barbaric Morgenthau Plan for the pastoralization of Germany, a scheme which later years were to prove so unfortunate and which had to be abandoned for the good of all Europe before it was ever fully implemented. When Roosevelt returned to Washington from Quebec, he confided to his shocked Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, that "he had evidently done it without much thought."(8) But this is not a very convincing disclaimer, for the Morgenthau Plan meshed too well with the rest of the Roosevelt-Hopkins pattern for Europe. 

It was Roosevelt who obstinately blocked Churchill's plan for attacking Germany through the Balkans and insisted instead upon the Russian-favored strategy of the Normandy invasion. This was another decision that had disastrous consequences for the future, delivering eastern Europe to the Communist terror and making another war virtually inevitable.(9) It was Roosevelt who would brook no stint in the lavishing of Lend-Lease upon the Russians and who exacted no conditions to safeguard the future security of Russia's neighbors or of this country itself while the power to do so was still in his hands. And it was Roosevelt-personally and willfully and with the ominous shadow of the world's next great threat already plain for such as he to see who took such men as Harry Hopkins and Alger Hiss with him halfway around the world to the suburbs of Russia, in the year 1945, to talk to Stalin and to bribe the Soviet Union to enter the war with Japan just in time to pluck the fruits of victory. 

As the record unfolds and as events come to be seen in the perspective of time, it becomes more and more difficult to exculpate Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even the men who were of his official family have, in later days, either given up the attempt or have drifted into a morass of mutual contradiction. Stettinius, last Secretary of State, who was at Yalta with the President, felt impelled to produce, four years after Roosevelt's death, a lengthy apologia for the Yalta Conference. Although by that time it had become apparent to all the world that the fruits of Yalta were sour indeed, Stettinius was unabashed to write in his book that it was, "on the whole, a diplomatic triumph for the United States and Great Britain."(10) James F. Byrnes, who was also at Yalta and who succeeded Stettinius as Secretary of State under President Truman, chooses·to wash his hands of most of the ill-fated agreements made at that conference and takes pains to point out that the secret protocol promising Russia certain Japanese territory and important concessions in China was signed by Roosevelt the day after Byrnes, thinking the conference was over, had left for home. 

The impression that Roosevelt, or those who had his ear at the time, did not want Byrnes to know about this deal is irresistible. It was not until some time after Roosevelt's death that a safe in the White House yielded the astonishing document.(11) General Patrick J. Hurley, Roosevelt's wartime Ambassador to China, .has characterized this secret agreement as a "blueprint for Communist conquest of China." With a lingering loyalty, perhaps, to his old chief, he explained that Roosevelt was "a sick man" at Yalta.(12) Farley, Stimson, Hull, and others have said or implied the same thing. Even Robert E. Sherwood, one of the White House ghost writers and certainly never one to tarnish the memory of his idol, is constrained to say that when Roosevelt agreed to the provisions concerning Manchuria (which he did in China's total absence from the conference, and clandestinely) he was "tired and anxious to avoid further argument."(13) Perhaps this appeals to Sherwood as a felicitous explanation of what happened at Yalta. The moral monstrousness of diplomacy, touching the fate of millions of people, being conducted on such a basis seems not to have occurred to him. 

One tragicomic facet of this illicit bargain was that it would be Russians, not Americans or Chinese, who would accept surrender of Japan's Kwantung Army. That Army's huge stores, the Mukden Arsenal, and the industrial facilities of Manchuria were to be handed on a platter to the Russians, who were to arrive on the scene in American-made jeeps, tanks, and trucks, uniformed, booted, and armed out of the supplies pledged by President Roosevelt at Yalta, to be carried on a hundred American ships across the Pacific Ocean to Vladivostok. 

The "blueprint," to use General Hurley's metaphor, served its purpose well. The next five years saw the carrying out of the Communist conquest of China, followed by the embroilment of the United States in war in Korea in a belated and costly move to stem the tide of Russian expansionism. 

When Joseph C. Grew, the prewar Ambassador to Japan, learned about that secret Yalta deal, he wrote a grave memorandum which the State Department promptly locked up out of sight. Once Russia is in the Japanese war, he predicted, "Mongolia, Manchuria and Korea will gradually slip into Russia's orbit, to be followed in due course by China and eventually Japan."14 Time has not yet run out on that prediction. For Japan, the word was "eventually." There is no mystery about why, year after year, the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan must bristle with American warships and planes patrolling in battle readiness. 

Nor is there any mystery about how the Soviet empire expanded during and soon after World War II to the point where 800,000,000 people were under its rule instead of the prewar 170,000,000. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, half of Poland, a chunk of Finland, a big slice of Romania, pieces of Manchuria, the Japanese half of Sakhalin, and all of the Kurile Islands were annexed. Mongolia was torn from China and practically incorporated into Russia's Siberian hinterland. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, and North Korea became satellite states. Of these gains, the industrial areas of East Germany (Silesia) and Czechoslovakia were the most valuable asset in modern resources. In Asia, Manchuria was the key to enormous industrial potentials, while China as a whole represented an inexhaustible source of manpower for almost any purpose-agricultural, industrial, or military. This vast Eurasian storehouse, workshop, and labor pool, all to be put to the service of Russian foreign policy, was the prize Stalin sought and won. 

That Roosevelt was "a sick man" at Yalta-in truth, a dying man-is hardly to be disputed in view of the evidence concerning his physical condition which has subsequently come to light. His extraordinary statement to Congress on March 1, 1945, in his report on the conference, that "I was well the entire time" and "I was not ill for a second until I arrived back in Washington" can only be taken as an example of the duplicity to which he so frequently felt free to resort in order to allay public suspicions. There is pathos in the picture of this pale and shaking man, with sagging jaw and cavernous eyes, addressing the Congress and feeling it politic to say, in a speech broadcast to his country and to the world, that he had just returned from his trip "refreshed" and that he had not been ill "for a second." It is shocking to reflect that he could treat the truth so casually and to be reminded by so glaring an example that the half-truth or, if need be, the  plain prevarication came so easily to his lips whenever political repercussions unfavorable to him might ensue from honesty. 

However, to blame the Yalta debacle on Roosevelt's state of health or to shield him from culpability on that ground is to take too easy a way out. Yalta followed the pattern of statesmanship if it can be called that-which Roosevelt, Hopkins, and the other favored Presidential intimates, "advisers," and "experts" had already established in their handling of the foreign affairs of the country. It was a natural extension of the habitual procedure of abject and reckless appeasement of the appetites of the Soviet Union. If that was Roosevelt's policy when he was sick, it had also been his policy when he was well. From the Atlantic Charter through Quebec, Casablanca, Cairo, Tehran, and Yalta, as well as by his instructions to the emissaries he sent to other meetings in London and Moscow, the role he played in this respect was always the same, as the following chapters of this book will show. By intention and deed he not only built up the power of the Soviet Union and made it a high-priority project but also fanatically devoted himself to bringing about a state of affairs in Europe and Asia in which there would be no neighboring powers capable of offering any check to Soviet ambitions. His "unconditional surrender" ultimatum and his insistence upon keeping American and British troops out of the Balkans and eastern German areas were but parts of this general design; and he overrode with inflexible stubbornness the efforts of Winston Churchill to look to the future and guard against the threat of a colossal Communistic hegemony casting its dark shadow over all of Europe and Asia(15) 

Churchill had the historical perspective to know that the military defeat of Germany and Japan could not alone be the cure for the violent tensions of the Eurasian continent or bring freedom from the fear of war to an unhappy world. He was also realist enough to know that conjuring up a new League of Nations and bestowing upon it the euphemistic name "The United Nations" could not be expected to· accomplish such a miracle. Therefore, although he was willing to indulge good-humoredly the penchant of political leaders like Roosevelt for making stirring speeches that dripped with hope and confidence and was not above giving forth some very sanguine rhetoric himself and exchanging loving toasts with the Russians at vodka-flushed banquets, he knew the importance of getting the right troops to the strategic places before it would be too late. The right troops in his mind were British and American, not Russian. 

Roosevelt must have known all this, too. There is ample evidence that he did. Yet he did things which made both peace and justice for Europe and Asia impossible, and he concealed from the American people information which could have put them on notice of the perils into which they were being steered by their leaders. The onus cannot be shifted to the generals and the admirals. The President too often vetoed or ignored their suggestions. They were expected to execute policies made for them on the political level. Even Harry Hopkins became a dilettante military authority. When he spoke to generals or admirals, they were not unaware that they were facing the alter ego of the Commander-in-Chief himself. We know from the writings of General Deane, General Mark Clark, General Wedemeyer, Admiral Leahy, Admiral Zacharias, and others and from the information which has been permitted to leak out concerning General Patton's show of recalcitrance that there was grave apprehension in Army and Navy circles concerning the Russians at the very times that Roosevelt was pretending to the world that relations were excellent. Such fears were not allowed to be publicized. 

"While our armed forces were fighting with superb skill and courage," William C. Bullitt has written, "our foreign policy was being handled with ignorant and reckless disregard of the vital interests of the American people."16 This is not political invective. It is the serious judgment of a man who had served by the appointment of Franklin D. Roosevelt himself as an Ambassador to Russia and to France but whose deep patriotism revolted at the spectacle of folly approaching downright treachery which he observed. 

There is no doubt that Roosevelt was, throughout the war, determined that the truth about our relations with Soviet Russia should not come out. In the government and in the armed services, he rewarded those who helped him conceal it, and he promptly punished all who sought to reveal it. Looking back over the public effusions of the Roosevelt official family, it is hard now to suppress a smile at such flights of oratory as that of Ed.. ward R. Stettinius, then Under Secretary of State, who said in a radio broadcast in January of 1944 that the end of the war would find Soviet Russia to be America's biggest, strongest, and warmest friend. It has been widely said that Stettinius was well meaning but a man of considerable naivete, but there is nothing to justify the belief that he was so naive that he believed that prediction. The Soviets had shown their real hand long before that in innumerable ways, as Stettinius well knew (not to mention the historical and ideological factors which made the prophecy so unlikely). 

Nor is it credible that by such statements it was hoped to cajole the masters of the Kremlin away from unfriendly attitudes and plans which were basic to them and which had already been plainly manifested to American representatives in high and low posts both at home and abroad. One has only to read the reminiscences of General John R. Deane, head of the American Military Mission in Moscow during the war, to realize how belligerent to their "allies" the Russians really were during the entire war and how impervious they were to cajolery. The General titled his book The Strange Alliance.17 

No, when Stettinius spoke in January, 1944, to his radio audience, he was merely parroting the theme which at that time, an election year, was of the gravest concern to the political fortunes of the Roosevelt clique. The President and Harry Hopkins and the others had crawled too far out on the Russian limb to allow the limb to be sawed off. Stettinius was rewarded for this and similar public professions by being promoted to Secretary of State. In that post, one of his closest advisers was Alger Hiss, the revelation of whose sub rosa activities was to shock the country a few years later.18 

To those who retort that hindsight is better than foresight and that Roosevelt, Stettinius, and others should not be condemned for not having seen the future as in a crystal ball, the simple answer must be given that statesmen of any competence are presumed to have a reasonable appreciation of the probable consequences of the policies they chart. As a matter of fact, the handwriting was on the wall, in legible terms. Many Americans saw it; courageous ones pointed to it publicly and were usually savagely attacked by the Roosevelt propagandists. 

If our statesmen read such honest analyses as Dr. David J. Dallin's Soviet Russia's Foreign Policy 19 it was their policy to ignore their practical implications and even to resent angrily the expression of any views that Soviet Russia might be something less than a "peace-loving democracy." "We must not annihilate either Germany or Japan," Professor Nicholas Spykman of Yale warned in a book shortly after Pearl Harbor, "lest we leave Europe or the Far East open to domination by Russia." And he was bold enough to stress that our foreign policy "should be designed not in terms of some dream world but in terms of the realities."20 To Rooseveltians, this was heresy. No professor escaped from his placid campus to land a lush job in wartime Washington with that kind of talk. The Russophilism of the. Harry Hopkins coterie of, White House favorites was of almost pathological intensity. These men were unmoved by logical considerations bearing upon the security of the United States in the years to come. General Deane, who watched the flow of American resources to Russia from his vantage point in Moscow and attended conferences dealing with it, writes that Hopkins carried out the Russian aid program "with a zeal which approached fanaticism." Hopkins' enthusiasm "became so ingrained that it could not be tempered."21 

Meanwhile, the public was treated in the spring of 1943 to such balderdash as Joseph E. Davies' Mission to Moscow 22 which would have been on the level of the moronic if it had not been conceived as sheer propaganda. This book was filmed in Hollywood with great fanfare and did much to condition the American people for the vast benefits to be conferred upon our Soviet "allies." Stalin was pictured as a sort of combination of Pavel Milyukov, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Bernard Baruch, and Jane Addams. People who called themselves "liberals" were deserting reason in droves, as though struck by what Aldous Huxley calls "herd-poisoning." But not all were struck. Norman Thomas went to see the movie Mission to Moscow and came home disgusted. It was dishonest, and he was a man of intellectual integrity. The next day, he organized a protest petition and found fifty-two fellow anti-Communist Leftists to sign it. The statement asserted that the film "falsifies·and glorifies dictatorship ... creates the impression that the methods of Stalin are not incompatible with genuine democracy." But Norman Thomas, in spite of his prominence, met difficulty in getting his protest to many newspapers or on the air. Mission to Moscow went its dizzy way through the theaters of America, and so cleverly had its Hollywood contrivers and their "special advisers" from Washington done their.work that millions of Americans could not separate the 90 per cent of fiction from the 10 per cent of fact. 

Sparked·by the President and his indefatigable wife, whose political shrewdness was of such a subtle character that it escaped the perception of most of her admirers, by the fanaticism of Harry Hopkins and the covey of strange birds which he gathered in the government, and by the Communist agents in this country operating either openly or surreptitiously, all of the modern techniques of propaganda were put to work to sell the American people what may best be described colloquially as "a bill of goods." A preposterous delusion was foisted upon the electorate of the United States. Why? 

And why, as victory mounted upon victory, did a strange uneasiness grip so many patriotic Americans? Why was there, to people of discernment, a foreboding mystery about so many things that were happening, a hollowness in so many of the fine words that were spoken? 

The reason was that the President of the United States had a secret.

Chapter 2 

THE SECRET IN THE CLOSET 

THE SECRET which Franklin D. Roosevelt guarded so obstinately could not, from his point of view, be allowed to come out. He had too much at stake. And public suspicion of it had to be stifled. 

It was not a small secret, like those which often burden politicians, such as a departmental scandal or some shady vote-trading deal or petty personal graft. Roosevelt's robust genius far transcended these lesser stratagems. This man did everything in a big way; even his secrets were gigantic. This one was as big as a war. In fact, it was a war. 

But it was not the war with Germany and Italy, the war which found Great Britain, France, Russia, the United States, and other countries lined up in resistance to the aggression's of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. That war involved the demands of Germany and Italy, spurious or otherwise, for Lebensraum, the arrogance and brutality of their ruling regimes, and the general problem of preponderant German power on the continent of Europe. Everybody knew about that war. 

Nor was it the clash which Japan precipitated by her insistence upon creating what she liked to call the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," which would have put China and Southeast Asia, at the least, under the economic aegis of a bloated Japanese Empire. Everybody knew about that war, too. 

But there was also a third war, one which Franklin D. Roosevelt was determined should be hidden from the masses of the American people by a camouflage which was to be his chef d'oeuvre. That war involved Soviet Russia,the fount of Communism. In it, Russia was the aggressor. It was she' who was on the march, both literally and figuratively. She waged her offensives with a perseverance and cunning probably never before equaled in the annals of warfare. 

This secret war must not be confused with the others mentioned, although they overlapped. Thus when Hitler turned his divisions east in the summer of 1941 and invaded Russia, Stalin, who had theretofore been on the prowl in Poland, Finland, Romania (Bessarabia), and the states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and who had tried to reach a deal with Hitler for carving up the Middle East, was, of course, put temporarily on the defensive himself.* He had to meet this development, and his other plans were contingent upon his success in doing so. But the war which was dearest to his heart and which was implicit in his ideological credo had started long before Hitler's Panzers rolled into the Ukraine and was to continue long after der Fuhrer was a charred corpse under the rubble of Berlin and his Third Reich nothing but a memory. It was destined to prevent the return of peace and security to the world for many years after what was popularly thought of as World War II had come to an end. World War II was really three wars. Two of them ended in 1945. The third one did not.

*It is probable that Russia would have turned on Germany at a propitious moment if Hitler had not struck first. The Soviets were planning to attack Germany in the autumn of 1941, according to General Alexei Markoff (see his article in the Saturday Evening Post [May 13, 1950], 175). Most opinions are that Stalin would have waited to see America committed and his prey weakened by Allied bombing.

Against whom was the Soviet Union waging this war, the concealment of which from the American people was the cornerstone of President Roosevelt's foreign policy? The more immediate victims slated for conquest were, of course, Russia's territorial neighbors: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania on the west; Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan on the south; and China and Japan on the east. Near-neighbors on the list were Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Iraq, and Tibet. Indochina, India, Burma, Malaya, and the·Dutch East Indies, chafing restlessly in colonial or semi-colonial status, loomed like rich, unripe plums for later plucking. On a broader scale, but with equal intensity of purpose, the war was being waged against all of the capitalistic countries of the world, by military attack or threats of attack, subversive conspiracy and infiltration, economic debilitation, or by a combination of these means. True to Lenin in this regard, Stalin charted a course of flexibility and opportunist, and wherever possible he would have others fight his battles for him. 

The United States and Great Britain, as the major bulwarks of democratic capitalism, were, of course, archenemies whose ultimate downfall was essential. That this project was not to be easy was apparent to such cool plotters as Stalin, Mikoyan, Molotov, Voroshilov, Vishinsky, and the lesser-known, behind-the scenes zealots of the Politburo; so the most subtle indirection's were reserved for its long-term accomplishment. Germany and Japan, the two great buffers against Communist expansion in Europe and Asia, were first to be removed from the path in two simultaneous wars. England, France, and the United States would help Russia crush Germany. The United States could vanquish Japan singlehandedly; there was no doubt about that. The Soviet Union would not have to dissipate her strength fighting Japan, but only manage to swoop in at the surrender.** A new chaos would be precipitated in China, and into the power vacuums thus created in both Europe and Asia, Soviet Russia would then step.

** A war between Japan and the United States was a consummation which could only have favorable consequences for Soviet Russia because for half a century Japan had been a check to Russian expansionism in the Far East and her defeat in a war with the United States was inevitable. It is well known that pro~Soviet influences in W'ashington discreetly fomented an outbreak of hostilities. Nor was Moscow indifferent during the months that preceded Pearl Harbor. In January, 1941, Sir Stafford Cripps, then British Ambassador to Russia, wrote'in his diary: "At the moment the Russians seem more sphinx like than ever and I doubt if even the Germans know what they are thinking. There are indications of something being on the tapis with Japan; I think an attempt to encourage Japan to go to war with America and so get Japan defeated and that danger out of the way."

Through his sources of information in the United'States, some of whom were in high places, Stalin knew that Franklin D. Roosevelt could be relied upon to see at least this phase of the program through. He was not mistaken. 

Does this mean the American people had elected a crypto Communist as President? Or that this President, by shunting the third war, the secret one, out of sight, consciously intended harm to his country? It does not. No such inference is intended. To make it is, to misapprehend the Roosevelt mentality. 

Here we touch a delicate point. Roosevelt was no more a Communist than he was a Jeffersonian. Conversely, he was no more a Jeffersonian than he was a Communist. Ideologies were not the stuff of the cerebration's that took place in that handsome head. Here was no furrow brow zealot for a system, no Karl Marx, no Adam Smith. In the presence of an argument between a socialist and a capitalist, he would be likely to steal the show with a charmingly put evasion. To Harold Ickes' wistful plaint that it was "impossible to come to grips with him," James F. Byrnes has added that "Franklin Roosevelt was not the same to any two men."[1] The man who, as we shall see, clandestinely obtained the recommendations of Earl Browder, the head of the Communist party, in the crucial months of the war, wore a different collar than the man who discussed affairs with Byrnes. 

That a web of subversion was spun over Washington in Roosevelt's administration is now beyond question. J. Edgar Hoover's Masters of Deceit is but one of many authoritative sources which verify that the government was infiltrated by both Communist sympathizers and Soviet agents and that U.S. policies, plans, and official attitudes were not only influenced by these infiltrators but also promptly reported to Moscow. In Washington, however, some people were spiders in the web and some were flies. Some were strange hybrids. Most were none of these. 

If Franklin D. Roosevelt became, as the war went on, Stalin's favorite fellow-traveler, it was not necessarily because any ideological conversion had occurred. Byrnes observes that his "stamp collection was often referred to as his hobby,·but politics was really his hobby," while one of his cabinet officers, Jesse Jones, put politeness aside to describe him as "a total politician." Here it is that the psycho biographers of the future will probably start in their quest for the "Why?" 

Historian Charles A. Beard, a man of vast human perspective, when looking for Roosevelt's war motivations, saw "only conceit, dreams of grandeur, vain imaginings, lust for power, or a desire to escape from our domestic perils-and obligations." More magnanimous is the·hypothesis that in his obsequiousness toward the Kremlin, Roosevelt was simply carried away by the hopeful expectation, implicit in the Dale Carnegie philosophy, that if you offer people a friendly smile and a warm handshake they will reciprocate in kind. The flaw here is that Roosevelt always used this technique, or abandoned it, as it suited his other plans. He did not practice it on the Germans (even the anti-Nazi underground), Italians, or Japanese, and he was never one to embrace it out of sheer innocence or credulity. 

General Wedemeyer recalls that when he came. back from China and told the President that he felt certain the Communists would cause trouble as soon as the war ended, the President "did not seem to understand what I was talking about" and quickly terminated the interview.[2] This had happened to others before. It is possible that Roosevelt was so constituted psychologically that he could easily insulate his mind against jarring facts and that his egocentricity was such that what he thus excluded from himself he deemed unfit for assimilation by the public. 

In the present narrative, we are not concerned with the smiling, debonair Roosevelt as a private person but with his deeds as a powerful public functionary. Robespierre, in his private life, was a man of culture, honest and kind; in his public life, he was a different kind of man. Vengeance was not the Lord's, but his. Under his leadership, the bloodletting that followed the French Revolution became a travesty on justice that went down in history as the Reign of Terror. We shall see, as we follow Roosevelt through his foreign summit conferences with Churchill and Stalin, that he permitted himself to become a tacit accomplice to, and abet, a terror on so broad a scale that the excesses of Robespierre's day are dwarfed by comparison. 

Some believe today that Roosevelt's mind was possessed by a myth. Thus Arthur Koestler writes that Roosevelt "sincerely believed that Stalin's regime was a kind of uncouth, Asiatic New Deal" and that he could be sympathetic to its enhancement because he was under this illusion. This is too facile. It was the same regime that his successor, President Truman, denounced on Washington's Birthday, 1950, as "a modern tyranny far worse than that of any ancient empire." From its bloody inception it had been the antithesis of a democratic state. The fascist theory of the "elite" and the rejection of parliamentarian-ism had always been dominant with Stalin, as with Lenin. As Franz Borkenau, the leading authority on international Communism, says, "it was Stalin who regarded democracy as the worst enemy."[3] This dictator had shown his venomous hostility toward the Western democracies time after time. In all of them he maintained apparati of subversion and sabotage, and, viper-like, he had snapped at them in an interview given to Pravda on November 30, 1939, saying: "It is not Germany who has attacked England and France, but England and France who have attacked Germany." 

The postulate, so often stated and so widely accepted on sheer faith, that Roosevelt showered American largesse on Russia only to defeat Nazi Germany crumbles under the weight of the facts. His beneficence to the Soviet regime and to Communist factions elsewhere went too far beyond such a limited objective. 

When Alcide De Gasperi, the non-Fascist premier of postwar Italy, told a press conference in Rome on February 24, 1954, that Italy was not entirely to blame for her failure to uproot Communism because "the evil plant ... was born and prospered in the Roosevelt climate," he was speaking of a country which had surrendered in 1943, only to find Palmira Togliatti rushed to Naples from the Soviet Union in an American ship and almost the whole of the local materiel and political favors assigned by the Allied command to Communists in Italy, Dalmatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and, indirectly, Croatia, with enormous political consequences. His rueful remark about "the Roosevelt climate" is amply verified by Borkenau's detailed researches on European Communism. 

Of Poland, for example, Borkenau reminds us: "From the beginning Stalin had fought a battle of extermination against any conceivable non-communist Polish leadership; a battle starting with the extermination of many thousand captured Polish officers in 1941 (in Katyn and other camps), continuing .... to the prompting and subsequent sabotage of the Warsaw rising. of the Polish underground army in July 1944 (which led to the extermination of the best Polish forces, as was Stalin's intention), and to the kidnapping of all available Polish underground leaders in March 1945.... Between the. Lublin committee and the Polish government-in-exile which enjoyed the loyalty of an overwhelming majority of Poles; there ensued a fierce struggle. Wherever the NKVD went, it exterminated the·Home Army iorces within its reach, while simultaneously Roosevelt preached to the Polish leaders in exile the virtues of Stalin's Russia.... Thus the men of Lublin became the rulers of Poland."4 

When Roosevelt told Chiang Kai-shek at Cairo in November, 1943, that he would have to coalesce with the Chinese Communists to hold his, Roosevelt's, favor after Japan's defeat, he was stepping out of the American-Japanese war and into another one.5 In this third war, which was to be the longest and most' crucial one of the twentieth century, we find Franklin D. Roosevelt almost invariably charging ahead on the side of Soviet Russia. In fact, his support was the sine qua non of its successful launching. His mission, which he performed implacably, was to put weapons in Stalin's hands and, with American military might, to demolish all of the dikes that held hack the pressing tides of Communist expansion in Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, everything was done to prevent the average American citizen from -becoming conscious of this war; his mind was kept preoccupied hating Hitler and Tojo. And since Roosevelt was concealing the war itself, a fortiori he did not reveal his own sympathies in it. 

Gullibility was widespread but not universal. Actually, the secret could not be kept indefinitely from any alert observer of world affairs endowed with reasonably good powers of analysis. However, it must be remembered that many Americans were riding the crest of the wave in their personal careers, as was the President himself, and were content not to probe too deeply under the surface appearances. Like Cinderella, they took their moment of revelry and asked the fairy godmother no questions. The government, in particular, was swarming with such individuals. But there were others, patriotic, disapproving people, both in and out of the armed services, who, under conditions of war hysteria, were cowed into a discreet silence. 

So perverted did the dominant mores become-in the press, the pulpit, the schools, and the clubs-under the impact of Rooseveltian propaganda on all subjects pertaining to the war that truthful objectivity concerning "our gallant ally," Russia, was actually associated with disloyalty. In those irrational days, one courted ostracism if he was bold enough to bring up Lenin's very plain words: 

We are living not merely in a state, but in a system of states; and it is inconceivable that the Soviet republic should continue to exist for a long period side by side with imperialist states. Ultimately one or the other must conquer. Meanwhile a number of terrible clashes between the Soviet republic and the bourgeois states are inevitable. 

Although Hitler's Mein Kampf was everywhere pointed to with horror, it was made to seem rather unpatriotic, or at least bad taste, to quote in public from Stalin's comparable call to action, his Problems of Leninism, or from the bellicose resolutions of the Congresses of the Third International, dominated first by Lenin and later by Stalin. Yet the design of ultimate world conquest, through the combination of Soviet military power with revolutionary action outside Soviet frontiers, is, and was' when, Roosevelt was President of the United States, one of the most open and undisguised conspiracies of historical record.6 

If Mr. Roosevelt had cared to call J. Edgar Hoover over from the F.B.I., he could have heard an earful about Stalin and the world-wide Communist mechanism to subvert and wreck the capitalist nations.7 Hoover and those around him had no illusion that the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were mere intellectual exercises. They saw in them a battle plan for conquest. The tactics might shift, they knew ("We must resort to artifices, evasions and subterfuges," Lenin had prescribed), but the grand strategy was· unshakable. These men of the. F.B.I. were coolly efficient but necessarily silent. 

Mr. Roosevelt sometimes had the New York Times brought to his bed. In that newspaper he could read such items as the report of Cyrus Sulzberger's trip to Russia. In the Times, Mr. Roosevelt could also enjoy with his morning coffee a series of slippery articles by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg which stressed the "community of aims" of America and Russia. But for five cents he could have read the accurate premonitions of the New York Daily News. That tabloid may not have been the President's favorite newspaper, but it has been able to boast in a postwar editorial: "Begging nobody's pardon, this newspaper never did get suckered into believing that Bloody Joe was fighting for anything but eventual Communist domination of the world." The boast was largely true. 

In addition, there were ample overt warnings from within Russia. The drums of war were beating there long before Hitler attacked. The predatory intentions of the men in the Kremlin were certainly known to the President of the United States, who had an ambassadorial staff and military attaches on the spot to make constant reports to him. Surely they heard and saw as much as did the American press correspondents in Moscow, with whom they naturally·exchanged information. In the latter part of 1940, there were only two American reporters left in Moscow, for the atmosphere was very belligerent and the censorship was stringent.8 One represented the United Press, the other the Associated Press. An interesting report made at that time has come to light, a copy now being in the possession of the Hoover Institute and Library at Stanford University.. This was a confidential, sealed report made to Hugh Baillie, president of the United Press Associations, by Virgil Pinkley, then United Press manager for Europe, after a swing through Europe, including Russia. It is dated November 28, 1940, and was transmitted through the diplomatic pouch from Switzerland. (This (was a full six months before the German attack on Russia.) In it, Mr. Pinkley said: 

Virtually all Soviet Republic enterprise is now devoted to building a gigantic military machine. Many competent observers believe that the idea of world revolution through propaganda has been shelved, and that emphasis is now being placed on building a tremendous military machine which will enable Soviet diplomacy to take over territories and countries by demand, and if requests are rejected, then objectives will be obtained through military force. Looking around Europe, Russians have observed the game of power politics and have proved apt pupils.

This definitely connotes aggressive, offensive, predatory intentions on the part of the Soviet Union, not mere preparations for home defense. Of Stalin's government, Mr.·Pinkley wrote: 

Russia has swung a long way back from the left and is rapidly becoming a completely military dictatorship conducted along absolute totalitarian lines.... All decisions of any import in Russia are made by Stalin: in this respect he is far more absolute than either Hitler or Mussolini and entrusts his assistants with far less authority than other dictators. 

These observations were accurate. They are supported by everything that transpired both before Hitler was defeated· and after he was' defeated. Further confirmation of Russia's greedy demands in the days before Hitler attacked came to light later in documents captured in the ruins of Berlin. The transcript of the conversations between Russian Foreign Minister Molotov and German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop few weeks before the 'attack came as a shock to many of the gullible, people who had supinely succumbed to the love-our-ally-Russia propaganda. This document proved that Molotov went to Berlin from the Kremlin to offer Germany a full military alliance and that he failed only because the Russian demands for territory in Europe and in the Middle East were too rapacious for Hitler to concede. It was simply a case of two bandits being unable to agree on how to divide the loot.9 The idea that President Roosevelt, with so many sources of information at his command, did not know of this background is, of course, incredible. 

In July, 1941, but a few weeks after Molotov had failed to sell Stalin's plan for pillage to Hitler,.the exuberant Harry Hopkins flew to Moscow to see Stalin and to promise him vast supplies of weapons and materiel from the United States. The Russian dictator, calm and cool and implacable, knew then that the Europe and Asia he had envisioned and plotted for might become a reality-with American help. He had an ally-at the least an unwitting one-in his war, his long-term crusade for the destruction of capitalism and the domination of the world by militant Communism. With cunning and deceit and every expedient, he would press his advantage. As for Hopkins, he came' home enthralled and wrote a magazine article in which he showed a childlike reverence for Stalin's every word, gesture, and mannerism. He obviously thought him a great man who talked "straight and hard." He was charmed when Stalin, in saying good-by, "added his respects to the President of the United States."10 

So Stalin's war, which was Roosevelt's secret, proceeded victoriously, and eventually it became very difficult to conceal the fact that there was more up Stalin's sleeve than the defeat of Hitler. But to the bitter end, Roosevelt kept up the show. 

On the same day in January, 1944, that Edward R. Stettinius took to the radio to make his fatuous prophecy that Russia would be America's warmest friend after the war, Karl von Wiegand foreign correspondent for the Hearst press, wrote in an article published in the Hearst newspapers that if Washington's policy of unbounded help to and blind enthusiasm for Soviet Russia continued without safeguards, it would be the logical, natural development of history that Russia would be America's greatest, strongest, and most formidable foe at the end of the war and would seek to become the dominating power in Europe and the world. The Hearst press was much despised and maligned by the most vociferous segment of the literati, the pseudo-intellectuals who danced, as if they were in a trance, around the flame of what was called "one-worldism" and echoed the prevailing slogans of the day with little or no regard for the underlying historical forces which were at work in the world. It was not fashionable among the sycophants and poseurs to read the Hearst press and certainly not to be caught agreeing with what was advocated in it. It was demode to see any scoundrels outside Germany, Italy, and Japan. Fawning over Soviet Russia was the mark of a new type of snobbery among that large group of people who are given to following intellectual fashions. Naturally, in those circles the warnings of such publicists as Karl von Wiegand, or Senator Robert A. Taft or Herbert Hoover, fell on deaf ears. 

On February 13, 1944, when the pro-Russian propaganda sponsored by the Roosevelt administration was at its raucous height, von Wiegand had the courage to write in his column: "The next war-the coming war is showing its horrible face before this war is ended-will be the first of the wars between the East and the West and will be led by Russia. By strange irony of destiny, America and Britain are clearing the way for Russia." On October 4, 1944, in answer to a letter from Vice Admiral William A. Glassford, he wrote: "As you so clearly indicate, the end of the shooting and bombing this time will not be the end of the war. Through the smoke and dust of the battlefields there already is visible the outline of World War III. It can come in fifteen years.... Its character at first will be mainly economic and ideological." This was three months before President Roosevelt went to Yalta and participated in making what his own envoy to China has referred to as "the blueprint for Communist conquest of China" and gave his benediction to the westward extension of Soviet power to the heart of Europe. It was also before the secret connivance that triumphant American troops should be held back to permit the capture of Berlin and Prague by Red armies. 

Von Wiegand and the handful of other writers who dared speak out were merely trying to illumine for the American people a picture which the Roosevelt regime strove desperately and with a remarkable measure of success to keep in darkness. Although both political parties in the United States were infected, in varying degrees, by the same psychological disease, which dulled their critical faculties and distorted their perspective, it was the Roosevelt regime which set up and controlled the censorious and propagandistic Office of War Information, and it was Roosevelt himself who locked the secrets of his machinations with foreign potentates securely away from the ears and eyes of the masses of the American people. 

The O.W.l was "stacked." There sat Owen Lattimore as a deputy director, and there were many like him. It was easy for an Adam Tarn to get a job in the O.W.l (after the war, this man switched his citizenship to Communist-governed Poland). James F. Byrnes, who as a Supreme Court Justice, Director of War Mobilization, and later Secretary of State, knew the Washington bureaucracy from many angles, put it mildly when he wrote: "Many of the people in O.W.l, admittedly a propaganda agency ... were sympathetic with Soviet ideology."[11] 

Roosevelt himself knew the truth about the Soviet dictatorship.The evidence to that effect is overwhelming. He knew to a certainty that the intentions of Stalin and his Politburo did not fit the pattern of the postwar world as envisioned by the.American public. He knew that Stalin's show of adherence to the principles of the Atlantic Charter was just a hoax. 

He was familiar with the outrages already committed. From Ciechanowski, Mikolajczyk, General Sikorski and others, he received unimpeachable evidence of what was taking place and being planned in eastern Europe. The gruesome facts of the Katyn massacre, which had wiped out fifteen thousand Polish officers who had been taken prisoner by the Russians in 1939 and whose whereabouts had been shrouded in mystery, had been laid on his desk; he was silent when the Kremlin angrily broke off relations with the Polish government in April, 1943, because the latter had appealed to the International Red Cross to investigate the Katyn murders. 

Premeditated and organized savagery, this pogrom will likely rank in history alongside the slaughter of the French Huguenots in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572. The diabolical purpose of Stalin had been to obliterate at one stroke the flower of the Polish army, literally to bury the entire trained officer corps. Scheming to impose Communism, he wanted no potential guardians of Polish freedom to live to resist.12 

When the piles of corpses were discovered by the Germans in April, 1943, the Polish Red Cross reported to the International Red Cross in Geneva they were satisfied the massacre had taken place in March or April of 1940 (a time when the Germans were not within hundreds of miles of Katyn Forest). Stalin screamed to Churchill that the free Poles under General Sikorski, prime minister of the exiled Polish government, who wanted an investigation, were "Fascists." Prompted by Roosevelt, Churchill replied to Stalin on April 23, 1943, that any International Red Cross probing was unthinkable. "We shall certainly oppose.vigorously any investigation.... Mr. Eden is seeing him [Sikorski] today."18 When a special intelligence report and documents and pictures attesting Russian guilt in the cold-blooded atrocity were brought to Roosevelt in the White House, he reacted with anger, not at the Russian murderers, but at those who had collected the facts, and he clamped the lid down tight. 

The Congressional committee which in 1952 investigated the Katyn Forest massacre declared that the suppression of information about it was a product of the "strange psychosis" of the Roosevelt administration. However, the case can be put more simply: whenever there is a big secret, there must be many little ones, too. Katyn was one of the many little ones. 

The popular delusion that Russia, our "gallant ally," was a freedom-loving, non-aggressive democracy anxious to co-operate with the United States was insidiously nurtured, although Roosevelt could not have believed it himself. His own experiences at the conference table put him on notice that the opposite was true. The predatory government that had, in December, 1939, been expelled from the League of Nations for its coldblooded attack on little Finland, had swallowed up Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and had, in concert with Hitler, carved up Poland and erased that nation from the map could not and did not undergo a metamorphosis. Its leaders were not miraculously purged of international banditry when another bandit, Adolf Hitler, turned on them. They never specifically recanted; they showed no penitence. They never told Roosevelt they would free the Balts and the others, nor did he ever require them to say so. On the contrary, they continued to whet their appetites as war raged. He was aware of this, even if. the American people were not. 

The idea that·Roosevelt, not a naive man, was fooled is unbelievable. The camouflage, not the exposing, of Soviet imperialism was the expedient that best fitted his own political plans. Friendly critics who write magnanimously of what they call Roosevelt's "Great Design" for luring the Reds into co-operative, peaceful ways,[14] a design which they say somehow miscarried, are merely spinning a yarn. Some of these people know better. For the rest, the sentiment is father to the thought. They do not really know their man. To becloud the issues whenever glimmerings of truth seemed to be reaching the public, it pleased the sycophants to have Russia spoken of, semi-romantically, as a great mystery and Stalin as a strange enigma. What Russia wanted was no mystery.[15] What Stalin was determined to do and to take was, as John T. Flynn picturesquely puts it, "as plain as the mustache on Stalin's face." That these intentions did not square with the Atlantic Charter was equally plain. But even Mr. Flynn falls at times into the error of presuming that Roosevelt was "taken in," that he "completely deceived himself" about Stalin. He states that Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman and Joseph E. Davies were completely taken in (even to the point of not considering Stalin a Communist at all) and that they, in turn, "passed on their deceptions to Roosevelt, who swallowed them without salt."[16] This interpretation would make Roosevelt more the fool and less the hypocrite, and it is not entirely consistent with Flynn's analysis of Roosevelt's character from other aspects. [All of them Russian agents! D.C]

Generally, men are puzzled, mystified, as they look back at Roosevelt's dealings with the Soviet leaders and reread his eloquent words. A distinguished former university president makes the not uncommon comment that "the reason for our encouragement of Soviet Russia ... is one of the historic enigmas of our time." But it ceases to be an enigma when one casts aside all false assumptions of Roosevelt's integrity, while the riddle must otherwise remain forever insoluble. 

Robert E. Sherwood, at one point in Roosevelt and Hopkins, speaks of Roosevelt's "incomprehensible character."[17] From one who writes of Roosevelt in the honey-dripping manner of Mr. Sherwood, this is probably meant to be a compliment. It is like speaking of the mystery of God. The remark is significant. To his worshipers, there must perforce be an element of incomprehensibility in Franklin D. Roosevelt's character. The wide gulf between his words and his deeds, the manifold contradictions in his avowed policies, can most felicitously be bridged if the workings of his mind remain somewhat inscrutable. A curtain is then more easily drawn over the troublesome facts that might otherwise mar the picture, and this is psychologically necessary in the process of rationalization. 

Diverse as Roosevelt's personal traits were, naivete was not one of them. Not a student or reader of books,[18] his talents lay in the field of direct human relationships, in which his activities were always marked by a keen perceptivity and the extraordinary shrewdness which is the politician's special gift. A scholarly academician with his head in the clouds, such as Woodrow Wilson, might conceivably have been deceived about the true motives of someone with whom he was in contact over a number of years, but not Franklin D. Roosevelt. He knew people far too well. To use a pithy colloquialism, people were "his dish." 

And his man Friday was the amazing Harry Hopkins. Harry knew the secret, too.

Next

HIS MAN FRIDAY

notes

INTRODUCTION 
1. Thomas A. Bailey, The Man in the Street (Macmillan, 1948). 
CHAPTER 1. 
1.This is the way the speech was verbally delivered before the Congress and heard over the radio. However, there is reason to believe that President Roosevelt ad-libbed the pronoun "me" and perhaps also the "I." See Bert Andrews, New York Herald Tribune, March II, .1945. Robert E. Sherwood says, "He was extremely casual in this speech, adlibbing a great deal of it." (Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History [Harper, 1948], 874) Some newspapers, in printing the speech on March 2, 1945, the day after it was delivered, did not contain the "by Russia, by Britain and by me" phrase in any form whatever, probably because they were using the prepared text which had been issued to the press and which did not contain the President's extemporaneous remarks. An example is the San Francisco Chronicle of March 2, 1945. However, the text of the speech as printed in the New York Times of that date, as recorded and transcribed by the New York Times, includes the words "by Russia, by Britain and by me" and also the "as far as I wanted" phrase. 

The words "and by me" were evidently too much for Samuel Rosenman when he came to editing the 1945 volume of The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (hereafter referred to as Public Papers), so he changed the "by me" to "by the United States." This version is faithful neither to the original text nor to the speech as actually delivered. Roosevelt very likely shied away from calling the Polish settlement an agreement by the United States, for that might have caused some eyebrow-raising on the part of the Senators whom he was addressing. Actually, the "and by me" was the more ludicrous. Perhaps that is why editor Rosenman discarded it ex  post facto and adopted the words "and by the United States" as the lesser of two embarrassing alternatives. It will be recalled that Rosenman was for years one of Rooseveles favorite ghost writers and was a trained expert at shuffling words and. phrases in a politic·manner. 

2. He did say in his speech to Congress that the Charter of the United Nations would have to be approved by the Senate, making particular mention of the fact that he was "aware of" the Constitution of the United States. He was at that point talking about what had been done at Yalta concerning the about-to-be-born United Nations Organization. According to some newspaper accounts, as, for example, in the San Francisco Chronicle of March 2, 1945, the text included the following words: "as will some of the other arrangements made at Yalta." Such accounts were probably based on a prepared text, but Roosevelt did not utter those words in delivering the speech. Accordingly,. they are not found in the "recorded and transcribed" text printed the following day in the New York Times (March 2, 1945). Nor are they in the version published in Public Papers. The paragraph referred to is somewhat casual in style, as though Roosevelt, in reading it, may have revised it on the spot by eliminating a vague reference to the necessity of Senate ratification of "some of the other arrangements made at Yalta." It is obvious that he did not intend to throw those "arrangements" open to questioning by the Senate; they were a fait accompli in his mind, and agreement "by me" ended the matter. 

Furthermore, although he said the limits of the western boundary of Poland would be fixed in the final "peace·conference," there was nothing tentative, about the eastern boundary or about East Prussia, Danzig, and the other areas affected. Said the President: "I think Danzig would be a lot better if it were Polish." So it had been made Polish. The people of Danzig, 95 per cent of whom were German speaking, were not to be asked if they agreed with the sage of Hyde Park that they would be better off if their city were Polish. (Public Papers [1945], 582.) 
3. Arthur Bliss Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed.(Babbs-Merrill, 1948)- 
4. William C. Bullitt, "A Report to the American People on China," Life (October 3, 1947). 5. Sherwood, Opt cit., 835- 
6. Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (Houghton MifHin, 1950), 686: "It was with some feelfug of surprise that I heard the President say at the press conference on January 24 that we would enforce 'unconditional surrender' upon all our enemies."  
7. Hanson W. Baldwin, Great Mistakes of the War (Harper, 1950). 
8.. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in War and Peace (Harper, 1947), 580, 581. 
9. See the discussion ofthis question from the military and political points of view in Baldwin, Ope cit. See also Note 15, post. 
10. Edward R. Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference (Doubled~Y~I949)~ and "What F.D.R. and Stalin Really Did at Yalta," Look (June 21, 1949)' 
11. James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (Harper, 1947),42,43. 
12. Press statement, August 7, 1949. See also Don Lohbeck, Patrick T. Hurley (Regnery, 1956). 
13. Sherwood, Ope cit., 867. 
14. Joseph C. Grew, The Turbulent Era (Houghton Mifflin, 1955). 15. Baldwin, Ope cit. This highly respected military analyst explains why the invasion of Normandy was, in his view, one of the blunders by which the United States lost the peace. The United States,he says, had no peace aims, and American policy was based on false premises and psychological delusions. Prime Minister Churchill was concerned over the postwar political repercussions which might ensue from current military decisions, only to be overruled repeatedly by President Roosevelt. This difference in approach between Roosevelt and Churchill is reflected throughout the latter's war memoirs. Elliott Roosevelt, in his book As He Saw It (Duell, Sloane & Pearce, 1946), tells of the sharp cleavage between the thinking of the two men with regard to Russia. Frequently quoting from private conversations with his father, he records that Churchill fought an unceasing battle to avoid a cross Channel invasion into Europe and constantly struggled to force a change in Allied strategy in order to prevent a situation which would find the Red Army dominating .the Balkans as well as eastern Germany. (pp. 184, 185, 231, 253). Franklin D. Roosevelt adamantly opposed any strategy which was objectionable to Stalin, whom he "liked," Elliott writes (p. 176), and whom he referred to as "Uncle Joe." 
16. William C. Bullitt, "The Strength of Our New Foreign Policy," Readers Digest (June, 1947). 
17. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance (Viking, 1947). 
18. For a detailed report of the celebrated Alger Hiss case, see Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason (Funk & Wagnalls, 1950). 
19. David J. Dallin, Soviet Russia's Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 1943)' 
20. Nicholas -J. Spykman, America's Strategy in World Politics (Harcourt, Brace, 1942). 
21. Deane, Ope cit., 90. 
22. Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow (Simon & Schuster, 1941). 
CHAPTER II 
1. James F. Byrnes, All in One Lifetime (Harper, 1958), 281. 
2. Albert C. Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports! (Holt, 1958), 340. 
3. Franz Borkenau,European Communism (Harper, 1953),72. 4· Ibid., 493-94· 
5. See Chapter XII. 
6. In addition to Borkenau, see Stephen King-Hall, The Communist Conspiracy (Constable [London], 1953), and J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (Holt, 1958). 
7. Don Whitehead, The FBI Story (Random House, 1956), 267- See also Hoover, Ope cit. 
8. Year-End News Report, United Press Associations, January 6, 1941 (Hoover Institute- and Library, Stanford University). So strict was the censorship that Henry Shapiro, the D.P. reporter, had a section of the Russian Constitution stricken from one of his dispatches. Censorship was also childishly arbitrary. Virgil Pinkley had a personality sketch of Stalin so ridiculously mutilated that he withdrew it. In it he had said that Stalin's hair was worn in pompadour style. When he asked why this harmless detail was removed, K. Palgunov, the chief of the Soviet press bureau, replied, "Mr. Pinkley, it is not permitted to compare Comrade Stalin with Madame Pompadour. 
9. See dispatch of L.S.B. Shapiro, New York Times, March 19, 1946. Mr. Shapiro reported: 

The key to Russia's expansion program in Europe and the Near -East has fallen into the hands of the State Department in Washington. Captured German documents detailing the final conversations between Russian Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop in the spring of 1941 have been collated and compared with the reports of American envoys and military attaches in European capitals at that time, with the result that Washington now possesses exact pictures of the aims and desires thatlie behind the current Soviet troop movements and diplomatic pressures. 

A few weeks before Germany attacked Russia in June,194I, Mr. Molotov travelled to Berlin.... The transcript of these last conversations ... became, in 1945, the chief objective of intelligence teams of every victorious nation scouring the ruins of the Third Reich. 

This correspondent has learned, on reliable authority, that the prized transcript was in a batch of captured German' documents that were dispatched to Washington during the winter. From sources in an indisputable position to know the facts, I have learned that the salient points of the transcript are as follows:.... 

The Soviet emissary arrived with authorization from the Kremlin to offer to Germany full military alliance in return for certain territorial concessions after victory, which were perm.anent possession of all Polish territory then occupied by Soviet forces; incorporation of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and the Karelian Isthmus, Bessarabia and. Bukovina into the Soviet Union; complete control of the Dardanelles, a free hand in Iraq and Iran, and enough of Saudi Arabia to give the Soviets controlof the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden guarding the approaches to the Red Sea. . . . 

After numerous conferences with Hitler, Ribbentrop arrived at certain private conclusions. The first was that Russia's territorial demands were too great for acceptance. Secondly, Ribbentrop felt that even if these were suitable, he could not accept Russia's friendly assurances at face value and that Germany would still require a huge force on her eastern frontiers to watch Russia's every move. 

These decisions were put to Mr. Molotov in an extremely stormy final session and the conference broke up shortly thereafter. 

In the light of current Russian moves, this transcript has now assumed importance. 

After a delay of three years, the State Department finally acknowledged. its possession of this telltale transcript. See Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939-1941 .(Department of State, 1948). 
10. Harry Hopkins, "The Inside Story of My Meeting with Stalin," American magazine (December, 1941). 
11. Byrnes, All in One Lifetime, 320. 
12. Russian guilt was firmly established. See Jan Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory, (Doubleday, 1947); Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, The Rape of Poland (McGraw-Hill, 1948); Stanislaw Mackiewicz, The Katyn Wood Murders (Hollis & Carter [London], 1951), with Foreword by Arthur Bliss Lane; Report of the House Committee to  Investigate the Katyn Massacre (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952); F. J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Nelson, 1953). 
13. Stalin's Correspondence with Churchill, Attlee, Roosevelt and Truman, 1941-1945 (Lawrence & Wishart [London], 1958). 
14. First described in an obviously White House-inspired article, "Roosevelt's World Blueprint," by Forrest Davis, in Saturday Evening Post (April 10, 1943). 
15. Demaree Bess, "What Does Russia Want?" Saturday Evening Post (March 20, 1943); see also DaHin, Ope cit. 
16. John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth (Devin-Adair, 1948). 
17. Sherwood, Ope cit., 71. 18. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking,. 1946), 43.