atmosphere that "was amazingly good."
The same spirit continued at the first meeting of Stalin, Churchill, and
Roosevelt in Tehran during November and early December 1943. Committed to
winning Stalin as a friend, FDR stayed at the Soviet Embassy, met privately
with Stalin, aligned himself with the Soviet leader against Churchill on a
number of issues, and even went so far as to taunt Churchill "about his
Britishness, about John Bull," in an effort to forge an informal "anti-
imperial" alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union. A spirit
of cooperation prevailed, with the wartime leaders agreeing that the Big Four
would have the power to police any postwar settlements (clearly consistent
with Stalin's commitment to a "sphere of influence" approach), reaffirming
plans for a joint military effort against Japan, and even—after much
difficulty—appearing to find a common approach to the difficulties of Poland
and Eastern Europe. When it was all over, FDR told the American people: "I
got along fine with Marshall Stalin ... I believe he is truly representative
of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along
very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed." When pressed on
what kind of a person the Soviet leader was, Roosevelt responded:
"I would call him something like me, ... a realist."
The final conference of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at Yalta in February
1945 appeared at the time to carry forward the partnership, although in
retrospect it would become clear that the facade of unity was built on a
foundation of misperceptions rooted in the different values, priorities, and
political ground rules of the two societies. Stalin seemed to recognize
Roosevelt's need to present postwar plans—for domestic political reasons—as
consistent with democratic, universalistic principles. Roosevelt, in turn,
appreciated Stalin's need for friendly governments on his borders. The three
leaders agreed on concrete plans for Soviet participation in the Japanese
war, and Stalin reiterated his support for a coalition government in China
with Chiang Kaishek assuming a position of leadership. Although some of
Roosevelt's aides were skeptical of the agreements made, most came back
confident that they had succeeded in laying a basis for continued
partnership. As Harry Hopkins later recalled, "we really believed in our
hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for. The
Russians have proved that they can be reasonable and far-seeing and there
wasn't any doubt in the minds of the president or any of us that we could
live with them and get along with them peacefully for as far into the future
as any of us could imagine."
In fact, two disquietingly different perceptions of the Soviet Union existed
as the war drew to an end. Some Washington officials believed that the
mystery of Russia was no mystery at all, simply a reflection of a national
history in which suspicion of outsiders was natural, given repeated invasions
from Western Europe and rampant hostility toward communism on the part of
Western powers. Former Ambassador to Moscow Joseph Davies believed that the
way to cut through that suspicion was to adopt "the simple approach of
assuming that what they say, they mean." On the basis of his personal
negotiations with the Russians, presidential aide Harry Hopkins shared the
same confidence.
The majority of well-informed Americans, however, endorsed the opposite
position. It was folly, one newspaper correspondent wrote, "to prettify Stalin,
whose internal homicide record is even longer than Hitler's." Hitler and Stalin
were two of the same breed, former Ambassador to Russia William Bullitt
insisted. Each wanted to spread his power "to the ends of the earth. Stalin,
like Hitler, will not stop. He can only be stopped." According to
Bullitt, any alternative view implied "a conversion of Stalin as striking as
the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus." Senator Robert Taft agreed. It
made no sense, he insisted, to base U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union "on the
delightful theory that Mr. Stalin in the end will turn out to have an angelic
nature." Drawing on the historical precedents of the purge trials and
traditional American hostility to communism, totalitarianism, and Stalin, those
who held this point of view saw little hope of compromise. "There is as little
difference between communism and fascism," Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen said, "as
there is between burglary and larceny." The only appropriate response was
force. Instead of "leaning over backward to be nice to the descendents of
Genghis Khan," General George Patton suggested, "[we] should dictate to them
and do it now and in no uncertain terms." Within such a frame of reference, the
lessons of history and of ideological incompatibility seemed to permit no
possibility of compromise.
But Roosevelt clearly felt that there was a third way, a path of mutual
accommodation that would sustain and nourish the prospects of postwar
partnership without ignoring the realities of geopolitics. The choice in his
mind was clear. "We shall have to take the responsibility for world
collaboration," he told Congress, "or we shall have to bear the
responsibility for another world conflict." President Roosevelt was neither
politically naive nor stupid. Even though committed to the Atlantic Charter's
ideals of self-determination and territorial integrity, he recognized the
legitimate need of the Soviet Union for national security. For him, the
process of politics—informed by thirty-five years of skilled
practice—involved striking a deal that both sides could live with. Roosevelt
acknowledged the brutality, the callousness, the tyranny of the Soviet
system. Indeed, in 1940 he had called Russia as absolute a dictatorship as
existed anywhere. But that did not mean a solution was impossible, or that
one should withdraw from the struggle to find a basis for world peace. As he
was fond of saying about negotiations with Russia, "it is permitted to walk
with the devil until the bridge is crossed."
The problem was that, as Roosevelt defined the task of finding a path of
accommodation, it rested solely on his shoulders. The president possessed an
almost mystical confidence in his own capacity to break through policy
differences based on economic structures and political systems, and to
develop a personal relationship of trust that would transcend impersonal
forces of division. "I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I
tell you," he wrote Churchill in 1942, "[that] I think I can personally
handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department.
Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better,
and I hope he will continue to do so." Notwithstanding the seeming naivete of
such statements, Roosevelt appeared right, in at least this one regard. The
Soviets did seem to place their faith in him, perhaps thinking that American
foreign policy was as much a product of one man's decisions as their own.
Roosevelt evidently thought the same way, telling Bullitt, in one of their
early foreign policy discussions, "it's my responsibility and not yours; and
I'm going to play my hunch."
The tragedy, of course, was that the man who perceived that fostering world
peace was his own personal responsibility never lived to carry out his
vision. Long in declining health, suffering from advanced arteriosclerosis
and a serious cardiac problem, he had gone to Warm Springs, Georgia, to
recover from the ordeal of Yalta and the congressional session. On April 12,
Roosevelt suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died. As word spread
across the country, the stricken look on people's faces told those who had
not yet heard the news the awful dimensions of what had happened. "He was the
only president I ever knew," one woman said. In London, Churchill declared
that he felt as if he had suffered a physical blow. Stalin greeted the
American ambassador in silence, holding his hand for thirty seconds. The
leader of the world's greatest democracy would not live to see the victory he
had striven so hard to achieve.
2.2 The Truman Doctrine.
Few people were less prepared for the challenge of becoming president.
Although well-read in history, Truman's experience in foreign policy was
minimal. His most famous comment on diplomacy had been a statement to a
reporter in 1941 that "if we see that Germany is winning [the war] we ought
to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that
way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler
victorious under any circumstances." As vice-president, Truman had been
excluded from all foreign policy discussions. He knew nothing about the
Manhattan Project. The new president, Henry Stimson noted, labored under the
"terrific handicap of coming into... an office where the threads of
information were so multitudinous that only long previous familiarity could
allow him to control them." More to the point were Truman's own comments:
"They didn't tell me anything about what was going on. . . . Everybody around
here that should know anything about foreign affairs is out." Faced with
burdens sufficiently awesome to intimidate any individual, Truman had to act
quickly on a succession of national security questions, aided only by his
native intelligence and a no-nonsense attitude reflected in the now-famous
slogan that adorned his desk: "The Buck Stops Here."
Truman's dilemma was compounded by the extent to which Roosevelt had acted" as
his own secretary of state, sharing with almost no one his plans for the
postwar period. Roosevelt placed little trust in the State Department's
bureaucracy, disagreed with the suspicion exhibited toward Russia by most
foreign service officers, and for the most part appeared to believe that he
alone held the secret formula for accommodation with the Soviets. Ultimately
that formula presumed the willingness of the Russian leadership "to give the
Government of Poland [and other Eastern European countries] an external
appearance of independence [italics added]," in the words of Roosevelt's
aide Admiral William Leahy. In the month before his death, FDR had evidently
begun to question that presumption, becoming increasingly concerned about
Soviet behavior. Had he lived, he may well have adopted a significantly tougher
position toward Stalin than he had taken previously. Yet in his last
communication with Churchill, Roosevelt was still urging the British prime
minister to "minimize the Soviet problem as much as possible . . . because
these problems, in one form or another, seem to arrive everyday and most of
them straighten out." If Stalin's intentions still remained difficult to fathom
so too did Roosevelt's. And now Truman was in charge, with neither Roosevelt's
experience to inform him, nor a clear sense of Roosevelt's perceptions to offer
him direction.
Without being able to analyze at leisure all the complex information that was
relevant, Truman solicited the best advice he could from those who were most
knowledgeable about foreign relations. Hurrying back from Moscow, Averell
Harriman sought the president's ear, lobbying intensively with White House
and State Department officials for his position that "irreconcilable
differences" separated the Soviet Union and the United States, with the
Russians seeking "the extension of the Soviet system with secret police,
[and] extinction of freedom of speech" everywhere they could. Earlier,
Harriman had been well disposed toward the Soviet leadership,
enthusiastically endorsing Russian interest in a postwar loan and advocating
cooperation wherever possible. But now Harriman perceived a hardening of
Soviet attitudes and a more aggressive posture toward control over Eastern
Europe. The Russians had just signed a separate peace treaty with the Lublin
(pro-Soviet) Poles, and after offering safe passage to sixteen pro-Western
representatives of the Polish resistance to conduct discussions about a
government of national unity, had suddenly arrested the sixteen and held them
incommunicado. America's previous policy of generosity toward the Soviets had
been "misinterpreted in Moscow," Harriman believed, leading the Russians to
think they had carte blanche to proceed as they wished. In Harriman's view,
the Soviets were engaged in a "barbarian invasion of Europe." Whether or not
Roosevelt would have accepted Harriman's analysis, to Truman the ambassador's
words made eminent sense. The international situation was like a poker game,
Truman told one friend, and he was not going to let Stalin beat him.
Just ten days after taking office, Truman had the opportunity to play his own
hand with Molotov. The Soviet foreign minister had been sent by Stalin to
attend the first U.N. conference in San Francisco both as a gesture to
Roosevelt's memory and as a means of sizing up the new president. In a
private conversation with former Ambassador to Moscow Joseph Davies, Molotov
expressed his concern that "full information" about Russian-U.S. relations
might have died with FDR and that "differences of interpretation and possible
complications [might] arise which would not occur if Roosevelt lived."
Himself worried that Truman might make "snap judgments," Davies urged Molotov
to explain fully Soviet policies vis-a-vis Poland and Eastern Europe in order
to avoid future conflict.
Truman implemented the same no-nonsense approach when it came to decisions
about the atomic bomb. Astonishingly, it was not until the day after Truman's
meeting with Molotov that he was first briefed about the bomb. By that time,
$2 billion had already been spent on what Stimson called "the most terrible
weapon ever known in human history." Immediately, Truman grasped the
significance of the information. "I can't tell you what this is," he told
his secretary, "but if it works, and pray God it does, it will save many
American lives." Here was a weapon that might not only bring the war to a
swift conclusion, but also provide a critical lever of influence in all
postwar relations. As James Byrnes told the president, the bomb would "put us
in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war."
In the years subsequent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, historians have debated
the wisdom of America's being the first nation to use such a horrible weapon
of destruction and have questioned the motivation leading up to that
decision. Those who defend the action point to ferocious Japanese resistance
at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, and the likelihood of even greater loss of life if
an invasion of Japan became necessary. Support for such a position comes even
from some Japanese. "If the military had its way," one military expert in
Japan has said, "we would have fought until all 80 million Japanese were
dead. Only the atomic bomb saved me. Not me alone, but many Japanese. . . ."
Those morally repulsed by the incineration of human flesh that resulted from
the A-bomb, on the other hand, doubt the necessity of dropping it, citing
later U.S. intelligence surveys which concluded that "Japan would have
surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had
not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or
contemplated." Distinguished military leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower later
opposed use of the bomb. "First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it
wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing," Eisenhower noted.
"Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon." In
light of such statements, some have asked why there was no effort to
communicate the horror of the bomb to America's adversaries either through a
demonstration explosion or an ultimatum. Others have questioned whether the
bomb would have been used on non-Asians, although the fire-bombing of Dresden
claimed more victims than Hiroshima. Perhaps most seriously, some have
charged that the bomb was used primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union
rather than to secure victory over Japan.
Although revulsion at America's deployment of atomic weapons is understandable,
it now appears that no one in the inner circles of American military and
political power ever seriously entertained the possibility of not using
the bomb. As Henry Stimson later recalled, "it was our common objective,
throughout the war, to be the first to produce an atomic weapon and use it. ...
At no time, from 1941 to 1945, did I ever hear it suggested by the president,
or by any other responsible member of the government, that atomic energy should
not be used in the war." As historians Martin Sherwin and Barton Bernstein have
shown, the momentum behind the Manhattan Project was such that no one ever
debated the underlying assumption that, once perfected, nuclear weapons would
be used. General George Marshall told the British, as well as Truman and
Stimson, that a land invasion of Japan would cause casualties ranging from five
hundred thousand to more than a million American troops. Any president who
refused to use atomic weapons in the face of such projections could logically
be accused of needlessly sacrificing American lives. Moreover, the enemy was
the same nation that had unleashed a wanton and brutal attack on Pearl Harbor.
As Truman later explained to a journalist, "When you deal with a beast, you
have to treat him as a beast." Although many of the scientists who had seen the
first explosion of the bomb in New Mexico were in awe of its destructive
potential and hoped to find some way to avoid its use in war, the idea of a
demonstration met with skepticism. Only one or two bombs existed. What if, in a
demonstration, they failed to detonate? Thus, as horrible as it may seem in
retrospect, no one ever seriously doubted the necessity of dropping the bomb on
Japan once the weapon was perfected.
On the Russian issue, however, there now seems little doubt that
administration officials thought long and hard about the bomb's impact on
