“You know,” Pa Watson explained to Frances Perkins, who thought it odd that Anna was going instead of Eleanor or one of the boys, “Anna can do things with her father and with other people that the boys can’t. They can’t manage him. Anna can handle him. She can tell him, ‘You mustn’t see people.’ ‘You mustn’t do that. It tires you out. You’ll be no good tomorrow.’ And she can also handle the other people.”
For her part, Anna was so thrilled at the chance to meet Stalin and serve as her father’s confidante that she refused to acknowledge that she was hurting her mother. Realizing that if her mother went she could not go, she hungrily accepted the rationale that daughters would be simpler than wives. “I wanted desperately to go,” she admitted later, “so I just fell in with this, just blocked it out for my own purposes very selfishly.”
Eleanor made a valiant effort to rise above her hurt and go about her business, but it was impossible to ignore the bustle of preparations when everyone else seemed to be going—Jimmy Byrnes, Pa Watson, Harry Hopkins, Admiral Leahy, even Ed Flynn, the boss of the Bronx. “I am tired and very depressed tonight,” she admitted to Joe Lash the day before the president left. “The next years seem impossible to live through.”
The presidential party boarded the U.S.S. Quincy in Newport News, Virginia, the morning of the 23rd. Anna later recalled sitting alone with her father on the deck that morning as the ship steamed past the coastline of Virginia. Feeling relaxed and happy, Roosevelt discoursed at length on the various birds that inhabited the Virginia shores. Then, suddenly, he told Anna to look at a particular spot on the shoreline. “Over there,” he said casually and without a trace of self-consciousness, “is where Lucy grew up.”
“Ocean voyage is certainly the life of Reilly,” Anna reported to John that first day, as the great warship cruised the Atlantic in weather that would remain calm the entire week. The gentle roll helped the president sleep until ten or eleven in the morning; at twelve, he lunched with Anna and his male cronies; in the afternoons, he lounged on the deck, enjoying the warm sunshine, sorting his stamps, and reading quietly by himself; at five, cocktails were served on the deck, followed by dinner and a movie. “Oh darling,” an exultant Anna wrote John, trying as always to shore him up, “I’m so grateful to you for letting me come—because I know that you would have been of so much more real value.”
On the seventh day at sea, January 30, Roosevelt celebrated his sixty-third birthday. He had forgotten the date, he claimed, until a surprise package from Lucy Rutherfurd and Margaret Suckley arrived with his breakfast tray. It contained “a lot of little gadgets,” he delighted in telling Anna, including a pocket comb, a room thermometer, and a cigarette lighter that could be used in the wind; they were whimsical gifts, but they signaled affection and intimate knowledge on the part of the givers, and that made him feel good.
That evening, Anna added a surprise of her own, a festive party with five cakes, three of the same size representing the first three terms, then a huge cake representing the fourth term, and finally a tiny cake with a large question mark representing a possible fifth term. She had also engineered the perfect present—a handsome map showing the route to Yalta along with a little message from everyone accompanying him and a brass ashtray fashioned from the case of a five-inch shell that had been fired by the Quincy during her first combat engagement at D-day. “Anna made the dinner a gala occasion,” Jimmy Byrnes recalled, noting that Roosevelt seemed happy and gay even though he looked tired and worn. “Our birthday dinner,” Anna told John, “was a great success. [Roosevelt] won all the money at poker, and seemed to enjoy all our little jokes.”
Twenty-five hundred miles away, Eleanor was working on her husband’s behalf, making the rounds of the annual birthday balls held to benefit the March of Dimes in its fight against polio. Starting early in the morning with the making of a newsreel, she hosted the traditional birthday luncheon for movie stars in the East Room, met with the trustees of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, toured five balls, returned to the White House to read the president’s message of appreciation to the nation, journeyed to the State Department to cut the cake at midnight, and then resumed her tour of the balls until 1 a.m.
Throughout the long day, Eleanor remained, as always, gracious and outgoing, but it was not hard to see her loneliness under the public persona. In the midst of her public duties, she tried to send a personal birthday telegraph to her husband, but the ship was under radio silence because two German submarines had been reported nearby. As it happened, the only communication he received from her that day was an irritated letter she had written four days earlier about the battle that had broken out in Congress over Roosevelt’s nomination of Henry Wallace to succeed Jesse Jones as secretary of commerce.
She was sorry she had to bother him about this, she had written, but if he refused to put his prestige behind Wallace, the conservatives would have their way and it would look as if he had nominated Wallace simply to have him beaten. “Of course Jones has behaved horribly,” she insisted, “but I guess he’s the kind of dog you should have ousted the day after election and given him the reasons.”
Tired and sick, anxious about Yalta, Roosevelt did not need to hear this from his wife on his birthday. Though he rarely chose to reveal to anyone the full extent of what he was thinking or feeling, he spoke openly to Anna about his frustrations with Eleanor. It’s “a very sad situation,” Anna told John: “the only times he has mentioned her to me on this trip have been times when he’s griped about her attitudes toward things he’s done or people he likes.”
As the Quincy was steaming east into the Mediterranean, Churchill was flying south to the island of Malta, where he and Roosevelt were scheduled to meet before going to Yalta. The journey began badly, Lord Moran reported: the prime minister was running a temperature and feeling generally out of sorts. Huddled in his greatcoat against the seat of the plane, he looked, his daughter Sarah observed, “like a poor hot pink baby about to cry!” It was a restless night for all; when Churchill awoke the next morning, he was “in the doldrums,” turned his face against the wall, and called for Clemmie, who was thousands of miles away.
The war had taken its toll on both partners of the Grand Alliance. Roosevelt’s decline was more dramatic, but some of Churchill’s vaunted vitality had also been sapped. “It is not the flesh only that is weaker,” Moran lamented. “Martin [Churchill’s private secretary] tells me that his work has deteriorated a lot in the last few months; and that he has become very wordy, irritating his colleagues in the Cabinet by his verbosity.” For four years, Moran noted, Churchill had kept his own counsel, “sharing his secret thoughts with no man.” Whereas the president had Harry Hopkins, “someone in whom he could confide,” Churchill had no one to whom he could open his heart and unburden his soul. And now, Moran believed, he was paying the price for his long isolation.
Harry Hopkins, meanwhile, was also in bad shape. He had traveled to London for talks with Churchill, then to Paris to confer with de Gaulle, and then to Naples to join Stettinius. “He was so weak,” Stettinius recalled, “that it was remarkable that he could be as active as he was. He fought his way through difficult and trying conferences on coffee, cigarettes, an amazingly small amount of food, paregoric and sheer fortitude.” On the flight from Italy to Yalta, he was so sick that he lay collapsed in a cot the entire ride.
When the Quincy pulled into the Grand Harbor at Valetta, Malta, Churchill came aboard. The president was sitting on the deck waiting for his old friend. Sarah Churchill, who had not seen Roosevelt since Teheran, was shocked at “the terrible change in him,” as were most of the members of the British party. But Churchill saw what he wanted to see—the smile, the jaunty cigarette holder, the cloth cap. He wrote Clemmie that night, “my friend has arrived in the best of health and spirits. Everything going well!”
Over the course of the day, Sarah felt better about Roosevelt, her attention drawn from his physical condition to his mental outlook, to h
is “bright charm” and his “brave expansive heart.” Churchill was also struck by the president’s high spirits and his friendly manner. “He must have noticed the candle by my bed when we were at the White House,” Churchill told Moran, “because there was a small lighted candle at the luncheon table by my place to light my cigar.”
That evening, Roosevelt and Churchill dined together on the Quincy. At ten-thirty, Anna gently but firmly broke up the party so that her father could rest before his midnight flight to Russia. Minutes later, as Anna was frantically packing, Hopkins and his son Robert arrived at her cabin. “Harry demanded a drink,” Anna wrote in her diary, “so I gave him my one bottle. A few minutes after they had left I went to get the bottle and it was gone. Stettinius had confided to me earlier that Hopkins has a return of his dysentery, has been drinking far too much.”
When Roosevelt arrived at Luga Airport in Malta, some twenty transport planes were waiting to carry the British and American delegations, totaling nearly seven hundred persons, to the Crimea. The flight was long and cold. Churchill was standing on the airfield in Saki when the president exited from his plane. Together they inspected the guards of honor, the president sitting in an open jeep, Moran noted, while the prime minister walked beside him, “as in her old age an Indian attendant accompanied Queen Victoria’s phaeton.”
The drive from the Saki airfield to Yalta was eighty miles. Anna placed herself beside the president “so that he could sleep as much as he wanted and would not have to ‘make’ conversation.” During the drive, Harriman pulled up beside the president’s car and told Anna that in about forty-five minutes they would reach a house along the road where Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov was waiting with vodka, wines, caviar, fish, bread, and butter. With Roosevelt’s concurrence, the decision was made not to stop; the drive to Yalta was long and hard enough as it was. The same invitation was issued to Churchill, Anna noted, and that “tough old bird accepted with alacrity.” Though Churchill had already eaten lunch in his car, he could see how disappointed the Russians were at the Americans’ failure to stop, so he fell on the food and showed by his appetite his appreciation of Molotov’s magnificent refreshments. Relaxed and fortified, he returned to his car and proceeded to recite Byron’s “Childe Harold” to Sarah for the remainder of the journey to Yalta.
• • •
The Conference was held in Lividia Palace, the former summer home of Czar Nicholas. Situated more than 150 feet above the Black Sea, the fifty-room palace included a main building with two wings, each one built around a separate courtyard, and a turreted tower with Moorish arches. Roosevelt was installed in the czar’s bedroom in the left wing; Anna found herself in the opposite wing, “a block and a half away.” General Marshall and Admiral King were given suites on the second floor, where the czarina and her five children had lived, while the remaining members of the delegation, including Hopkins, Leahy, Watson, Byrnes, and Harriman, were scattered in various sections of the palace.
The first session of the conference was held on February 4 in the grand ballroom, a rectangular room with arched windows and a huge fireplace. Stalin invited Roosevelt to sit in the presider’s chair, closest to the fireplace, while he and Churchill took seats on opposite sides of the round table. With Roosevelt were Hopkins, Leahy, Stettinius, and Bohlen; with Churchill were Anthony Eden, Undersecretary to the Foreign Office Sir Alexander Cadogan, Secretary to the Cabinet Sir Edward Bridges, and British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. With Stalin were Foreign Commissar Molotov, Ambassador to the United States Andrei Gromyko, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky, and Soviet diplomat Ivan Maisky.
The discussion opened with a review of the military situation. For the first time, Stettinius noted, the Russian generals talked from maps, mentioning exactly where their troops were at the moment and making a complete disclosure of their plans for the future. On the Eastern front, Soviet troops had enveloped Budapest, taken Warsaw, driven the Nazis out of Yugoslavia, penetrated Austria and Czechoslovakia, and conquered East Prussia, and were now poised at the Oder River, less than fifty miles from Berlin. On the Western front, General Marshall reported that the Allies had completely recovered from the Battle of the Bulge, had expelled all German forces from Belgium, and were now entering Germany east of St. Vith. Six of the capital cities captured by the Germans in 1939 and 1940 were now liberated: Paris, Brussels, Warsaw, Belgrade, Budapest, and Athens. The war in Europe was slowly coming to an end. When the presentations of the generals were completed, the Big Three agreed to complete collaboration on all future military operations. “This is the first time such a thing has ever been done,” Stettinius marveled.
While the first session was going on, Anna was “sitting on tacks.” Her father was hosting the formal dinner that evening, and no definite list of invitees had been made up. Harriman kept assuring her “it was quite customary to do things this way,” but Anna worried that certain people’s feeling would be hurt. Her worries were realized when Dr. Bruenn told her Jimmy Byrnes was having a tantrum and she had better go to his room at once.
“Fire was shooting from his eyes,” Anna recorded in her diary that night. He was furious that he had not been invited to the formal session: “Harry H. had been at the Conference—why hadn’t he?” And now, Anna wrote, “he was asking me the only favor he would ever ask me in his life: to go and tell FDR that he would not attend the dinner.” Knowing that her father would be upset, Anna argued and cajoled for twenty minutes. Many times she was tempted to say, “Okay, who cares anyhow if you do or don’t get to the dinner,” but she realized that if Byrnes did not go there would be thirteen at the table, “which I knew would give superstitious FDR ten fits. Finally won my argument on the stupid basis of superstition.”
The dinner was a success. Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill were all in good humor, and the conversation was relaxed and personal. No subject of importance came up until the last half-hour, when the discussion turned to the rights and responsibilities of big powers versus small powers. “Stalin made it quite plain,” Bohlen recorded, “he felt the three great powers which had borne the brunt of the war . . . should have the unanimous right to preserve the peace. Said it was ridiculous to believe Albania would have an equal vote with three powers who won war. He would never agree to have any action of any of the great powers submitted to judgment of small powers.”
Both Roosevelt and Churchill recognized in Stalin’s thought an undercurrent of antagonism to the concept of the United Nations, but little more was said at the moment, and the dinner ended on a pleasant note. “FDR seemed happy about both the Conference and the dinner,” Anna wrote. “FDR says Jimmy [Byrnes] made a fine toast. This amused me as J. had told me very firmly that if he went to the dinner as a favor to me, he would not open his mouth!”
“Life is quickly assuming a definite pattern,” Anna noted. In the mornings, while the president ate breakfast, worked on his pouch, and dictated responses to America’s domestic problems, Anna made the rounds of Harry’s room, Steve Early’s room, and anyone else she ran into, “to pick up information on the day’s plans, what meetings are scheduled outside the big conference, gossip on meetings, etc.”
After making her morning rounds, she went into her father’s room “to get his version of events and fill him in with any gossip” she had picked up that might be “amusing or interesting” to him. Her talks with Harry, for instance, revealed that Harriman’s daughter Kathleen and FDR, Jr., had had a heavy romance two years earlier, and that Hopkins used to carry letters between them.
The plenary sessions convened after lunch and lasted for four or five hours. When he returned to his suite, Roosevelt typically enjoyed a quick rubdown and then dressed for dinner, with people rushing in and out of his study, sometimes at ten-minute intervals. The formal dinners, complete with buckets of Caucasian champagne and thirty or forty standing toasts, were generally lengthy affairs, making sleep a precious commodity.
“Just between you and me,” Anna expl
ained to John, “we are having to watch OM very carefully from physical standpoint. He gets all wound up. Seems to thoroughly enjoy it all but wants too many people around and then won’t go to bed early enough. The result is he doesn’t sleep well. Ross and Bruenn are both worried because of the old ticker trouble.”
Dr. Mclntire had been telling her for months that everything was going to be all right; that, as long as her father got sufficient rest, he could live a productive life for years to come. But now, at Yalta, Anna had the chance to talk at length with Dr. Bruenn, who gave her a more honest assessment. “I have found out through Bruenn who won’t let me tell Ross I know,” Anna confided in John, “that this ticker situation is far more serious than I ever knew. And the biggest difficulty in handling the situation here is that we can of course tell no one of the ticker troubles. (Better tear off and destroy this paragraph.)”
“I am using all the ingenuity and tact I can muster to try to separate the wheat from the chaff,” she went on, “to keep the unnecessary people out of OM’s room and to steer the necessary ones in at the best times. This involves trying my best to keep abreast as much as possible of what is actually taking place at the Conference so I will know who should and should not see the OM.”
Harry Hopkins, Anna soon discovered, was in the best position to know what was really going on. Though he was so sick that he spent most of the conference in his bedroom, venturing out only to attend the plenary sessions, his room was a center of activity, with members of all three delegations stopping by to seek his advice. “I wish Harry was in better fettle,” Lord Moran recorded in his diary. “He knows the President’s moods like a wife watching the domestic climate. He will sit patiently for hours, blinking like a cat, waiting for the right moment to put in his point and if it never comes . . . he is content to leave it to another time.”