“If he wants that, Lanny, it can mean only another world war. What I hope to do is to persuade him that if he will let the free nations alone, their people will find their own solution to their problems. If they want a Socialist state, surely I have no desire to stop them; only let them get it by the democratic process and not by repression and dictatorship.”
“What you are asking, Governor, is that Stalin shall cease to be a Leninist and become a Kautskyist, or a Blumite, or shall we say a Norman-Thomasite? But Stalin hates the very names of these men; he calls them Social Fascists and teaches his people to liquidate them.”
“You think the problem is hopeless then?”
“I don’t say that. Lenin was always ready to shift his party line—he set up the NEP, you remember. And Stalin is his disciple; Stalin was ready to make deals with Hitler, and even with Hirohito. He will make a deal with you, for the time being—until his industry has recovered. It might even be that he would make one with you and mean it, provided you could convince him that you were actually going to unhorse your economic royalists. Wall Street is his real enemy, and he knows it well.” Lanny paused for a moment and then asked, “Why don’t you send Harry Hopkins?”
“In the first place I need Harry in San Francisco; he is at the Mayo Clinic resting up for the ordeal, as I am. If I ordered him to Russia, I should feel that it was a death sentence. The poor fellow hangs onto life with his teeth and toenails.”
An alarming idea had come into the P.A.’s mind. “You’re not planning to send me!” he exclaimed.
“Why not, Lanny?”
“I’m not equal to a job of that size.”
“I have thousands of men doing jobs they aren’t equal to. They just have to brace themselves and become equal. You have the health and the time. You know Stalin, and he remembers you—he went out of his way to indicate that. He asked you why you hadn’t come again—and now why not come?”
“I would go as your representative?”
“Not to take any action, but to inquire, and explain, and report to me.”
“And what am I to say?”
“Say whatever you think may persuade Stalin to trust me and make a trial of real friendship. You understand his ideology and you understand ours. Try to show him that if he will make a real peace and let the democratic countries alone, they will be traveling the road toward social control of industry, and may surprise him by the speed with which they move. I can surely answer for the next four years. Believe you me, the economic royalists are not going to be running the U.S.A. while I am alive.”
III
Of course Lanny had to say yes; he had never said no to Roosevelt in the eight years they had been working together. He would diligently bone up on the problems of the peace settlement, the control of Germany and Japan, and of capitalism and Communism in a constantly shrinking world. He would retrace the long flying route to Sevastopol, and from there to Moscow. He would sit in the Kremlin room, oval-shaped, with white oak paneling and a vaulted ceiling; he would summon all the tact and knowledge of human nature he had acquired in his forty-five years; he would gaze into the heavy-lidded eyes of the Georgian dictator, solemnly puffing on his pipe; he would pause while the bespectacled young translator Pavlov put the words into Russian. It would be a slow process and would give Lanny time to shape each sentence in his mind. He would do it conscientiously, hoping that some well-chosen word might be the means of averting the greatest calamity that had yet befallen the unhappy human race.
The Boss said, “My first thought was to send you to Washington and arrange for the striped-pants boys to give you a briefing; but I decided against that for several reasons. They are not at all pleased with my idea of sending personal representatives; they take it as a sign that I am not entirely satisfied with their routine, and in that I am sorry to say they are correct. Also, I am afraid the newspaper fellows might get on your trail. I want this to be strictly between us two.”
“Of course, Governor.”
“You understand, you are not to make any decisions, not even any proposals. What I want you to do, or try to do, is to explain our country to Stalin. Make him realize our intense desire for good faith and good feeling between the two countries. Make him understand the seriousness with which we take our agreements, and that we intend to follow them, not merely to the letter but in the spirit. We have been his allies in this war, and we want to be his friends in the peace. Tell him I have sent you for that purpose and that alone: not to complain about particular breaches of faith so much as to re-establish the spirit of friendship in which we met at Teheran and Yalta.”
“I understand that perfectly, Governor. I am not well enough informed to go into the details with Stalin.”
“You must know about the breaches of our agreements, to deal with them if he brings them up. I will give you confidential documents which you may study on the trip and then destroy before your plane reaches Russian territory. In addition, I will set aside an hour or two tomorrow afternoon, the fore part. I shall be busy with the mail in the morning, and later in the afternoon I have promised to go to a barbecue; one of my friends, a peach grower, is going to make me some of his good Brunswick stew. Do you know what that is?—chicken and corn, with some fixings. In the evening the patients here are putting on a minstrel show for me. A President is not allowed to live entirely as a recluse, you know.”
“I can’t see you very well as a recluse,” replied Lanny, returning the smile.
“There is a Russian lady who comes to paint a portrait of me; she sits and works while I attend to the mail. I’ll manage to get rid of her while we have our confidential talk. Shall we say half-past one? I won’t invite you to lunch, as there will be other people here, and I don’t want any talk about you.”
“Of course, Governor.”
Roosevelt handed him a sheet of paper and took one himself. “I’ll make notes of what I want to tell you, and you make some so that you can be thinking the points over. I have mentioned Italy. Then there is Poland: we had a perfectly clear understanding at Yalta that the Polish people were to choose their own government in free, democratic elections; but the Russians have gone right ahead setting up a Communist regime there. I know their antagonism to the Polish government-in-exile; but it is for the Polish people as a whole to decide what sort of government they want.”
“Right,” said Lanny.
“We also had the same agreement regarding the Greek people. Now the Russians are sending arms to partisans in the Greek mountains; and if they are to fight Germans, that is fine, but all our information indicates that they are getting ready to fight other Greeks, the existing government.”
Lanny hesitated, then decided to speak. “I don’t need to travel to Moscow to know what Stalin will say to that; and you might as well give me the answer now. He will say the existing government is a stooge for Winston Churchill, who is trying to set up a puppet king to maintain Greek landlords and capitalists.”
“Remind Stalin that I am not Churchill. He knows perfectly well how I have stood between Churchill and himself. I would not let Churchill send our armies into the Balkans, to occupy them and keep Stalin out; but neither do I want to see Stalin keep Churchill out. I want the Greek people to decide what sort of government Greece shall have.”
“But suppose the Greek people want to have a civil war?”
“We don’t want to let any people have wars. We want to establish an international authority, which will order a free and fair election, and compel people to submit to that decision. That goes for Italy, for Poland, for Greece. It goes also for Iran, where the Russian agents are working now to undermine the British position. We buy oil from Iran, and so do the British. We are perfectly willing to let the Russians buy their fair share. What we don’t want is to see an oil war built up between Russia and Britain.”
“And don’t forget Turkey and the Dardanelles.”
“So far they haven’t brought that up; but we are informed that Russian agents are stirrin
g up the Kurds—which is a way of making a civil war in Turkey. In short, Lanny, the present Russian government is coming to look more and more like the old Russian government, with exactly the same aims the tsars had—warm-water ports and all the rest. We thought they had dropped their old national anthem.”
“Yes, but their new one says: ‘The international party shall be the human race.’”
“Our answer is, if they mean to be human, let them come into the United Nations Organization and make provisions for the settlement of international disputes by negotiation and arbitration. What we fear is that inhuman part of the race which aims to take what it wants by force and fraud.”
IV
Lanny had always been careful never to overstay his time with this overburdened man. Now he saw exhaustion in the gray face, and several times he had noticed that the jaw quivered, and had turned his eyes away to avoid embarrassing his host. He said, “All right, Governor. You have given me enough to think over till tomorrow. Shall I go now and let you get your sleep? You have my promise, I will take the mission and do my best.”
“Be assured,” replied the President, “I shall give great weight to what you tell me. I have many friends, but only a few who can say that they have never asked me for anything.” He paused, and then added, “I lost one of my closest friends on the trip back from Yalta. I suppose you heard that Pa Watson died on the Quincy soon after you left us.”
“I read it, and I knew what a loss it would be to you.”
“A great sorrow. He had a cerebral hemorrhage, a terrible thing. It strikes like lightning, and the doctors can neither foresee it nor do anything when it comes.”
“Take care of yourself,” Lanny said, and put all his heart into the words. “Get your full sleep now.”
“You talk like Doctor Mac,” said F.D.R., smiling again. “He’d give me a terrible scolding if he knew about this conference. I promised him I’d have none here.”
The two exchanged a warm handclasp, and Lanny went out.
V
A storm had come up, and he was driven back to the hotel through rain. Baker said, “The Chief looks bad,” and Lanny replied, “He carries a heavy load.”
That was all; he went up to his room, undressed, and lay on the bed, thinking hard about the load that had been transferred to his shoulders. He felt no pride in the honor that had been done him; only fear that he would not be equal to the duty. Perhaps no man could be equal to it; perhaps it was a task beyond anyone’s power. Perhaps those who ruled the world were not ready for order and justice and peace. Perhaps too many of them wanted to have their own way, cost what it might. Perhaps there were too many Hitlers, big and little, loose in the world.
Lanny slept over the problem, and in the morning, the rain having stopped, he went for a long walk among the peach orchards of Georgia, now in fresh pale green, and the pine forests, always a dark green. He thought as hard as he ever had in his life, and his decision was that he dared not spare this man of many cares but must put the painful truth before him. To go on this mission and come back and report defeat, or doubt of success, would be humiliating, but Lanny was not moved by fear of that. The point was not to go blindly or to let Roosevelt send him blindly. On that long walk Lanny prepared a speech which it was his painful duty to make:
“Governor, if Stalin were to send you a confidential emissary and tell you that in his opinion the principal factor creating the danger of another world war was American big business with its search for raw materials all over the world and for markets for its finished products—what would you answer? You would say that you doubt it, and that even if it were so, there is nothing you could do about it. Private enterprise, as we call it, is our way of life and of doing business with the rest of the world; our whole economic system its committed to it; our people, all but a small minority, believe in it and intend to maintain it. You are President of the United States and head of the Democratic party, but you are not omnipotent, and you could not change America from a capitalist to a co-operative economy even if you wanted to. That is what you would say, is it not, Governor?”
So Lanny asked in his imagination, and his great friend nodded assent. The discourse continued:
“If Stalin really talks straight to me, if we ever get down to brass tacks, he will tell me that the situation is the same in his case. His is a revolutionary country, and his party is committed to abolishing the capitalist economy and all its ways. Stalin is not alone, he is one drop of water in a gigantic rolling wave. He has helped to train millions of young Russians, a whole generation of them, to believe in Communism and to hate and fear capitalism. If I, the plausible and friendly Lanny Budd, were to succeed in persuading him to accept Kautskyism, or Blumism, or Norman-Thomasism, how much success would he have in persuading the thirteen devotees in the Politburo? How much success would they have with the army of fanatics they have trained and sent out to every country of the world, and who now see their hour at hand, the people awake and eager for change, asking only for leadership. ‘Arise, ye pris’ners of starvation; arise, ye wretched of the earth!’ Stalin would say to me the same thing that you, Governor, have said: ‘I don’t want to do it, and if I did want to, I haven’t the power. I am Marshal of the Soviet Union and head of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, but I am not all-powerful.”
“But,” countered Roosevelt in Lanny’s imaginary conversation, “does that mean that he has to give pledges and then break them?”
“For the answer to that,” said the P.A., “you have to consult the works of Lenin, who told his disciples that everything was right that furthered the cause of the proletarian revolution, and that Communists must be prepared to lie and cheat for the cause.”
VI
Lanny lunched at the hotel and then went for a stroll. He had arranged to meet Baker on the road, to avoid attracting the attention of any of the “newspaper fellows.” Lanny had diligently studied his notes, and now went over in his mind the sentences he meant to speak; it was almost as important to get them right with Roosevelt as it would be with Stalin. Halfway to Pine Mountain he met Baker and got into his car; they drove slowly, so as not to arrive too soon. Baker spoke of the war news; the Germans were really on the run now, and would they give up? Lanny gave his opinion that Hitler would never give up—they would have to fight their way into his house. All Americans were asking one another questions like that. Americans wanted the war over; they fought hard, but they didn’t like to fight. General Patton was unique in his enjoyment of that activity.
They parked in the wide driveway in front of the Little White House. Lanny, in uniform, rated a salute from the guards. Baker led the way and Lanny followed. In the entrance hall Baker hung up his hat and Lanny his cap; they went into the ample study, and one swift glance told them there was something wrong. Three ladies sat on the far side of the room on a couch, the Russian painter and two cousins of the President; they were silent, staring before them, seeming not to see the new entrants. The latter went into the anteroom of the President’s bedroom. Near the study door were three other persons, Reilly, Grace Tully, the President’s confidential secretary, and Hassett, who had charge of documents; they too were behaving in the same strange way. Nobody greeted them—only stared.
The two halted of course. “What is it?” Baker asked in a low voice, and Reilly answered, “The Boss is ill.”
Then Baker, “Serious?”
“He was unconscious.”
“Who is with him?”
“Doctor Bruenn has just come.”
Baker signed Lanny to a seat and took one beside him. There was nothing they could do or say; they just had to wait. From the open door of the President’s bedroom came sounds of heavy breathing. They followed the sounds, and never took their eyes off the doorway.
The two most agonizing hours of Lanny Budd’s life followed. It was like falling into a black abyss, endlessly falling, as if to the center of the earth, or into hell itself. Fear grew upon him; sometimes despair, but ver
y seldom hope. Those words the President had spoken echoed in his brain “… a cerebral hemorrhage … a terrible thing … it strikes like lightning, and the doctors can neither foresee it nor do anything when it comes.” Were they words of prescience, words of doom? The President had known his own condition, and Lanny had known it too. He didn’t see how anybody could have looked at that exhausted man and failed to know.
He had given his life for the cause he was trying to serve—just as surely as any man who went into battle. He was trying to save his country and the world. Rightly or wrongly, he had believed that no other man could do it. There might be others who had the knowledge, the understanding; but who else had the prestige, the political skill? Who else knew how to manage bullheaded and recalcitrant men? Who else was known to the people of the whole world and trusted as their friend? F.D.R. had told Lanny that he was going to San Francisco to make the speech of his life; he was going to establish the United Nations Organization—he had chosen the name for it himself. He had said that if he did not succeed in this, everything else he had done would be rubble. And now, if he were to die, what a tragedy for mankind, the blackest in the history of the world!
Lanny’s grief and horror had nothing to do with his personal self and fortunes. The lightning stroke would reduce him to a nobody, but he didn’t mind that; he had no craving for prominence or glory. He didn’t mind if his trip to see Stalin was knocked on the head; he didn’t really want to go, he didn’t have any real hope of success. He was prepared to take a plane ride of some fifteen thousand miles just to oblige his great friend. He would have a talk with the Red Marshal, and the Marshal would be polite, even affable, as he had been at Yalta; but when it was over, would it mean a thing? Stalin is a nom de guerre, and means steel; you could talk to steel ever so politely, but you couldn’t change the shape of it—except if you melted it in the white-hot furnace of war.