I am becoming convinced that the 1930's are the key to understanding just what happened to our government and hence the country,because of it.Back in late 1978,and into the early 80's,folks who were keeping track, spoke of at least 2 Major Factions going at it behind the scenes.Now this book here on Roosevelt(who I see as a Russian Agent)has spoken about the "1933 Fascist Coup" as it was called.Now we are lucky at this time,because I was very blessed to have come across the book DuPont Dynasty:Behind the Nylon Curtain, and that book, not only gives THE OTHER SIDE of that same 1933 Coup,it comes right out and says "The DuPont's led it" Now readers of the DuPont book should study how and where the DuPont's diversified to, when they started bailing on their polluting Chemical Assets. What they got into was Banks and finances, and in no small way.I see all this as no coincidence that this started with Reagan(to me this was a you have to be kidding moment at 24 years old,an actor?Well perhaps We have come full circle, as I am pretty sure THE OTHER SIDE, is in the White House(Which is not necessarily a bad thing), and given the time expired, and some of the events that have transpired since, it would not surprise me if the DuPont's were The Power behind the curtain in America fighting Internationalism. The DuPont's it should be recalled were into Swastika's before the Nazi's even came to power....
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
Chapter VIII
FISH AND CHURCHILL
ON SUNDAY, the third day of August, 1941, a sleek 165-foot yacht
slipped from its berth at the submarine base at New London,
Connecticut, and headed, in the sunset afterglow, for Long Island
Sound. It steamed down the Thames River, over the course
of the annual Yale-Harvard rowing race, and out beyond the
Race Rock lighthouse. Then it vanished into the Atlantic.
Aboard was the President of the United States, ostensibly off on
a fishing trip. It was to be probably the most bizarre fishing
trip any angler ever took.
President Roosevelt had left Washington that afternoon in
jaunty mood and with what was described as "the same old
optimistic cast in his eye." Always alert to advertise himself as
a lover of peace, he had taken the occasion of his departure to
remark that he still hoped the United States "would not have to
get in a shooting war." (Mr. Roosevelt made a habit of lapsing
into a colloquial jargon, which even the twelve-year~old mentalities
among the electorate could grasp, whenever he wished to
strike a popular attitude upon a big issue.) A week or ten days
on the Potomac, out on salt water, would be fine, and, as far as
he could see, it was a good time to take a vacation.1
The country had been prepared for this·the day before when Stephen Early, the White House press secretary, had announced
that the President was going to take a week's vacation in New
England waters. Mr. Early's chief purpose, it seemed, was to
indicate that Mr. Roosevelt desired a rest and did not wish, to
be bothered by publicity or routine government business. "From
the time the President boards the Potomac until the time he
returns to shore," Mr. Early said, "the movements of the ship
will be a confidential naval operation and it is particularly requested
that the press, radio and other media of dissemination
of information so consider the movements of the Potomac." No
newspapermen were to be permitted to accompany the party,
although in the past the press had customarily covered Presidential
voyages from an escort ship. Mr. Early said the President
had no plans to land, even at his mother's summer home at
Campobello, New Brunswick. Accompanying him would be his
military aide, General ("Pa") Watson, his naval aide, Captain
Beatdall, and the White House physician, Admiral McIntire.
Captain Beardall had been requested to send the Navy a daily
dispatch, which would be released to the press. All ofthis, of
course, was just enough to.give the whole expedition a tinge of
mystery.
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was a straight-faced accomplice.
"I can assure you that it is a purely rest or vacation trip,"
he told reporters at his press conference, "and I ask the newspapers
not to display any enterprise in attempting to follow him
or speculate on his whereabouts." As though a President could
not have a rest on his own yacht in New England coastal waters
without enshrouding his voyage in semi-secrecy, Mr. Knox
added: "The man has been carrying a tremendous burden and
we should let him have a week or ten days of complete rest. I
am asking the press to treat the President as it would any officer
of any ship." This appeal did not quite ring true, if, indeed, it
was intended to. Why this uncustomary coyness? It could not be a question of safety, for surely there was no imaginable need
for the President to expose himself to personal danger. There
were plenty of perfectly safe places to go, in or out of the country,
whether he wanted to rest, to work, or to hold a conference.
Mr. Roosevelt boarded the Potomac a few minutes before she
sailed on Sunday. He was piped aboard as the Presidential flag
was run up the mast. Sailors in summer whites stood at salute
at the gangway. The President made no statement. Not even
the crew knew where they were going. The correspondent of
the New York Times wrote: "It was no more than the start of
a vacation for a man who has ... longed for some sea air."
Naturally, the buzzing started soon. On Monday, the British
Press Association announced that Harry Hopkins had returned
to London "yesterday" from Moscow after his dramatic flight to
talk to Stalin. On Tuesday, Clement Attlee, Lord Privy Seal,
told the House of Commons that Prime Minister Churchill
"would not find it convenient" to attend an important debate
on the progress of the war. Hints were allowed to pass through
British censorship that Roosevelt and Churchill had met or were
to meet somewhere. In Washington, the Navy Department released
a dispatch from the Potomac: "After a night of restful
sleep the.President is continuing his cruise in northern waters
to an undisclosed destination. He is attired in a sport shirt and
slacks and is enjoying the sea air from the fantail. . . . The
President spent some time discussing affairs with the Commander-in-Chief
of the Atlantic Fleet.... All on board well." This
was a teaser. Apparently Admiral Ernest J. King, the Atlantic
fleet's commander, "had popped up from nowhere," as the
magazine Newsweek described this development.
Meanwhile, in England, Harry Hopkins, the President's alter
ego, had disappeared. London sleuths looking for him were
told: "You'll find Hopkins where Churchill is." By Wednesday
it was known in London that the rotund Prime Minister and the American roving wraith had left "together" for a secret
destination.
White House Press Secretary Stephen Early refused to squelch
the rumors of a Roosevelt-Churchill meeting. He merely said
he knew nothing about it. Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State,
also avoided a categorical denial, but he did say that the President
had made no mention of such a meeting when he talked
with him on the telephone the previous Saturday night (the
night before Mr. Roosevelt's departure).
On Wednesday, the Navy released a laconic message from
the Potomac which said that the sailors were "responding to
New England air after·Washington summer." It did not mention
the President. Some observers viewed this omission as indicating
that Mr. Roosevelt might have transferred to another
ship which would speed him to a secret rendezvous. The Canadian
Prime Minister was questioned, but he provided no solution
to the mystery.
Washington reporters were making bets on whether Roosevelt
and Churchill had met, were meeting, or would meet. The
feverish inquiries of· Domei's correspondent, Masua Kato, revealed
Japan's curiosity, while the German D.N.B.'s reporter,
Kurt Sell, offered even money that if such a meeting were held,
it would be on shore rather than at sea. (He would have come
within a few hundred yards of untroubled waters in a sheltered
bay·of winning his bet.)
On Thursday, the Navy divulged another chatty radio report
from the Potomac. "All members of party showing effects of sunning. Fishing luck good.... President being kept in close
touch international situation by Navy radio." The report did
not say that Mr. Roosevelt was on board or that he was not on
board.
Meanwhile, the New York Herald Tribune's Washington
bureau had been playing Sherlock Holmes. The information it ferreted out showed that "something was cooking." General
George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, was missing, ostensibly
on a routine inspection trip to an undisclosed destination which
even Chairman Robert R. Reynolds of the Senate Military Affairs
Committee could not learn. Admiral Harold R. Stark,
Chief of Naval Operations, was presumably on leave, but where
he was, nobody seemed to know. Major General H. H. ("Hap")
Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Forces, had gone "somewhere"
on official business and even his wife was wondering where. On
top of all this, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles suddenly
disappeared for "a short rest," and Major General James
H. Burns, Hopkins' assistant in the Lend-Lease Administration,
vanished without leaving a word about his whereabouts. Secretary
of the Navy Frank Knox made his exodus from the capital
during the week, but by Friday he had been located at York Harbor, Maine. It was now taken for granted that a momentous
conference between two chiefs of state, Roosevelt and Churchill,
was in progress. Washington now calmed down to await the
results.
The President had, in fact, transshipped to the cruiser Augusta
on Monday night. Elliott Roosevelt tells us in As He Saw
It that his father "enjoyed himself thoroughly, giving the press
the slip, much as a twelve-year-old boy playing cops-and-robbers
will enjoy shaking a playmate who is trying to shadow him."
According to Elliott, this jocular conversation occurred when
he and Franklin, Jr., joined their father on the Augusta:
"You look wonderful, Pop. But how come all this?You on a fishing
trip?"
Father roared with laughter. "That's what the newspapers think.
They think I'm fishing somewhere off the Bay of Fundy." He was
as delighted as a kid, boasting of how he had thrown the newspapermen
off the scent by going as far as Augusta, Maine, on the presidential
yacht Potomac. Then he told us what it was an about.
"I'm meeting Churchill here. He's due in tomorrow. on the -Prince
of Wales. Harry Hopkins is with him." And he leaned back to watch
the -effect-of his announcement on us. I guess-it was-big. I wasn't
near any mirrors, but he enjoyed it.
Elliott takes for granted "Father's" preoccupation at the moment
with "the effect of his announcement on us." To the senior
Roosevelt, the "effect" of a statement or of an event, in the sense
of its emotional impact, was always one of the most important
things about it.
As for fishing, "Father" did fish once. It was on Thursday, in
Placentia Bay, from the deck of a battle cruiser. "He caught a
What-is-it, unidentifiable by anyone on board," writes Elliott.
" 'Have it sent to the Smithsonian,' Father suggested, and tried
no more fishing during the whole trip."
On the other side of the Atlantic, Winston Churchill left
Scapa Flow on Monday, August 3, -on the battleship Prince of
Wales. His most valuable fellow-passenger was Harry Hopkins,
who had been assigned the Admiral's cabin. It is generally conceded
that Harry Hopkins played a large part in the genesis of
the Atlantic Conference, and he was certainly the intermediary
between Roosevelt and Churchill in making the preparatory
arrangements. Churchill's chronicler, H. V. Morton, writes that
Hopkins pressed the idea on the Prime Minister one afternoon
"towards the end of July" while the two were walking in a little
garden behind No. 10 Downing Street. "When Mr. Churchill
reentered No. 10 he had decided to cross the Atlantic."2 Early
the following morning, President -Roosevelt was called to the
telephone in the White House to receive a trans-Atlantic call.
It was Winston Churchill, proposing the meeting, and the
President "agreed."
Of course such a meeting was in Mr. Roosevelt's plans before
Hopkins had left Washington for England, as Robert- E. Sherwood's account makes clear 3 Hull states that Roosevelt had
cherished the idea for some time 4 but Sherwood does not divulge
what Hopkins told the Prime Minister in order to sell the idea
to him, particularly on the point of why a theatrical spectacle
involving the Atlantic fleets and air forces of both nations was
to be chosen as the setting for what could be more soberly accomplished
at a simple meeting in Washington or Ottawa. Sherwood
writes: "Most of Hopkins' conversations with Churchill
on the forthcoming Atlantic Conference ... were conducted in
private and Hopkins kept no record of them." 5 But Hopkins
left notes of innumerable conversations which were "conducted
in private." Many of these were far less important than these
talks with Churchill, which fashioned the conference at which
the aims of the war were to be laid down. Yet, says·Sherwood,
Hopkins kept no record of them. He did, however, record in his
notes that he played backgammon with the Prime Minister
aboard the Prince of Wales and he took the trouble to describe
Churchill's type of game, all of which Sherwood quotes for posterity.
Sherwood states, ex cathedra, that these two backgammon
players also "discussed the phraseology of the Atlantic Charter,"
but he goes into no details and discloses no entries in Hopkins'
notes on the subject-if he made any. Here is one of those strange
gaps that abound in the erratic Hopkins' "notes" as ,"'e are permitted
to glimpse them piecemeal at the sufferance of his
friendly biographer. The latter's historical task, it should be said
in fairness, was probably not made easier by Harry Hopkins'
neurotic harping upon his own intimacy with the great personages
into whose company a whimsical fate had thrown him, but
it is sometimes difficult to decide where Hopkins' erratic-ism
ends and Sherwood's deft editing begins.
In his memoirs, Winston Churchill sidesteps any responsibility for the staginess of his nautical rendezvous with Roosevelt. With exquisite casualness, he writes that Harry Hopkins told him the President wished very much to have a meeting with him "in some lonely bay or other" and that he accepted.6
On Saturday, August 9, the Prince of Wales and its escort, all camouflaged, joined the American armada assembled in Placentia Bay as planes circled overhead. The battleship Arkansas, the cruisers Augusta and Tuscaloosa, and a flotilla of destroyers, still in peacetime gray, with gleaming brass and pine-white woodwork, rode at anchor, placed somewhat like chessmen not yet brought forward into play. Franklin D. Roosevelt, wearing a Palm Beach suit, stood under an awning that had been erected upon the forward gun turret of the Augusta. That day, the Atlantic Conference began.
When Secretary of State Cordell Hull, wearing his most lamblike expression, had put off inquisitive reporters by telling them that the President had not mentioned any meeting with Prime Minister Churchill when he, Hull, talked with Mr. Roosevelt on the telephone the night before Roosevelt's departure,.he had perhaps spoken with literal veracity but certainly without candor. He knew about·the meeting.
However, Mr. Hull had not been invited along. Under Secretary Sumner Welles, a man more consistently pliable under the Roosevelt touch,·had been. In his memoirs, Hull reveals that Welles had written to him on July 28 at White Sulphur Springs, where Hull was resting (he was to be back at his desk in Washington on Monday, August 4), telling him that the conference with Churchill had been arranged for August 8, 9, and 10. In this letter Welles reported that "he intended to urge the President, if he expected to discuss more than purely military problems, to take someone with him who could keep a precise record of the conversations and of the agreements that might be reached."7
This was indeed a strange communication, and it accentuates the strained relationship that existed between these two officials. Welles knew perfectly well that Roosevelt expected to discuss "more than purely military problems," for he had himself been alerted to prepare for that; there was no "if" about it. In fact, he went to the conference with a working draft of the Charter in his brief case.8 As for his intending "to urge" the President "to take someone with him who could keep a precise record of the conversations and of the agreements that might be reached," it is difficult to credit the sincerity of this ostensible naivete on Welles' part. One would suppose that but for Welles' solicitude, Mr. Roosevelt was going to swim out into the Atlantic Ocean to talk to Winston Churchill alone. on a raft. A competent shorthand reporter would have sufficed to "keep a precise record," if that were anything to worry about. Actually, both men were to be accompanied by large entourages, and the Under Secretary must have known of these arrangements, for, as he later disclosed, he had rather detailed preparatory conversations with the President in Washington.9 His letter to Mr. Hull appears to have been phrased to play down the importance of the impending meeting, to assuage the man who, as Secretary of State, would certainly have been a logical functionary to participate in drawing up the aims of the war but who was being left behind.
Franklin D. Roosevelt hardly needed Sumner Welles to urge him to take "someone" with him. He had a natural proclivity for showmanship. Nor did he need to be told by a Louis B. Mayer or a Cecil B. De Mille that there are three essential elements of any successful theatrical production: a good dramatic story, a colorful setting, and an impressive cast. With a war raging in the world and with all the facilities of the Army and the Navy at his disposal for use as props, his fecund imagination had had no difficulty contriving the story and the setting. As for an all-star cast, that was his at the snap of his fingers. Generals, admirals, and lords, striped-trousered diplomats and slouch hatted back-room favorites-all big. names, exuding glamour and mystery-were only too happy to participate in the epic drama of the hour and could be summoned from either side of the Atlantic by a telephone call.
With the Prime Minister came his inscrutable chum and confidant, Lord Cherwell, who had until recently been plain Professor Lindemann and who is tersely described by Morton ·(who was also on board) as "a tall, unsmiling man"; General Sir John Dill, Chief of the British Army's Imperial General Staff; Admiral of the Fleet Sir Alfred Pound, the First Sea Lord; Sir Wilfrid Freeman, Vice Chief of the Air Staff; Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; and their assistants, secretaries, and flunkies. England's much cartooned newspaper publisher, Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Supply in Churchill's cabinet, followed by air.
Even more ostentatious was the company President Roosevelt chose to surround him at the conference. Included were General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army; Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations; Admiral Ernest J. King, commander of the Atlantic fleet; General H. H. ("Hap") Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Forces; Admiral Richmond K. Turner of the Navy's War Plans Division and Colonel Charles W. Bundy of the Army's War Plans Section; Harry Hopkins, officially the Lend-Lease Administrator, actually the President's right-hand man in. all things, just back from a cabal in the Kremlin; Hopkins' Lend-Lease assistant, Major General James H. Burns; Lend-Lease "Coordinator" W. Averell Harriman, generally considered a traveling handy man of the President and Hopkins; Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles; General Edwin M. ("Pa") Watson, the President's military aide, arid Captain John R. Beardall, his naval aide. In addition, two of the President's sons were brought into this momentous gathering.
Mr. Roosevelt had four sons. Two had put on uniforms.·The youngest, Franklin, Jr., in his early twenties, had become an ensign in the Navy. Elliott, a few years older, had been commissioned a captain in the Army. John and James were civilians. The President chose Franklin, Jr., and Elliott and had them detached from their service assignments and brought to his side at the Atlantic Conference, where they figured prominently in the photographs and movie reels taken for public display. This widely advertised the fact that two of the Roosevelt sons were in uniform.
When the battleship Prince of Wales moved into Placentia Bay
on Saturday morning, Harry Hopkins was at once transferred
to the Augusta. At eleven o'clock, Prime Minister Churchill,
wearing a dark blue Trinity House uniform with a visor cap,
followed in an Admiralty launch. With naval ceremony and to
the strains of God Save the King and The Star-Spangled Banner,
he was received aboard the President's cruiser. He handed
a letter to Mr. Roosevelt and said, "I have the honor, Mr. President,
to hand you a letter from His Majesty the King," as the
cameras clicked.
The scene was pictorially impeccable. The President, his shoulders thrown hack, his head slightly cocked on one side, was handsome, impressive, and photogenic-as usual. Franklin, Jr., and Elliott had been placed in the immediate foreground. Even the veriest dolt would now see that if the world was going to be saved in its great crisis, it was the Roosevelt family that was rolling up its sleeves to save it.
Mr. Churchill stayed on the Augusta to have lunch privately with Mr. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins. Elliott Roosevelt tells us that when he joined them at the end of the meal, he found the Prime Minister "draining his glass" and talking about the United States' declaring war on Germany "straightaway." We gather from Elliott's report that his father did not say to Mr. Churchill that he still hoped the United States "would not have to get into a shooting war," which was the cheerful tidings he had left with the press when he boarded the Potomac the previous Sunday. On the contrary, he was ruefully explaining to his guest that the temper of the American people was not yet ready. The President was thinking, blurts out Elliott, of "American politics."10
It would appear that this luncheon meeting on the first day of the conference provided a revelation of the basic motivations of the principals. Yet Robert E. Sherwood's account does. not even mention it. Sherwood skips to the formal dinner (dinner jackets and black ties) given by the President that evening. The Americans present, he states, were Roosevelt, Welles, Stark, Marshall, King, Arnold, Hopkins, and Harriman; on the British side were Churchill, Cadogan, Pound, Dill, Freeman,and Cherwell. Perhaps it was a distaste for the inappropriate that forced Sherwood to omit two names from this list, Franklin, Jr., and Elliott. They were present, too, but the deletion is understandable, particularly since he was going on to state that "during dinner, Roosevelt, Churchill, Hopkins, Welles and Cadogan got down to business,"11 which business,·it then appears, was nothing more modest than a charter to project the future of most of the world.
Elliott, however, is not similarly deterred in his hook. He gloats over his presence at the historic banquet. But from his ribald, eyewitness account, we gather that the "business" consisted chiefly of Churchillian eloquence on the subject of what the United States must give and do in the war. "Winston Churchill held everyone of·us, that night-and was conscious every second of the time that he was holding us." There was a reservation in "Father's" mind, however, when the Prime Minister pleaded, .as Elliott puts it, "that the lion's share of Lend...Lease should go to the British lion." "Father" was thinking of Russia.12
The next morning was Sunday. The President, the entire American delegation, and several hundred sailors and marines attended Divine Service on the quarterdeck of the Prince of Wales. They sang and prayed in unison with the British ship's company. The pulpit was draped with the American and British flags. Fifteen hundred British seamen craned their necks to see the bounteous Mr. Roosevelt, who had, the previous afternoon, sent each of them a cardboard carton containing an orange, two apples, two hundred cigarettes, and a half-pound of cheese. (Mr. Roosevelt had chosen to take personal credit for this gift, supplied by the American Navy, by having inserted in each box a card with the words: "The President of the United States sends his compliments and best wishes.") 13
So poignant was the ceremony that Churchill's writer, Morton, recorded that it was almost intolerable in its emotionalism. There was a prayer for the President, a prayer for the King and his ministers and generals and admirals, and, lest the supplication be too personalized, a prayer for the victory of Right and Truth. Onward Christian Soldiers was one of the hymns chosen for the occasion. As its martial beats rolled out over the water, even the huge fourteen-inch guns of the battleship seemed beatified, and one could easily forget that some of the Allies in the great impending crusade were renegade Christian soldiers at best, with little godliness to commend them.
The propagandistic potentialities of this mise en scene were, of course, a politician's delight. From the standpoint of anyone bent upon wooing the American people toward greater belligerency, they were reason enough for the whole expedition. In preparation, Elliott Roosevelt had sent a Grumman plane to Lake Gander and back, a trip of almost three hundred miles, to bring Air Force photographers with both still and motion-picture film and equipment. The Navy, with its battleships, cruisers, and destroyers on the spot and its submarine base nearby, naturally had·its own amplitude of such facilities,. but economy could hardly be expected in exploiting this opportunity. As a promotional medium, pictures could be almost as effectual as the lofty words soon to be unloosed to the world from the unique backdrop of this trumped-up naval concentration in a bay on the coast of Newfoundland. So there was more business· on hand than just praying. This, Franklin D. Roosevelt's moment of piety before going forth, like St. George to slay the dragon, had to be seen in movie theaters throughout the land, from Maine to California.
After these rapturous rites of Sunday morning on the deck of a battleship, of which a vast number of pictures were taken, Mr. Roosevelt was treated to a delectation of a more worldly kinda gastronomic one-of which no pictures were taken. The grouse-shooting season had opened in England on August 1, and Mr. Churchill had arranged for sufficient birds to be put on the Prince of Wales for a luncheon party, with an extra brace for the President. This was the delight served in the wardroom to the two leaders and their staff chiefs after the Divine Service.14 The spirit at once yielded to the flesh.
General "Hap" Arnold pronounces that "it was a good
lunch."15 The General had evidently been disporting with the
British long enough to catch their habit of understatement. Yet
he was sufficiently impressed to record that it started with caviar
and vodka, followed by turtle soup, then grouse and champagne,
tapering off faultlessly with port, coffee, and brandy. As the
smoke of Churchill's long, savory cigars, passed round the table,
pervaded the wardroom, it was a genial company of well-fed,
well-oiled men, most of them decorated and beribboned, who sat
sipping well into the afternoon, talking about the wars to be
fought.
"Hap" Arnold's epicureanism, a capacity not normally cultivated by the army fare of the professional soldier, had been considerably refined during his recent peregrinations in the higher echelons of brass and might. On his visit to England that spring, the red carpet had been rolled out for him. From the many gracious references in his memoirs-such as "we had a delightful lunch at the Savoy" and "we had an interesting dinner at 'The Beaver's' [Lord Beaverbrook's] house in the country"-we gather that his "Global Mission" was not always a harrowing experience. The gates of Buckingham Palace had been opened to him. ("Then I entered a room, and there was the King.") He had also been invited for a week end with the Churchill's at Dytchley Castle, where life in wartime was so far from grim that a dinner coat was still derigueur. Here a guard of honor saluted his departure, in the limousine of Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, after a luxurious visit devoted at least partly to.the elaboration of Mr. Churchill's ideas of "proper propaganda" to change the thinking of the American people and bring the United States into the war.16
So the caviar-and-grouse feast in the wardroom of the Prince of Wales was not "Hap's" first experience as a gourmet, and there is no reason to believe that the vodka, the champagne, the port, and the brandy rendered him any less able to enjoy the dinner Sir John·Dill gave that night "for some of us" in the Admiral's cabin. By this time he seems to have recovered from the shock of the British requests made the previous day. ("There was one item that stunned me: the British were asking for 6,000 more heavy bombers than we were then producing.") Between the luncheon and the dinner, there was, on the Augusta, a round table discussion, which included. Marshall, Arnold, Dill, and Freeman, on the favorite subject of expanding and accelerating the American war effort.17 Dill and Freeman could hardly have chosen a more propitious moment to find their American military opposites in a mellow and obliging mood. By Monday, Sir Wilfrid was so pleased with "Hap" that he confided to him: "When Portal comes over, I am going to insist that he see just two people; one is the.President of the United States, and the other is you."18 (The British knew, of course, that it was Harry Hopkins who really held the key to the treasure, but as far as air-force materiel was concerned, it was important to them that General Arnold be an eager expediter, an efficient conduit.)
Elliott Roosevelt was also invited to the Prime Minister's voluptuous Sunday grouse-and-champagne luncheon. Only one incident does he record: "And there was the moment when someone rapped for quiet and cried out: 'Gentlemen, the King!' and there was a great scraping back of chairs and shuffling of feet and a moment of silence while the glasses were lifted up and then the wine sipped."
That night, and the next, too, the Prime Minister dined with the President on the Augusta. To these intimate meetings the brass and the braid were not invited. But Harry Hopkins was included. So were the two Roosevelt boys.19
On Monday morning, Churchill came over from his battleship at eleven o'clock for a two-hour conference with the President. The purpose of this meeting was twofold: to beat into shape the final draft of the joint declaration (the Atlantic Charter) and to prepare a stiff note to Japan. The State Department and the Foreign Office were represented, appropriately enough, by, respectively, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles and Sir Alexander Cadogan, Britain's Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.20
One might have thought that this quartet-Roosevelt, Churchill, Welles, and Cadogan-would proceed to chart the future policy of the world (if indeed they judged themselves qualified to tackle such a project at all) as well, if not better, without the assistance of Harry Hopkins. Surely there was nothing in the background of this man that would prepare him for this role, which would seem at the least to require a developed juridical sense and a profound knowledge of history. Hopkins' recent tete-a-tete with the Russian tyrant in the Kremlin was hardly a substitute for these prerequisites. Indeed, the mantle of a sage could only look ludicrous on his shoulders. Yet President Roosevelt had him at this meeting, as he had him at most important meetings.
Harry Hopkins understood the kinetics of politics. Let such as Sumner Welles fret about punctilio; let him excite himself over the absence of a qualifying phrase in a document. If the exigencies of the moment demanded a charter, with Harry Hopkins present no nice concern over precision of meaning could long delay it. Words for the purpose would be put together and agreed upon without much ado and with little exertion required from Mr. Roosevelt. A wag in Washington had once remarked that Sumner Welles glanced in a mirror every three hours "to be sure the halo was still there." But virtue was never likely to get out of hand with Harry Hopkins in the room, which is probably one reason why he was so constantly at his master's elbow.
By the time the British sailed for home on Tuesday, "Winston" and "Franklin" had achieved a well-buttered camaraderie. This was to be expected, since both came to the conference with the same objective in mind, i.e., to hasten the entry of the United States into outright war. The Atlantic Charter was to glorify the war in the eyes of the American people. Roosevelt's eagerness to do this overrode all other considerations.
One would have supposed that in any game with the Prime Minister, the President held all the trump cards at that time, but to a surprising extent, the reverse was true. Thus on Monday, Mr. Churchill reported in a telegram to his cabinet, addressed to the ·Lord Privy Seal: "For the sake of speedy agreement I have little doubt he [the President] will accept our amendments." Referring to one of these amendments, he said: "He will not like this very much, but he attaches so much importance to the Joint Declaration, which he believes will affect the whole movement of United States opinion, that I think he will agree." He did agree. Churchill, it appears, was rightly confident that he had the President in his pocket, but. there was the haunting doubt of whether the President yet had the American people in his pocket. So' when.the Briton asked in his telegram that the War,Cabinet be summoned that night to approve what he was doing, he cautioned. that "it would be most imprudent on our part to raise unnecessary. difficulties" and added 'that' he feared the President would be "very much upset" if no joint statement could be issued, and "grave and vital interests might be affected."
Implicit in this message is a recommendation that his 'colleagues not take too seriously all of the content of the strange declaration which he was asking them to approve. We know that they did not. As Sherwood puts it, the officials of the British government never regarded the Atlantic Charter as much more than "a publicity handout."21
Certain objections which Sumner Welles had raised, at the
Monday morning session, to the flabby wording favored by Mr.
Churchill (on the crucial subject of the availability of the resources
of the world to all peoples) died a quick death in the afternoon.
Harry Hopkins had contributed the opinion that it was
inconceivable that the issuance of the joint declaration could be
held up "by a matter of this kind." Welles had thought President
Roosevelt stood with him on the principle involved, but the
President capitulated, as Mr. Churchill had known he would.
Welles later wrote: "I can only surmise that afterwards Harry
Hopkins persuaded him that the questions at issue would not be
of sufficient importance to warrant any delay." Time was of the
essence, Roosevelt told Welles. Why quibble now about the discriminatory
trade practices of Great Britain and her dominions?
Churchill and Cadogan had, on Saturday evening, presented the first draft, some parts of which, according to Welles, "meant precisely nothing." Welles prepared an alternative draft which Roosevelt edited early Monday morning. By eleven o'clock, Welles had the third draft ready for the four-man meeting in the President's quarters. The next day, the conference ended and the Prime Minister went home.
Thus was born what Churchill's accompanying chronicler, Morton, called "a new charter for Humanity." Harry Hopkins acted as a sort of midwife. The period of gestation, be it noted, was not long. However, as Morton professed to see it, it was "a splendid charter, but one that, after all, was drawn up long ago upon a mountain side in Galilee." Such plagiarism, if it be that, might perhaps explain the briskness of the literary composition that took place on the cruiser Augusta, although the image Morton contrives, of two master politicians dashing· out to sea on warships to rephrase the Sermon on the Mount, is a bit disconcerting. The haste with which "a new charter for Humanity" was brought forth comes to mind when one reads what was said of it by the English magazine Twientieth Century in its·next issue: "Even as a piece of rhetoric, the Anglo-American Declaration will simply not do." (As events proved, it was as a piece of rhetoric, and as that only, that the Charter did do.) This was the final text:
Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister August 12, 1941
The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's. Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.
First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.
Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.
Third, they respect the right of all peoples·to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.
Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.
Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field, with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security.
Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and·want.
Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance.
Eighth, they believe that all the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.[What a fucking joke D.C]
The "new charter for Humanity" did bear one resemblance to Divine Writ. There were no mortal signatures affixed,no sealing wax.
Mr. Churchill also took advantage of the occasion to see to·it that Roosevelt shook his fist at the Japanese again. It.was now known that the imposition of economic sanctions on July 26 had put Japan in an intolerable predicament. As we have seen, this was no surprise to Roosevelt, who had been warned by the Navy that the embargo meant war.22 Nor could Sumner Welles,with the accumulated information of the State Department at his disposal, have harbored any illusion. He could not have been unfamiliar, for example, with the Hornbeck Memorandum of January 3, 1935, in which the Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs stated what must have been almost axiomatic in diplomatic circles: "It is obvious that Japan either must have access to enlarged markets for her goods and must further develop an industrialized economy or must starve. The inherent virility and vitality of the Japanese people preclude any expectation that they will passively accept the latter alternative." As for Mr. Churchill, surely no one needed to expostulate with an Englishman on the problems of Japan's insularity, and he was geographer enough to know that there was in Japan, which has meager natural resources, a population of eighty million occupying an area one twentieth the size of Australia, which had a population of only seven million. So it is somewhat surprising to read in the Churchill memoirs: "It had not perhaps been realized by any of us how powerful they [the sanctions] were."23 Be that as it may, it was agreed that a truculent American note would be dispatched to the Japanese. Their dilemma was to be pressed upon them. Churchill telegraphed his cabinet: "He [Roosevelt] has agreed to end his communication with a severe warning, which I drafted."24 (It is no wonder, then, that when the attack on·Pearl Harbor came, the exultant Mr. Churchill blurted out to the House of Commons: "This is the object that I have dreamed of, aimed at and worked for; and now it has come to pass!")25
The Prince of Wales weighed anchor at 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday. In a pleasing little farewell ceremony, the President and the Prime Minister exchanged "autographed photographs," Morton tells us. A cordial message had been sent to the Russian dictator just before the final parting.
Back on the Prince of Wales, Churchill again telegraphed his government. "They"-the pronoun hangs in the air-"are sending us immediately 150,000 more rifles, and I look for improved allocations of heavy bombers and tanks. I hope they will take over the whole ferry service and deliver both in England and in West Africa by American pilots, many of whom may stay for war..training purposes with US."26 He hoped that his colleagues would feel that his mission had been "fruitful." From the King came a message of congratulation. Nine days before, Franklin D. Roosevelt had started out on what he had called a fishing trip, but it was Winston Churchill who made the big catch.
Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Supply, who, had flown
over at the Prime Minister's invitation, was now sent on by air,
in the company of W. Averell Harriman, to Washington, where
a local wit was quoted in Time as saying, perhaps with more perspicacity
than graciousness, "Beaverbrook came over to see if the
British had left anything."27
There was one point on which Roosevelt took full charge. That was the form of the Charter and the timing and manner of its release to the world. He insisted that it not be inscribed on parchment and signed and sealed as a treaty. That would have required him to submit it to the Senate for ratification, and, as Sherwood frankly states, "he was taking no chances on that."28 It was merely to be mimeographed and released.
"Nevertheless," writes Sherwood, "its effect was cosmic and historic." Sumner Welles has written that "it was precisely as valid in its binding effect as if it had been signed and sealed,"29 thereby introducing a new concept into the law of international compacts which might be designated, for want of any other passport, as the Welles Doctrine and which has, at least, the merit of clothing with legality, even if by sheer fiat, an ostensible agreement which the masses of the world were allowed to think was solemnly consecrated. A "Joint Declaration" presupposes a meeting of minds, i.e., an agreement or compact. As for Franklin D. Roosevelt, whether or not he considered his agreement with the Prime Minister "valid in its binding effect" in a technical, legal sense, there is no doubt that he intended the effect of its release to the world to be "cosmic and historic." It was to strike the American scene like a bolt of lightning.
He had arranged that it be released in London and Washington On Thursday, August 14, while he would still be at sea. When the conference ended, Welles was sent on to Washington with the President's instructions. Just as Welles was leaving the harbor, he received this message, which Roosevelt, with his usual finesse in such matters, had ordered Admiral Stark to send him:
The President said he would like no release of'the names of those who accompanied the President until Saturday on which day you may release it.
His reasons are that he wants the. press release to stand out "like a sore thumb," with nothing to detract from it or to cause any other discussion; then when it has had time to be. thoroughly digested, just of itself, to go ahead and give out the names of the rest of the party-on Saturday.
The ''sore thumb" technique was spectacularly successful. On Saturday, when the yacht Potomac, with the President again on board, came around the breakwater and dropped anchor at Rockland, Maine, the country was still agog, and fifty newsmen, radiomen, cameramen, and technicians were waiting for the great performer. Broadcasters babbled into microphones. He was home from the mysteries of the Atlantic, from hostile seas, from a conference that had no parallel. The mellifluous phrases of the Charter had already cast their spell. It was an extraordinary Rooseveltian coup, more dramatic than the cross-country flight in 1932 to address the Chicago convention which first nominated him for the Presidency.
In the wardroom of the Potomac, the President received the White House press corps. He sat calm and relaxed, with Harry Hopkins nearby. To the newsmen, who had been through thirteen days of irritating suspense, he talked informally, smoothly, and soothingly but was sufficiently evasive to allow an intriguing air of grandiose mystery to hover. He said that Anglo-American understanding was now complete as regarded developments on every continent of the world and that he and the Prime Minister had outlined a course of action for any eventuality that might develop anywhere. Some newsmen nodded knowingly at this. Manifestly, anyone who wanted war could easily read into this equivocacy a portent of imminent participation. But to the question "Do you think we are any closer to entry into the war?" the President replied cryptically that he would not say so.
Whereupon Mr. Roosevelt went to Washington by train. His first moves were to confer with Secretary of State Cordell Hull and to summon Congressional.leaders to the White House for a first-hand report of the conference. But there was nothing to deliberate about. The whole affair, including the Charter of the Atlantic, was a fait accompli.
In Great Britain, the London Daily Sketch refused to believe that the Prime Minister and the President had conferred only to produce "a piece of oratory." To Britons in general, the Churchill-Roosevelt conference was worth the effort and expense·only if it brought the United States deeper into the war. They were disappointed that Roosevelt had not openly committed his country to declare war, but they hoped that his understanding with Churchill was like an iceberg, the largest part of which remains invisible.
As for the Charter, that was thought to be mainly for American consumption. Its eight points were met with widespread indifference in England, and Canada, where the more outspoken newspapers and magazines brushed it off with such phrases as "stale magniloquence," "a rhetorical manifesto," and "unrealistic." One London newspaper (the Daily Express) growled that the English people were more interested in war aims than peace aims (a fact which, unfortunately for the future, was only too true).Furthermore, English statesmen had been attending international conferences for a long time, much longer than the Americans. There was much less inclination to whoop things up over mere words. The London Times did manage, dutifully, to rejoice that "the world now knows beyond doubt what we are fighting for," but the Canadian Forum, in its next issue, ridiculed "the gushing efforts" of editors and columnists who took that tack. "None of them," it said, "professes to discuss the actual content of the eight points-and for the obvious reason that there is nothing much in them to discuss.... About the only conclusion we can reach is that Mr. Churchill must be a better sailor than President Roosevelt. He has notoriously been opposed throughout to committing his government to any war aims except the defeat of Hitler. He now concedes to the president a few pious generalities, including two of the president's 'four freedoms,' and in return he no doubt goes home with some very specific promises of American assistance."
A piece of oratory or not, the Atlantic Charter no doubt deserves a place among the memorabilia of British history. It may be trotted out by historians of the future to illustrate the fatuity, or the perfidy, of Anglo-American statesmanship in the Second World War, which is perhaps an ignoble destiny, considering its flamboyant origin. In 1941, however, its consequences were real, if devious. Viscount Samuel did bother·to discuss the eight points in the Contemporary Review and to argue that some were meaningless and others were silly, yet·he said that the Charter would always be "outstanding in the history of these times." Winston Churchill gives us the key to this paradox. He writes in his memoirs that "the profound and far-reaching importance of this Joint Declaration was apparent." But it is also apparent from his treatment of the subject in his memoirs that in his mind, the importance did not lie in any probability that the eight points would be honored at the end of the war. These had been cast off long before Mr. Churchill wrote his memoirs. It lay first, of course, in the efficacy of the proclaimed principles as soothing sirup fora gullible American public and, secondly, in the fact that President Roosevelt's very words, pronounced in the Charter, were a casus belli. The German government could take them in no other way. Churchill writes:
The fact alone of the United States, still technically neutral, joining with a belligerent Power in making such a declaration was astonishing.31
Mr. Churchill knew the restraints put upon neutrals by international law, and he had read the American Constitution, which gives to the Congress alone the power to declare war. So it was natural that he should consider Roosevelt's conduct "astonishing," pleasing though it was to the British and the Russians. He prided himself on having induced Roosevelt·practically to·declare war. "The inclusion in it," he goes on to say, "Is a reference to 'the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny' (this was based on a phrase appearing in my original draft) amounted to a challenge which in ordinary times would have implied warlike action." A challenge to whom? To the existing government of Germany. A challenge to the death. (It "implied warlike action" this time, too. In September, Roosevelt announced orders to the Navy in the Atlantic to "shoot on sight," and in October, in his Navy Day speech, he said, "The shooting has started.")
The message was also plain to the heads of the Soviet government. The tyranny which President Roosevelt was going to see destroyed was the Nazi one, not their own. It was important to them to know this.
Whatever Churchill's private feelings may have been, he played the game to the end. On the Sunday evening after his return to England, at the hour when the greatest number of the American people were sitting quietly at home, he made a broadcast. It was beamed to the United States and had been widely advertised in advance. Never was his voice more sonorous, his cadences more exquisite!y executed, his judging of American susceptibilities more astute. The meeting with President Roosevelt, he said, was "symbolic." It symbolized "the deep underlying unities of the English-speaking people throughout the world." This was fraternal, as befitted the occasion, but it was not grand enough for Mr. Churchill. Sure of his mastery, he rose to a higher plane. It symbolized, he intoned, "something even more majestic, namely the marshaling of the good forces of the world against the evil forces."32
Coming from another man, such sanctimony might have evoked either disgust or laughter, but Mr. Churchill brought tears to many eyes. In the spell of his oratory, the element of self exaltation was overlooked, and forgotten were the British Empire's long record of conquests and subjugation's, her invention of the concentration camp during the Boer War, the scrapping of the Fourteen Points after Germany surrendered in World War I, the grabbing of vast territories in Africa in 1919, and other skeletons which were moldering in His Majesty's royal closet and which had contributed to the international reputation of "perfidious Albion." Also forgotten was the moral record of Britain's new ally to the east, the semi-Asiatic despotism which had only the year before been expelled from the League of Nations for aggression, at which time Mr.. Churchill himself had made the historic remark that "Communism rots the soul of a nation." Not in the least abashed by any of this, Mr. Churchill put the present war up to his American listeners as a simple clash between the "good forces of the world" and the "evil forces."
Then came the shining promise. He announced that the English-speaking nations were going to lead "the broad toiling masses in all the continents" out of "their miseries" and to "the broad high-road of freedom and justice." If the Americans needed a cause to fight for, what more could they want than this? For good measure, he added this sweetener: "This is the highest honor and the most glorious opportunity which could ever have come to any branch of the human race!"
Surely Hitler had nothing to do with the miseries of most of the "broad toiling masses" on the continents of the world. And did these unfortunates include the beaten-down subjects of Stalin, Molotov, et ai, which notorious gentlemen now presumably came within Mr. Churchill's category of "the good forces"? Had Mr. Churchill asked these new allies of his what their postwar plans for Europe and Asia were? On none of this was he specific, or even articulate.
The flaws were fairly safe from detection. The Prime Minister's appeal was emotional rather than analytical, and his art was irresistible to most Americans. Months of incessant propaganda had predisposed them to acceptance of this type of approach. Actually, the speech was an eclipse of fact, a sheer tour de force of distortion, as events were inexorably to prove. But Mr. Churchill had the sagacity to turn to religion on this Sunday eve and, at the same time, to shroud with silence the doctrinaire atheism of his Communist allies. He described the hymns sung on the deck of the battleship Prince of Wales, good old Christian hymns familiar to his audience.
We sang "Onward Christian Soldiers," and indeed, I felt that this was no vain presumption but that we had a right to feel that we were serving a cause for the sake of which a trumpet has sounded on high.
The war had indeed been made holy.
By coincidence, Mr. Churchill's archenemy, Adolf Hitler, also had a habit of using the word "masses" with the redundant adjective "broad" preceding it. "If you want the sympathy of the broad masses," he had written in Mein Kampf, "then you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things." One of the few virtues found alongside the roster of Hitler's vices was the frankness to lay bare his methods for all to see and to copy if they wished. In this instance, Machiavelli had given the same counsel some four hundred years before. It had been put into practice by many illustrious figures in modern European history, who, however, unlike Machiavelli and Hitler, possessed a reticence, or delicacy, which would never have permitted such self-revelation.
If in August of 1941 one had set out consciously to compose a crude and stupid thing to say about the war then raging in Europe, one could not have done better than to say that the triumph of the Soviet military hordes, which was one of the objectives and the inevitable effect of the Allied coalition, would spread freedom and justice to the peoples who would lie in their path. It could only be more preposterous to suggest···that Onward Christian Soldiers be the theme song.
The cynicism of Adolf. Hitler should not have shocked too greatly the inhabitants of Mr. Churchill's island homeland. The Scotch novelist Henry Mackenzie had long ago given them this thought to ponder:
Mankind, in the gross, is a gaping monster, that loves to be deceived, and has seldom been disappointed.
The American people had recently heard Hitler's warmed-up version of this old aphorism quoted up and down the land to prove that Hitler was a scoundrel. Most of them were blissfully unaware that the potion he prescribed was an old recipe and that presidents and prime ministers could mix it as well as a Fuhrer and often had.
Incredible as it may seem, even the House of Commons, which one would assume to have some sophistication, was to hear from the lips of Winston Churchill on February 27, 1945, and to accept docilely, this amazing statement:
I know of no Government which stands to its obligations even in its own despite more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.33
Of this, the noted English naval historian Captain Russell Grenfell has said: "This must surely rank as one of the most serious political misjudgments in history."34
Perhaps Grenfell underrated the Prime Minister's judgment by overrating his candor. Churchill could not possibly have been speaking from conviction; for a quarter of a century he had been saying the contrary. Peremptorily, he silenced debate: "I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith." By then, Stalin had long since repudiated the Atlantic Charter pledge to seek no territorial aggrandizement, had gobbled up with the ruthlessness of a Ghengis Khan the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, was in the process of seizing parts of Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Germany as permanent annexations to Russia, and had conspired, for a secret price, to violate his neutrality treaty with Japan, as Mr. Churchill, just back from Yalta, knew. The record of the Soviet government from the early days of Bolshevism had been one of chicanery, perfidy, and default because these were openly prescribed tactics of Leninism and Stalinism in the grand strategy for the Communist world revolution. The more recent moves of the Red dictatorship had demonstrated beyond cavil that it would not be deterred in its imperialistic ambitions by any moral commitments.
We can only believe that Churchill made his statement to Commons as a gesture to which he felt committed, a sort of diplomatic obeisance which Yalta compelled. We do know that at this stage of his life he moved about, as he later wrote, "with an aching heart and a mind oppressed by forebodings."35 Nine years later, Sir Winston, still at his euphonious as his eightieth birthday approached, was found at Blackpool, England, telling a political meeting that if the United States were to withdraw its troops and armaments from Europe, that "would condemn all Europe to Russian communist subjugation and our famous and beloved island to death and ruin."36
Actually, from the moment of Hitler's flaming death and the triumph everywhere of "the good forces" over the "evil forces," Europe had never been out of that mortal peril. Churchill had made his own volte-face publicly as far back as March 5, 1946, when in his famous Fulton speech he dolefully intoned:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain had descended across the continent... Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case.... Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.*
*: Speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri. Roosevelt was dead; Truman· was now President.
Winston Churchill's tongue-in-cheek blurb to the House of Commons in 1945 after Yalta ("Their word is their bond," he even brought himself to say of the Kremlin masters) is one of those assertions, sometimes resorted to in desperate polemics, which in many minds defy contradiction by their very enormity. They stun the intellect by sheer audacity, and opposition freezes. It has been said that politics is the science of exigencies. In fairness to Churchill, it should be recalled that in those days he had always, in his public utterances, to take into account the wishes of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, says Captain Grenfell, was "in a state of infatuated hallucination regarding the virgin purity of Marshal Stalin's motives." The role Churchill deigned to play was often an unenviable one.
More pleasant to perform, perhaps, though no less grotesque, was his task on that Sunday evening back in August, 1941, when, by radio, he assumed command of the forces of God on earth against Satan and graciously offered to share his generalship with the President of the United States.
The semanticists could no doubt prove, by their methods, that such a document as the Atlantic Charter means nothing, or could mean anything. It contains words such as "aggrandizement," "freely," "right," "access," and "threaten," which, they would say, have no determinate meaning at all but are like rubber, stretchable at will. However, the moral responsibility of illustrious men, such as presidents and prime ministers, who take it upon themselves to make pronouncements and pledges to the public, cannot be dissolved by showing that they used rubber words. Obviously, they had a purpose in speaking, not to themselves, but to the public. The question we must ask ourselves is: What did they expect most of the people who would hear their message to think it meant? Or what is the minimum meaning which attaches to the words in common parlance? The words of such men beget belief and generate action. They know that. The onus of any latent ambiguity is upon them. The criteria of interpretation must be looked for in the prevailing modes of thought of the receptive public.
It appears from the eyewitness account of Sumner Welles that no little time was spent at the Atlantic Conference trying to say things in a way which would seem, on the surface, to convey a certain meaning but which would not really have that meaning. The problem was complicated by a desire to have phrases mean different things in different parts of the world. Thus Roosevelt and Welles wanted the impression to emerge, at least in the United States, that there was to be a general abandonment by all,including the British Empire, of monopolies of raw materials and trade discrimination's, while Churchill, with his eye on public opinion in England and the Commonwealth, was adamant to exempt,imperial preference without making the exemption so explicit that the American people would detect it.
Roosevelt wished the American people, and others, too, to feel assured that the populations to be liberated would include not only Germany's victims but all subjugated peoples everywhere, while Churchill, on the other hand, nurtured in his own mind a much narrower interpretation which it was inexpedient to spell out in the Charter but which he subsequently reported to the House of Commons. According to Elliott Roosevelt's account, the two men not only chose to give the words they adopted these two meanings respectively, but they were also quite aware of the divergence and yet allowed the fiction of complete mutual agreement to prevail. The Australian historian Chester Wilmot, in his monumental history of the war, The Struggle for Europe, has examined this point with care and has concluded that Elliott Roosevelt's report in this instance is accurate.! So we have here a curious variation on the theme of having one's cake and eating it, too.
Any man possessed of a fair wit and a facility with words can develop the art of the double-entendre. From Aristophanes through Shakespeare, Moliere, Oscar Wilde, and Noel Coward, to the gag writers of radio and television, it has been, in varying degrees of polish, an indispensable tool of comedy. But to achieve mastery of the hidden double-entendre was reserved for great statesmen and diplomats. The team of Roosevelt, Welles, Churchill, Cadogan, and Hopkins, with their five heads together, was not unequal to the task. This more subtle form of wordplay is not of the stuff of comedy, however. It usually occurs in the more tragic plots.
We proceed to examine the eight points of the Charter. But first, there arises the question: Were Churchill and Roosevelt, when they brewed this potion of words, purporting to speak for their respective countries or only for themselves? In the one case they would be placing their countries' honor on the table. In the other, nothing would be committed but their own personal reputations.
Churchill's first draft of the Charter was hazy.2 There was a one-sentence Preamble, which began: "The President of the United States and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government...." Plainly, they were present in their official capacities. The sentence went on to say that these two men "... deem it right to make known certain principles which they both accept for guidance in the framing of their policy and on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world." The "they" refers to the President and the Prime Minister. "Their policy" is not necessarily national policy in their democratic countries. Churchill's language was cautious. Roosevelt changed this. The Preamble finally adopted read thus: "The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries [italics added] on. which they base their hopes for a better future for the world." This left no doubt. The two men were not voicing personal feelings. They were, they said, enunciating the national policies of their respective countries
The United States of America was one of the few nations of the world which had not long since exhausted·its moral credit. It had refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles because that malignant document had violated principle and pledge; it had disassociated itself from stubborn refusal of the French and the English ever to honor the general disarmament clause of that treaty; it was not a party to the incredibly stupid policy of hatred, repression, and vindictiveness which had, in the twenties and early thirties, flaunted a cold ring of bayonets all around a disarmed Germany, stifled her trade, trampled upon her sovereignty, and humiliated her proud people, made a fiasco of the disarmament conference in Geneva in 1932, and, by the inexorable law of action and reaction, helped to assure the advent of a Hitler. Woodrow Wilson's celebrated Fourteen Points had been scrapped as soon as the Germans had laid down their arms at the end of World War I, but the United States had renounced this perfidy of the victorious nations. Furthermore, the United States, as the Poles"the Czechs, the Lithuanians, and others well knew, was, of all the great powers, the most sincere champion of the right of self-determination. So it was a shining reputation for honorable conduct, his country's esteem in the eyes of friends and foes, which Franklin D. Roosevelt was willing to throw into this new jeopardy.
The importance of this to the future of America as a moral force in the world cannot be overestimated. Sumner Welles wrote that the Atlantic Charter was "the official pronouncement of the policies of the two governments." It was "valid in its binding effect," and it was "notice to the world by the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, that in accordance with their constitutional authority to speak for their countries and their governments, the two nations which they represented Would adhere to the great principles set forth in the declaration."3
If this be so, the Atlantic Charter was a gigantic moral commitment made to a world on the threshold of enormous travail and sacrifices. Welles cited no clause of the American Constitution as giving the President authority to bind the United States in this manner. Whether he had the authority or not, Roosevelt arrogated it to himself, and the world took his words to be a pledge by the United States.
Then on September 29, 1941, in what must surely rank as one
of the most macabre frauds of history, Commissar of Foreign
Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov, the notorious Janus-faced collaborator
with von Ribbentrop in arranging the partition of Poland,
was ushered into St. James's Palace to vow allegiance, on behalf
of the Soviet dictatorship, to the eight points of the Atlantic
Charter. The ceremony was later repeated in.Washington, D.C.,
for the better convenience of the American press. It would have
been no more a mockery had Adolf Hitler, for a prize of fifty
thousand tanks and twenty-five thousand airplanes, scribbled
his signature on a paper saying that he was dedicated to the
sacred Judaic laws of. the Talmud. Eventually, the plenipotentiaries
of more than thirty nations trooped in to subscribe to the Atlantic Charter. It thus became a multilateral international
pact.
This was in the original draft prepared by Churchill. This draft was handed to Mr. Welles by Sir Alexander Cadogan on Sunday morning, August 10, the day after the conference began. According to Churchill's account, President Roosevelt had told him on Saturday that "he thought it would be well if we could draw up a joint declaration laying down certain broad principles which should guide our policies along the same road." One would think the idea had not been broached before. "Wishing to follow up this most helpful suggestion," writes Mr. Churchill, "I gave him the next day, August 10, a tentative outline of such a declaration."4
This casual introduction is in line with Churchill's rather too obvious anxiety to play down the Atlantic Charter in his memoirs. (It was already a dead letter when he wrote them.) However, Harry Hopkins' version of the matter was different, for according to Sherwood, who had Hopkins' private notes before him, Mr. Churchill knew before he saw President Roosevelt that the issuance·to the world of a joint declaration was one of the purposes, if not the only purpose, of staging such a spectacular rendezvous. On the trip across the Atlantic on the Prince of Wales, Harry and the Prune Minister did more than play backgammon. Sherwood records: "They discussed the phraseology of the Atlantic Charter which the Prime Minister was to present to the President."5
The First Point of Churchill's tentative draft was never changed. On the surface, it is unexceptionable. Territorial aggrandizement by annexation is·surely covered. The more subtle kind, by the imposition of puppet rulers in nominally autonomous countries, is not specifically mentioned but should at least come under the catch-all alternative, "or other."
The basic hypocrisy of the First Point lies deeper. Costly as modern wars are, they inevitably aggrandize the victor in some ways at the expense of a powerful enemy who is utterly crushed. Surely Mr. Churchill, looking into the future, could foresee that if the German merchant marine were swept from the seas for a decade, the shipping industry of Britain would capture much of the tonnage formerly carried in German bottoms and that the Cunard and·White Star lines would enjoy a more thriving passenger business if North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American were to be eliminated from the picture for many years after the war..Would not British Overseas Airways be aggrandized by the obliteration of all commercial aviation in a beaten and occupied Germany? Would Britain's markets in Asia, Africa, and South America he more secure in the years to come if the rising competition of upstart Japan were done to death, either by slow economic strangulation or by defeat in war?
Regardless of any moral posturing and pretensions of high motives, a war which eliminates, even temporarily, a strong competitor in the markets of the world and in the commerce on the seas and ·in the air aggrandizes the victor vis-a-vis that enemy. How had Britain won her commercial position from the fifteenth century to the twentieth? By wars in which she had knocked down each competitor who raised a head,the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the Germans. The Germans in the twentieth century, however, would not stay down, and the Japanese were in ascendance in Asia, where British imperialism was an old story. Both were good sailors and efficient industrialists and lived in overpopulated countries. Sharp commercial rivalry with Britain was inevitable. Future historians would record that in the first half of the twentieth century, the issue was settled by war, not by fair and open competition in the market place, just as in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the Anglo-Spanish wars, and in the seventeenth century the Anglo-Dutch wars, had determined the commercial supremacy of those days.
President Woodrow Wilson, speaking in 1919, expressed the opinion that all modern wars are of. this nature. "Is there·any man or woman," he said, "let me say is there any child, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern.world is industrial and commercial rivalry? This was an industrial and commercial war." Sigmund Freud would no doubt have considered this an oversimplification, for he found the seed of war deeply embedded in human psychology and probably ineradicable.6 Nor is it likely that the economic exegesis which a distraught and disillusioned Wilson permitted himself to embrace in 1919 would have satisfied Jonathan Swift, who called war "that mad game the world so loves to play." Be that as it may, to pretend that a war involving Great Britain, Germany, and Japan, all three of·them dependent on foreign trade for their standard of living and all rivals for the markets of the world, would not bring serious dislocations of economic power.and aggrandize the victors in relation to the vanquished is to indulge in fantasy.
When Mr. Churchill drafted the First Point of the Atlantic Charter, he said only that his country "seeks" no aggrandizement, territorial or other. A man might just as well say, when he shakes his neighbor's plum tree, that he is not seeking the plums that by chance fall into his open basket.
This was in the original Churchill draft and was not changed.. It was the golden promise to peoples whose lands and homes were coveted by others. The words are: "no territorial changes." There are·no exceptions. This could only be understood to be an assurance to Germans, Poles, and all other peoples that their nations would not be forcibly dismembered.
"Freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned." Surely this meant that countries would not be carved up by a few men sitting around a table. It meant that families would not be uprooted from the farms and dwellings which they and their ancestors had possessed for generations and set adrift on the roads. It meant that nationalities would not be put under alien domination, without even being asked their wishes. Such barbarities were renounced.
The idea of plebiscites in disputed areas is implicit. It was not the dickering of contending governments or the predispositions of such men as Roosevelt, Churchill, or Stalin that would prevail in any revision of the map of Europe, but only the wishes of the peoples concerned.
All of this was clear in the language used. It had to be,for Roosevelt could never sell this war to the American people if they were not told that this war, unlike previous wars of Europe, would not end in that fruitless shoving around of unwilling populations and callous penciling of new lines on maps which in the past had made each war but a prelude to another war. Any equivocation on this point might have been fatal to his and Churchill's purpose, so they made a solemn pledge before the world.
This war was to end in perhaps the most. terrifying peace in all history. The mass deportation of millions of innocent civilians, the partitions, the spoliation and plunder, and the destruction of moral and spiritual values were to be on an unprecedented scale: 'the world was to be left with no alternative but to prepare for a new holocaust. What took place at Tehran and Yalta, along with the procedures adopted there, we shall examine in detail later. The ancient kings of the Assyrian Empire,from Ashurnazirpal, who ascended the throne of Nineveh in 884 B.C., to Ashurbanipal, who devastated Elam in 645 B.C., had made mass deportation a routine procedure of conquest. Other prototypes for the practices that were adopted at the end of World War II, including the systematic looting, the seizure of territory, the hanging of the leaders of the vanquished countries, and the imposition of alien cultures and puppet officials, were not lacking in the long annals of warfare. In the Atlantic Charter, however, President Roosevelt and 'Prime Minister Churchill renounced in advance most of these excesses, which a more enlightened Christian civilization had come to look upon as atrocities. It was an age of democracy, and-or so they solemnly proclaimed-"the wishes of the people concerned" were to be consulted.
The choice of the precatory word "desire" in the Second Point ("... they desire to see no territorial changes ....") offers no loophole. The war was but a test of military strength. The victors would have overwhelming superiority at its conclusion, so that their will and their desire could be the same. The only imponderable was their sincerity, or the lack of it. (Actually, as we shall see, the Second Point was thrown in the wastebasket by Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Russians-by tacit understanding early in the war and by firm agreement long before the war ,was over.)
The original Churchill draft read differently:
Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; they are only concerned to defend the rights of freedom of speech and thought without which such choice must be illusory.
Why was this second clause cut out when it got into American hands? Concern for freedom of speech and thought is at the heart of the American political creed. Sumner Welles gives a curious reason for the elimination. He says "it was more than doubtful that the American Congress would at that moment have approved a pledge by the government of the United States to 'defend .the rights of freedom of speech and thought' when those rights were abrogated in every Axis country."8
Welles must indeed have been hard put to think up a respectable reason when, several years after the event, he stooped to this bit of dissembling. In the first place, the Atlantic Charter was not intended to be submitted to the Congress for approval, nor was it. As Sherwood confides, Roosevelt "was taking no chances on that."9 In the second place, the rights of freedom of speech and thought were not only being abrogated "in every Axis country," as Welles chooses to put it, but had never even existed, and were laughed at with official contempt, in Soviet Russia, which the Roosevelt administration was undertaking to build up to be the dominant military power in Europe. In the third place, if the word "defend" was too strong at the moment, as implying warlike action, such an expression as "endeavor to further," as adopted in the Fourth Point of the Charter, could have been substituted. Instead, Roosevelt did not permit freedom of speech and thought to be mentioned at all.
The real reason is' easy to surmise. President Roosevelt and Welles knew that as far as the Atlantic Charter was concerned, two of the President's much-touted· "four freedoms". had to'be thrown overboard. Or, as the Saturday Evening Post quipped in its September 27, 1941, issue, Roosevelt left Washington with his four freedoms and "came back with only two." Every literate person in the world, except the most ignorant or credulous and those blinded by. an emotional affinity for Communism, knew that freedom of speech and-freedom of thought were nonexistent in Soviet Russia, the new ally. Therefore, to bring the subject up at all would create an embarrassment. Too many people might be prodded to ask: "If freedom of speech and thought is what this war is all about, why was Harry Hopkins rushed over to Moscow to cuddle up to Stalin, and why are vast quantities of American weapons and supplies going to be put into the hands of this voracious dictator, who has trampled on every freedom which Americans hold dear?" The incongruity of the situation would approach the ludicrous. The hypocrisy of the pose being struck at the conference might show through, so the reference was deleted completely. That it had been included in the first draft and then cut out was never divulged by Roosevelt,and·by Welles only long after the war was over.
In its place, Roosevelt himself inserted the clause "and they hope that self-government may be restored to those from whom it has been forcibly removed." The next morning, Mr. Churchill suggested putting in the words "sovereign rights and" before "self...government," and thus was the final text arrived at. The meaning was sufficiently fuzzy from the British point of view, for the conceptions of "sovereign rights" and "self government" might be quite contradictory if ever applied to such ·places as Hong Kong, British Honduras, British Guiana, and British Africa.
Thus did President Roosevelt eliminate language which was relatively clear but embarrassing and insert a clause which could he useful for his purposes if misinterpreted, which it would be in the United States. As we know from Hull, Hopkins, and Elliott Roosevelt, the President's mind, when he wrote the clause, was not only on Germany's successes but also on the colonial powers of the world, with their far-flung empires built upon conquest of indigenous peoples in. Asia, Africa, South America, and the islands of the seas. He wanted the American people to see in it a manifesto of liberation everywhere and for all. This was essential if the war was to he sanctified in American eyes to the point of justifying an all...out effort. According to Elliott Roosevelt, his father felt very strongly about Western colonialism.10 He knew the Prime Minister was not with him on this issue, but he did not tell that to his people at home.
The first clause of the sentence, it is to be noted, refers to "all peoples." The second clause, still within the context of "all peoples," would restore sovereign rights and self-government to "those who have been forcibly deprived of them." There. are no limitations of geography or nationality or time. Yet Churchill had his own mental reservations, as Roosevelt knew. These were later confided to a worried House of Commons on September 9, when the Prime Minister said: "At the Atlantic meeting we had in mind the restoration of the sovereignty . . . of the states . . . now under the Nazi yoke." This, he insisted, was "quite a separate problem" from the question of self-government for the "regions and peoples that owe allegiance to the British Crown." This statement was for British consumption and was given little publicity in the United States.
With that breezy vagueness at which he excelled, the Prime Minister did not particularize the "we" ("... we had in mind. . . ."). He could, of course, have meant himself and·Sir Alexander Cadogan, who was with him at the Atlantic meeting, but it is doubtful that his listeners put this interpretation on his words, for he was speaking of the Charter, which was a joint declaration with President Roosevelt. But if he meant the·pronoun "we" to include the President, he was stretching the fact. Sumner Welles, Elliott Roosevelt, and Harry Hopkins contradict him here by direct testimony, and the memoirs of Cordell Hull, who conversed with Roosevelt on the subject, support their recollections. Chester Wilmot's very objective history of the war states that the President "had no such limited view... Roosevelt was thinking not only of the occupied countries of Europe but also of colonial peoples throughout the world."11
So while Churchill was singing one song in England, Roosevelt was carrying a different tune in the United States. "We of the United Nations," he said in his Washington's Birthday speech the following February, "are agreed on certain broad principles in the kind of peace we seek. The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and the four freedoms-freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear."12
When he uttered these words, Mr. Roosevelt knew there was a flat disagreement between himself and Mr. Churchill with regard to the applicability of the Atlantic Charter "to the whole world." He was continuing to propagate the fiction of a sincere mutual understanding which he knew had never existed, just as Mr. Churchill had done in England. Who was trying to fool whom? Surely neither of these seasoned politicians, who had chewed over the subject together on a first-name basis in the Admiral's cabin on the cruiser Augusta, thought he was fooling the other. Elliott Roosevelt, who had listened in, relates, with evident relish, that each knew exactly where the other stood. We can only conclude that the Washington's Birthday speech was conceived to fool the American public.*
It: Sherwood states that this speech had been announced at least three weeks in advance, adding, "It had always been Steve Early's practice to build up the radio audience for the President's speeches with plenty of advance publicity and he did this extraordinarily well." Roosevelt and Hopkins, 950
In this speech, Roosevelt took another extraordinary liberty. He spoke of freedom of speech and freedom of religion as though they were covered by the Atlantic Charter. Actually, they had been conspicuously omitted. The Charter mentioned only freedom from "fear" and "want." But by this time the United States was in the war, and in order to assure sufficient public backing for the vast gifts which the Roosevelt administration was going to make to Russia during the ensuing years, a nation-wide campaign of propaganda, or of what Aldous Huxley has labeled "emotional engineering," had been set in motion. This was to condition American thinking to the fantasy that the Soviet government was a liberal democracy which nurtured the same freedoms that all Americans treasured. By this time a Russian signature had been put on a paper saying ,that the Soviet Union adhered to the principles of the Charter. Mr. Roosevelt now found it expedient to pretend that the Charter contained a provision on freedom of speech and religion, which it did not.
As a matter of fact, President Roosevelt started to plow this field even before the United States was in the war. The omission of any reference to freedom of speech and freedom of thought or religion in the Atlantic Charter had proved to be ,a blunder. Inclusion would have caused smiles, perhaps, but exclusion left a gaping hole. No sooner had the President returned to Washington from his epoch-making conference with Mr. Churchill than a wisecrack began to reverberate and reach his ears: two of the four freedoms had got lost somewhere out in the Atlantic. Religious circles were especially shocked" and some of their spokesmen did not conceal their suspicion that the two freedoms had been dropped overboard out of tenderness for the susceptibilities of atheistic Communism.
Mr. Roosevelt was not one to let an issue of this kind dissipate his gains. His decision was a bold one, and it illustrates his extreme confidence in himself and his low opinion of the intellectual alertness of his countrymen. He would,simply make believe that the Atlantic Charter covered freedom of speech and freedom of religion. He would talk that way. People not given to reading would take his word for it, while. others, who read only superficially, might be bemused into some such syllogizing as this: The Charter is a good thing and looks toward a good world; freedom of speech and freedom of religion are certainly good; therefore they are covered by the Charter, especially if Mr. Roosevelt, who ought to know, says they are. Then he would follow up this verbal sleight of hand with a phantasm. He would conjure up a new Soviet Union, complete with all four freedoms, for the delectation of the American people.
Harry Hopkins, of course, was so entangled emotionally in the burgeoning Russophilism of the Roosevelt administration that he was deeply chagrined by the widespread lack of enthusiasm, in the United States, for the Soviet dictatorship. He was restless and ill humored at this period, but he considered the task ahead to be simply one of manipulating public opinion. A job of emotional engineering had to be done. Early in September, he wrote a private letter to Brendan Bracken, a member of the British cabinet, in which he said:
We are having some difficulty with our public opinion with regard to Russia. The American people don't take aid to Russia easily. The whole Catholic population is opposed to it, all the Nazis, all the Italians and a lot of people who sincerely believe that Stalin is a great menace to the world. Still I think it will come out all right in the end.13
By this time, the clandestine infiltration of the agencies of the federal government by the Communist party had gone far.14 In the Party's work, everything was now subordinated to the necessities of Russian foreign policy. Borkenau describes the strategy thus:
From 1941 onward the communists were assigned tasks such as infiltrating at the center into the policy-making bodies and intelligence services of America and Britain. Even during the Popular Front phase, the communists had learned to conceal their basic political aims. Now-and this was the decisive novelty-they proceeded to conceal, as far as possible, the political identity of their personnel. It was the last consequence of Leninism, of the theory that a closely selected party must lead the country without allowing the masses a share in deciding upon the course to be taken.15
A Roosevelt intimate was Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, whose right-hand man and adviser on foreign affairs was Harry Dexter White. The names of Lee Pressman, David Weintraub, John J. Abt, Nathan Witt, Alger Hiss, and Victor Perlo opened many doors. Lauchlin Currie was a confidential administrative assistant of the President. He wrote his letters on White House stationery. Communist cells had been spawned in the State, Treasury, Commerce, and other departments. The burgeoning war bureaucracy brought to Washington, side by side with loyal Americans, a horde of crypto-apostates and schelners whose deepest allegiance was to a foreign power and ideology. These people, who were part of a conspiratorial network of subversion, were in positions which enabled them to advise Cabinet members and write their speeches, colonize key committees of Congress and write Congressional reports, and prepare news releases. Already the espionage rings which were to be exposed in the revelations of later years were busy. Harry Hopkins was not wrong in his prediction that the "difficulty with our public opinion with regard to Russia" would "come out all right in the end." America had her guard down.
When President Roosevelt reported the Atlantic Charter to Congress in September, his message obliquely mentioned freedom of religion, although the Charter did not. He still shied away from the embarrassing words "freedom of speech." Instead, he spoke of "freedom of information," without defining it.
His choice of this odd phrase, which is alien to American usage but which has a special significance in Marxian political terminology, escaped the attention of most commentators, but the Saturday Evening Post, in its September 27 issue, and certain other publications made a point of it. What did Mr. Roosevelt mean by the phrase? Why were the well-known terms "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" no longer good enough for him? In Communist and other totalitarian societies, the dissemination of news is controlled by the government. This output is called "information." The only freedom possessed by the individual citizen is to receive the information sanctioned by the government in its official or controlled organs of publication. This is very different from the concept of freedom of speech and press which is rooted in Anglo-American institutions.
After gingerly tossing in the expression "freedom of information" on this occasion, Mr. Roosevelt did not toy with it again. He proceeded to bear down on the subject of religion. We now know that what had been bothering him and Harry Hopkins ever since they came back from the Atlantic Conference was the problem of reconciling the facts with the pretense that the war was a showdown between what Winston Churchill had euphemistically called "the good forces and the evil forces" of the world. It would be difficult to erase from the minds of all churchmen and the devout of all faiths the revilement of religion in the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Had not religion been called the "opiate" and the "poison" of the people?
There was only one thing to do: draw a curtain over the past
and try to persuade the doubters, by reiteration and ruse, that
religion was protected and flourishing in the Soviet Union. It
was decided that the President would have a few carefully chosen
words on the subject to drop strategically into the publicity mill
at a press conference. In addition, Averell Harriman was dispatched to Moscow. His primary assignment was to discuss with
Stalin the delivery of American weapons and supplies, but an
important secondary purpose was to induce the Russians to make some kind of a statement, for publicity purposes in the United
States, sympathetic to religion.
At his press conference of September 30, when a reporter asked about religion in Russia, Mr. Roosevelt was ready for him. "Go and read Article 124 of the Russian Constitution," he said. But he did not tell what Article 124 provided. Instead, with that facility for unobtrusive evasion which was always one of his strongest forensic assets, he went on to say that Russia's provisions concerning religion are "essentially what is the rule in this country; only we don't put it quite the same way."
A precisian might prefer to call this a suggestio falsi rather than a lie. One given to colloquial descriptiveness would surely call it a "whopper." Mr. Roosevelt could not have believed what he said. Not two years before, he had told the American Youth Congress how much he detested "the banishment of religion" from Russia.16 (That was during the period of the Berlin-Moscow alliance, when it served Mr. Roosevelt's bellicose purposes to throw some mud on Hitler's ally, as well as on Hitler himself.)
However, as Mr. Roosevelt no doubt knew, not one American in ten thousand had a copy of the Russian Constitution or had access to one. Few libraries possessed it. Most newspapers printed his remarks and let it go at that. The effect was the deception of a large portion of the American public.
Some alert and courageous publications were horrified at this. The magazine Christian Century, which did manage to find a copy of the Russian Constitution, asked: Is Roosevelt trying to soothe the American conscience by deceiving it?17 The Russian Constitution was known to be a dead letter. It was mere window dressing for a despotism which held individual civil rights as nothing. Furthermore, Article 124 was heavily weighted against religion, not in favor of it. Indeed, the evident objective of that amazing verbiage is the ultimate extinction of religion. First it purports to guarantee the right to perform religious rites; then it guarantees freedom to propagandize, but only against ,religion! Propaganda and instruction are reserved exclusively for the atheists. Even more important is the law governing "religious associations.." This outlaws most of the practices considered basic in civilized countries for the cultivation of the religious life.
In Moscow, Averell Harriman had some success in getting a statement out of the Russians for publicity purposes. This was not as easy as one might have supposed. Saying nice things about religion was not on the list of recommended activities in the Soviet Union; furthermore, the whole idea of having to cater to public opinion in this way was abhorrent, if not incomprehensible. "Throughout the week in Russia," Harriman wrote in his confidential notes, "I took every occasion (and I believe covered most of the members of the Soviet delegation, including of course Stalin and Molotov) of explaining the American political situation and public opinion regarding Russia, particularly in relation to the religious subject, and urged that both statements and action be taken to indicate to America that the Soviets were willing to allow freedom of worship not only in letter but in fact."
Stalin did not tell Harriman that there was religious freedom in Russia or that he believed there should be. In fact, he said nothing. But he did nod his head, which Harriman took to mean "a willingness to see that something was done." Finally, through Oumansky, there came an assurance "that the Soviets did allow religious worship and would reduce restrictions and would have the necessary publicity."18
This was in itself a confession. If the right to worship existed, what were the "restrictions"? And why were the restrictions only to be "reduced"? These details were irrelevant to the purpose of Harriman's assignment, which was not to reform the Soviet Union but to arrange for a publicity statement which would be useful to President Roosevelt in what Harriman had explained to Stalin as "the American political situation." He recorded his successful accomplishment of his assignment with this note: "He [Oumansky] promised the last time I saw him at the American Embassy Friday, October 3, categorically without qualification that the President's public statement on religion would be responded to by a high Soviet official in a manner to obtain maximum publicity in the United States."19
Actually, Harriman was not taken in. He was quite aware that the pretensions about to be broadcast throughout the United States were sham. He knew a fraud was to be perpetrated on the American people, for he wrote a confidential memorandum which recorded his own disbelief. "In spite of all comments and assurances," he wrote, "I leave with the impression that all the Soviets intend to do is to give lip service and to create certain instances which would give an impression of relaxation without really changing their present practices."20
Apparently, Harriman made a conscientious effort to ascertain the true status of religion in Russia. He heard conflicting reports regarding the amount of worship, the percentage of churches in the villages that were open, and the attendance. However, he found everybody in agreement that worship was engaged in only by "older people," chiefly women, and never by Communists. He wrote in his memorandum: "Religion to the communists is superstition and against the Communist philosophy, and its organized form dangerous in developing anti Communist political groups. It is of course a grave offense for anyone to teach the youth under sixteen religious philosophy." He was convinced that in spite of the "lip service" to freedom which might be given for the purpose of the publicity handout to America, religious worship would continue to be tolerated "only under closest G.P.U. scrutiny." In Harriman's words: "The Communists will unquestionably continue anti-religious education of the youth up to sixteen years without allowing religious education. Religious worshipers will be restricted in economic or political advancement even if they are no longer persecuted. Priests or clergymen will be closely watched as will everybody with whom they have intimate contact."21
It was of this police regime, ideologically dedicated to the suppression of religion, that President Roosevelt was speaking when he said in his press conference that Russia's provisions concerning religion "are essentially what is the rule in this country; only we don't put it quite the same way."
There can be no doubt that the inner circle of the Roosevelt administration knew the truth from the many sources available to them. Unfortunately, the contents of the Harriman memorandum quoted above were not divulged to the American people (until many years later). In fairness to Harriman, it may be observed that his duty was to report to his chief, the President. However, no one could have compelled him to play even the least role in this business if his conscience had rebelled. Fraus est celare fraudem. ("It is a fraud to conceal a fraud.")
During the next two months, Mr. Roosevelt's phantasm was taking robust shape. A constant stream of propaganda went forth,to press, pulpit, school, luncheon club, radio. The Soviet Union was given a clean bill of health. It, so the line ran, allowed religious freedom, as we do. The findings of President Roosevelt's emissary, Mr. Harriman, to the contrary were, of course, kept secret, and the most was made of the prearranged publicity which emanated from Moscow, although it was known to be sham.
By December 15, Roosevelt's audacity was so unrestrained that he permitted himself to impute to the entire world, with the exception of Germany, Italy, and Japan, a tender regard for all the principles of the American Bill of Rights.22 This must indeed have surprised many people in the far-flung magistrates of the world, in the diverse dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, caliphates, and lingering feudalism's which comprised the greater part of the land surface of the earth. Surely it must have brought a smile to the lips of Joseph Stalin, who, like Lenin, as Franz Borkenau tells us, always "regarded democracy as the worst enemy."23
It was the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the Bill of Rights as part of the Constitution of the United States. Speaking over the combined radio stations of the nation, Roosevelt said:
Indeed, prior to 1933, the essential validity of the Bill of Rights was accepted everywhere, at least in principle. Even today, with the exception of Germany, Italy and Japan, the peoples of the whole world, all probability four-fifths of them-support its principles, its teaching and its glorious results.
On the contrary, the American Bill of Rights is grounded upon certain philosophic assumptions, concerning the relationship of Man to his God and to the State, which are in violent conflict with patterns of thought which have prevailed in most regions of the world from ancient times to the present. Mr. Roosevelt must have known that the Bill of Rights contained many principles-in limitation of the powers of the State-which were flatly rejected in many nations other than the three he mentioned. Anyone with a mediocre knowledge of the laws and mores of the peoples of the world could have named in two minutes a score of examples which would belie the President's words. But by this time, what F. J. P. Veale, in his book Advance to Barbarism, calls "that mental and moral paralysis" engendered by the war, had already begun to set in. Such extravagances as this latest one of Mr. Roosevelt passed with surprisingly little challenge, even in the academic or so-called intellectual circles, where one might have expected them to arouse doubts about either the rationality or the sincerity of the speaker and to provoke an effort to set the facts straight before the people. Unfortunately, future generations were to pay heavily in blood and resources for the distortions with which Franklin D. Roosevelt was enabled to torpify the thinking of the American people at this juncture.
Just as fatuous, and indeed more reckless, was the peroration of this speech. "We covenant with each other before all the world," he intoned in a high allargando, "that having taken up arms in the defense of liberty, we will not lay them down before liberty is once again secure in the world we live in." If this gratuitous and unilateral commitment were to be taken literally, it could only mean that Mr. Roosevelt was sentencing his people to perpetual warfare. Of course liberty had never been "secure in the world we live in." It was certain not to be after this war, which was to open the floodgates of Europe and Asia to Communism.24
By the time of the Washington's Birthday speech in February, 1942, America was in a frenzy of wartime excitement. Few people checked Roosevelt's words when, as we have seen, he went the full way and made a palpable misrepresentation of the contents of the Atlantic Charter and the degree of mutual agreement between himself and Winston Churchill on the scope of its applicability:
We of the United Nations are agreed on certain principles in the kind of peace we seek. The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and the four freedoms-freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
One must search far to find a Presidential utterance so lacking in integrity. Prime Minister Churchill had insisted to Mr. Roosevelt when they drew up the Atlantic Charter that it was not to apply to the whole world, and he had later emphasized this point in his report to Parliament. The Atlantic Charter did not embrace the four freedoms; Roosevelt himself had cut out two of them which were in an earlier draft. And one of the "United Nations"-one of the largest, in fact, and the one which would be the most aggrandized by victory in the war-had been virtually bribed by Roosevelt's emissary into making a fraudulent announcement of devotion to religious freedom for publicity purposes in the United States-an announcement which was known to be a sham and which had been so described by the emissary himself in his confidential report.
Thus far we have focused mainly on the tacked-together "restoration" clause of the Third Point. We have seen what was originally suggested by Churchill and eliminated by Roosevelt and what Roosevelt later pretended it contained, although it did not. The other clause, which was never changed, proclaimed "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live."
"All peoples" must include the German people. However, the Sixth Point pledged "the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny," by which was meant the National Socialist government of the German Reich. Some English critics quickly pointed out that the majority of Germans had chosen Nazism, or National Socialism, and were loyal to it. Which point of the Charter was to prevail? Such magazines as Contemporary Review and Twentieth Century were displeased with the Third Point because it contradicted the Sixth Point; German commentators were shocked at the Sixth Point because it contradicted the Third Point. To a German or an Italian, the discrepancy was obvious. The Charter was double talk.
In fairness to Churchill, it should be emphasized that in his original draft of the Charter, he had tried to qualify the Third Point, perhaps to reconcile it with the Sixth, by adding the words "they are only concerned to defend the rights of freedom of speech and thought without which such choice [of the form of government desired] must be illusory." But Roosevelt would not have these words in the Charter. They could be brought to bear against the Soviet form of government as well as against the Nazi. The result was that both the illusion and the contradiction remained.
Their tongues "dropped manna" in Milton's phrase, "but all was false and hollow." There was no intention to ask the Tanganyikans whether British mandate was "the form of government" under which they would choose to live or the indigenous Algerians whether they were happy to be absorbed into the French Republic. Nor was it contemplated to poll the Ukrainians or the Estonians on remaining in the Soviet Union or the eastern Poles on joining it.
As their future actions proved, Roosevelt and Churchill respected the right of some peoples only,not "all peoples"-to choose their form of government. For millions of people in Europe and elsewhere, these two men, along with Stalin, soon presumed to make the choice themselves. But when the Atlantic Charter was "held aloft" as a "beacon"-as Sumner Welles put it,the American people were expected to take its words literally. Roosevelt's speech on Washington's Birthday demanded faith in all it said and even more. It is not surprising that a brilliant English lawyer, in a book to which Dean lnge of St. Paul's contributed the Foreword, has bluntly described the Atlantic Charter as "a collection of dishonest verbiage."25
Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field, with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security.
These are.the economic points. There was a reason, especially for the Fourth. In 1932, by the Ottawa Agreements, England and her Dominions had shackled world trade. Sumner Welles described them thus: "The Ottawa Agreements were designed to force every component part of the British Empire, covering a quarter of the globe, to trade solely within that area. Theoretically other countries would still be able to purchase what they wished within the Empire. But, unless they were willing to come within the sterling area, because of the hindrances otherwise placed upon their ability to sell their own goods to the Empire, they could not long continue so to buy for lack of sterling exchange."26
http://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ottawa-agreement-1932
Tariffs, quotas, and blocked currencies had become a part of British trade policy after 1932. The Germans, under Hjalmar Schacht, had resorted to barter; so had the Italians. The Japanese, looking out from their meager islands, saw that many of the raw materials and foods they needed were not purchasable, and they had resolved to build their own empire.
The Fourth Point was meant to give the impression that all of this.was to be changed after the war, but a loophole was left. Churchill insisted upon inserting the words "with due respect for their existing obligations."27 The "existing obligations" were, of course, the Ottawa Agreements between the United Kingdom and the Dominions.
Jeered the magazine Catholic World:
So that's it? Our old acquaintance reappears, the weasel word that sucks the meaning out of a sentence. There used to be current on Broadway years ago a bit of snappy dialogue: "You wouldn't kid me, would you?" "I would if I could, Mister." You wouldn't trick me, would you, Winston? You wouldn't trick me, would you, Franklin? You wouldn't make me a fine promise about "equal access for all to the trade and raw materials of the world," and then neutralize it with the old diplomatic standby "due respect for existing obligations"? Or would you?
Others took it seriously. Ralph Robey, Newsweek's business specialist and its mentor on economic matters,was moved to write an article entitled "Economic Implications of the Eight Points" in the August 25 issue. This was his vision of the postwar world that Roosevelt and Churchill hoped to usher in:
It will be a world in which the whole present system of quotas, allotments, special tariffs, barter agreements, and bilateral trade agreements will have to be junked.... The only system that the world has found which makes this possible is one based on hard money. . .. The whole concept of parity prices for farm products must be tossed out the window.... Likewise, our policy on wages would have to be reversed in order to get our cost of production down to the point where we could meet foreign competition.... Only in those conditions can we live and prosper in a world of the character outlined by the Roosevelt-Churchill agreement.
He concluded that such a world would be "wholly desirable."
This fantasy had a short life. What actually followed the war was the very opposite. There came an orgy of trade restrictions and blocked currencies, soft money and inflation, and as for the United States, the concept of parity prices for farm products was perpetuated, not "tossed out the window," while rising wages and costs of production became a permanent trend. As though under a heavy fine, America was to pour out her wealth during the next generation to a grasping world ridden by fear, hatreds, and militarism.
The Fifth Point was but a prayer for freedom from want "for all." The words "the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field" were purposely vague, if not meaningless. Similar expressions had gushed forth from the World Economic Conference in London in 1933 and on other occasions in the past. The British took a realistic view of Points Four and Five. The typical reaction was that of the distinguished magazine Twentieth Century, which pronounced them "harmless." Bluntly, it said: -"But experience has shown that aspirations expressed in terms as vague and general as these rarely come to anything."
Just as a "hope," this was as moldy as old cheese. Most men have hoped for such a peace since time immemorial. The context, however, offered more than a mere hope to the uncritical. Surely Roosevelt and Churchill knew that nations had differing ideas about what were "their own boundaries," particularly in Europe, where boundaries had been in a state of flux since the days of Charlemagne. Was this meant to restore the status quo ante bellum? Or to freeze forever the status quo post bellum? What if the latter turned out to be unjust? Or politically absurd? Or controversial? Actually, these two gentlemen, along with Stalin, were soon to draw some new and strange boundaries themselves-boundaries so wanton and anomalous'that within them men could not possibly live in freedom from fear and want.
The chief hypocrisy of the Sixth Point lay in its opening phrase, which implied that "the Nazi tyranny" alone stood between mankind and the vision of a tranquil world. Tyranny was by no means an exclusive vice of Adolf Hitler. Fear and want were ubiquitous in the world. They had been before "the Nazi tyranny" and would be after its demise.
Although these words sounded virtuous, nobody seemed to know their purport. In times of peace, men had no difficulty traversing the high seas and oceans without hindrance. Until the war came, the flags of Germany, Japan, Greece, Panama, Sweden, etc-, flew aloft on all the sea lanes of the world. Such small nations as Holland and Denmark had enormous merchant marines. An Italian had no more trouble booking passage: around the world than did an Englishman. In war, freedom of the seas was curtailed. Churchill's Royal Navy was just as busy curtailing it as was Hitler's Deutsche Marine.
The scholarly Twentieth Century was bewildered, but polite. Of the Seventh Point, it said only: "We confess we are unable to understand what this means." To this day, nobody has explained it.
This is the disarmament clause of the Atlantic Charter. Somebody is to be disarmed, but who? No names are mentioned. Sumner Welles confides that it was President Roosevelt who brought this idea to the table. There was no such clause in Churchill's draft. Mr. Roosevelt took his pen in hand and wrote that "any nation which threatens or may threaten to use force outside its frontiers" must be disarmed.28 [Look at the Beast you have created,77 years forward,and the One needing to be DISARMED D.C]
When Churchill read this, the wheels in his head whirled.Great Britain had used force outside its frontiers every generation since the time of William the Conqueror. How could he indulge Roosevelt's little whim and yet make the clause practically meaningless? Presto! Change the words "to use force," which meant something, to "aggression," which meant nothing.29 Roosevelt readily accepted this. However imprecise the word, "aggression" was indubitably something one should be against.
It was no compliment to the intelligence of their people at home that the President and the Prime Minister ventured the Eighth Point with evident confidence that it would not be widely taken as a joke. Less than two years before, the Soviet Union had been expelled from the League of Nations for aggression against her little neighbor, Finland. She had, with the Nazis, marched into Poland and wiped it off the map. She had recently overrun the sovereign nations of Estonia,Latvia, and Lithuania and annexed them. Yet this marauder was now being made a partner of Great Britain and America. Stalin, the strong-arm brigand of eastern Europe, was about to be christened "Uncle Joe" and given one of the three seats at the tables of the mighty. An arms race unprecedented in human history was to follow this war.[And continues to this day DC]
NEXT
PART THREE
Wastebasket Road: Casablanca to Yalta
notes
CHAPTER VIII
1. The statements and impressions given to the press and·the pub" lie during the first few days of Mr. Roosevelt's trip, as referred to in this and succeeding paragraphs, are drawn from the daily reports in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune and the weeklies Time and Newsweek.
2. Morton, Ope cit., xi.
3. Sherwood, Ope cit., 311•
4. Hull, op. cit., 974.
5. Sherwood, op~ cit., 313.
6. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 427.
7. Hull, Ope cit., 974.
8. Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., 39.
9. Welles, Ope cit., 6.
10. Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., 27.
11. Sherwood, Ope cit., 353.
12. Elliott Roosevelt, op. cit., 30.
13. Morton, Ope cit., 101.
14. Ibid., 119. IS. H. H. Arnold, Global Mission (Harper, 1949), 253.
16. Ibid., 231. '
17. Ibid., 253.
18. Ibid., 254.
19. Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., 33, 41•
20. What transpired at this meeting is gleaned from Welles, Ope cit., II-IS; Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 434-42; Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., 39; Sherwood, Ope cit., 356-60; and the record of the Congressional investigation of the Pearl Harbor attack.
21. Sherwood, Ope cit., 362.
22. See Chapter VI.
23. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 438.
24. Ibid., 441.
25. Churchill's address of February IS, 1942. New York Times, February 16, 1942.
26. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 447.
27. Time, August 25, 1941.
28. Sherwood, Ope cit., 362.
29. Welles, Ope cit., 17.
30. Ibid., 17.
31 . Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 444.
32. New York Times, August 25, 1941.
33. London Times, February 28, 1945.
34' Russell Grenfell, Unconditional Hatred (Devin-Adair, I953), 152 •
35. Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 456.
36• London Times, October II, 1954.
CHAPTER IX
1. Chester Wilmot, The Struggle for Europe (Harper, 1952 ), 633.
2. The drafts were disclosed in Welles Ope cit. Churchill's original draft also appears in The Grand Alliance.
3. Welles, Ope cit., 16, 17.
4. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 433.
5. Sherwood, Ope cit., 350.
6. See Freud's letter to Albert Einstein, written in Vienna in September, 1932, in Readings in World Politics (American Foundation for Political Education, 1952), II.
7. See Veale, op.cit., and the Foreword by The Very Reverend William Ralph lnge, Dean of St. Paul's; Freda Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (Regnery, 1949); Austin J. App, History's Most Terrifying Peace (Boniface Press, 1946); Montgomery Belgion, Victors' lustice (Regnery, 1949).
8. Welles, Ope cit., 7.
9. Sherwood, Ope cit., 362.
10. See Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., Chapter II.
11. Wilmot, Ope cit." 633.
12. Public Papers.
13. Sherwood, op. cit., 372.
14. See Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments, Report of the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Laws, to the Judiciary Committee, U.S. Senate, July 30, 1953 (Government Printing Office); documentation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; James Burnham, The Web of Subversion (John Day, 1954); Whitehead, Ope cit.; Hoover, Ope cit.
15. Borkenau, Ope cit.~ 279.
16. February 10, 1940. See Public Papers (1940), 93.
17. Christian Century (October IS, 1941).
18. Sherwood, Ope cit., 391-93.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Public Papers (1941),557.
23. Borkenau, Ope cit., 72.
24. See Harry Elmer Barnes (ed.), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caxton 1952).
25. Veale, Ope cit.
26. Welles, Ope cit.~ 8.
27. Ibid.~ 14; Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 437..
28. Welles, Ope cit., 10.
29. Ibid., 14.
In his memoirs, Winston Churchill sidesteps any responsibility for the staginess of his nautical rendezvous with Roosevelt. With exquisite casualness, he writes that Harry Hopkins told him the President wished very much to have a meeting with him "in some lonely bay or other" and that he accepted.6
On Saturday, August 9, the Prince of Wales and its escort, all camouflaged, joined the American armada assembled in Placentia Bay as planes circled overhead. The battleship Arkansas, the cruisers Augusta and Tuscaloosa, and a flotilla of destroyers, still in peacetime gray, with gleaming brass and pine-white woodwork, rode at anchor, placed somewhat like chessmen not yet brought forward into play. Franklin D. Roosevelt, wearing a Palm Beach suit, stood under an awning that had been erected upon the forward gun turret of the Augusta. That day, the Atlantic Conference began.
When Secretary of State Cordell Hull, wearing his most lamblike expression, had put off inquisitive reporters by telling them that the President had not mentioned any meeting with Prime Minister Churchill when he, Hull, talked with Mr. Roosevelt on the telephone the night before Roosevelt's departure,.he had perhaps spoken with literal veracity but certainly without candor. He knew about·the meeting.
However, Mr. Hull had not been invited along. Under Secretary Sumner Welles, a man more consistently pliable under the Roosevelt touch,·had been. In his memoirs, Hull reveals that Welles had written to him on July 28 at White Sulphur Springs, where Hull was resting (he was to be back at his desk in Washington on Monday, August 4), telling him that the conference with Churchill had been arranged for August 8, 9, and 10. In this letter Welles reported that "he intended to urge the President, if he expected to discuss more than purely military problems, to take someone with him who could keep a precise record of the conversations and of the agreements that might be reached."7
This was indeed a strange communication, and it accentuates the strained relationship that existed between these two officials. Welles knew perfectly well that Roosevelt expected to discuss "more than purely military problems," for he had himself been alerted to prepare for that; there was no "if" about it. In fact, he went to the conference with a working draft of the Charter in his brief case.8 As for his intending "to urge" the President "to take someone with him who could keep a precise record of the conversations and of the agreements that might be reached," it is difficult to credit the sincerity of this ostensible naivete on Welles' part. One would suppose that but for Welles' solicitude, Mr. Roosevelt was going to swim out into the Atlantic Ocean to talk to Winston Churchill alone. on a raft. A competent shorthand reporter would have sufficed to "keep a precise record," if that were anything to worry about. Actually, both men were to be accompanied by large entourages, and the Under Secretary must have known of these arrangements, for, as he later disclosed, he had rather detailed preparatory conversations with the President in Washington.9 His letter to Mr. Hull appears to have been phrased to play down the importance of the impending meeting, to assuage the man who, as Secretary of State, would certainly have been a logical functionary to participate in drawing up the aims of the war but who was being left behind.
Franklin D. Roosevelt hardly needed Sumner Welles to urge him to take "someone" with him. He had a natural proclivity for showmanship. Nor did he need to be told by a Louis B. Mayer or a Cecil B. De Mille that there are three essential elements of any successful theatrical production: a good dramatic story, a colorful setting, and an impressive cast. With a war raging in the world and with all the facilities of the Army and the Navy at his disposal for use as props, his fecund imagination had had no difficulty contriving the story and the setting. As for an all-star cast, that was his at the snap of his fingers. Generals, admirals, and lords, striped-trousered diplomats and slouch hatted back-room favorites-all big. names, exuding glamour and mystery-were only too happy to participate in the epic drama of the hour and could be summoned from either side of the Atlantic by a telephone call.
With the Prime Minister came his inscrutable chum and confidant, Lord Cherwell, who had until recently been plain Professor Lindemann and who is tersely described by Morton ·(who was also on board) as "a tall, unsmiling man"; General Sir John Dill, Chief of the British Army's Imperial General Staff; Admiral of the Fleet Sir Alfred Pound, the First Sea Lord; Sir Wilfrid Freeman, Vice Chief of the Air Staff; Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; and their assistants, secretaries, and flunkies. England's much cartooned newspaper publisher, Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Supply in Churchill's cabinet, followed by air.
Even more ostentatious was the company President Roosevelt chose to surround him at the conference. Included were General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army; Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations; Admiral Ernest J. King, commander of the Atlantic fleet; General H. H. ("Hap") Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Forces; Admiral Richmond K. Turner of the Navy's War Plans Division and Colonel Charles W. Bundy of the Army's War Plans Section; Harry Hopkins, officially the Lend-Lease Administrator, actually the President's right-hand man in. all things, just back from a cabal in the Kremlin; Hopkins' Lend-Lease assistant, Major General James H. Burns; Lend-Lease "Coordinator" W. Averell Harriman, generally considered a traveling handy man of the President and Hopkins; Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles; General Edwin M. ("Pa") Watson, the President's military aide, arid Captain John R. Beardall, his naval aide. In addition, two of the President's sons were brought into this momentous gathering.
Mr. Roosevelt had four sons. Two had put on uniforms.·The youngest, Franklin, Jr., in his early twenties, had become an ensign in the Navy. Elliott, a few years older, had been commissioned a captain in the Army. John and James were civilians. The President chose Franklin, Jr., and Elliott and had them detached from their service assignments and brought to his side at the Atlantic Conference, where they figured prominently in the photographs and movie reels taken for public display. This widely advertised the fact that two of the Roosevelt sons were in uniform.
The scene was pictorially impeccable. The President, his shoulders thrown hack, his head slightly cocked on one side, was handsome, impressive, and photogenic-as usual. Franklin, Jr., and Elliott had been placed in the immediate foreground. Even the veriest dolt would now see that if the world was going to be saved in its great crisis, it was the Roosevelt family that was rolling up its sleeves to save it.
Mr. Churchill stayed on the Augusta to have lunch privately with Mr. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins. Elliott Roosevelt tells us that when he joined them at the end of the meal, he found the Prime Minister "draining his glass" and talking about the United States' declaring war on Germany "straightaway." We gather from Elliott's report that his father did not say to Mr. Churchill that he still hoped the United States "would not have to get into a shooting war," which was the cheerful tidings he had left with the press when he boarded the Potomac the previous Sunday. On the contrary, he was ruefully explaining to his guest that the temper of the American people was not yet ready. The President was thinking, blurts out Elliott, of "American politics."10
It would appear that this luncheon meeting on the first day of the conference provided a revelation of the basic motivations of the principals. Yet Robert E. Sherwood's account does. not even mention it. Sherwood skips to the formal dinner (dinner jackets and black ties) given by the President that evening. The Americans present, he states, were Roosevelt, Welles, Stark, Marshall, King, Arnold, Hopkins, and Harriman; on the British side were Churchill, Cadogan, Pound, Dill, Freeman,and Cherwell. Perhaps it was a distaste for the inappropriate that forced Sherwood to omit two names from this list, Franklin, Jr., and Elliott. They were present, too, but the deletion is understandable, particularly since he was going on to state that "during dinner, Roosevelt, Churchill, Hopkins, Welles and Cadogan got down to business,"11 which business,·it then appears, was nothing more modest than a charter to project the future of most of the world.
Elliott, however, is not similarly deterred in his hook. He gloats over his presence at the historic banquet. But from his ribald, eyewitness account, we gather that the "business" consisted chiefly of Churchillian eloquence on the subject of what the United States must give and do in the war. "Winston Churchill held everyone of·us, that night-and was conscious every second of the time that he was holding us." There was a reservation in "Father's" mind, however, when the Prime Minister pleaded, .as Elliott puts it, "that the lion's share of Lend...Lease should go to the British lion." "Father" was thinking of Russia.12
The next morning was Sunday. The President, the entire American delegation, and several hundred sailors and marines attended Divine Service on the quarterdeck of the Prince of Wales. They sang and prayed in unison with the British ship's company. The pulpit was draped with the American and British flags. Fifteen hundred British seamen craned their necks to see the bounteous Mr. Roosevelt, who had, the previous afternoon, sent each of them a cardboard carton containing an orange, two apples, two hundred cigarettes, and a half-pound of cheese. (Mr. Roosevelt had chosen to take personal credit for this gift, supplied by the American Navy, by having inserted in each box a card with the words: "The President of the United States sends his compliments and best wishes.") 13
So poignant was the ceremony that Churchill's writer, Morton, recorded that it was almost intolerable in its emotionalism. There was a prayer for the President, a prayer for the King and his ministers and generals and admirals, and, lest the supplication be too personalized, a prayer for the victory of Right and Truth. Onward Christian Soldiers was one of the hymns chosen for the occasion. As its martial beats rolled out over the water, even the huge fourteen-inch guns of the battleship seemed beatified, and one could easily forget that some of the Allies in the great impending crusade were renegade Christian soldiers at best, with little godliness to commend them.
The propagandistic potentialities of this mise en scene were, of course, a politician's delight. From the standpoint of anyone bent upon wooing the American people toward greater belligerency, they were reason enough for the whole expedition. In preparation, Elliott Roosevelt had sent a Grumman plane to Lake Gander and back, a trip of almost three hundred miles, to bring Air Force photographers with both still and motion-picture film and equipment. The Navy, with its battleships, cruisers, and destroyers on the spot and its submarine base nearby, naturally had·its own amplitude of such facilities,. but economy could hardly be expected in exploiting this opportunity. As a promotional medium, pictures could be almost as effectual as the lofty words soon to be unloosed to the world from the unique backdrop of this trumped-up naval concentration in a bay on the coast of Newfoundland. So there was more business· on hand than just praying. This, Franklin D. Roosevelt's moment of piety before going forth, like St. George to slay the dragon, had to be seen in movie theaters throughout the land, from Maine to California.
After these rapturous rites of Sunday morning on the deck of a battleship, of which a vast number of pictures were taken, Mr. Roosevelt was treated to a delectation of a more worldly kinda gastronomic one-of which no pictures were taken. The grouse-shooting season had opened in England on August 1, and Mr. Churchill had arranged for sufficient birds to be put on the Prince of Wales for a luncheon party, with an extra brace for the President. This was the delight served in the wardroom to the two leaders and their staff chiefs after the Divine Service.14 The spirit at once yielded to the flesh.
"Hap" Arnold's epicureanism, a capacity not normally cultivated by the army fare of the professional soldier, had been considerably refined during his recent peregrinations in the higher echelons of brass and might. On his visit to England that spring, the red carpet had been rolled out for him. From the many gracious references in his memoirs-such as "we had a delightful lunch at the Savoy" and "we had an interesting dinner at 'The Beaver's' [Lord Beaverbrook's] house in the country"-we gather that his "Global Mission" was not always a harrowing experience. The gates of Buckingham Palace had been opened to him. ("Then I entered a room, and there was the King.") He had also been invited for a week end with the Churchill's at Dytchley Castle, where life in wartime was so far from grim that a dinner coat was still derigueur. Here a guard of honor saluted his departure, in the limousine of Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, after a luxurious visit devoted at least partly to.the elaboration of Mr. Churchill's ideas of "proper propaganda" to change the thinking of the American people and bring the United States into the war.16
So the caviar-and-grouse feast in the wardroom of the Prince of Wales was not "Hap's" first experience as a gourmet, and there is no reason to believe that the vodka, the champagne, the port, and the brandy rendered him any less able to enjoy the dinner Sir John·Dill gave that night "for some of us" in the Admiral's cabin. By this time he seems to have recovered from the shock of the British requests made the previous day. ("There was one item that stunned me: the British were asking for 6,000 more heavy bombers than we were then producing.") Between the luncheon and the dinner, there was, on the Augusta, a round table discussion, which included. Marshall, Arnold, Dill, and Freeman, on the favorite subject of expanding and accelerating the American war effort.17 Dill and Freeman could hardly have chosen a more propitious moment to find their American military opposites in a mellow and obliging mood. By Monday, Sir Wilfrid was so pleased with "Hap" that he confided to him: "When Portal comes over, I am going to insist that he see just two people; one is the.President of the United States, and the other is you."18 (The British knew, of course, that it was Harry Hopkins who really held the key to the treasure, but as far as air-force materiel was concerned, it was important to them that General Arnold be an eager expediter, an efficient conduit.)
Elliott Roosevelt was also invited to the Prime Minister's voluptuous Sunday grouse-and-champagne luncheon. Only one incident does he record: "And there was the moment when someone rapped for quiet and cried out: 'Gentlemen, the King!' and there was a great scraping back of chairs and shuffling of feet and a moment of silence while the glasses were lifted up and then the wine sipped."
That night, and the next, too, the Prime Minister dined with the President on the Augusta. To these intimate meetings the brass and the braid were not invited. But Harry Hopkins was included. So were the two Roosevelt boys.19
On Monday morning, Churchill came over from his battleship at eleven o'clock for a two-hour conference with the President. The purpose of this meeting was twofold: to beat into shape the final draft of the joint declaration (the Atlantic Charter) and to prepare a stiff note to Japan. The State Department and the Foreign Office were represented, appropriately enough, by, respectively, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles and Sir Alexander Cadogan, Britain's Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.20
One might have thought that this quartet-Roosevelt, Churchill, Welles, and Cadogan-would proceed to chart the future policy of the world (if indeed they judged themselves qualified to tackle such a project at all) as well, if not better, without the assistance of Harry Hopkins. Surely there was nothing in the background of this man that would prepare him for this role, which would seem at the least to require a developed juridical sense and a profound knowledge of history. Hopkins' recent tete-a-tete with the Russian tyrant in the Kremlin was hardly a substitute for these prerequisites. Indeed, the mantle of a sage could only look ludicrous on his shoulders. Yet President Roosevelt had him at this meeting, as he had him at most important meetings.
Harry Hopkins understood the kinetics of politics. Let such as Sumner Welles fret about punctilio; let him excite himself over the absence of a qualifying phrase in a document. If the exigencies of the moment demanded a charter, with Harry Hopkins present no nice concern over precision of meaning could long delay it. Words for the purpose would be put together and agreed upon without much ado and with little exertion required from Mr. Roosevelt. A wag in Washington had once remarked that Sumner Welles glanced in a mirror every three hours "to be sure the halo was still there." But virtue was never likely to get out of hand with Harry Hopkins in the room, which is probably one reason why he was so constantly at his master's elbow.
By the time the British sailed for home on Tuesday, "Winston" and "Franklin" had achieved a well-buttered camaraderie. This was to be expected, since both came to the conference with the same objective in mind, i.e., to hasten the entry of the United States into outright war. The Atlantic Charter was to glorify the war in the eyes of the American people. Roosevelt's eagerness to do this overrode all other considerations.
One would have supposed that in any game with the Prime Minister, the President held all the trump cards at that time, but to a surprising extent, the reverse was true. Thus on Monday, Mr. Churchill reported in a telegram to his cabinet, addressed to the ·Lord Privy Seal: "For the sake of speedy agreement I have little doubt he [the President] will accept our amendments." Referring to one of these amendments, he said: "He will not like this very much, but he attaches so much importance to the Joint Declaration, which he believes will affect the whole movement of United States opinion, that I think he will agree." He did agree. Churchill, it appears, was rightly confident that he had the President in his pocket, but. there was the haunting doubt of whether the President yet had the American people in his pocket. So' when.the Briton asked in his telegram that the War,Cabinet be summoned that night to approve what he was doing, he cautioned. that "it would be most imprudent on our part to raise unnecessary. difficulties" and added 'that' he feared the President would be "very much upset" if no joint statement could be issued, and "grave and vital interests might be affected."
Implicit in this message is a recommendation that his 'colleagues not take too seriously all of the content of the strange declaration which he was asking them to approve. We know that they did not. As Sherwood puts it, the officials of the British government never regarded the Atlantic Charter as much more than "a publicity handout."21
Churchill and Cadogan had, on Saturday evening, presented the first draft, some parts of which, according to Welles, "meant precisely nothing." Welles prepared an alternative draft which Roosevelt edited early Monday morning. By eleven o'clock, Welles had the third draft ready for the four-man meeting in the President's quarters. The next day, the conference ended and the Prime Minister went home.
Thus was born what Churchill's accompanying chronicler, Morton, called "a new charter for Humanity." Harry Hopkins acted as a sort of midwife. The period of gestation, be it noted, was not long. However, as Morton professed to see it, it was "a splendid charter, but one that, after all, was drawn up long ago upon a mountain side in Galilee." Such plagiarism, if it be that, might perhaps explain the briskness of the literary composition that took place on the cruiser Augusta, although the image Morton contrives, of two master politicians dashing· out to sea on warships to rephrase the Sermon on the Mount, is a bit disconcerting. The haste with which "a new charter for Humanity" was brought forth comes to mind when one reads what was said of it by the English magazine Twientieth Century in its·next issue: "Even as a piece of rhetoric, the Anglo-American Declaration will simply not do." (As events proved, it was as a piece of rhetoric, and as that only, that the Charter did do.) This was the final text:
Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister August 12, 1941
The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's. Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.
First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.
Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.
Third, they respect the right of all peoples·to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.
Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.
Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field, with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security.
Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and·want.
Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance.
Eighth, they believe that all the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.[What a fucking joke D.C]
The "new charter for Humanity" did bear one resemblance to Divine Writ. There were no mortal signatures affixed,no sealing wax.
Mr. Churchill also took advantage of the occasion to see to·it that Roosevelt shook his fist at the Japanese again. It.was now known that the imposition of economic sanctions on July 26 had put Japan in an intolerable predicament. As we have seen, this was no surprise to Roosevelt, who had been warned by the Navy that the embargo meant war.22 Nor could Sumner Welles,with the accumulated information of the State Department at his disposal, have harbored any illusion. He could not have been unfamiliar, for example, with the Hornbeck Memorandum of January 3, 1935, in which the Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs stated what must have been almost axiomatic in diplomatic circles: "It is obvious that Japan either must have access to enlarged markets for her goods and must further develop an industrialized economy or must starve. The inherent virility and vitality of the Japanese people preclude any expectation that they will passively accept the latter alternative." As for Mr. Churchill, surely no one needed to expostulate with an Englishman on the problems of Japan's insularity, and he was geographer enough to know that there was in Japan, which has meager natural resources, a population of eighty million occupying an area one twentieth the size of Australia, which had a population of only seven million. So it is somewhat surprising to read in the Churchill memoirs: "It had not perhaps been realized by any of us how powerful they [the sanctions] were."23 Be that as it may, it was agreed that a truculent American note would be dispatched to the Japanese. Their dilemma was to be pressed upon them. Churchill telegraphed his cabinet: "He [Roosevelt] has agreed to end his communication with a severe warning, which I drafted."24 (It is no wonder, then, that when the attack on·Pearl Harbor came, the exultant Mr. Churchill blurted out to the House of Commons: "This is the object that I have dreamed of, aimed at and worked for; and now it has come to pass!")25
The Prince of Wales weighed anchor at 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday. In a pleasing little farewell ceremony, the President and the Prime Minister exchanged "autographed photographs," Morton tells us. A cordial message had been sent to the Russian dictator just before the final parting.
Back on the Prince of Wales, Churchill again telegraphed his government. "They"-the pronoun hangs in the air-"are sending us immediately 150,000 more rifles, and I look for improved allocations of heavy bombers and tanks. I hope they will take over the whole ferry service and deliver both in England and in West Africa by American pilots, many of whom may stay for war..training purposes with US."26 He hoped that his colleagues would feel that his mission had been "fruitful." From the King came a message of congratulation. Nine days before, Franklin D. Roosevelt had started out on what he had called a fishing trip, but it was Winston Churchill who made the big catch.
There was one point on which Roosevelt took full charge. That was the form of the Charter and the timing and manner of its release to the world. He insisted that it not be inscribed on parchment and signed and sealed as a treaty. That would have required him to submit it to the Senate for ratification, and, as Sherwood frankly states, "he was taking no chances on that."28 It was merely to be mimeographed and released.
"Nevertheless," writes Sherwood, "its effect was cosmic and historic." Sumner Welles has written that "it was precisely as valid in its binding effect as if it had been signed and sealed,"29 thereby introducing a new concept into the law of international compacts which might be designated, for want of any other passport, as the Welles Doctrine and which has, at least, the merit of clothing with legality, even if by sheer fiat, an ostensible agreement which the masses of the world were allowed to think was solemnly consecrated. A "Joint Declaration" presupposes a meeting of minds, i.e., an agreement or compact. As for Franklin D. Roosevelt, whether or not he considered his agreement with the Prime Minister "valid in its binding effect" in a technical, legal sense, there is no doubt that he intended the effect of its release to the world to be "cosmic and historic." It was to strike the American scene like a bolt of lightning.
He had arranged that it be released in London and Washington On Thursday, August 14, while he would still be at sea. When the conference ended, Welles was sent on to Washington with the President's instructions. Just as Welles was leaving the harbor, he received this message, which Roosevelt, with his usual finesse in such matters, had ordered Admiral Stark to send him:
U.S.S. Augusta
Ship Harbor, Newfoundland
August 12, 1941
The President said he would like no release of'the names of those who accompanied the President until Saturday on which day you may release it.
His reasons are that he wants the. press release to stand out "like a sore thumb," with nothing to detract from it or to cause any other discussion; then when it has had time to be. thoroughly digested, just of itself, to go ahead and give out the names of the rest of the party-on Saturday.
H. R. Stark 30
The ''sore thumb" technique was spectacularly successful. On Saturday, when the yacht Potomac, with the President again on board, came around the breakwater and dropped anchor at Rockland, Maine, the country was still agog, and fifty newsmen, radiomen, cameramen, and technicians were waiting for the great performer. Broadcasters babbled into microphones. He was home from the mysteries of the Atlantic, from hostile seas, from a conference that had no parallel. The mellifluous phrases of the Charter had already cast their spell. It was an extraordinary Rooseveltian coup, more dramatic than the cross-country flight in 1932 to address the Chicago convention which first nominated him for the Presidency.
In the wardroom of the Potomac, the President received the White House press corps. He sat calm and relaxed, with Harry Hopkins nearby. To the newsmen, who had been through thirteen days of irritating suspense, he talked informally, smoothly, and soothingly but was sufficiently evasive to allow an intriguing air of grandiose mystery to hover. He said that Anglo-American understanding was now complete as regarded developments on every continent of the world and that he and the Prime Minister had outlined a course of action for any eventuality that might develop anywhere. Some newsmen nodded knowingly at this. Manifestly, anyone who wanted war could easily read into this equivocacy a portent of imminent participation. But to the question "Do you think we are any closer to entry into the war?" the President replied cryptically that he would not say so.
Whereupon Mr. Roosevelt went to Washington by train. His first moves were to confer with Secretary of State Cordell Hull and to summon Congressional.leaders to the White House for a first-hand report of the conference. But there was nothing to deliberate about. The whole affair, including the Charter of the Atlantic, was a fait accompli.
In Great Britain, the London Daily Sketch refused to believe that the Prime Minister and the President had conferred only to produce "a piece of oratory." To Britons in general, the Churchill-Roosevelt conference was worth the effort and expense·only if it brought the United States deeper into the war. They were disappointed that Roosevelt had not openly committed his country to declare war, but they hoped that his understanding with Churchill was like an iceberg, the largest part of which remains invisible.
As for the Charter, that was thought to be mainly for American consumption. Its eight points were met with widespread indifference in England, and Canada, where the more outspoken newspapers and magazines brushed it off with such phrases as "stale magniloquence," "a rhetorical manifesto," and "unrealistic." One London newspaper (the Daily Express) growled that the English people were more interested in war aims than peace aims (a fact which, unfortunately for the future, was only too true).Furthermore, English statesmen had been attending international conferences for a long time, much longer than the Americans. There was much less inclination to whoop things up over mere words. The London Times did manage, dutifully, to rejoice that "the world now knows beyond doubt what we are fighting for," but the Canadian Forum, in its next issue, ridiculed "the gushing efforts" of editors and columnists who took that tack. "None of them," it said, "professes to discuss the actual content of the eight points-and for the obvious reason that there is nothing much in them to discuss.... About the only conclusion we can reach is that Mr. Churchill must be a better sailor than President Roosevelt. He has notoriously been opposed throughout to committing his government to any war aims except the defeat of Hitler. He now concedes to the president a few pious generalities, including two of the president's 'four freedoms,' and in return he no doubt goes home with some very specific promises of American assistance."
A piece of oratory or not, the Atlantic Charter no doubt deserves a place among the memorabilia of British history. It may be trotted out by historians of the future to illustrate the fatuity, or the perfidy, of Anglo-American statesmanship in the Second World War, which is perhaps an ignoble destiny, considering its flamboyant origin. In 1941, however, its consequences were real, if devious. Viscount Samuel did bother·to discuss the eight points in the Contemporary Review and to argue that some were meaningless and others were silly, yet·he said that the Charter would always be "outstanding in the history of these times." Winston Churchill gives us the key to this paradox. He writes in his memoirs that "the profound and far-reaching importance of this Joint Declaration was apparent." But it is also apparent from his treatment of the subject in his memoirs that in his mind, the importance did not lie in any probability that the eight points would be honored at the end of the war. These had been cast off long before Mr. Churchill wrote his memoirs. It lay first, of course, in the efficacy of the proclaimed principles as soothing sirup fora gullible American public and, secondly, in the fact that President Roosevelt's very words, pronounced in the Charter, were a casus belli. The German government could take them in no other way. Churchill writes:
The fact alone of the United States, still technically neutral, joining with a belligerent Power in making such a declaration was astonishing.31
Mr. Churchill knew the restraints put upon neutrals by international law, and he had read the American Constitution, which gives to the Congress alone the power to declare war. So it was natural that he should consider Roosevelt's conduct "astonishing," pleasing though it was to the British and the Russians. He prided himself on having induced Roosevelt·practically to·declare war. "The inclusion in it," he goes on to say, "Is a reference to 'the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny' (this was based on a phrase appearing in my original draft) amounted to a challenge which in ordinary times would have implied warlike action." A challenge to whom? To the existing government of Germany. A challenge to the death. (It "implied warlike action" this time, too. In September, Roosevelt announced orders to the Navy in the Atlantic to "shoot on sight," and in October, in his Navy Day speech, he said, "The shooting has started.")
The message was also plain to the heads of the Soviet government. The tyranny which President Roosevelt was going to see destroyed was the Nazi one, not their own. It was important to them to know this.
Whatever Churchill's private feelings may have been, he played the game to the end. On the Sunday evening after his return to England, at the hour when the greatest number of the American people were sitting quietly at home, he made a broadcast. It was beamed to the United States and had been widely advertised in advance. Never was his voice more sonorous, his cadences more exquisite!y executed, his judging of American susceptibilities more astute. The meeting with President Roosevelt, he said, was "symbolic." It symbolized "the deep underlying unities of the English-speaking people throughout the world." This was fraternal, as befitted the occasion, but it was not grand enough for Mr. Churchill. Sure of his mastery, he rose to a higher plane. It symbolized, he intoned, "something even more majestic, namely the marshaling of the good forces of the world against the evil forces."32
Coming from another man, such sanctimony might have evoked either disgust or laughter, but Mr. Churchill brought tears to many eyes. In the spell of his oratory, the element of self exaltation was overlooked, and forgotten were the British Empire's long record of conquests and subjugation's, her invention of the concentration camp during the Boer War, the scrapping of the Fourteen Points after Germany surrendered in World War I, the grabbing of vast territories in Africa in 1919, and other skeletons which were moldering in His Majesty's royal closet and which had contributed to the international reputation of "perfidious Albion." Also forgotten was the moral record of Britain's new ally to the east, the semi-Asiatic despotism which had only the year before been expelled from the League of Nations for aggression, at which time Mr.. Churchill himself had made the historic remark that "Communism rots the soul of a nation." Not in the least abashed by any of this, Mr. Churchill put the present war up to his American listeners as a simple clash between the "good forces of the world" and the "evil forces."
Then came the shining promise. He announced that the English-speaking nations were going to lead "the broad toiling masses in all the continents" out of "their miseries" and to "the broad high-road of freedom and justice." If the Americans needed a cause to fight for, what more could they want than this? For good measure, he added this sweetener: "This is the highest honor and the most glorious opportunity which could ever have come to any branch of the human race!"
Surely Hitler had nothing to do with the miseries of most of the "broad toiling masses" on the continents of the world. And did these unfortunates include the beaten-down subjects of Stalin, Molotov, et ai, which notorious gentlemen now presumably came within Mr. Churchill's category of "the good forces"? Had Mr. Churchill asked these new allies of his what their postwar plans for Europe and Asia were? On none of this was he specific, or even articulate.
The flaws were fairly safe from detection. The Prime Minister's appeal was emotional rather than analytical, and his art was irresistible to most Americans. Months of incessant propaganda had predisposed them to acceptance of this type of approach. Actually, the speech was an eclipse of fact, a sheer tour de force of distortion, as events were inexorably to prove. But Mr. Churchill had the sagacity to turn to religion on this Sunday eve and, at the same time, to shroud with silence the doctrinaire atheism of his Communist allies. He described the hymns sung on the deck of the battleship Prince of Wales, good old Christian hymns familiar to his audience.
We sang "Onward Christian Soldiers," and indeed, I felt that this was no vain presumption but that we had a right to feel that we were serving a cause for the sake of which a trumpet has sounded on high.
The war had indeed been made holy.
By coincidence, Mr. Churchill's archenemy, Adolf Hitler, also had a habit of using the word "masses" with the redundant adjective "broad" preceding it. "If you want the sympathy of the broad masses," he had written in Mein Kampf, "then you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things." One of the few virtues found alongside the roster of Hitler's vices was the frankness to lay bare his methods for all to see and to copy if they wished. In this instance, Machiavelli had given the same counsel some four hundred years before. It had been put into practice by many illustrious figures in modern European history, who, however, unlike Machiavelli and Hitler, possessed a reticence, or delicacy, which would never have permitted such self-revelation.
If in August of 1941 one had set out consciously to compose a crude and stupid thing to say about the war then raging in Europe, one could not have done better than to say that the triumph of the Soviet military hordes, which was one of the objectives and the inevitable effect of the Allied coalition, would spread freedom and justice to the peoples who would lie in their path. It could only be more preposterous to suggest···that Onward Christian Soldiers be the theme song.
The cynicism of Adolf. Hitler should not have shocked too greatly the inhabitants of Mr. Churchill's island homeland. The Scotch novelist Henry Mackenzie had long ago given them this thought to ponder:
Mankind, in the gross, is a gaping monster, that loves to be deceived, and has seldom been disappointed.
The American people had recently heard Hitler's warmed-up version of this old aphorism quoted up and down the land to prove that Hitler was a scoundrel. Most of them were blissfully unaware that the potion he prescribed was an old recipe and that presidents and prime ministers could mix it as well as a Fuhrer and often had.
Incredible as it may seem, even the House of Commons, which one would assume to have some sophistication, was to hear from the lips of Winston Churchill on February 27, 1945, and to accept docilely, this amazing statement:
I know of no Government which stands to its obligations even in its own despite more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.33
Of this, the noted English naval historian Captain Russell Grenfell has said: "This must surely rank as one of the most serious political misjudgments in history."34
Perhaps Grenfell underrated the Prime Minister's judgment by overrating his candor. Churchill could not possibly have been speaking from conviction; for a quarter of a century he had been saying the contrary. Peremptorily, he silenced debate: "I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith." By then, Stalin had long since repudiated the Atlantic Charter pledge to seek no territorial aggrandizement, had gobbled up with the ruthlessness of a Ghengis Khan the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, was in the process of seizing parts of Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Germany as permanent annexations to Russia, and had conspired, for a secret price, to violate his neutrality treaty with Japan, as Mr. Churchill, just back from Yalta, knew. The record of the Soviet government from the early days of Bolshevism had been one of chicanery, perfidy, and default because these were openly prescribed tactics of Leninism and Stalinism in the grand strategy for the Communist world revolution. The more recent moves of the Red dictatorship had demonstrated beyond cavil that it would not be deterred in its imperialistic ambitions by any moral commitments.
We can only believe that Churchill made his statement to Commons as a gesture to which he felt committed, a sort of diplomatic obeisance which Yalta compelled. We do know that at this stage of his life he moved about, as he later wrote, "with an aching heart and a mind oppressed by forebodings."35 Nine years later, Sir Winston, still at his euphonious as his eightieth birthday approached, was found at Blackpool, England, telling a political meeting that if the United States were to withdraw its troops and armaments from Europe, that "would condemn all Europe to Russian communist subjugation and our famous and beloved island to death and ruin."36
Actually, from the moment of Hitler's flaming death and the triumph everywhere of "the good forces" over the "evil forces," Europe had never been out of that mortal peril. Churchill had made his own volte-face publicly as far back as March 5, 1946, when in his famous Fulton speech he dolefully intoned:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain had descended across the continent... Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case.... Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.*
*: Speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri. Roosevelt was dead; Truman· was now President.
Winston Churchill's tongue-in-cheek blurb to the House of Commons in 1945 after Yalta ("Their word is their bond," he even brought himself to say of the Kremlin masters) is one of those assertions, sometimes resorted to in desperate polemics, which in many minds defy contradiction by their very enormity. They stun the intellect by sheer audacity, and opposition freezes. It has been said that politics is the science of exigencies. In fairness to Churchill, it should be recalled that in those days he had always, in his public utterances, to take into account the wishes of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, says Captain Grenfell, was "in a state of infatuated hallucination regarding the virgin purity of Marshal Stalin's motives." The role Churchill deigned to play was often an unenviable one.
More pleasant to perform, perhaps, though no less grotesque, was his task on that Sunday evening back in August, 1941, when, by radio, he assumed command of the forces of God on earth against Satan and graciously offered to share his generalship with the President of the United States.
Chapter 9
THE EIGHT POINTS
"SPEECH IS A FACULTY given to man to conceal his thoughts." In
our day the semanticists have taken this witticism of Talleyrand
and turned it into a cult. It started with the psychologists, but
at the altar of Korzybski an assortment of educators, sociologists
and even economists now worship, often with mixed motives.
They have invented a special jargon and publish a quarterly
magazine to keep the faithful up to date. Many thoughts about
language which were banal to Aristotle and Cicero are now
dressed up in the new esoteric vocabulary and exploited as recently
discovered profundities. Then, by eschewing all objective
definition and subjectivising the meaning of words as the tools
of language, they propagate a kind of linguistic nihilism which,
in its theoretical conclusions, would almost eradicate speech as a
means of communication of ideas. The semanticists could no doubt prove, by their methods, that such a document as the Atlantic Charter means nothing, or could mean anything. It contains words such as "aggrandizement," "freely," "right," "access," and "threaten," which, they would say, have no determinate meaning at all but are like rubber, stretchable at will. However, the moral responsibility of illustrious men, such as presidents and prime ministers, who take it upon themselves to make pronouncements and pledges to the public, cannot be dissolved by showing that they used rubber words. Obviously, they had a purpose in speaking, not to themselves, but to the public. The question we must ask ourselves is: What did they expect most of the people who would hear their message to think it meant? Or what is the minimum meaning which attaches to the words in common parlance? The words of such men beget belief and generate action. They know that. The onus of any latent ambiguity is upon them. The criteria of interpretation must be looked for in the prevailing modes of thought of the receptive public.
It appears from the eyewitness account of Sumner Welles that no little time was spent at the Atlantic Conference trying to say things in a way which would seem, on the surface, to convey a certain meaning but which would not really have that meaning. The problem was complicated by a desire to have phrases mean different things in different parts of the world. Thus Roosevelt and Welles wanted the impression to emerge, at least in the United States, that there was to be a general abandonment by all,including the British Empire, of monopolies of raw materials and trade discrimination's, while Churchill, with his eye on public opinion in England and the Commonwealth, was adamant to exempt,imperial preference without making the exemption so explicit that the American people would detect it.
Roosevelt wished the American people, and others, too, to feel assured that the populations to be liberated would include not only Germany's victims but all subjugated peoples everywhere, while Churchill, on the other hand, nurtured in his own mind a much narrower interpretation which it was inexpedient to spell out in the Charter but which he subsequently reported to the House of Commons. According to Elliott Roosevelt's account, the two men not only chose to give the words they adopted these two meanings respectively, but they were also quite aware of the divergence and yet allowed the fiction of complete mutual agreement to prevail. The Australian historian Chester Wilmot, in his monumental history of the war, The Struggle for Europe, has examined this point with care and has concluded that Elliott Roosevelt's report in this instance is accurate.! So we have here a curious variation on the theme of having one's cake and eating it, too.
Any man possessed of a fair wit and a facility with words can develop the art of the double-entendre. From Aristophanes through Shakespeare, Moliere, Oscar Wilde, and Noel Coward, to the gag writers of radio and television, it has been, in varying degrees of polish, an indispensable tool of comedy. But to achieve mastery of the hidden double-entendre was reserved for great statesmen and diplomats. The team of Roosevelt, Welles, Churchill, Cadogan, and Hopkins, with their five heads together, was not unequal to the task. This more subtle form of wordplay is not of the stuff of comedy, however. It usually occurs in the more tragic plots.
We proceed to examine the eight points of the Charter. But first, there arises the question: Were Churchill and Roosevelt, when they brewed this potion of words, purporting to speak for their respective countries or only for themselves? In the one case they would be placing their countries' honor on the table. In the other, nothing would be committed but their own personal reputations.
Churchill's first draft of the Charter was hazy.2 There was a one-sentence Preamble, which began: "The President of the United States and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government...." Plainly, they were present in their official capacities. The sentence went on to say that these two men "... deem it right to make known certain principles which they both accept for guidance in the framing of their policy and on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world." The "they" refers to the President and the Prime Minister. "Their policy" is not necessarily national policy in their democratic countries. Churchill's language was cautious. Roosevelt changed this. The Preamble finally adopted read thus: "The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries [italics added] on. which they base their hopes for a better future for the world." This left no doubt. The two men were not voicing personal feelings. They were, they said, enunciating the national policies of their respective countries
The United States of America was one of the few nations of the world which had not long since exhausted·its moral credit. It had refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles because that malignant document had violated principle and pledge; it had disassociated itself from stubborn refusal of the French and the English ever to honor the general disarmament clause of that treaty; it was not a party to the incredibly stupid policy of hatred, repression, and vindictiveness which had, in the twenties and early thirties, flaunted a cold ring of bayonets all around a disarmed Germany, stifled her trade, trampled upon her sovereignty, and humiliated her proud people, made a fiasco of the disarmament conference in Geneva in 1932, and, by the inexorable law of action and reaction, helped to assure the advent of a Hitler. Woodrow Wilson's celebrated Fourteen Points had been scrapped as soon as the Germans had laid down their arms at the end of World War I, but the United States had renounced this perfidy of the victorious nations. Furthermore, the United States, as the Poles"the Czechs, the Lithuanians, and others well knew, was, of all the great powers, the most sincere champion of the right of self-determination. So it was a shining reputation for honorable conduct, his country's esteem in the eyes of friends and foes, which Franklin D. Roosevelt was willing to throw into this new jeopardy.
The importance of this to the future of America as a moral force in the world cannot be overestimated. Sumner Welles wrote that the Atlantic Charter was "the official pronouncement of the policies of the two governments." It was "valid in its binding effect," and it was "notice to the world by the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, that in accordance with their constitutional authority to speak for their countries and their governments, the two nations which they represented Would adhere to the great principles set forth in the declaration."3
If this be so, the Atlantic Charter was a gigantic moral commitment made to a world on the threshold of enormous travail and sacrifices. Welles cited no clause of the American Constitution as giving the President authority to bind the United States in this manner. Whether he had the authority or not, Roosevelt arrogated it to himself, and the world took his words to be a pledge by the United States.
FIRST POINT
First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other. This was in the original draft prepared by Churchill. This draft was handed to Mr. Welles by Sir Alexander Cadogan on Sunday morning, August 10, the day after the conference began. According to Churchill's account, President Roosevelt had told him on Saturday that "he thought it would be well if we could draw up a joint declaration laying down certain broad principles which should guide our policies along the same road." One would think the idea had not been broached before. "Wishing to follow up this most helpful suggestion," writes Mr. Churchill, "I gave him the next day, August 10, a tentative outline of such a declaration."4
This casual introduction is in line with Churchill's rather too obvious anxiety to play down the Atlantic Charter in his memoirs. (It was already a dead letter when he wrote them.) However, Harry Hopkins' version of the matter was different, for according to Sherwood, who had Hopkins' private notes before him, Mr. Churchill knew before he saw President Roosevelt that the issuance·to the world of a joint declaration was one of the purposes, if not the only purpose, of staging such a spectacular rendezvous. On the trip across the Atlantic on the Prince of Wales, Harry and the Prune Minister did more than play backgammon. Sherwood records: "They discussed the phraseology of the Atlantic Charter which the Prime Minister was to present to the President."5
The First Point of Churchill's tentative draft was never changed. On the surface, it is unexceptionable. Territorial aggrandizement by annexation is·surely covered. The more subtle kind, by the imposition of puppet rulers in nominally autonomous countries, is not specifically mentioned but should at least come under the catch-all alternative, "or other."
The basic hypocrisy of the First Point lies deeper. Costly as modern wars are, they inevitably aggrandize the victor in some ways at the expense of a powerful enemy who is utterly crushed. Surely Mr. Churchill, looking into the future, could foresee that if the German merchant marine were swept from the seas for a decade, the shipping industry of Britain would capture much of the tonnage formerly carried in German bottoms and that the Cunard and·White Star lines would enjoy a more thriving passenger business if North German Lloyd and Hamburg-American were to be eliminated from the picture for many years after the war..Would not British Overseas Airways be aggrandized by the obliteration of all commercial aviation in a beaten and occupied Germany? Would Britain's markets in Asia, Africa, and South America he more secure in the years to come if the rising competition of upstart Japan were done to death, either by slow economic strangulation or by defeat in war?
Regardless of any moral posturing and pretensions of high motives, a war which eliminates, even temporarily, a strong competitor in the markets of the world and in the commerce on the seas and ·in the air aggrandizes the victor vis-a-vis that enemy. How had Britain won her commercial position from the fifteenth century to the twentieth? By wars in which she had knocked down each competitor who raised a head,the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the Germans. The Germans in the twentieth century, however, would not stay down, and the Japanese were in ascendance in Asia, where British imperialism was an old story. Both were good sailors and efficient industrialists and lived in overpopulated countries. Sharp commercial rivalry with Britain was inevitable. Future historians would record that in the first half of the twentieth century, the issue was settled by war, not by fair and open competition in the market place, just as in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the Anglo-Spanish wars, and in the seventeenth century the Anglo-Dutch wars, had determined the commercial supremacy of those days.
President Woodrow Wilson, speaking in 1919, expressed the opinion that all modern wars are of. this nature. "Is there·any man or woman," he said, "let me say is there any child, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern.world is industrial and commercial rivalry? This was an industrial and commercial war." Sigmund Freud would no doubt have considered this an oversimplification, for he found the seed of war deeply embedded in human psychology and probably ineradicable.6 Nor is it likely that the economic exegesis which a distraught and disillusioned Wilson permitted himself to embrace in 1919 would have satisfied Jonathan Swift, who called war "that mad game the world so loves to play." Be that as it may, to pretend that a war involving Great Britain, Germany, and Japan, all three of·them dependent on foreign trade for their standard of living and all rivals for the markets of the world, would not bring serious dislocations of economic power.and aggrandize the victors in relation to the vanquished is to indulge in fantasy.
When Mr. Churchill drafted the First Point of the Atlantic Charter, he said only that his country "seeks" no aggrandizement, territorial or other. A man might just as well say, when he shakes his neighbor's plum tree, that he is not seeking the plums that by chance fall into his open basket.
SECOND POINT
Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord
with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned. This was in the original Churchill draft and was not changed.. It was the golden promise to peoples whose lands and homes were coveted by others. The words are: "no territorial changes." There are·no exceptions. This could only be understood to be an assurance to Germans, Poles, and all other peoples that their nations would not be forcibly dismembered.
"Freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned." Surely this meant that countries would not be carved up by a few men sitting around a table. It meant that families would not be uprooted from the farms and dwellings which they and their ancestors had possessed for generations and set adrift on the roads. It meant that nationalities would not be put under alien domination, without even being asked their wishes. Such barbarities were renounced.
The idea of plebiscites in disputed areas is implicit. It was not the dickering of contending governments or the predispositions of such men as Roosevelt, Churchill, or Stalin that would prevail in any revision of the map of Europe, but only the wishes of the peoples concerned.
All of this was clear in the language used. It had to be,for Roosevelt could never sell this war to the American people if they were not told that this war, unlike previous wars of Europe, would not end in that fruitless shoving around of unwilling populations and callous penciling of new lines on maps which in the past had made each war but a prelude to another war. Any equivocation on this point might have been fatal to his and Churchill's purpose, so they made a solemn pledge before the world.
This war was to end in perhaps the most. terrifying peace in all history. The mass deportation of millions of innocent civilians, the partitions, the spoliation and plunder, and the destruction of moral and spiritual values were to be on an unprecedented scale: 'the world was to be left with no alternative but to prepare for a new holocaust. What took place at Tehran and Yalta, along with the procedures adopted there, we shall examine in detail later. The ancient kings of the Assyrian Empire,from Ashurnazirpal, who ascended the throne of Nineveh in 884 B.C., to Ashurbanipal, who devastated Elam in 645 B.C., had made mass deportation a routine procedure of conquest. Other prototypes for the practices that were adopted at the end of World War II, including the systematic looting, the seizure of territory, the hanging of the leaders of the vanquished countries, and the imposition of alien cultures and puppet officials, were not lacking in the long annals of warfare. In the Atlantic Charter, however, President Roosevelt and 'Prime Minister Churchill renounced in advance most of these excesses, which a more enlightened Christian civilization had come to look upon as atrocities. It was an age of democracy, and-or so they solemnly proclaimed-"the wishes of the people concerned" were to be consulted.
The choice of the precatory word "desire" in the Second Point ("... they desire to see no territorial changes ....") offers no loophole. The war was but a test of military strength. The victors would have overwhelming superiority at its conclusion, so that their will and their desire could be the same. The only imponderable was their sincerity, or the lack of it. (Actually, as we shall see, the Second Point was thrown in the wastebasket by Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Russians-by tacit understanding early in the war and by firm agreement long before the war ,was over.)
THIRD POINT
Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of
government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign
rights and self-government restored to those who have been
forcibly deprived of them. The original Churchill draft read differently:
Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; they are only concerned to defend the rights of freedom of speech and thought without which such choice must be illusory.
Why was this second clause cut out when it got into American hands? Concern for freedom of speech and thought is at the heart of the American political creed. Sumner Welles gives a curious reason for the elimination. He says "it was more than doubtful that the American Congress would at that moment have approved a pledge by the government of the United States to 'defend .the rights of freedom of speech and thought' when those rights were abrogated in every Axis country."8
Welles must indeed have been hard put to think up a respectable reason when, several years after the event, he stooped to this bit of dissembling. In the first place, the Atlantic Charter was not intended to be submitted to the Congress for approval, nor was it. As Sherwood confides, Roosevelt "was taking no chances on that."9 In the second place, the rights of freedom of speech and thought were not only being abrogated "in every Axis country," as Welles chooses to put it, but had never even existed, and were laughed at with official contempt, in Soviet Russia, which the Roosevelt administration was undertaking to build up to be the dominant military power in Europe. In the third place, if the word "defend" was too strong at the moment, as implying warlike action, such an expression as "endeavor to further," as adopted in the Fourth Point of the Charter, could have been substituted. Instead, Roosevelt did not permit freedom of speech and thought to be mentioned at all.
The real reason is' easy to surmise. President Roosevelt and Welles knew that as far as the Atlantic Charter was concerned, two of the President's much-touted· "four freedoms". had to'be thrown overboard. Or, as the Saturday Evening Post quipped in its September 27, 1941, issue, Roosevelt left Washington with his four freedoms and "came back with only two." Every literate person in the world, except the most ignorant or credulous and those blinded by. an emotional affinity for Communism, knew that freedom of speech and-freedom of thought were nonexistent in Soviet Russia, the new ally. Therefore, to bring the subject up at all would create an embarrassment. Too many people might be prodded to ask: "If freedom of speech and thought is what this war is all about, why was Harry Hopkins rushed over to Moscow to cuddle up to Stalin, and why are vast quantities of American weapons and supplies going to be put into the hands of this voracious dictator, who has trampled on every freedom which Americans hold dear?" The incongruity of the situation would approach the ludicrous. The hypocrisy of the pose being struck at the conference might show through, so the reference was deleted completely. That it had been included in the first draft and then cut out was never divulged by Roosevelt,and·by Welles only long after the war was over.
In its place, Roosevelt himself inserted the clause "and they hope that self-government may be restored to those from whom it has been forcibly removed." The next morning, Mr. Churchill suggested putting in the words "sovereign rights and" before "self...government," and thus was the final text arrived at. The meaning was sufficiently fuzzy from the British point of view, for the conceptions of "sovereign rights" and "self government" might be quite contradictory if ever applied to such ·places as Hong Kong, British Honduras, British Guiana, and British Africa.
Thus did President Roosevelt eliminate language which was relatively clear but embarrassing and insert a clause which could he useful for his purposes if misinterpreted, which it would be in the United States. As we know from Hull, Hopkins, and Elliott Roosevelt, the President's mind, when he wrote the clause, was not only on Germany's successes but also on the colonial powers of the world, with their far-flung empires built upon conquest of indigenous peoples in. Asia, Africa, South America, and the islands of the seas. He wanted the American people to see in it a manifesto of liberation everywhere and for all. This was essential if the war was to he sanctified in American eyes to the point of justifying an all...out effort. According to Elliott Roosevelt, his father felt very strongly about Western colonialism.10 He knew the Prime Minister was not with him on this issue, but he did not tell that to his people at home.
The first clause of the sentence, it is to be noted, refers to "all peoples." The second clause, still within the context of "all peoples," would restore sovereign rights and self-government to "those who have been forcibly deprived of them." There. are no limitations of geography or nationality or time. Yet Churchill had his own mental reservations, as Roosevelt knew. These were later confided to a worried House of Commons on September 9, when the Prime Minister said: "At the Atlantic meeting we had in mind the restoration of the sovereignty . . . of the states . . . now under the Nazi yoke." This, he insisted, was "quite a separate problem" from the question of self-government for the "regions and peoples that owe allegiance to the British Crown." This statement was for British consumption and was given little publicity in the United States.
With that breezy vagueness at which he excelled, the Prime Minister did not particularize the "we" ("... we had in mind. . . ."). He could, of course, have meant himself and·Sir Alexander Cadogan, who was with him at the Atlantic meeting, but it is doubtful that his listeners put this interpretation on his words, for he was speaking of the Charter, which was a joint declaration with President Roosevelt. But if he meant the·pronoun "we" to include the President, he was stretching the fact. Sumner Welles, Elliott Roosevelt, and Harry Hopkins contradict him here by direct testimony, and the memoirs of Cordell Hull, who conversed with Roosevelt on the subject, support their recollections. Chester Wilmot's very objective history of the war states that the President "had no such limited view... Roosevelt was thinking not only of the occupied countries of Europe but also of colonial peoples throughout the world."11
So while Churchill was singing one song in England, Roosevelt was carrying a different tune in the United States. "We of the United Nations," he said in his Washington's Birthday speech the following February, "are agreed on certain broad principles in the kind of peace we seek. The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and the four freedoms-freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear."12
When he uttered these words, Mr. Roosevelt knew there was a flat disagreement between himself and Mr. Churchill with regard to the applicability of the Atlantic Charter "to the whole world." He was continuing to propagate the fiction of a sincere mutual understanding which he knew had never existed, just as Mr. Churchill had done in England. Who was trying to fool whom? Surely neither of these seasoned politicians, who had chewed over the subject together on a first-name basis in the Admiral's cabin on the cruiser Augusta, thought he was fooling the other. Elliott Roosevelt, who had listened in, relates, with evident relish, that each knew exactly where the other stood. We can only conclude that the Washington's Birthday speech was conceived to fool the American public.*
It: Sherwood states that this speech had been announced at least three weeks in advance, adding, "It had always been Steve Early's practice to build up the radio audience for the President's speeches with plenty of advance publicity and he did this extraordinarily well." Roosevelt and Hopkins, 950
In this speech, Roosevelt took another extraordinary liberty. He spoke of freedom of speech and freedom of religion as though they were covered by the Atlantic Charter. Actually, they had been conspicuously omitted. The Charter mentioned only freedom from "fear" and "want." But by this time the United States was in the war, and in order to assure sufficient public backing for the vast gifts which the Roosevelt administration was going to make to Russia during the ensuing years, a nation-wide campaign of propaganda, or of what Aldous Huxley has labeled "emotional engineering," had been set in motion. This was to condition American thinking to the fantasy that the Soviet government was a liberal democracy which nurtured the same freedoms that all Americans treasured. By this time a Russian signature had been put on a paper saying ,that the Soviet Union adhered to the principles of the Charter. Mr. Roosevelt now found it expedient to pretend that the Charter contained a provision on freedom of speech and religion, which it did not.
As a matter of fact, President Roosevelt started to plow this field even before the United States was in the war. The omission of any reference to freedom of speech and freedom of thought or religion in the Atlantic Charter had proved to be ,a blunder. Inclusion would have caused smiles, perhaps, but exclusion left a gaping hole. No sooner had the President returned to Washington from his epoch-making conference with Mr. Churchill than a wisecrack began to reverberate and reach his ears: two of the four freedoms had got lost somewhere out in the Atlantic. Religious circles were especially shocked" and some of their spokesmen did not conceal their suspicion that the two freedoms had been dropped overboard out of tenderness for the susceptibilities of atheistic Communism.
Mr. Roosevelt was not one to let an issue of this kind dissipate his gains. His decision was a bold one, and it illustrates his extreme confidence in himself and his low opinion of the intellectual alertness of his countrymen. He would,simply make believe that the Atlantic Charter covered freedom of speech and freedom of religion. He would talk that way. People not given to reading would take his word for it, while. others, who read only superficially, might be bemused into some such syllogizing as this: The Charter is a good thing and looks toward a good world; freedom of speech and freedom of religion are certainly good; therefore they are covered by the Charter, especially if Mr. Roosevelt, who ought to know, says they are. Then he would follow up this verbal sleight of hand with a phantasm. He would conjure up a new Soviet Union, complete with all four freedoms, for the delectation of the American people.
Harry Hopkins, of course, was so entangled emotionally in the burgeoning Russophilism of the Roosevelt administration that he was deeply chagrined by the widespread lack of enthusiasm, in the United States, for the Soviet dictatorship. He was restless and ill humored at this period, but he considered the task ahead to be simply one of manipulating public opinion. A job of emotional engineering had to be done. Early in September, he wrote a private letter to Brendan Bracken, a member of the British cabinet, in which he said:
We are having some difficulty with our public opinion with regard to Russia. The American people don't take aid to Russia easily. The whole Catholic population is opposed to it, all the Nazis, all the Italians and a lot of people who sincerely believe that Stalin is a great menace to the world. Still I think it will come out all right in the end.13
By this time, the clandestine infiltration of the agencies of the federal government by the Communist party had gone far.14 In the Party's work, everything was now subordinated to the necessities of Russian foreign policy. Borkenau describes the strategy thus:
From 1941 onward the communists were assigned tasks such as infiltrating at the center into the policy-making bodies and intelligence services of America and Britain. Even during the Popular Front phase, the communists had learned to conceal their basic political aims. Now-and this was the decisive novelty-they proceeded to conceal, as far as possible, the political identity of their personnel. It was the last consequence of Leninism, of the theory that a closely selected party must lead the country without allowing the masses a share in deciding upon the course to be taken.15
A Roosevelt intimate was Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, whose right-hand man and adviser on foreign affairs was Harry Dexter White. The names of Lee Pressman, David Weintraub, John J. Abt, Nathan Witt, Alger Hiss, and Victor Perlo opened many doors. Lauchlin Currie was a confidential administrative assistant of the President. He wrote his letters on White House stationery. Communist cells had been spawned in the State, Treasury, Commerce, and other departments. The burgeoning war bureaucracy brought to Washington, side by side with loyal Americans, a horde of crypto-apostates and schelners whose deepest allegiance was to a foreign power and ideology. These people, who were part of a conspiratorial network of subversion, were in positions which enabled them to advise Cabinet members and write their speeches, colonize key committees of Congress and write Congressional reports, and prepare news releases. Already the espionage rings which were to be exposed in the revelations of later years were busy. Harry Hopkins was not wrong in his prediction that the "difficulty with our public opinion with regard to Russia" would "come out all right in the end." America had her guard down.
When President Roosevelt reported the Atlantic Charter to Congress in September, his message obliquely mentioned freedom of religion, although the Charter did not. He still shied away from the embarrassing words "freedom of speech." Instead, he spoke of "freedom of information," without defining it.
His choice of this odd phrase, which is alien to American usage but which has a special significance in Marxian political terminology, escaped the attention of most commentators, but the Saturday Evening Post, in its September 27 issue, and certain other publications made a point of it. What did Mr. Roosevelt mean by the phrase? Why were the well-known terms "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" no longer good enough for him? In Communist and other totalitarian societies, the dissemination of news is controlled by the government. This output is called "information." The only freedom possessed by the individual citizen is to receive the information sanctioned by the government in its official or controlled organs of publication. This is very different from the concept of freedom of speech and press which is rooted in Anglo-American institutions.
After gingerly tossing in the expression "freedom of information" on this occasion, Mr. Roosevelt did not toy with it again. He proceeded to bear down on the subject of religion. We now know that what had been bothering him and Harry Hopkins ever since they came back from the Atlantic Conference was the problem of reconciling the facts with the pretense that the war was a showdown between what Winston Churchill had euphemistically called "the good forces and the evil forces" of the world. It would be difficult to erase from the minds of all churchmen and the devout of all faiths the revilement of religion in the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Had not religion been called the "opiate" and the "poison" of the people?
At his press conference of September 30, when a reporter asked about religion in Russia, Mr. Roosevelt was ready for him. "Go and read Article 124 of the Russian Constitution," he said. But he did not tell what Article 124 provided. Instead, with that facility for unobtrusive evasion which was always one of his strongest forensic assets, he went on to say that Russia's provisions concerning religion are "essentially what is the rule in this country; only we don't put it quite the same way."
A precisian might prefer to call this a suggestio falsi rather than a lie. One given to colloquial descriptiveness would surely call it a "whopper." Mr. Roosevelt could not have believed what he said. Not two years before, he had told the American Youth Congress how much he detested "the banishment of religion" from Russia.16 (That was during the period of the Berlin-Moscow alliance, when it served Mr. Roosevelt's bellicose purposes to throw some mud on Hitler's ally, as well as on Hitler himself.)
However, as Mr. Roosevelt no doubt knew, not one American in ten thousand had a copy of the Russian Constitution or had access to one. Few libraries possessed it. Most newspapers printed his remarks and let it go at that. The effect was the deception of a large portion of the American public.
Some alert and courageous publications were horrified at this. The magazine Christian Century, which did manage to find a copy of the Russian Constitution, asked: Is Roosevelt trying to soothe the American conscience by deceiving it?17 The Russian Constitution was known to be a dead letter. It was mere window dressing for a despotism which held individual civil rights as nothing. Furthermore, Article 124 was heavily weighted against religion, not in favor of it. Indeed, the evident objective of that amazing verbiage is the ultimate extinction of religion. First it purports to guarantee the right to perform religious rites; then it guarantees freedom to propagandize, but only against ,religion! Propaganda and instruction are reserved exclusively for the atheists. Even more important is the law governing "religious associations.." This outlaws most of the practices considered basic in civilized countries for the cultivation of the religious life.
In Moscow, Averell Harriman had some success in getting a statement out of the Russians for publicity purposes. This was not as easy as one might have supposed. Saying nice things about religion was not on the list of recommended activities in the Soviet Union; furthermore, the whole idea of having to cater to public opinion in this way was abhorrent, if not incomprehensible. "Throughout the week in Russia," Harriman wrote in his confidential notes, "I took every occasion (and I believe covered most of the members of the Soviet delegation, including of course Stalin and Molotov) of explaining the American political situation and public opinion regarding Russia, particularly in relation to the religious subject, and urged that both statements and action be taken to indicate to America that the Soviets were willing to allow freedom of worship not only in letter but in fact."
Stalin did not tell Harriman that there was religious freedom in Russia or that he believed there should be. In fact, he said nothing. But he did nod his head, which Harriman took to mean "a willingness to see that something was done." Finally, through Oumansky, there came an assurance "that the Soviets did allow religious worship and would reduce restrictions and would have the necessary publicity."18
This was in itself a confession. If the right to worship existed, what were the "restrictions"? And why were the restrictions only to be "reduced"? These details were irrelevant to the purpose of Harriman's assignment, which was not to reform the Soviet Union but to arrange for a publicity statement which would be useful to President Roosevelt in what Harriman had explained to Stalin as "the American political situation." He recorded his successful accomplishment of his assignment with this note: "He [Oumansky] promised the last time I saw him at the American Embassy Friday, October 3, categorically without qualification that the President's public statement on religion would be responded to by a high Soviet official in a manner to obtain maximum publicity in the United States."19
Actually, Harriman was not taken in. He was quite aware that the pretensions about to be broadcast throughout the United States were sham. He knew a fraud was to be perpetrated on the American people, for he wrote a confidential memorandum which recorded his own disbelief. "In spite of all comments and assurances," he wrote, "I leave with the impression that all the Soviets intend to do is to give lip service and to create certain instances which would give an impression of relaxation without really changing their present practices."20
Apparently, Harriman made a conscientious effort to ascertain the true status of religion in Russia. He heard conflicting reports regarding the amount of worship, the percentage of churches in the villages that were open, and the attendance. However, he found everybody in agreement that worship was engaged in only by "older people," chiefly women, and never by Communists. He wrote in his memorandum: "Religion to the communists is superstition and against the Communist philosophy, and its organized form dangerous in developing anti Communist political groups. It is of course a grave offense for anyone to teach the youth under sixteen religious philosophy." He was convinced that in spite of the "lip service" to freedom which might be given for the purpose of the publicity handout to America, religious worship would continue to be tolerated "only under closest G.P.U. scrutiny." In Harriman's words: "The Communists will unquestionably continue anti-religious education of the youth up to sixteen years without allowing religious education. Religious worshipers will be restricted in economic or political advancement even if they are no longer persecuted. Priests or clergymen will be closely watched as will everybody with whom they have intimate contact."21
It was of this police regime, ideologically dedicated to the suppression of religion, that President Roosevelt was speaking when he said in his press conference that Russia's provisions concerning religion "are essentially what is the rule in this country; only we don't put it quite the same way."
There can be no doubt that the inner circle of the Roosevelt administration knew the truth from the many sources available to them. Unfortunately, the contents of the Harriman memorandum quoted above were not divulged to the American people (until many years later). In fairness to Harriman, it may be observed that his duty was to report to his chief, the President. However, no one could have compelled him to play even the least role in this business if his conscience had rebelled. Fraus est celare fraudem. ("It is a fraud to conceal a fraud.")
During the next two months, Mr. Roosevelt's phantasm was taking robust shape. A constant stream of propaganda went forth,to press, pulpit, school, luncheon club, radio. The Soviet Union was given a clean bill of health. It, so the line ran, allowed religious freedom, as we do. The findings of President Roosevelt's emissary, Mr. Harriman, to the contrary were, of course, kept secret, and the most was made of the prearranged publicity which emanated from Moscow, although it was known to be sham.
By December 15, Roosevelt's audacity was so unrestrained that he permitted himself to impute to the entire world, with the exception of Germany, Italy, and Japan, a tender regard for all the principles of the American Bill of Rights.22 This must indeed have surprised many people in the far-flung magistrates of the world, in the diverse dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, caliphates, and lingering feudalism's which comprised the greater part of the land surface of the earth. Surely it must have brought a smile to the lips of Joseph Stalin, who, like Lenin, as Franz Borkenau tells us, always "regarded democracy as the worst enemy."23
It was the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the Bill of Rights as part of the Constitution of the United States. Speaking over the combined radio stations of the nation, Roosevelt said:
Indeed, prior to 1933, the essential validity of the Bill of Rights was accepted everywhere, at least in principle. Even today, with the exception of Germany, Italy and Japan, the peoples of the whole world, all probability four-fifths of them-support its principles, its teaching and its glorious results.
On the contrary, the American Bill of Rights is grounded upon certain philosophic assumptions, concerning the relationship of Man to his God and to the State, which are in violent conflict with patterns of thought which have prevailed in most regions of the world from ancient times to the present. Mr. Roosevelt must have known that the Bill of Rights contained many principles-in limitation of the powers of the State-which were flatly rejected in many nations other than the three he mentioned. Anyone with a mediocre knowledge of the laws and mores of the peoples of the world could have named in two minutes a score of examples which would belie the President's words. But by this time, what F. J. P. Veale, in his book Advance to Barbarism, calls "that mental and moral paralysis" engendered by the war, had already begun to set in. Such extravagances as this latest one of Mr. Roosevelt passed with surprisingly little challenge, even in the academic or so-called intellectual circles, where one might have expected them to arouse doubts about either the rationality or the sincerity of the speaker and to provoke an effort to set the facts straight before the people. Unfortunately, future generations were to pay heavily in blood and resources for the distortions with which Franklin D. Roosevelt was enabled to torpify the thinking of the American people at this juncture.
Just as fatuous, and indeed more reckless, was the peroration of this speech. "We covenant with each other before all the world," he intoned in a high allargando, "that having taken up arms in the defense of liberty, we will not lay them down before liberty is once again secure in the world we live in." If this gratuitous and unilateral commitment were to be taken literally, it could only mean that Mr. Roosevelt was sentencing his people to perpetual warfare. Of course liberty had never been "secure in the world we live in." It was certain not to be after this war, which was to open the floodgates of Europe and Asia to Communism.24
By the time of the Washington's Birthday speech in February, 1942, America was in a frenzy of wartime excitement. Few people checked Roosevelt's words when, as we have seen, he went the full way and made a palpable misrepresentation of the contents of the Atlantic Charter and the degree of mutual agreement between himself and Winston Churchill on the scope of its applicability:
We of the United Nations are agreed on certain principles in the kind of peace we seek. The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and the four freedoms-freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
One must search far to find a Presidential utterance so lacking in integrity. Prime Minister Churchill had insisted to Mr. Roosevelt when they drew up the Atlantic Charter that it was not to apply to the whole world, and he had later emphasized this point in his report to Parliament. The Atlantic Charter did not embrace the four freedoms; Roosevelt himself had cut out two of them which were in an earlier draft. And one of the "United Nations"-one of the largest, in fact, and the one which would be the most aggrandized by victory in the war-had been virtually bribed by Roosevelt's emissary into making a fraudulent announcement of devotion to religious freedom for publicity purposes in the United States-an announcement which was known to be a sham and which had been so described by the emissary himself in his confidential report.
Thus far we have focused mainly on the tacked-together "restoration" clause of the Third Point. We have seen what was originally suggested by Churchill and eliminated by Roosevelt and what Roosevelt later pretended it contained, although it did not. The other clause, which was never changed, proclaimed "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live."
"All peoples" must include the German people. However, the Sixth Point pledged "the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny," by which was meant the National Socialist government of the German Reich. Some English critics quickly pointed out that the majority of Germans had chosen Nazism, or National Socialism, and were loyal to it. Which point of the Charter was to prevail? Such magazines as Contemporary Review and Twentieth Century were displeased with the Third Point because it contradicted the Sixth Point; German commentators were shocked at the Sixth Point because it contradicted the Third Point. To a German or an Italian, the discrepancy was obvious. The Charter was double talk.
In fairness to Churchill, it should be emphasized that in his original draft of the Charter, he had tried to qualify the Third Point, perhaps to reconcile it with the Sixth, by adding the words "they are only concerned to defend the rights of freedom of speech and thought without which such choice [of the form of government desired] must be illusory." But Roosevelt would not have these words in the Charter. They could be brought to bear against the Soviet form of government as well as against the Nazi. The result was that both the illusion and the contradiction remained.
Their tongues "dropped manna" in Milton's phrase, "but all was false and hollow." There was no intention to ask the Tanganyikans whether British mandate was "the form of government" under which they would choose to live or the indigenous Algerians whether they were happy to be absorbed into the French Republic. Nor was it contemplated to poll the Ukrainians or the Estonians on remaining in the Soviet Union or the eastern Poles on joining it.
As their future actions proved, Roosevelt and Churchill respected the right of some peoples only,not "all peoples"-to choose their form of government. For millions of people in Europe and elsewhere, these two men, along with Stalin, soon presumed to make the choice themselves. But when the Atlantic Charter was "held aloft" as a "beacon"-as Sumner Welles put it,the American people were expected to take its words literally. Roosevelt's speech on Washington's Birthday demanded faith in all it said and even more. It is not surprising that a brilliant English lawyer, in a book to which Dean lnge of St. Paul's contributed the Foreword, has bluntly described the Atlantic Charter as "a collection of dishonest verbiage."25
FOURTH and FIFTH POINTS
Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations,
to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor
or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw
materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity. Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field, with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security.
These are.the economic points. There was a reason, especially for the Fourth. In 1932, by the Ottawa Agreements, England and her Dominions had shackled world trade. Sumner Welles described them thus: "The Ottawa Agreements were designed to force every component part of the British Empire, covering a quarter of the globe, to trade solely within that area. Theoretically other countries would still be able to purchase what they wished within the Empire. But, unless they were willing to come within the sterling area, because of the hindrances otherwise placed upon their ability to sell their own goods to the Empire, they could not long continue so to buy for lack of sterling exchange."26
http://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ottawa-agreement-1932
Tariffs, quotas, and blocked currencies had become a part of British trade policy after 1932. The Germans, under Hjalmar Schacht, had resorted to barter; so had the Italians. The Japanese, looking out from their meager islands, saw that many of the raw materials and foods they needed were not purchasable, and they had resolved to build their own empire.
The Fourth Point was meant to give the impression that all of this.was to be changed after the war, but a loophole was left. Churchill insisted upon inserting the words "with due respect for their existing obligations."27 The "existing obligations" were, of course, the Ottawa Agreements between the United Kingdom and the Dominions.
Jeered the magazine Catholic World:
So that's it? Our old acquaintance reappears, the weasel word that sucks the meaning out of a sentence. There used to be current on Broadway years ago a bit of snappy dialogue: "You wouldn't kid me, would you?" "I would if I could, Mister." You wouldn't trick me, would you, Winston? You wouldn't trick me, would you, Franklin? You wouldn't make me a fine promise about "equal access for all to the trade and raw materials of the world," and then neutralize it with the old diplomatic standby "due respect for existing obligations"? Or would you?
Others took it seriously. Ralph Robey, Newsweek's business specialist and its mentor on economic matters,was moved to write an article entitled "Economic Implications of the Eight Points" in the August 25 issue. This was his vision of the postwar world that Roosevelt and Churchill hoped to usher in:
It will be a world in which the whole present system of quotas, allotments, special tariffs, barter agreements, and bilateral trade agreements will have to be junked.... The only system that the world has found which makes this possible is one based on hard money. . .. The whole concept of parity prices for farm products must be tossed out the window.... Likewise, our policy on wages would have to be reversed in order to get our cost of production down to the point where we could meet foreign competition.... Only in those conditions can we live and prosper in a world of the character outlined by the Roosevelt-Churchill agreement.
He concluded that such a world would be "wholly desirable."
This fantasy had a short life. What actually followed the war was the very opposite. There came an orgy of trade restrictions and blocked currencies, soft money and inflation, and as for the United States, the concept of parity prices for farm products was perpetuated, not "tossed out the window," while rising wages and costs of production became a permanent trend. As though under a heavy fine, America was to pour out her wealth during the next generation to a grasping world ridden by fear, hatreds, and militarism.
The Fifth Point was but a prayer for freedom from want "for all." The words "the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field" were purposely vague, if not meaningless. Similar expressions had gushed forth from the World Economic Conference in London in 1933 and on other occasions in the past. The British took a realistic view of Points Four and Five. The typical reaction was that of the distinguished magazine Twentieth Century, which pronounced them "harmless." Bluntly, it said: -"But experience has shown that aspirations expressed in terms as vague and general as these rarely come to anything."
SIXTH POINT
Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to
see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of
dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford
assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in
freedom from fear and want. Just as a "hope," this was as moldy as old cheese. Most men have hoped for such a peace since time immemorial. The context, however, offered more than a mere hope to the uncritical. Surely Roosevelt and Churchill knew that nations had differing ideas about what were "their own boundaries," particularly in Europe, where boundaries had been in a state of flux since the days of Charlemagne. Was this meant to restore the status quo ante bellum? Or to freeze forever the status quo post bellum? What if the latter turned out to be unjust? Or politically absurd? Or controversial? Actually, these two gentlemen, along with Stalin, were soon to draw some new and strange boundaries themselves-boundaries so wanton and anomalous'that within them men could not possibly live in freedom from fear and want.
The chief hypocrisy of the Sixth Point lay in its opening phrase, which implied that "the Nazi tyranny" alone stood between mankind and the vision of a tranquil world. Tyranny was by no means an exclusive vice of Adolf Hitler. Fear and want were ubiquitous in the world. They had been before "the Nazi tyranny" and would be after its demise.
SEVENTH POINT
Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high
seas and oceans without hindrance.Although these words sounded virtuous, nobody seemed to know their purport. In times of peace, men had no difficulty traversing the high seas and oceans without hindrance. Until the war came, the flags of Germany, Japan, Greece, Panama, Sweden, etc-, flew aloft on all the sea lanes of the world. Such small nations as Holland and Denmark had enormous merchant marines. An Italian had no more trouble booking passage: around the world than did an Englishman. In war, freedom of the seas was curtailed. Churchill's Royal Navy was just as busy curtailing it as was Hitler's Deutsche Marine.
The scholarly Twentieth Century was bewildered, but polite. Of the Seventh Point, it said only: "We confess we are unable to understand what this means." To this day, nobody has explained it.
EIGHTH POINT
Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic
as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the
use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or
air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten,
or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe,
pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general
security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They
will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which
will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments. This is the disarmament clause of the Atlantic Charter. Somebody is to be disarmed, but who? No names are mentioned. Sumner Welles confides that it was President Roosevelt who brought this idea to the table. There was no such clause in Churchill's draft. Mr. Roosevelt took his pen in hand and wrote that "any nation which threatens or may threaten to use force outside its frontiers" must be disarmed.28 [Look at the Beast you have created,77 years forward,and the One needing to be DISARMED D.C]
When Churchill read this, the wheels in his head whirled.Great Britain had used force outside its frontiers every generation since the time of William the Conqueror. How could he indulge Roosevelt's little whim and yet make the clause practically meaningless? Presto! Change the words "to use force," which meant something, to "aggression," which meant nothing.29 Roosevelt readily accepted this. However imprecise the word, "aggression" was indubitably something one should be against.
It was no compliment to the intelligence of their people at home that the President and the Prime Minister ventured the Eighth Point with evident confidence that it would not be widely taken as a joke. Less than two years before, the Soviet Union had been expelled from the League of Nations for aggression against her little neighbor, Finland. She had, with the Nazis, marched into Poland and wiped it off the map. She had recently overrun the sovereign nations of Estonia,Latvia, and Lithuania and annexed them. Yet this marauder was now being made a partner of Great Britain and America. Stalin, the strong-arm brigand of eastern Europe, was about to be christened "Uncle Joe" and given one of the three seats at the tables of the mighty. An arms race unprecedented in human history was to follow this war.[And continues to this day DC]
NEXT
PART THREE
Wastebasket Road: Casablanca to Yalta
notes
CHAPTER VIII
1. The statements and impressions given to the press and·the pub" lie during the first few days of Mr. Roosevelt's trip, as referred to in this and succeeding paragraphs, are drawn from the daily reports in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune and the weeklies Time and Newsweek.
2. Morton, Ope cit., xi.
3. Sherwood, Ope cit., 311•
4. Hull, op. cit., 974.
5. Sherwood, op~ cit., 313.
6. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 427.
7. Hull, Ope cit., 974.
8. Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., 39.
9. Welles, Ope cit., 6.
10. Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., 27.
11. Sherwood, Ope cit., 353.
12. Elliott Roosevelt, op. cit., 30.
13. Morton, Ope cit., 101.
14. Ibid., 119. IS. H. H. Arnold, Global Mission (Harper, 1949), 253.
16. Ibid., 231. '
17. Ibid., 253.
18. Ibid., 254.
19. Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., 33, 41•
20. What transpired at this meeting is gleaned from Welles, Ope cit., II-IS; Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 434-42; Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., 39; Sherwood, Ope cit., 356-60; and the record of the Congressional investigation of the Pearl Harbor attack.
21. Sherwood, Ope cit., 362.
22. See Chapter VI.
23. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 438.
24. Ibid., 441.
25. Churchill's address of February IS, 1942. New York Times, February 16, 1942.
26. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 447.
27. Time, August 25, 1941.
28. Sherwood, Ope cit., 362.
29. Welles, Ope cit., 17.
30. Ibid., 17.
31 . Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 444.
32. New York Times, August 25, 1941.
33. London Times, February 28, 1945.
34' Russell Grenfell, Unconditional Hatred (Devin-Adair, I953), 152 •
35. Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Houghton Mifflin, 1953), 456.
36• London Times, October II, 1954.
CHAPTER IX
1. Chester Wilmot, The Struggle for Europe (Harper, 1952 ), 633.
2. The drafts were disclosed in Welles Ope cit. Churchill's original draft also appears in The Grand Alliance.
3. Welles, Ope cit., 16, 17.
4. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 433.
5. Sherwood, Ope cit., 350.
6. See Freud's letter to Albert Einstein, written in Vienna in September, 1932, in Readings in World Politics (American Foundation for Political Education, 1952), II.
7. See Veale, op.cit., and the Foreword by The Very Reverend William Ralph lnge, Dean of St. Paul's; Freda Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (Regnery, 1949); Austin J. App, History's Most Terrifying Peace (Boniface Press, 1946); Montgomery Belgion, Victors' lustice (Regnery, 1949).
8. Welles, Ope cit., 7.
9. Sherwood, Ope cit., 362.
10. See Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., Chapter II.
11. Wilmot, Ope cit." 633.
12. Public Papers.
13. Sherwood, op. cit., 372.
14. See Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments, Report of the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Laws, to the Judiciary Committee, U.S. Senate, July 30, 1953 (Government Printing Office); documentation of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; James Burnham, The Web of Subversion (John Day, 1954); Whitehead, Ope cit.; Hoover, Ope cit.
15. Borkenau, Ope cit.~ 279.
16. February 10, 1940. See Public Papers (1940), 93.
17. Christian Century (October IS, 1941).
18. Sherwood, Ope cit., 391-93.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Public Papers (1941),557.
23. Borkenau, Ope cit., 72.
24. See Harry Elmer Barnes (ed.), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caxton 1952).
25. Veale, Ope cit.
26. Welles, Ope cit.~ 8.
27. Ibid.~ 14; Churchill, The Grand Alliance, 437..
28. Welles, Ope cit., 10.
29. Ibid., 14.
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