PART 6:ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA: QUEBEC 1& CAIRO

More FDR treachery here with regard to basically screwing over his real Chinese ally for the benefit of his communist comrade Uncle Joe.Know this people without FDR's help China would never had been taken over by the communists.THIS is one of the big lies coming out of WW II,that was rewritten by the 'victors' to the benefit of Communist Russia. 

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 XI 

QUEBEC I 

ROOSEVELT'S Secretary of State was Cordell Hull, a handsome, idealistic Southerner born in 1871. Since 1933, he had brought esteem to the Cabinet and had helped to hold the "Solid South." But Cordell Hull was a frustrated man. He was not·allowed to sit in on the President's war councils. "This was because the President did not invite me to such meetings," he writes plaintively in his memoirs. "I raised the question with him several times."1 The shadow of Harry Hopkins was omnipresent. To Hull, it was obvious that scarcely any large..scale military operation could be undertaken that would not have diplomatic aspects, and he considered it a serious mistake for the Secretary of State to be left out. Even worse, he had not been taken to the Atlantic Conference or to Casablanca. Nor was he to go to Cairo or Tehran, and he was to resign before Yalta. As he puts it in his memoirs, "The President did not take me with him." He had protested this belittling treatment. "I said to him: 'I'm not looking for increased responsibilities, but I do believe the Secretary of State should attend these meetings.' "2 Extravagant personal flattery was Roosevelt's way of smoothing the ruffled feathers. 

Why was Hull left out? We know it was not age or ill health, as the public was allowed to surmise at the time; actually, Hull was to outlive Harry Hopkins nine years and the President ten years. We have a strong clue in the fact that columnist Drew Pearson attacked him as "anti-Russian." The New Republic (September 6, 1943) said he was "notoriously" so. Other Left Wing organs echoed this line.[There was nothing wrong with his attitude toward Russia,history has vindicated Him,HE was right,FDR was wrong and a traitor to America D.C]   

The truth is that Hull fancied himself a stickler for international probity, and he was capable of being revolted by treachery to a principle when it was plain enough for him to recognize it. In 1942, he had blocked secret agreements Stalin had tried to get, particularly out of the harassed British, for postwar territorial plunder which would have vitiated the Atlantic Charter even that early.3 In February of that year, he had rather indiscreetly sent the President a memorandum reminding him that "there is no doubt that the Soviet Government has tremendous ambitions with regard to Europe."4 And he had shown that he was not easily to be fooled by Stalin, for he said to Churchill in March of 1943: "It's my opinion that if Russia should eventually come into the war in the Pacific, it will probably be two or three weeks before victory, during which time she can spread out over Manchuria and other large areas and then be assured of sitting in at the peace conference."5 

This kind of talk did little to please Roosevelt and Hopkins. When they went abroad to the big conferences, the Secretary of State was left at home to putter around in Washington. Yet Roosevelt needed Hull politically. Hull tried to resign in 1944 before the fourth-term election. "Mr. Roosevelt then asked that I withhold my resignation at least until after the election. To this I agreed."6 A fortnight after the election, Hull resigned. 

From Yalta, a few weeks later, Hull received a syrupy cable signed by Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, Molotov, Eden, and Stettinius. "We have missed you at this conference," it said.. This gem of hypocrisy was almost too much for the patient and gentle old man, who remembered that his presence had not been deemed necessary at Argentina, Casablanca, Cairo, or Tehran. 

In his memoirs, he hastens to add: "I should state at this point that I was not consulted by the President or anyone else on policy issues prior to or during the Yalta Conference."7 The President saw him just before departing for Yalta, "but he did not take up any of the topics he expected to discuss with Stalin and Churchill or the decisions he might make." The undertone of irritation impels one to think that the Roosevelt brand of syrup was not sweet enough this time. The "we have missed you" was too raw to swallow. We also sense that Hull wished to assure that the judgment of history would acquit him of any guilt for the crimes of Yalta. 

To only one of the Roosevelt foreign conferences was Cordell Hull invited. That was at Quebec in August of 1943. However, it was arranged that he should arrive late-after the important decisions had already been made. Nor was he ever told all that happened there. 

It was another Big Two conference. Delighted by the prospect of congenial Canadian hospitality, Churchill brought his wife and daughter over from England. Stalin had again coyly declined. The American public did not know that President Roosevelt's courtship of the Russian .dictator was still a one-sided romance as far as any desire for "a date" was concerned, and the press was left to speculate on whether or not Stalin had been invited. But Hull writes: "The President made his fourth unsuccessful attempt to meet with Stalin at the time of the Quebec Conference in August, 1943. He had hoped to induce the Soviet leader to attend that meeting."8 Had Stalin come, certain people in Quebec would not have shared Roosevelt's ardor. L'Action Catholique, the newspaper mouthpiece of Cardinal Villeneuve, greeted the conferees with an editorial that began: "Stalin will not come to Quebec. We rejoice. His presence would have spoiled the pleasure ... and tarnished the pride."

Italy had all but surrendered. Mussolini was out. He had been deposed in the last week of July, and the government of Marshal Badoglio was frantically trying to switch sides, a flip-flop that was complicated by the presence of German forces on Italian soil. The details of Italy's status were being worked out in Lisbon by emissaries from Badoglio and from General Eisenhower's headquarters. Italy was to surrender officially a few days after the invasion of the mainland from Sicily on September 3. 

In the east, the Russians had turned the Nazi summer offensive into a rout. The 'Germans could hardly have been expected to perform well in view of what was happening behind their backs in their homeland. Germany was being reduced to rubble by the R.A.F. and the American Eighth Air ·Force. Hamburg was destroyed in six night and two day raids. Ruhr industries were almost paralyzed. On August 2, Berlin was ordered evacuated. Throughout the Reich, thousands were dying and supplies for the fighting forces were going up in flames. Desperation, whipped up by Roosevelt's "unconditional surrender" ukase, and little more, postponed the Gotterdammerung of the Nazi regime. At the Quebec Conference, everyone laughed at a gag credited to Churchill before he left England: 

INTERVIEWER: Will you offer peace terms to Germany? 

CHURCHILL: Heavens, no. They would accept immediately.9 

In the Pacific, the Japanese were being driven out of the Solomon's. Allied air superiority was assured in almost all of the Pacific and Asian theaters. The Japanese navy was to be spoken of largely in the past tense. 

Churchill met with the President at Hyde Park on August 13, before the conference, and made a detour to show his daughter Niagara Falls. Roosevelt made a pompous entry into Quebec on the seventeenth. There was a parade to the Citadel, the summer home of the Governor-General, where he and Harry Hopkins were to stay and where special ramps had been built for his wheel chair. His dog, Fala, chaperoned by a Secret Service agent, had a big automobile all to himself in the parade and was visible proof to all the world that his master loved dogs and therefore had a heart of gold. 

The chiefs of staff had assembled in advance on the twelfth and were lodged at the luxurious Chateau Frontenac, along with assorted conference-followers and more than a hundred news reporters. All other guests were moved out of the hotel. From all accounts, the weather was brisk after torrid Washington, the Canadian ale and whisky were superb, and there were many parties. Roosevelt and Churchill held their talks informally in their suites in the Citadel. 

The big question came up, for Churchill was a bulldog on the point, even though he had lost before. Where should America and Britain hurl their military might on the continent of Europe? Into France, as Stalin had always insisted? The plan had been made, but Churchill was still against it. Roosevelt, Hopkins, and Marshall were adamant. By the time Hull arrived at Quebec on the twentieth they had prevailed again. "Prior to my arrival, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had ... decided that an Anglo-American invasion of France should be made in spring of 1944. Mr. Churchill had argued-and continued to argue up to the Tehran Conference-that the invasion of Europe by the Western Allies should be through the Balkans, the 'soft underbelly of Europe.' " He wanted to "prevent a Soviet rush into that area which would permanently establish the authority of the Soviet Union there, to the detriment of Britain and incidentally of the United States."10 

Hopkins' notes and Churchill's memoirs both confirm the disagreement, so there is no doubt that Roosevelt was untruthful when he said at a press conference on the day the Quebec Conference broke up that there had been no controversy during the conference that was in any way important. The controversy, though secret, was crucial. According to Hull, Roosevelt had his way because the United States was putting up the majority of the forces. 

Churchill understood perfectly,as Roosevelt must have also ,that what was involved here was not the winning of this war that was no longer in doubt,but the geopolitics of postwar Europe. At stake was the heartland of the Continent. What Churchill was really talking about was not the war with Germany, but that other war-the hush-hush one-of militant Communism, incarnate as the new Russian dictatorship which had risen from the grave of the last Czar, against the capitalistic West, which, by the basic assumptions and written words of both Leninism and Stalinism, it was pledged to annihilate. 

The busiest beaver at Quebec was Harry Hopkins. He had in his pocket an extraordinary top-secret document. It was headed "Russia's Position."11 

If the assemblage of bigwigs at Quebec had had no other raison d'etre, the opportunity it afforded Harry to pass this document around would have sufficed. The American public was to know nothing of it until after both Roosevelt and Hopkins were dead, yet it was an arrogant pronouncement of political policy of far-reaching consequence to the nation's future. Its precise authorship has never been disclosed. It claimed to be extracted from "a very high level United States military strategic estimate," so, presumably, somebody in the Army had either originated or embraced it. The words "high level" pointed to the office of the Chief of Staff; the adjective "very" seemed to put it in that office. But the "very high level" could also have been the Commander-in-Chief. In either case, it is a model of what a "military strategic estimate" should not be. So it is not surprising that its origin remains a mystery and its authorship an unclaimed honor. 

Let us examine the document. One paragraph said: 

Russia's post-war position in Europe will be a dominant one. With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to oppose her tremendous military forces. It is true that Great Britain is building up a position in the Mediterranean vis-a-vis Russia that she may find useful in balancing power in Europe. However, even here she may not be able to oppose Russia unless she is otherwise supported. 

Now to anyone heedful of the future freedom of Europe, the problem presented by this intelligence was as obvious as the ribbons on General Marshall's chest. It was how to prevent the postwar domination of Europe by the Soviet Union from coming to pass. One would immediately perceive that·the war should be waged and won in a manner to thwart that calamity. To Winston Churchill, this was elementary. As we have seen, he had plans to accomplish it. 

But Hopkins' document made a flying leap in the opposite direction: 

The conclusions from the foregoing are obvious. Since Russia is the decisive factor in the war, she must be given every assistance and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship. Likewise, since without question she will dominate Europe on the defeat of the Axis, it is even more essential to develop and maintain the most friendly relations with Russia. 

In other words, give Russia "every assistance," and then, when she dominates Europe, keep flirting with her and hope for her friendship. So this was the garment being cut for America to wear. It had an unmistakable made-in-Moscow look. 

One can only wonder what kind of a postwar world the writer of this paper envisaged. The military security of the United States seems to have been the last thing in his mind, not the first, as he made this sly foray into a mystical statecraft of "friendship." If this was General Marshall expounding on the psycho dynamics of nations, he was beyond his depth. If it was President Roosevelt, or Harry Hopkins, he was hiding behind a mask. 

The American people, living in a thickening miasma of propaganda diffusing out from the White House, had little understanding that what Roosevelt and Hopkins were seeing in their crystal ball was the domination of Europe by Communist Russia. This grim apocalypse would have shocked the nation. Was this what the vast sacrifices were being made for? The apocalypse was not broadcast; it was a secret document in Harry's pocket, to be pulled out and shown to a chosen few. Nor was it grim to Harry and his boss, who continued, as though enchanted, to give "every assistance" to its fulfillment. 

As for the Chief of Staff, his state of mind is sorrowfully described for us by an officer who had the closest prolonged contact with him in the Pentagon and on trips abroad during the war, General Albert C. Wedemeyer. Marshall, he tells us, "had little knowledge of the complexities of the world conflict" and "would seem to have failed to understand the nature and aims of communism." Wedemeyer's predicament is obvious. If this is a gentle apology for his old chief, it lets off as an ignoramus the man who had the entire intelligence facilities of the United States Army at his beck and call and those of the Navy as well for the asking, both of which services had files bulging with information on the nature and aims of Communism. Reading on, we learn of another serious flaw in the Marshall character, but it is a common and human one. Wedemeyer confesses that he revered General Marshall at one time but later came to see him as a man corrupted by power and homage: "Thus he became an easy prey to crypto-Communists, or Communist-sympathizing sycophants, who played. on. his vanity to accomplish their own ends."12 

Whether or not Harry Hopkins, who was an intimate of General Marshall, had inspired this "military strategic estimate" in the first place, he took charge of putting it across as a sort of credo. Harry was not a man to dispute with at that time. For three and one-half years, he had been living in the White House, which the wits in Washington were referring to as "that two family flat."13 (Mrs. Hopkins had also moved in.) When the' President's "man Friday" spoke to government officials or to high officers in the Army or·Navy, he spoke with the authority becoming one whose address was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Slipped into his document was this mystifying clause: "Since Russia is the decisive factor in the war...." (The dictionary defines "decisive" as "serving to decide; determinate.") This meant that winning or losing the war depended upon Russia. The factual absurdity of this·bald assertion needs no laboring. With what motive was it implanted in this document? It was a libel against the titanic military and industrial might of the United States and Great Britain and the nations of the British Commonwealth, a force so overwhelming in the context of August, 1943, that the Axis powers were inevitably doomed even if Russia had collapsed. It exhibited a strange attitude of defeatism, almost masochistic, which somebody wished to insinuate into the American consciousness. In the postwar years, this idea -that but for Russia the Axis powers would not have been defeated-was to be one of the major propaganda weapons used by the Soviet Union throughout Europe and Asia in waging the cold war against the United States and its allies. 

We know now that in Washington high naval officers were seething with suppressed dissent. Captain W. D. Puleston, the naval historian, who was a special adviser to the Secretary of Navy at the time, writes: "Most of them·were convinced that Russia needed the support of the United Nations more than they [the United Nations] needed that of Russia. The navy thought we had heard too much of Red contribution to victory and too little of the Anglo-American. They feared that if the Anglo-American representatives continued to extol Russia's efforts and apologize for their own, Stalin would demand more and more concessions."14 Puleston mentions the document Hopkins produced at Quebec as "this almost unbelievable policy of appeasing Russia." 

Anyone who went through the Army's Command and General Staff School during 1943 or 1944, as did this author, will remember the intellectual rebellion taking place there. In spite of the docility of General George C. Marshall in meshing his every thought into the Roosevelt-Hopkins pattern, his fawning attitude toward the Russians did not permeate all echelons of the Army. There was muffled grumbling in every headquarters and field camp and along the channels of supply, where Russian requisitions were usually, by order from high above, given priority. Nor was it limited to the Mark Clark's and Douglas MacArthur's. There were men of all ranks, men of independence, whose reason and patriotism could not be desensitized by any amount of politics and propaganda, in or out of the Army. They obeyed orders, as good soldiers, but with misgivings. When thousands of white sheets had to be sent to Fairbanks, Alaska, to be furnished to Red Army pilots taking delivery of free American airplanes (because they had complained of their bedding), the comments were unprintable. Such galling incidents were common. 

The specter of a Soviet imperial colossus held no terror for Harry Hopkins. The anonymous, top-secret paper he flashed at Quebec was the Word. Sherwood writes that it was"of great importance as indicating the policy which guided the making of decisions at Tehran and, much later, at Yalta." Stettinius says the same. It epitomized the Rooseveltian mind. 

At Quebec, Roosevelt decided to have American troops land in southern France (ANVIL), to supplement the Normandy invasion. "I never could understand why," writes General Mark Clark, who commanded the campaign in Italy. But Roosevelt and Hopkins could understand why. It diverted American strength from Italy and a push northeastward into Austria and the Balkans and was an "assistance" to Russia in becoming "dominant" in Europe. Thus it fitted in perfectly with the paper Harry Hopkins was carrying. Churchill, says Sherwood, fought "implacably" against Roosevelt's plan. 

The Prime Minister induced President Roosevelt to sign one agreement at Quebec which was so secret that it lay hidden for almost eleven years. It gave Britain an equal voice in the use of the atom bomb, which the United States was soon to possess. In the first week of April, 1954, Sir Winston Churchill brought it to light in a debate in the House of Commons, causing an uproar on both sides of the Atlantic. It was at once apparent that the McMahon Act of 1946, which restricted exchange of American atomic information with foreign powers, had canceled the agreement, which few men knew anything about. Congress had abrogated a secret agreement made by the deceased President while having no inkling of it. 

The secret agreement pledged that neither the United States nor Britain would ever use the bomb against the other, that neither would divulge any information to third parties without mutual consent, and that neither country would use the bomb against a third nation without the consent of the other. Actually, Roosevelt had made an unwarranted gift of Power to a foreign country, however friendly at the time. It is unthinkable that the Senate of the United States would. ever have ratified a treaty conferring this veto power over weapons, strategy, and, in the dawning nuclear age, American foreign policy itself. 

On this, too, the Secretary of State was kept in the dark. "I was not told about the atomic bomb," Cordell Hull's memoirs say. "I did not really know about it until it was dropped." But Klaus Fuchs and Harry Gold and David Greenglass and the Rosenbergs knew about it. People of alien and hostile backgrounds were being welcomed into installations where the newest weapons were being "developed and into governmental positions. In those days, however, there were many things the Secretary of State was not permitted to know. 

The Communist party knew about the development of the atomic bomb even before the F.B.I. did. The F.B.I. learned about it not from the Roosevelt administration but from undercover informants in Communist circles on the West Coast. F.B.I. men got their first information in 1943 from the Communists, who had friendly contacts with some of the scientists at a secret project at the University of California, from which it was known to be leaking, and the F.B.I. was promptly requested to discontinue its investigation of one of the scientists.15

Chapter XII 

CAIRO 

WE NOW COME to a melancholy turn in the fortunate career of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He had but seventeen months more to live when he left for Egypt in November of 1943, taking with him his physician, his masseur, his valet, six Filipino cooks from the yacht Potomac, Harry Hopkins, and the usual assortment of "brass." He was to confer with Churchill and Chiang Kaishek in Cairo; but the real Mecca of this pilgrimage was beyond, under the brow of the Soviet Union, for Stalin had condescended at last to budge as far as Tehran, the Iranian capital, near the Caspian Sea, to share his company. In these next seventeen months were to be compressed a series of perpetration's which historians would judge the most ignoble of Roosevelt's spectacular life and which would forever tarnish his memory. 

Now we even read it between the lines written by his adulators. He began to fumble his role. Old friends like Hull and Byrnes and Stimson and Jones saw this happening. A train of incredible blunders of policy and decision followed. And because he was now acting his part on a global stage, where every miscue could have burgeoning historic consequences, his repeated bungles at Cairo, Tehran, Quebec, and finally at Yalta, began to take on the gravity of a world catastrophe.

This is not to say there was any specific moment when the President lost his grip. And those, like Byrnes, who charitably blame his sagging health for the hatcheries of the final months miss the point of the Roosevelt tragedy. The Roosevelt who wilted before the Russian dictator at Yalta was the same Roosevelt who had sent Harry Hopkins to Moscow with a blank check in 1941, who had feigned astonishment when the Japanese were provoked into "firing the first shot" in the Pacific, and who for three years had blocked Churchill's strategy in Europe every time it endangered Stalin's ambitions. The defects of personality which ambushed him when he sat down with Stalin-such as the narcissism which permitted him to gamble so heavily on his personal charm-were all there during the earlier years. It was the vertigo of unbridled world power that brought out the basic weakness of the Roosevelt character. The picture was gradually coming into focus. 

His self-conceit now took on a new dimension. For beginning with the Cairo meeting with Churchill and Chiang Kaishek, Roosevelt began to fall victim to·the messianic complex which had destroyed Wilson in 1919. He began to envisage himself as the Master Builder of the shiny new postwar world. It was a role he was pathetically unsuited to attempt. 

The Western powers could now reach any target in Germany with a thousand bombers by day or night. In a series of disasters, the Wehrmacht had been driven back from the Volga to the Dnieper. The OVERLORD Channel invasion was being prepared upon a stage so enormous that its certain success was assured. Roosevelt could now speak to his war allies as the leader of a coalition which was sure of victory. He could seriously consider the map of the world which was to follow. 

In this pre-victory hour, one of the Big Four,China,was becoming weaker, not stronger. She needed a shot in the arm. That was supposedly one of the purposes of the Cairo Conference, to which Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek were invited. China had been bled white by six years of continuous war with Japan. In its gloomy Chungking fastness, the Kuomintang government's will to fight was still strong, but its means had dwindled alarmingly. 

Had Japan been her only enemy, China could have carried on and exacted a heavy toll. Unfortunately, China faced a second enemy more terrible than the first. This enemy was internal Communist rebellion. While she fought desperately on her two.. thousand-mile front to expel the Japanese invaders, she was experiencing the grim sensation of seeing tens of thousands of square miles of her domain seized or infiltrated by Communist activists who were taking their orders from Moscow. What had happened was that the confusion of war had given the declining Chinese Communist Party a chance to make a sensational come.. back in North China, and because he was preoccupied with the Japanese aggressors, President Chiang Kai-shek was powerless to take counter steps to check the power-hungry native Reds. 

The 1943 situation stemmed back to 1937, when Chiang, just liberated from the ordeal of kidnapping by warlords at Sian, made the mistake of his life by making peace with the Chinese Communists. At that time, the Communists, who had been fighting Chiang continuously since 1927, were just about ready to quit. Confined to a small enclave around Yenan in the northwest province of Shensi, their plight was so desperate that their leaders had, even before the Sian affair, made overtures to representatives of Chiang, looking toward dissolution.1 Their top bosses were making plans to go to Europe. 

When the Japanese attack was imminent in 1937, Chiang determined that China must be unified, even at the cost of tolerating the Communists. If they could be induced to employ their Red Army to repel the Japanese, he would take them back into the fold. We now know that this failure to mop up the Chinese Communists when he could have done so was the supreme blunder which brought Chiang down to ruin in 1948. But at the time, with Japan threatening total war, the decision seemed justified. 

In an agreement which he concluded with the Communists in February, 1937, Chiang promised to discontinue his Communist-suppression policy. They, in turn, agreed to place their insurrectionary army under the authority of the National Army, to be known as the Eighteenth Group Army. The Communist forces were limited by this agreement to a strength of forty-five thousand men, later increased to sixty thousand. They were to wage guerrilla war against the Japanese in specified areas in North and Northwest China.2 The Communists concluded this agreement with their tongues in their cheeks. 

However, after Chiang was driven to Chungking, with no remaining armed force of any size north of the Yellow River, the Communists realized that their chance had come. Instead of fighting the Japanese, they withdrew from the war almost completely after Russia signed the Molotov-Matsuoka Treaty with Japan in April, 1941. With Chiang unable to halt them, they proceeded to carve out an empire for themselves in the un-policed rural areas between the Japanese-occupied cities. 

Spreading out, fanlike, through the countryside between the scattered Japanese bases, the Communists soon dominated most of the provinces of Hopeh, Chahar, Suiyuan, Shensi, Kansu, Anhwei, Shantung, and even northern Kiangsu-a vast empire of ninety million inhabitants. Disregarding the 1937 agreement with Chiang limiting the Red Army to four divisions, they increased their armed strength to more than five hundred thousand men, backed by partially armed local militia detachments.3 

In thus defying the Chungking government, the Communists had their eyes firmly set on the· date of Japanese defeat. They knew that when Japanese authority disintegrated after the surrender, control of the populous northern provinces-the heart of China-would pass, during the interregnum of confusion, to whomever was on the ground with the largest forces. Chiang and his main forces were fifteen hundred or two thousand miles away in Szechwan and Burma and would be powerless to act in the north. By their cynical use of the war period to infiltrate and to arm, the Communists were making certain that they would be the real victors of the war. In their optimistic dreams, they envisaged Communist occupation of Nanking, Shanghai, and even Manchuria when the Japanese fell.

This was the harrowing situation which confronted Chiang Kai-shek in 1943 as he clung unhappily to his bomb-scarred Chungking capital. It was a situation which cried for bold, imaginative American intervention. It is one of the major disasters of the war that the United States, under Roosevelt, instead of bringing boldness and imagination to the Far East, brought irresoluteness and abjection. 

Chiang was not naive on the subject of Communism. "The Japanese," he had commented publicly, "are only lice on the body of China, but Communism is a disease of the heart." Politically wise, he knew that the long-range struggle in China was not between China and Japan-that war was won when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor-but between Chinese independence and subjugation to the international Communist revolution. 

In the light of our present knowledge, the course which Roosevelt followed in China policy after the Casablanca Conference of January, 1943, seems incompatible with any conceivable pattern of American self-interest or even of plain common sense. It is the common practice of writers to blame General George C. Marshall· and his 1945-46 "Mission" for the master blunders which opened China to Communism. Without exonerating Marshall in the slightest, it is only fair to point out that he was simply following the China line which Roosevelt had prescribed as early as 1943. It was Roosevelt, leaning upon such Left Wing advisers as Owen Lattimore, Lauchlin Currie and,John Carter Vincent, and the now infamous Davies-Service clique in the Foreign Service, who decided arbitrarily, sometime in 1943, that it would be desirable to turn China over to Communism, at least in part, by forcing Chiang Kai-shek to take the Chinese Communists into his national government under the form of coalition.4 

At a desk in the White House sat Lauchlin Currie, a confidential administrative assistant of the President, handling Far Eastern affairs. This man had not always been an American, and we may presume that his attachment to American citizenship was less than passionate, for the day was to come, after the war, when he would shake the soil of America from his shoes, shift his residence and activities to Colombia, South America, and see his American citizenship lapse after five years. (After the spy disclosures of 1948, in which there was testimony placing him in the Silvermaster espionage cell, Currie saw fit to depart for South America and remain there.) But during his White House interlude, under the warm wing of Mr. Roosevelt and with the benign smile of the First Lady and close contact with Harry Hopkins to give him confidence from day to day, "Lauch" (as the President called him)5 was well placed to be of service to people. 

However, Lauchlin Currie's idea of a good deed for the day was not exactly that of a Boy Scout. Joining Harry Dexter White and Nathan Witt as a reference for Nathan Gregory Silvermaster was the type of thing that appealed to him; and when Military Intelligence (G-2), outraged at seeing Silvermaster in a sensitive government post, made a secret security report on him, pointing out that he was known and listed in the files of the Seattle and San Francisco police departments, the Thirteenth Naval District, the American Legion, and the F.B.I. as a member and leader of the Communist Party and concluding that "the overwhelming ... testimony of the many and varied witnesses and sources indicates beyond reasonable doubt that Nathan Gregory Silvermaster is now, and has for years, been a member and a leader of the Communist Party and very probably a secret agent of the O.G.P.U," it was Currie who intervened in Silvermaster's favor, successfully, to keep him in the government. To assist himself, Currie selected one Michael Greenberg, a transplanted Britisher. Greenberg was indeed a sort of "expert" on the Far East, but it also happened to be the case that he had been a trained Communist for many years. He, too, felt enough at home in his new milieu to write letters on White House stationery.6 

Naturally, such men had plans for China. In 1943, the gambit was "coalition." The coalition concept is now so thoroughly discredited in the free world's mind that it is difficult to recapture the almost suicidal trustfulness with which Roosevelt welcomed it. Coalition appealed to the President because it gave him the illusion that he had settled his hard problems without open collision with Stalin over postwar aims. It was an attractive device for sweeping the dust under the bed instead of cleaning it up. The fact that the coalition expedient merely postponed the showdowns into the future, while strengthening Communism in the meantime, was not the kind of thing that could keep this man awake nights. He was breathing the intoxicating incense of present glory and apparent success; the future he would leave to his successors.

It was at Cairo that Roosevelt first notified the beleaguered Chiang Kai-shek that he must take the Communists into his cabinet. No word of this historic sabotage appears in the discreetly worded communique which the conferees issued after the meeting. It was done clandestinely, as part of an under-the table deal Roosevelt was attempting while Churchill was out of the room. Elliott Roosevelt, perhaps indiscreetly, reveals what was in his father's mind when he came face to face with the Chinese President; it was to wrest from Chiang a pledge to appease the Communists. "Father" confided to Elliott: "You see, he [Chiang] wants very badly to get our support against the British moving into Hong kong and Shanghai and Canton with the same old extraterritorial rights they enjoyed before the war." Elliott asked if "Father" would give that support. "Not for nothing," cried "Father." He then told Elliott he had complained to Chiang about the character of his government:

I'd told him it was hardly the modern democracy that ideally it should be. I'd told him he would have to form a unity government, while the war was still being fought, with the Communists in Yenan.7

It is a measure of Franklin D. Roosevelt's statesmanship and his semantics that he saw a gain for "democracy" in empowering the Communists.

With equal unreality, another idee fixe was germinating in Franklin D. Roosevelt's mind at this time. He was about to begin the frenzied imploration of the Russians to enter a Japanese war which only stern American opposition could have kept them out of when the time came to grab the spoils. In August, 1942, Averell Harriman had asked Stalin for a pledge of eventual entrance into the Japanese War. The shrewd Russian had put him off with a vague promise,8 which he repeated to another Roosevelt envoy, General Patrick J. Hurley, in November.9 Hull says that Stalin stated in October, 1943, that he would "help defeat Japan" after Germany was beaten 10 but Stalin was not asked what his intentions would be in the Far East after Japan's defeat. Now, at the end of 1943, all the logic of the situation called for extreme vigilance to keep the Russians out of the Far East. Instead, President Roosevelt, egged on constantly by Harry Hopkins, was preparing to invite, entice, and even bribe them to come in. And simultaneously, at Cairo, as we have seen, he started to pull the rug out from under anti-Communist government of China. 

Roosevelt, as usual, was busy thinking up ways to make Stalin happy. So at Cairo, we are informed by Averell Harriman, he proposed to Chiang that China give the Russians the use of the port of Dairen.11 Chiang naturally dodged this blow, but it was a grim foretaste of the Roosevelt technique. It is the common impression.that Dairen was yielded to Russia at Yalta under duress by a reluctant Roosevelt. The truth is even more discreditable. Roosevelt offered it. He had liked the idea at Cairo, and at Tehran he opened the door to this and all the later concessions demanded by Stalin at the expense of China. 

The military discussions at Cairo concerned a project-to which Roosevelt had already committed himself,to reconquer Burma and open the Burma Road into China. The idea was that the Chinese would invade Burma from across the Salween River, and American General Stilwell would lead four crack Chinese divisions being trained in India through the jungles of northern Burma. At the same time, the British were to undertake an amphibious operation across the Bay of Bengal. It was both a romantic plan and "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell's obsession. 

Prime Minister Churchill had no stomach for it. Why should British forces be sent to fight the Japanese? Japan would lose the war in due time anyway. So he talked again about Rhodes and the Balkans-or veering toward "the right" from Italy-and he wanted any available British naval strength to concentrate in the eastern Mediterranean, not the Bay of Bengal. He was not pleased that Roosevelt had invited the Chinese to Cairo. "The talks of the British and American Staffs were sadly distracted by the Chinese story, which was lengthy, complicated and minor," his memoirs moan. "All hope of persuading Chiang and his wife to go and see the pyramids and enjoy themselves until we returned from Teheran fell to the ground, with the result that the Chinese business occupied first instead of last place at Cairo."12 

As for President Roosevelt, he was on his way to make a favorable impression on Marshal Stalin, and the last thing he wanted to talk about at this moment-was an Anglo-American invasion of the Balkans. The American delegation saw plainly that the dogged Prime Minister was resuming the advocacy of strategic diversions into southeastern Europe and away from northern France. "They prepared themselves," says Sherwood, "for the battles at Tehran in which the Americans and the Russians would form a united front. "13 

"The Chinese business," which so irked Churchill, was a comedy of motives. He was opposed to ANAKIM (the Burma campaign) because he wanted to use the British strength elsewhere. Roosevelt favored ANAKIM because he did not want British strength to be sent where Churchill wanted to send it. Chiang Kai-shek took a long-range view; he perceived that the opening of the Burma Road to his stronghold in China would -enhance his prestige, bring a seasoned, loyal, well-equipped army home, and reinforce his capacity to deal with the Communists as the war ended. At the same time, Roosevelt was pressuring Chiang to merge with the Communists, for a secret price, at the expense of the British. 

If this seems fantastic, particularly since the Cairo Conference had the outward appearance of a love feast of dedicated allies, Sherwood's analysis gives a candid answer. In Southeast Asia, he says, "the British and Americans were fighting two different wars for different purposes and the Kuomintang Government was fighting a third war for purposes largely its own."14 This would have been a stunning revelation to the American people if it·had been made while the war, or wars, were in progress.

Actually, there was a multiplicity of wars in Europe and Asia as a whole, and the pseudo-alliance of America, Britain, China, and Russia was a tissue of cross-purposes. 

The upshot was characteristic. The talks produced what Sherwood calls "a semblance of agreement" that ANAKIM would be carried out. As Admiral Leahy points out, "the commitment had been made months before." He adds: "Chiang left Cairo for Chungking fully expecting his allies to make good their promises."15 This corroborates Sherwood's assertion that when the Generalissimo and the Madame departed, their hopes were high that this time China's demands would be met with more than "mere words." 

These hopes were short lived. Roosevelt and Churchill stopped at Cairo again on the way home from Teheran. They tossed the ANAKIM plan into the wastebasket. As Sherwood puts it, "Roosevelt felt impelled to renege on his own promise to Chiang Kai-shek, made ten days previously."16 

Why? Because Roosevelt had talked with Stalin in the interval. Russia was intending to come into the Japanese War herself. (Sherwood admits that this was "the most important factor.") 17 A strengthened Chinese Nationalist government would hardly fit in with Stalin's long-term plans for China. 

The consequences soon proved to be catastrophic. The Japanese, relieved of uncertainty over Burma, mounted their most formidable offensive against China in five years. It carried their troops.forward on a fifteen-hundred mile front between the Yangtze and the frontiers of Indochina. It wiped out strongholds in Southeast China which had withstood the Japanese since 1938 and airfields used by the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force under General Claire L. Chennault in Hunan, Kwangsi, and Yunnan. This blow, coming in the final year of the war after seven years of agonized Chinese resistance, almost knocked Chiang out of the war. Only his stout heart, the fortunate assignment of General Albert C. Wedemeyer to Chungking, and the valor of such men as General Chennault saved the disaster from becoming total. 

By inducing Chiang to focus upon Burma and then walking out on him, his allies imposed an impossible war plan upon him. His best troops were on the Burma frontier. He was drawn to the south. Yet it has always been true that he who controls the north of China controls China. The Communists were feverishly busy there. When the war ended, they were either entrenched in or contiguous to the important areas and in direct contact with the Russians. Bereft of the logistical support he had expected from his allies, Chiang was never able to recover the military advantage over Mao Tse-tung and the Red Army. 

The return to Cairo, after Tehran, also concerned another neighbor of the Soviet Union. For a long time Churchill had been avid to get Turkey to join the Allies, as part of his strategy to penetrate southeastern Europe, but President Inonu of Turkey was a cautious fence-sitter. Roosevelt had never shown any enthusiasm for going into that part of Europe, so when Inonu came to see Roosevelt and Churchill at Cairo, he was friendly, but he committed none of Turkey's fifty divisions. To Churchill's bitter disappointment, Roosevelt contributed nothing but smiles to the interview, and Inonu departed. 

Before he left Cairo for home, Roosevelt made one historic decision which it is generally believed pleased Churchill. He selected General Dwight D. Eisenhower to command OVERLORD. This choice was against "the almost impassioned advice" of Harry Hopkins, who preferred Marshall for the job.ls Admiral Leahy, Admiral King, and General Arnold had all hoped that Marshall would not be appointed.19 

We now know from the war diary of Field Marshal Viscount Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, that Brooke did not have a high opinion of Marshall as a strategist.20 The Hopkins-Marshall team had consistently bucked Churchill in favor of strategy pleasing to Stalin. It is probable that strong British pressure upon Roosevelt accounts for the unexpected appointment of Eisenhower. Marshall was placated with this Presidential compliment: "I feel I could not sleep with you out of the country." 

As Chief of Staff, Marshall continued to be a powerful figure. If we are to accept Field Marshal Brooke's final appraisal, Eisenhower's skill lay in harmonizing the diverse elements which planned and carried out the invasion. "He learned a lot during the war, but tactics, strategy and command were never his strong points.... As Supreme Commander what he may have lacked in military ability he greatly made up for by the charm of his personality."21 

Be that as it may, Eisenhower went on to become a national hero and the President of his country. That he owed much to Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision at Cairo in December, 1943, will never be denied. Perhaps a lingering gratitude is the reason why, in the Presidential office, he protected the Roosevelt reputation with a solicitude which is not helpful to historical research. The Tehran papers, shrouded in the State Department's files under lock and key, were to be revealed. They never were.

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TEHERAN

Footnotes
CHAPTER XI 
1. Hull, Ope cit., 11°9. 
2. Ibid., 1110. 
3. Ibid., Chapter LXXXV. 
4. Ibid., 1169. 
5. Ibid., 1249. 6. Ibid., 1716. 
7. Ibid., 1720. 
8. Ibid., 1252. 
9· Time (August 30, 1943)· 
10. Hull, Ope cit., 1231. 
11. Sherwood, Ope cit., 748. 
12. Wedemeyer, Ope cit., 370, 376. 
13. Sherwood, Ope cit., 752. 
14. W. D. Puleston, The Influence of Force in Foreign Relations (Van Nostrand, 1955). 
15. Whitehead, Ope cit., 355. (Foreword by J. Edgar Hoover) 

CHAPTER XII 
1. Hollington K. Tong, Chiang Kai-shek (China Publishing, 1953), 21 4. 
2. Ibid., 323 ft. 
3. T. H. White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder out of China (Sloane, 1946), 199· 
4. John T. Flynn, The Lattimore Story (Devin-Adair, 1953), 53; see also the documented account in Lohbeck, Ope cit., Part IV. 
5. Sherwood, Ope cit., 284. 
6. On Currie and Greenberg, see references to Senate and House committee evidence and reports collected in Burnham, op. cit. 
7. Elliott Roosevelt, Ope cit., 164. 
8. Deane, Ope cit., 226. 
9. Leahy, Ope cit., 147. 
10. Hull, Ope cit., 1309. 
11. U.S. Senate, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East, Part III, 1845. 
12. Winston Churchill, Closing the Ring (Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 328. 
13. Sherwood, Ope cit., 776. 
14· Ibid., 773. 
15. Leahy, Ope cit., 202. 
16. Sherwood, op. cit., 800. 
17. Ibid., 802. 
18. Ibid., 802. 
19. Ibid., 767. 
20. General Sir Alan Brooke, The Turn of the Tide (Doubleday, 1957)· 
21.Ibid 430.