In rallying the nation, Churchill drew once again not only on his personal experience with overcoming setbacks but also on his affinity for the hero’s role—the fulfillment of long-standing fantasies of power in the service of valiant deeds. “In my long political experience,” Churchill wrote later, “I had held most of the great offices of State, but I readily admit that the post which had now fallen to me [of prime minister] was the one I liked the best…. Power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.” Fighting Hitler perfectly suited Churchill’s attraction to a contest with someone he identified as pure evil. It gave him “enormous vitality.” He found the energy to work almost nonstop in his drive to destroy Hitler and the Nazis. They were ideal enemies for someone who craved a contest with wickedness that could give him the wherewithal to resist his affinity for depression and immobility.
In June 1941, after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Churchill unhesitatingly identified Britain as Stalin’s ally. “The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism,” Churchill declared in a radio address the night of Hitler’s attack on Russia. “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it.” But the realities of defeating Hitler required a different approach to the Soviet Union. The primary goal was “to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.” Churchill promised to fight him by land, sea, and air until “we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated his peoples from its yoke.”
When Churchill’s private secretary asked if his reputation as an arch anti-Communist was not being compromised by aid to Moscow, he replied, “Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler…. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” His implicit reference to Stalin as the devil was a telling expression of how he viewed the Soviet dictator: a useful ally in the struggle against Hitler and Nazism, but a ruthless tyrant nonetheless who after the war would likely revert to a reach for world power through the eclipse of Britain and the extension of communism around the globe.
In December 1941, when Stalin pressed British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, who had come to Moscow for conversations, to agree to postwar Soviet control of the Baltic states and eastern Poland, Churchill refused, telling Eden that the Soviets had acquired this territory “by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler. The transfer of the peoples of the Baltic states to Soviet Russia against their will would be contrary to all the principles for which we are fighting this war and would dishonour our cause.”
Yet in October 1944, with Soviet armies moving decisively into southeastern Europe, Churchill met with Stalin in Moscow to discuss the fate of the Balkans. The sixty-seven-year-old Churchill and the sixty-five-year-old Stalin showed the effects of age and the burdens of their wartime responsibilities. Churchill was short, fat, and stoop-shouldered, his ruddy complexion betraying his years of heavy alcohol consumption. A damaged left arm from a childhood accident, facial scars from a smallpox attack at the age of seven, a yellowish complexion, and tobacco-stained teeth made the diminutive Stalin a match for the imperfect Churchill.
Together, hunched over a table in the Kremlin, they cynically divided up responsibility for the postwar Balkans: the Soviets were to have 90 percent control in Rumania, 75 percent in Bulgaria, and 50 percent in Hungary and Yugoslavia, with an equal share of power for Britain, which would have 90 percent dominance in Greece along with the United States. Churchill suggested burning the paper on which they recorded what they called the percentages agreement. He feared the reaction to their disposal “of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner.” But Stalin, who had no qualms about eventual public knowledge of how great power arrangements were made, urged Churchill to keep the paper. In the same meetings, Churchill emphasized to Stalin how essential their friendship was to a future without war. “Perhaps it is the only thing that can save the peace for our children and grandchildren,” he said. “Hopes are high for the permanent results of victory,” he added.
The percentages agreement with Stalin speaks volumes about Churchill’s belief that unless he reined in Soviet ambitions in the Balkans by acknowledging their respective spheres of control, Moscow would impose itself on all the countries in the region. It was also Churchill’s way of buying big power peace at the cost of small nations’ autonomy. The division of power was the kind of language Churchill and Stalin understood. While Stalin agreed to Churchill’s proposal, it was only a temporary arrangement that served the war effort. Who controlled what in the Balkans, Stalin believed, would be decided not by a paper pledge but by who had troops on the ground. “How many divisions does the pope have?” Stalin famously asked an adviser who warned him against open verbal clashes with the Vatican.
Roosevelt was no less mindful of power considerations. In August 1943, almost two years after an Anglo-American agreement for joint research on atomic energy, and a year after development and manufacture of a bomb had begun, the president and prime minister signed an agreement promising not to use an atomic weapon against each other or against a third party without mutual consent. They also agreed not to share information about atomic development with another country unless both saw it as acceptable. It was an unspoken commitment to exclude the Soviet Union from knowledge that could help it build a bomb, or to give Britain a military advantage in a postwar Europe over which London and Moscow would presumably exercise greatest control.
A year later, after a second Anglo-American conference in Quebec to discuss postwar arrangements, Churchill and Roosevelt traveled to the president’s home at Hyde Park, New York, where they made their exclusion of Soviet access to their knowledge of atomic development more specific. In an aide-mémoire of a September 19, 1944, conversation, they agreed that the Russians were not to share in the control and use of atomic power. Because the Danish physicist Niels Bohr had urged both Churchill and Roosevelt to reach an agreement with Moscow on international control of atomic energy, they included a proviso that said, “Enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps should be taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information, particularly to the Russians.”
After discussing this agreement with the president, Vannevar Bush, the chairman of the president’s Military Policy Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote a coworker on the atomic project: “The President evidently thought he could join with Churchill in bringing about a US-UK postwar agreement on this subject by which it would be held closely and presumably to control the peace of the world.” Bush knew that atomic research had not been and could not remain the exclusive province of one or two nations. While Britain and the United States might win the race, currently against Germany, to build an atomic bomb, eventually scientists in other nations, who were part of an international community of atomic researchers, would duplicate what the British and Americans had achieved. Trying to exclude the Soviets from knowledge that London and Washington were forging ahead on atomic research would do little else than arouse old suspicions that the West intended to prepare itself for the defeat of communism.
Roosevelt’s suspicions of Stalin and Soviet intentions were never as strong as Churchill’s. Like Churchill, Roosevelt was part of a native aristocracy. It was a nobility of wealth, however, rather than bloodlines, even though Franklin’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, prided herself on being able to trace her ancestry back to European aristocrats and Mayflower émigrés. Unlike Churchill, who had spent his childhood largely in the care of hired help, Roosevelt’s boyhood was marked by close ties to his parents. His father, James Roosevelt, “showered him with attention … affectionately teaching him to sled, skate, toboggan, ride, fish, sail, and farm. Sara also doted on the boy, keeping diaries with almost daily records of his achievements,” as if she were anticipating his fame.
Like Churchill,
Franklin also burned with ambition, although it seems to have been less the product of neediness or a compulsion to satisfy a yearning for attention, regard, and unqualified love. Franklin’s drive for distinction seems to have originated more in a sense of entitlement—a gentleman’s right to govern and see to the well-being of those less endowed than he was. Franklin Roosevelt’s idea of the presidency, some said, was Franklin Roosevelt in the presidency.
Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s reach for power and fame was not simply the birthright and altruism of a privileged man. Few of his classmates, who were also indulged by attentive parents and learned the obligations of Christian gentlemen at Groton and Harvard, devoted themselves to public life as Franklin did. He found special pleasure in outdoing competitors for high office and using power to bestow gifts on those in need.
An attack of poliomyelitis in 1921 at the age of thirty-nine that left him paralyzed from the waist down may have heightened Roosevelt’s desire for public distinction, but his desire for high station preceded his paralysis. His distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt was a model he aspired to imitate as early as the 1890s, when TR was police commissioner in New York City, a state assemblyman, assistant secretary of the navy, a hero in the Spanish-American War, governor of New York, and vice president. TR’s almost eight years in the White House between 1901 and 1909 encouraged Franklin to have thoughts of ascending to the presidency as well. When he won a New York State Senate seat in 1910, appointment as Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy in 1913, and nomination to the vice presidency in 1920, Franklin saw himself as fulfilling his greatest hopes. James Cox’s defeat by Warren G. Harding in 1920, which denied Franklin the vice presidency, and the onset of polio in 1921, which limited his political activities, would be only temporary setbacks.
During the next seven years, despite his disability, Roosevelt remained active in Democratic Party politics, winning the national spotlight in 1924 with a brilliant nominating speech for New York Governor Al Smith—“the Happy Warrior”—at the national convention. Although Smith lost the presidential nomination that year, he succeeded in 1928, once again with Roosevelt’s help. Backed by Smith and a unified party, Roosevelt won the New York governorship in 1928 and again in 1930. During his two terms, he established himself as a leading progressive combating suffering in the Great Depression. His nomination and election to the White House in 1932 opened the way to bold leadership in response to the country’s worst economic downturn in history.
The similarity to Churchill’s rise to power is striking. Like Churchill, Roosevelt weathered a personal crisis that prepared him to deal with public distress much the way he countered his polio and loss of mobility. A beleaguered Britain could take hope from a man who had surmounted career setbacks or defeats that jeopardized his prospects for holding any high office. Likewise, Roosevelt’s physical disability made him an unlikely candidate for president, but his doggedness had not only returned him to the public arena, it also recommended him to Americans in a time of crisis as someone who understood how to cope with and overcome disabling problems.
In a time of isolationism, Franklin, like Theodore, thought of himself as a foreign policy leader. He was warmly disposed to American involvement in World War I and supported Wilson’s postwar plan for a world organization that could prevent future conflicts through collective security. Disillusionment over the postwar reversion to power politics and the onset of the Depression eclipsed internationalism in the 1920s and ‘30s and dissuaded Roosevelt from his eagerness to involve the United States in overseas affairs.
Although he devoted himself to a domestic New Deal between 1933 and 1938, Roosevelt believed it essential for his administration to exert some influence against acts of aggression in Europe and Asia. By contrast with Churchill, he saw Soviet Russia less as a menace to the Western democracies than as a potential ally against Fascist gains. In 1919–20, when the first Red scare, a reaction against anarchists and Bolsheviks, swept the United States, Roosevelt refused to join the hysteria.
Six months after becoming president in 1933, Roosevelt reversed the Republican policy of refusing to recognize the Communist government of Soviet Russia. He expected a return to normal relations to foster trade and boost the U.S. economy. He also hoped that Japan, which had seized Manchuria in 1931–32, might see Washington and Moscow as coming together to restrain Japanese aggression in Asia. Unlike Churchill, with his fears of a Bolshevik contagion spreading across Europe, Roosevelt did not see Russia as a direct threat to the United States, despite a small but activist Communist Party in America with ties to the Soviet Comintern promoting Communist control in other countries. Eager for access to Russian markets, American business chiefs favored a restoration of relations. Conservative newspaper publisher Roy Howard said that “the menace of Bolshevism in the United States is about as great as the menace of sunstroke in Greenland or chilblains in the Sahara.”
Roosevelt saw the Soviet Union as more of a domestic political problem than a threat to America and other democracies. To convince Americans, especially Catholics who were offended by Soviet anticlerical propaganda, that normalization of relations was a way to temper Communist ideology, Roosevelt concocted a story about Maxim Litvinov, commissar for foreign affairs and the chief Soviet negotiator. Assuming an anecdote he told his cabinet would be leaked to the press, Roosevelt described how he had pressured Litvinov into agreeing to freedom of religious worship for Americans in the USSR. He had embarrassed the commissar by telling him, “Now you may think you’re an atheist … but I tell you, Max, … before you die, you will believe in God.” Roosevelt thought that “the expression of his face” meant that “he knew I was right.” Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins said that “Roosevelt would only tell the Cabinet what he wanted them to hear.” And it may be assumed that only the details he wanted revealed ever reached the press.
Although Roosevelt’s hopes for productive relations with Moscow were disappointed in the 1930s and by the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact in August 1939, he did not think an alternative anti-Nazi Soviet agreement with Britain and France would have helped the Allies much in a war with Hitler. Moreover, when the Soviets seized parts of eastern Poland, Roosevelt did not designate Moscow a belligerent and invoke America’s neutrality law against her. He hoped to keep a line open to Stalin that would deter him from joining Hitler in fighting Britain and France.
Nor did he publicly protest Moscow’s seizure of the Baltic states in September and October 1939 or exert much pressure on the Soviets not to invade Finland in November. He feared that such actions would agitate U.S. isolationists into believing that he was about to involve the United States in the war. More important, it might jeopardize a revision of American neutrality laws to allow the sale of war goods to Britain and France on a cash-and-carry basis.
Roosevelt was not without anger toward Moscow for what he saw as its unprincipled opportunism. At a White House gathering in February 1940 of the left-wing American Youth Congress, he described the Soviet Union as “a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.” He decried its alliance with Hitler and its invasion of “infinitesimally small” Finland. Privately, he described the Soviet attack as “this dreadful rape of Finland,” and wondered “why one should have anything to do with the present Soviet leaders because their idea of civilization and human happiness is so totally different from ours.” Nevertheless, beyond sending a cable to Soviet president Mikhail Kalinin asking restraint in dealings with the Finns and facilitating a $10 million loan to Helsinki, which fell far short of the $80 million they had asked for, he took no overt steps to punish Soviet actions. On the contrary, Soviet purchases of U.S. goods during the Finnish war more than doubled from the previous year.
When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Roosevelt quickly concluded that Russia’s survival could “mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination—and at the same time I do not think we need worry about any possibility of Russian domination,” he said priv
ately. He saw Soviet ineffectiveness in its management of its economy and its war with Finland as evidence of a weak nation. His eagerness to supply Russia ran counter to the judgment of his military chiefs, who did not think the Soviets could hold out for more than three months or could possibly defeat Hitler’s armies. Like Churchill, Roosevelt believed that it was vital to supply the Soviet military as fast as possible so that they could maintain resistance until at least October, when the weather would rescue Russia by bogging down Germany’s war machine in freezing winter rain and snow.
To get supplies to Russia in the summer of 1941, Roosevelt had to overcome doubts in his administration about Soviet capacity to offer effective military resistance and convince subordinates that ruthless Soviet indifference to anything but their own interests was essential if they were going to survive the Nazi invasion. Roosevelt’s army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, complained that Soviet ambassador Constantine Oumansky “will take everything we own if we submit to his criticisms.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson described Oumansky as “nothing but a crook” and “a slick, clever little beast.” Nevertheless, under the president’s prodding and their own conviction that the “maintenance of an active front in Russia” was America’s and Britain’s best strategy for ultimate victory, they worked to speed the delivery of munitions and fuel.