May 13, 2005
INEXCUSABLY IGNORANT:
FDR’s Failure Not Forgotten (Arnold Beichman, May 13, 2005, Human Events)
Bush never mentioned the name of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But it was FDR who accepted the Soviet-dictated partition of the European continent and thus legitimized the enslavement of the peoples of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. In agreeing to Stalin’s Bolshevik imperialism, FDR told William C. Bullitt, a confidante: “I think that if I give him [Stalin] everything I possibly can without demanding anything in return then, noblesse oblige, he will not attempt to annex anything and will work to build a peaceful and democratic world.”Noblesse oblige, indeed! FDR, by a process of self-corruption, blinded himself to the realities of Stalin’s Great Terror. He ignored written, documented warnings from State Department Soviet experts such as Loy W. Henderson, a longtime career diplomat and one of the principal architects of 20th-Century U.S. diplomacy. He preferred the lying reportage of Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, and the scandalous pro-Soviet reports from his ambassador in Moscow, Joseph E. Davies. This is the Davies, a wealthy corporation lawyer, who in 1946 actually preached treason, to wit: “Russia in self-defense has every moral right to seek atomic-bomb secrets through military espionage if excluded from such information by her former fighting allies.” (“Davies Says Soviet Has Right to Spy,” the New York Times, Feb. 19, 1946, Page 2.)
Roosevelt was as determined to recognize the USSR as he was to ignore the openly avowed purposes of the Communist International. As late as 1953, George Kennan wrote that the United States “should never have established de jure relations with the Soviet government.” Yet FDR, with willful ignorance, embarked on a recognition policy without seeking an enforceable quid pro quo. By the time FDR realized he had failed at Yalta, it was too late to do anything about it.
On March 23, 1945, 19 days before he died, Roosevelt confided to Anna Rosenberg: “Averell [Harriman] is right. We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” In other words, FDR had actually believed that Stalin would keep his promises and treaty engagements.
Watching what was going on during and after the war, Kennan deplored “the inexcusable ignorance about the nature of Russian communism, about the history of its diplomacy.” He wrote in 1960: “I mean by that FDR’s well-known conviction that, although Stalin was a rather difficult character, he was at bottom a man like everyone else; that the only reason why it had been difficult to get on with him in the past was because there was no one with the right personality, with enough imagination and trust to deal with him properly; that the arrogant conservatives in the Western capitals had always bluntly rejected him, and that his ideological prejudices would melt away and Russian cooperation with the West could easily be obtained, if only Stalin was exposed to the charm of a personality of FDR’s caliber.”
Nowhere is the special Providence better demonstrated than in our having survived him. Pity about everyone else. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 13, 2005 4:38 PM
Survived whom? Roosevelt, or Stalin?
Posted by: SP at May 13, 2005 4:41 PMOnce Again, the Big Yalta Lie
... what actually happened at Yalta? Let's review the facts. The conference itself took place in the seaside Crimean city in February 1945, during the final months of the war. A delegation of more than 600 British and U.S. officials, including FDR and Churchill, met with Stalin. They discussed postwar borders and issued a 'Declaration on Liberated Europe' calling for free elections in Poland and elsewhere.
The truth is that Yalta did not hand Eastern Europe to the Soviets. That territory was already in their possession. Stalin had made clear his plan to take over as much territory as possible back in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, which carved Poland in half and gave the Soviets the Baltic states. The discovery in 1943 of the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet army in the Katyn forest was further evidence of Stalin's malign intention to exterminate the leadership of Poland. Then, in 1944, during the Warsaw uprising by the Polish Home Army, Stalin halted the advance of his army on the banks of the Vistula River and allowed Nazi SS units to return to slaughter the Poles. By the time of Yalta, the Red Army occupied all of Poland and much of Eastern Europe.
Theoretically, Churchill and Roosevelt could have refused to cut any deal with Stalin at Yalta. But that could have started the Cold War on the spot. It would have seriously jeopardized the common battle against Germany (at a moment when Roosevelt was concerned with winning Soviet assent to help fight the Japanese, which he received).
Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower was happy to let the Soviets bear the brunt of the fighting as they marched toward Berlin, and he was unwilling to expend American troops on storming the German capital. The only one who was eager to do that was Gen. George Patton, who hoped to take on the Russians as well. Given the domestic pressure to "bring the boys back home," Roosevelt would have been taking a politically suicidal course had he broken with our allies, the Soviets.
Roosevelt was hardly perfect at Yalta. He was naive about Stalin's intentions and believed he could cajole the dictator into following more moderate policies. But FDR's approach was not particularly different from that of Churchill (who had declared that he would "sup with the devil" to win the war, which is what he and Roosevelt, in effect, did).
As for the charges about Hiss' influence, they've been overblown by the right for political purposes; in fact, Hiss was a minor player at Yalta.
What's more, it was the isolationist right that never wanted to fight the war in the first place, which it conveniently forgot once it began attacking Democrats as being soft on communism. Nothing of course could be further from the truth. Roosevelt went on to recognize Stalin's perfidy shortly before he died, and it fell to Truman to fight the Cold War.
deborah:
So your argument is that because FDR recognized on his deathbed what conservatives knew all along it's okay he was duped in the first place?
Posted by: oj at May 13, 2005 8:20 PMOJ:
We agree on many things, but on nothing do we agree more than our views of FDR. Now, the acide test: I say Woodrow Wilson was even worse. Your view?
Posted by: Dan at May 13, 2005 8:37 PMNo Wilson, no WWII. Of course he was worse and our participation in WWI a disaster from start to finish.
Posted by: oj at May 13, 2005 8:40 PMNice writing Deborah. Were you a speech writer for Kerry by any chance?
Posted by: Genecis at May 13, 2005 9:17 PM