Three Egos
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
Three Egos One Christmas in Washington: The Secret Meeting Between Roosevelt and Churchill That Changed the World By David J. Bercuson and HolgerH. Herwig Overlook. 320 pp. $29.95. My...
...Stalin...
...Roosevelt did not hesitate to accept the Soviet Union as an ally...
...economy, manifested in the supply of war matériel to its allies...
...Roosevelt's messages to Stalin were typically chatty yet designedly vague, while Stalin's to FDR were to the point and often visibly impatient...
...In early 1945 Stalin even refused to let U.S...
...But the fact remains that Roosevelt was impelled by powerful visions in both the opening and closing years of the War...
...Even the United States and Britain had to overcome long traditions of mutual distrust and the rival sensitivities of their leaders' egos...
...In the case of the Soviet Union, the Western powers had to deal with a bloody and perhaps deranged tyrant who had only been thrown into their arms by the madness of an even nastier dictator...
...thinks he likes me better...
...The only egregious error I detected was her confusing the anti-Hitler plotter Claus von Stauffenberg with the last Nazi German ambassador to Moscow, Friedrich von der Schulenburg...
...Churchill, the inveterate anti-Bolshevik, met Stalin for the first time when he flew to Moscow in 1942 to tell the Soviet dictator that there would be no second front in Europe that year, and Roosevelt never met Stalin in person until the Tehran Conference in December 1943...
...Most of the originals come from the White House "Map Room" records now in the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York...
...officers visit the American POWs in Poland being liberated by Soviet troops...
...But the British had to yield on the matter of a unified wartime command, embodied in the Combined Chiefs of Staff, and Churchill was implicitly forced to accept the junior position in the transatlantic partnership...
...Much of this material was published by the Soviets in 1957, in Russian and in English...
...How the three principals worked out the details of their cooperation, though, was far from simple...
...It presents "all the messages as Roosevelt wrote them, and all of Stalin's messages, in the form Roosevelt read them...
...361 pp...
...Churchill, in contrast, appears here as an ebullient yet anachronistic champion of the British Empire...
...Both beliefs, of course, have long since been discredited by the preponderance of historical research...
...But the new volume, which parallels Yale's "Annals of Communism" series of documentary collections, is complete and more accurate...
...dealing with him, both Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin were only reactive, comparatively speaking...
...Stalin, according to Hopkins' report (reproduced here from Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins), wanted the United States to enter the War forthwith, and would even welcome American troops in Russia under American command—a gesture of desperation he would later retract...
...He was intent on erecting a world order—symbolized by the creation of the United Nations—that would prevent the mistakes of the postWorld War I years...
...Barely a month after the German invasion in the summer of 1941, he sent his aide and alter ego Harry Hopkins to Moscow to promise American logistical help...
...My Dear Mr...
...Stalin, a collection of the personal exchanges between Roosevelt and Stalin, is a salutary reminder of how complicated their relationship was from start to finish...
...Stalin made it clear in his correspondence that he was determined to install his Communist clients as the postwar government there, and quite contemptuously dismissed the non-Communist Warsaw uprising as "a handful of criminals...
...To be sure, Roosevelt had the advantage of leading from strength, the industrial strength of the U.S...
...Roosevelt personified the transformation of the United States from a reluctant player to a confident superperformer on the great power stage...
...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor of history emeritus, University of Vermont...
...The negotiations around the Big Three conferences at Tehran in December 1943 and at Yalta in February 1945 merely papered over the widening cracks between the prospective victors of West and East, as Stalin focused on consolidating Soviet influence in Central Europe...
...In testimony to their own insularity, perhaps, Roosevelt and Churchill had never met before 1941, except for a chance encounter back in 1918 when FDR was assistant secretary of the Navy...
...Yale...
...And this all before Pearl Harbor...
...Diehard idealists depicted him as an architect of U.S.-Soviet cooperation whose successors torpedoed that hope and launched the Cold War...
...The Soviet leader was always suspicious of too close a relationship, and consistently evaded American and British proposals to send military personnel to Soviet territory to accompany aid shipments...
...In retrospect, Roosevelt and Churchill had no choice but to forge their Grand Alliance to defeat Hitl er's Germany (together with their standoffish Soviet partner) and Emperor Hirohito's Japan (with whom the Soviet Union remained technically at peace until August 1945...
...He was the active force in the Big Three wartime relationship...
...Another plus in the new book is the extensive Introduction and continuity supplied by Susan Butler, not a Soviet affairs specialist but a competent journalist...
...Poland was the biggest bone of contention...
...Ego conflicts and strategic tensions were never completely disposed of...
...Pursuers of the isolationist tradition tended to portray FDR as plotting to provoke the United States into the War...
...To the end of the War Stalin did not hide his suspicions of an Anglo-American deal with Germany, sharpened by information on negotiations held in Switzerland for a German surrender in Italy...
...After the military tide turned in 1943, Stalin's attitude distinctly stiffened...
...by nature a manipulator," who liked to postpone big decisions...
...There was, for instance, no direct communication from Roosevelt to Stalin at the time of the ARCADIA meeting with Churchill, but Churchill and Stalin exchanged several brief messages at the time, and in Washington Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinov was kept informed...
...35.00...
...Occasionally the notes seem a bit naïve, as on the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944...
...Butler quotes a message he sent Churchill: "I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department...
...Even before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, he recognized the grave clanger Hitler's Germany represented forthe democracies...
...Stalin: The Complete Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin Edited, with commentary, by Susan Butler Foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...
...Churchill got the main thing he wanted out of the meeting code-named arcadia: American agreement to concentrate initially on the defeat of Hitler...
...This is no dry diplomatic history...
...Roosevelt's priority at that point, however, was establishing the UN and overcoming Soviet haggling about voting rights in the new organization...
...Though Pearl Harbor was a military disaster that initiated a long purgatory before the tide was turned against Japan, politically it vastly simplified Roosevelt's task of stiffening the British and the Russians against Hitler...
...The differences between these English-speaking leaders, though, were nothing compared to the task of dealing with Stalin and Russia...
...That was no problem for Roosevelt, since he had harbored an anti-German animus from his youth, and after the fall of France had already made the United States a nonbelligerent ally of Britain...
...stresses Roosevelt's realism about Stalin and his worrying that Soviet unilateralism, along with American isolationism, would undermine his notion of a United Nations that could keep the peace...
...By fall, Roosevelt had convinced Congress to include the USSR in the Lend-Lease program initiated for Britain the previous spring...
...From ahost of memoirs, documentary sources and secondary accounts, Bercuson and Herwig draw a fast-paced picture of the first of many wartime meetings of Roosevelt, Churchill and their staffs...
...It is appropriate, then, that the two Canadian military historians David J. Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig have now taken up more thoroughly than any previous authors the story of the emergency meeting with Roosevelt that Churchill initiated within days after Pearl Harbor to hammer out a grand strategy for the War...
...Their direct exchanges were spotty, although other diplomatic contacts (some of them included here) filled in the gaps...
...After the fall of France in 1940, he was determined to get all the aid to Britain that was possible in an America still in the grip of isolationism and the Neutrality Act...
...Bercuson and Herwig subscribe to the view of many American historians of Roosevelt as a devious charmer, "secretive...
...But he had no illusions about the challenge of pulling the American public and the government of the Soviet Union into the new system...
...So it is not surprising that nearly half a century of Cold War hostility ensued...
...Stalin was sure the German plan was to yield in the west while holding the Russians off in the east...
...As long as his back was to the wall in the face of Germany's advance, Stalin was fixated on getting military supplies from the West and the opening of a second front on the European continent—a strategy Roosevelt and Churchill had to postpone repeatedly between 1942 and 1944...
...Similarly, he pushed against the grain of American opinion to get aid to the Soviets following the German invasion of June 1941...
...As the War's end came into sight, the President feared a renewed American attraction to isolationism and a Soviet lurch into unilateralism...
...Mr Dear Mr...
...Following a brief run-up that includes Roosevelt and Churchill's "Atlantic Charter" meeting in Newfoundland in August 1941, and the critical turning point of Pearl Harbor, the authors chronicle day-by-day and literally mealby-meal the history-making sessions in Washington from Churchill's arrival by battleship on December 22 to his spurof-the-moment flight home on January 14, 1942...
...A Foreword by the tireless Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...
...Despite their pressing mutual interest in stopping Hitler, the Roosevelt-Stalin relationship was never very cordial, but Roosevelt thought his persuasiveness would be decisive...
...author, "Russia: The Roots of Confrontation" Two much debated questions about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the diplomacy of World War II concerned the President's role in bringing the United States into the battle against Hitler, and his perception of postwar relations between this country and the Soviet Union...
...Western relations with the Soviet Union during the War have been heavily documented and exhaustively analyzed, albeit to no clear conclusion...
...with all the color they can muster about the verbal sparring among the personalities involved—not only Roosevelt and Churchill but their military chiefs as well—Bercuson and Herwig produce a real page-turner...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
