Roosevelt and Stalin
Nisbet, Robert
a valued presidential counselor. For his was the voice that held—when such views were hopelessly out of fashion— that the United States is more than a collection of interest groups; that it...
...q a callous indifference to the fate of American and British soldiers and sailors are the most revolting...
...From such premises, and Roosevelt's ignorance of the history and nature of the Soviet Union, it followed quite naturally that the best hope for a democratic postwar world, free of imperialism, would have to be some form of AmericanSoviet condominium...
...q 'University of Georgia Press, $29.95...
...a frequent contributor, is a Washington lawyer...
...Like Wilson, Roosevelt wanted to transform an imperialist war into a war to make the world safe for democracy...
...Since the intentions of the Red East are now once again seen in a golden haze, there can be no more timely reading than Robert Nisbet's book on Roosevelt's stubborn refusal to open his eyes to the nature and goals of Stalin and the Soviet state...
...Only an interpreter from each side was present...
...He agreed with Stalin that France's overseas possessions must be taken from her and assured him "that not only Germany but France would be reduced to third rate powers after the war...
...One barely believes one's eyes to read further that Roosevelt added "that what most concerned Americans was the right of self-determination and that he himself 'was confident that the people would vote to join the Soviet Union.' " Thus, "in less than an hour" slavery was decreed for Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians...
...Equally revolting was Roosevelt's refusal in March 1945 to respond when "Harriman, outraged by Soviet brutality and callousness toward American prisoners-of-war rescued from German prison camps, begged the President to communicate directly with Stalin as a means of bringing the mistreatment to immediate [sic] stop...
...We had better pray that euphoric blindness will not produce similar results in the next...
...Stalin's nature and goals were well known by those whose warnings Roosevelt systematically ignored: Averell Harriman, his ambassador in Moscow...
...According to Nisbet, the answer to the question of Roosevelt's motives, "in a word, is Wilsonianism...
...And, finally, Roosevelt secured the Balkans for Soviet totalitarianism by promising Stalin that "the Channel invasion of . . . France would be supplemented by an invasion of southern France" by troops from the Italian campaign, "thus wrecking the 'soft underbelly' strategy of Churchill...
...According to Marks, Stalin "announced himself the champion of religious liberty...
...On the vast canvas of Roosevelt's indulgences of Stalin, those that exhibit Franz M Oppenheimer...
...By then victory was taken for granted...
...Nisbet shows convincingly that those betrayals were perpetrated during Roosevelt's first meeting with Stalin at the Teheran Summit in November 1943 rather than at Yalta in February 1945...
...We should be grateful to Professor Nisbet, a distinguished historian of intellectual history, for spending two full years to distill these 120 pages from the immense documentation of World War II and to the editor whose initiative set him on this course...
...Throughout 1942, Roosevelt insisted over Churchill's violent protests that convoys carrying arms to Russia keep sailing to Archangel and Murmansk even though the losses of ships and lives, caused by German submarines and aircraft operating from close-by Norwegian bases, were unbearable: "On July 14, Churchill wrote FDR: 'Only four ships have reached Archangel . . . out of thirtythree included in Convoy PQ 17.' " Moreover, Roosevelt insisted on this course in the teeth of Stalin's refusal to help those convoys by permitting English and American planes and ships to use Soviet bases, and despite the "often ugly treatment at Archangel and Murmansk of British sailors who had managed to survive the Arctic route...
...So, naturally, Teheran it was...
...Willful blindness has been a recurring constant in the West's relations with the Soviet Union...
...As early as July 1941, "Roosevelt seems to have been seized by a desire to have a meeting of his own with Stalin, one that would be secret, limited to the two of them and very small staffs...
...The decisions subsequently made at Yalta merely ratified the death warrants handed down at Teheran...
...In them Roosevelt agreed that the Soviet Union should retain the parts of Poland that Hitler had permitted the Soviet Union to annex in the Hitler-Stalin pact...
...The results of Roosevelt's blindness— the Berlin Wall, the division of Germany, the subjugation of Poland and of the Balkan countries, Korea, Vietnam —inflicted tragic suffering in the second half of this century...
...At Teheran, where butter would not melt in his mouth, he expressed a preference for Paasikivi as Finnish president even though the latter was a democrat rather than a communist...
...Coming Next Month: P. J. O'Rourke on Dave Barry on P. J. O'Rourke ROOSEVELT AND STALIN: THE FAILED COURTSHIP Robert Nisbet/Regnery Gateway/120 pp...
...Scarcely anything" was discussed at the plenary sessions that had not been "discussed and largely agreed on beforehand by Roosevelt and Stalin in their three private meetings...
...At Teheran, Stalin really began the Cold War, and did so on the basis of perceptions identical with those of Hitler at Munich...
...enduring security requirements that it must deal with rationally...
...By the time of the Teheran Summit, at the latest, the motivation could not have been to save the Soviet Union from defeat...
...that it has V ery early in this book we read that Franklin Roosevelt, in reporting to his cabinet upon his return from Yalta, referred to Joseph Stalin's early training in a seminary and said: "I think that something entered into his nature of the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave...
...22.50 Franz M. Oppenheimer THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 47...
...The contrast between their warnings and the observable facts on the one hand and Roosevelt's obsession with pleasing Stalin on the other justifies the subtitle of Nisbet's book, "The Failed Courtship": the tale has more in common with fictional accounts of amorous obsessions, like Swann's Way, than with sober statecraft...
...Time after time Roosevelt proposed such a meeting, and time after time he was rebuffed...
...And all that Roosevelt asked in return "was that Stalin be sensitive to the needs of Roosevelt's re-election campaign...
...Stalin's superb gift of dissembling, well described in Frederick W. Marks's work Wind Over Sand The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt,' helped Roosevelt, a parochial man, to disregard his experts...
...He perceived Britain and France as imperialist powers, but, as recorded in the diary of General Brooke, he said: "Of one thing I am certain, Stalin is not an imperialist...
...Nor were these the only people Roosevelt betrayed...
...George Kennan, and Charles E. Bohlen, among others...
...General John Deane, the head of the United States Military Mission in Moscow...
...In both the private and the plenary meetings Roosevelt made his disagreements with Churchill plain to Stalin...
...It is depressing to contemplate that those individual sufferings directly resulting from Roosevelt's infatuation with Stalin pale in comparison with the suffering inflicted on all the people of Eastern Europe whom Roosevelt betrayed by means of understandings with Stalin, originally kept secret from Churchill, and very deliberately kept secret from the American people for fear of how American Poles and other ethnics would vote in 1944...
...While Nisbet's sources have all been accessible before, there is much in this most readable distillation, like Roosevelt's discovery of the Christian gentleman in Stalin, that has been forgotten or never known by the young, many of whom were taught the "revisionist" version of the Cold War by Red professors...
...All this was done behind Churchill's back...
...Nisbet is therefore justified in concluding that, in this respect, Teheran was comparable to Munich in 1938, because it was at Munich that Hitler realized the fragility of the French-English alliance...
...When, after a year and a half of pleading by Roosevelt, Stalin condescended to a summit meeting, he insisted that he could travel no farther than Teheran...
...With equal liberality Roosevelt said that "he fully realized that Russia had had sovereignty" over Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and "added jokingly that when the Soviet armies re-occupied these areas, he did not intend to go to war with the Soviet Union on this point...
...Stalin never deigned to "take notice" of repeated complaints about that treatment...
...Roosevelt's interpreter was Charles Bohlen, to whom we owe the record of those private meetings...
...But Roosevelt fulfilled his heart's desire: he had private meetings with Stalin before each of the three official summit meetings...
...W hat motivated Roosevelt in this blind pursuit of Stalin's friendship...
...Marks's longer and more academic work confirms Nisbet's account and his conclusions...
...There would be private ownership, he [Stalin] assured Roosevelt, along with freedom of worship," and so on...
...The USSR, he said, would "chart a postwar course between communism and capitalism...
...Roosevelt replied: "It does not appear appropriate for me to send another message now to Stalin...
...and that citizenship in twentieth-century America carries with it obligations as well as privileges...
Vol. 22 • August 1989 • No. 8
