Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (162 page)

R
OOSEVELT
, C
HURCHILL,
and Stalin eventually reconciled their positions on most issues at Yalta, but the composition of the Polish government formed a persistent stumbling block. Roosevelt appealed to Stalin personally. “I am greatly disturbed that the three great powers do not have a meeting of minds about the political setup in Poland,” Roosevelt said in a note to Stalin. “It seems to me that it puts us all in a bad light throughout the world to have you recognizing one government while we and the British are recognizing another…. I am sure this state of affairs should not continue, and that if it does it can only lead our people to think there is a breach between us, which is not the case. I am determined that there shall be no breach between ourselves and the Soviet Union. Surely there is a way to reconcile our differences.”

Roosevelt suggested one such way. He conceded Stalin’s right to worry about the safety of the Red Army as the Soviet troops pushed toward Berlin. “You cannot, and we must not, tolerate any temporary government which will give your armed forces any trouble.” But the marshal must take account of the president’s political concerns. “You must believe me when I tell you that our people at home look with a critical eye on what they consider a disagreement between us at this vital stage of the war. They, in effect, say that if we cannot get a meeting of minds now, when our armies are converging on the common enemy, how can we get an understanding on even more vital things in the future?”

Roosevelt recommended a meeting of minds via a banging of heads. Stalin had said he would be willing to bring some of the Lublin Poles to Yalta. Roosevelt proposed that he and Churchill prevail on some representatives of the Londoners to come, too. Doubtless recalling the shotgun ceremony between de Gaulle and Giraud, the president imagined the two Polish parties, with appropriate encouragement from their sponsors, agreeing on a provisional government consisting of elements of both sides. “It goes without saying,” Roosevelt added—precisely because it did
not
go without saying—“that any interim government which could be formed as a result of our conference with the Poles here would be pledged to the holding of free elections in Poland at the earliest possible date. I know this is completely consistent with your desire to see a new free and democratic Poland emerge from the welter of this war.”

Stalin declined to answer this letter. Perhaps his offer to bring the Lubliners hadn’t been serious. Perhaps he feared being forced to compromise if the Londoners came. Perhaps he realized the Londoners would rather have met the devil in hell than Stalin at Yalta. The best he would do was allow the Londoners to travel to Moscow at a later date, to talk with the Lubliners.

Stalin realized he held the trump card in his negotiations with Roosevelt. While the president was speaking with Stalin and Churchill, the American chiefs of staff were meeting with their British and Soviet counterparts. The British were open and forthright, as were the Soviets on matters relating to Europe. But the Soviet generals refused even to talk about the other half of America’s—and Britain’s—war: the conflict with Japan. George Marshall and the American strategists were already laying plans for shifting the focus of American efforts to the Pacific; essential to their planning was knowledge of what the Soviets were going to do against the Japanese. Marshall and the American chiefs envisaged an invasion of the Japanese home islands sometime after the middle of 1945; they earnestly hoped that the Soviet Union would have declared war on Japan by then and would have moved substantial forces from Europe to the Far East. If Soviet units pinned down large parts of the Japanese army, many thousands of American lives would be saved and many months of fighting would be averted. Stalin had declared unspecifically at Teheran that the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan after Germany was defeated. Marshall and the chiefs needed to confirm this commitment and attach a date to it.

The Soviet timetable was the crucial issue for Roosevelt at Yalta—more immediate than voting procedures in the United Nations assembly, more pressing than the makeup of the Polish government. Those were details of the peace; Soviet entry into the conflict against Japan was a matter of the war, which still claimed priority. Roosevelt understood this, which was why he wouldn’t push Stalin any harder on Poland. Stalin knew it, which was why
he
stood his ground.

T
HE CONFERENCE
ended with a communiqué summarizing the successes of the talks and disguising their failures. The former included close collaboration regarding the final stages of the war in Europe. “Nazi Germany is doomed,” the tripartite statement asserted. “The German people will only make the cost of their defeat heavier to themselves by attempting to continue a hopeless resistance.” An enigmatically worded pair of sentences explained that the three governments continued to agree on “unconditional surrender terms” toward Germany but that “these terms will not be made known until the final defeat of Germany has been accomplished.” The Big Three tipped their hand far enough to say that each of their armies would occupy a zone of Germany and that France would be invited to occupy a zone as well. The communiqué forecast harsh treatment of the Nazi party and the German war machine but said nothing about dismemberment.

On the United Nations, the three governments kicked the matter of representation and voting down the road—specifically, to San Francisco, where a meeting would begin in April to draft a charter of the United Nations organization along the lines established at Dumbarton Oaks. China and France would join the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain as sponsors.

The Yalta “Declaration on Liberated Europe” reaffirmed “our faith in the principles of the Atlantic Charter” and “our determination to build, in cooperation with other peace-loving nations, a world order under law, dedicated to peace, security, freedom, and the general well-being of all mankind.”

Poland rated a section of its own. “We reaffirm our common desire to see established a strong, free, independent and democratic Poland,” the communiqué asserted. A provisional government for Poland should be established, including both the Lublin Poles and the London Poles. “This Polish Provisional Government of National Unity shall be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot.”

The communiqué was released from Yalta to an understandably curious world. What was
not
released was more important to Roosevelt than what was. A secret codicil declared:

The leaders of the three Great Powers—the Soviet Union, the United States of America and Great Britain—have agreed that in two or three months after Germany has surrendered and the war in Europe has terminated, the Soviet Union shall enter into the war against Japan.

56.

“
I
T WAS THE BEST
I
COULD DO
,” R
OOSEVELT TOLD
A
DOLF
B
ERLE ON
his return from Yalta. The Soviet commitment to the war against Japan was vital, allowing American military planners to move ahead confidently, knowing they’d have the help of the Red Army in taking on the Japanese. Stalin’s promise of free elections in Poland might prove hard to enforce; Roosevelt was enough of a Democrat to know the means by which his own party prevented free elections in the American South, and he assumed that Stalin was at least as clever as that. But the mere promise was more than Roosevelt could have demanded, given Russia’s existing control of Poland. And it was more than Churchill was offering India or the rest of the British empire. Perhaps Roosevelt made too much of personal trust among the leaders of governments, but what was his alternative? The United States couldn’t dictate the actions of the Soviet Union. It lacked the manpower and the political will. The only feasible option was to encourage decent behavior by the Kremlin, and the most likely way of doing this was to cultivate the Kremlin’s master. “I didn’t say it was good,” Roosevelt continued, in his Yalta summary to Berle. “I said it was the best I could do.”

There was something on Roosevelt’s mind the communiqué and codicil didn’t address. At one of the Yalta sessions, Stalin alluded to the mortality of the three leaders. They all understood, he said, that as long as they lived, they would not involve their countries in aggressive actions. They had experienced war and would do what was necessary to prevent its repetition. But times, and leaders, would change. “Ten years from now, none of us might be present,” Stalin said.

Roosevelt didn’t have ten years, and he knew it. He didn’t have more than four years, since he certainly couldn’t run for president again. He might have much less. At Yalta he carried on through force of will, but he felt his strength ebbing. The 1944 election campaign had revived him, but it also wore him out. He lost his appetite and lost more weight. His doctors removed all restrictions from his diet, and he was fed eggnogs to fatten him up. Yet he didn’t respond. “The President has lost ten pounds in the last two to three months and is, I think, rather worried about it,” his cousin Daisy Suckley wrote in her diary on Thanksgiving Day. “He looked very thin today, and his aches and pains worry me.” At the end of November, Roosevelt went to Warm Springs. His appetite improved, but his weight remained unchanged at 165 pounds. One of his molars became painfully loose and was extracted. He visited with friends and drove about the neighborhood. In early December he took a swim. The warm water seemed to relax him. But on leaving the water his blood pressure was higher than ever: 260 over 150. Though encouraged to eat, he complained that he couldn’t taste anything and he lost more weight.

The Christmas holidays saw little improvement. “I had quite a talk with Anna about her father’s health,” Daisy Suckley wrote. “It is a very difficult problem, and I am entirely convinced that he can
not
keep up the present rate—he will kill himself if he tries.” Roosevelt put on the paterfamilias role for a gathering of the grandchildren, but he couldn’t maintain the pose. “As the evening wore on, he seemed to me to be terribly tired and to be making an effort even in ordinary conversation.”

January brought the inauguration. The war and the president’s condition suggested a small ceremony, which was held at the White House rather than the Capitol. The day was cold, with snow on the ground, but Roosevelt insisted on giving his inaugural address without hat or overcoat. His spirits rose on the day’s excitement; he was in fine form at the reception that evening.

He remained in good spirits during the long journey to Yalta. The plane ride from Malta to Saki caused him some discomfort, on account of the noise and vibration, but he enjoyed the five-hour car trip from the airport at Saki to Yalta.

His health held up during the conference, despite the enormous pressure attending the talks. On one occasion, however, the tension told. He had been going back and forth with Stalin over Poland, and though he maintained his good humor during the session, he came out drained. “He was obviously greatly fatigued,” Howard Bruenn noted. “His color was very poor (gray).” For the first time, Roosevelt exhibited
pulsus alternans,
a regular variability in the amplitude of the pulse indicating failure of the left ventricle. Bruenn was alarmed and ordered that the president’s schedule be cut back. Roosevelt saw no visitors before noon, and he took a rest of at least an hour every evening before dinner. His condition stabilized, and the new symptoms went away.