What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
In 2007 I published From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima and the Cold War which explored the implications for American foreign policy of the presidential transition from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman. I want to draw on a part of the argument of that book to put before Ricochet readers an issue that divides historians –namely how FDR should have dealt with Stalin and the Soviet Union during World War II and in planning for the postwar world. I trust the matter might be of interest.
I argued in my book that Franklin Roosevelt nebulously and naively planned for a postwar world in which continued collaboration between the Big Four of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and China would assure an era of peace and a prosperity powered by free trade among nations. In his visionary scenario, the significance of Europe in general and especially Germany would be greatly reduced in world affairs. FDR expected the U.S. to be well engaged in the world but he couldn’t foresee any extensive and permanent American military or political commitments far beyond the western hemisphere and certainly not in Europe. He rather strangely thought that Britain and the Soviet Union could oversee European developments despite the increasingly apparent power imbalance between those two nations.
In light of these aims the American leader worked during the war to build a cooperative relationship with his Soviet opposite. Rather naively he relied on his hunches and intuitions and held the hope that he could civilize or domesticate the Soviet ‘beast’ and establish a personal connection with Stalin. Operating on this sad delusion Roosevelt fashioned a strategy towards the Soviets based on these personal connections and significant concessions aimed as reassuring them of his bona fides.
Rather than pursuing a hard-headed political-military strategy which many of his knowledgeable advisers recommended especially in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising tragedy of 1944, Roosevelt pursued collaboration with Stalin to the end. Filled with idealistic hopes for the success of a new international body, Roosevelt made concessions to Stalin at Yalta to secure Soviet participation in it. He believed that the UN would serve as a vehicle to prevent American disengagement from world affairs after the war and, so rather understandably, he vested it with notable importance. But doing so led him to perpetuate an adolescent idealism among the American people on postwar possibilities and to turn a blind eye to the Soviet establishment of their control over much of eastern Europe. Better not to confront the real issues that divided the wartime allies. Better to build the UN on foundations of shifting sand rather than honestly face the fundamentally different worldviews and interests of the major powers which inevitably dominated postwar international politics. Thus, Franklin Roosevelt, that great conjurer and juggler, left to his successor rather inflated expectations and unrealistic hopes for postwar peace which incidentally influenced and restricted the Truman administration’s policy making for almost two years.
Now, of course, it is possible, as the historian Robert Dallek has posited, that "had he lived, Roosevelt would probably have moved more quickly than Truman to confront the Russians." But there is little indication that he was contemplating such a move. FDR had preserved some diplomatic instruments for future use, and both the sharing of information regarding the atomic bomb and the extension of a postwar reconstruction loan to the Soviet Union come readily to mind. But there is little evidence that he had given serious thought to how they might be used to influence Soviet behavior. To the end FDR remained trapped by the same hopes and, it must be said, illusions regarding the possibility for genuine cooperation with Stalin which had guided his actions from 1941 onwards.
To criticize Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy is not easy. There still exists a shield of sorts that seemingly protects the dominant president of the twentieth century and which encourages even capable historians to assess Roosevelt’s diplomacy towards the Soviets in favorable and forgiving ways. Perhaps the desire to avoid any residual association with the extreme criticisms of those who falsely alleged that Roosevelt deliberately ‘sold out’ half of Europe to Stalin at Yalta contributes to this tendency. Maybe there is even more involved. Addressing FDR’s violation of “the first principle of war-and-peace politics—the possession of turf,” the tough-minded liberal journalist Max Lerner cogently argued some years ago, that “if anyone else happened to be president—Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace—the historians and the political culture would have called it the idiocy it was. But it was Roosevelt, and it is a measure of the spell he casts over us that few even now dare condemn his actions and inactions outright.” One might think that the time has come to move beyond the Rooseveltian “spell” and to acknowledge honestly the limitations of FDR’s efforts in preparing for the postwar world. Yet, with notable exceptions, like Remi Nadeau, Dennis Dunn and Amos Perlmutter, there is a great hesitation among academic historians to make this case.
In response to any criticism of their champion, Roosevelt’s defenders ask bluntly for a better alternative which would have served American interests in the global war still being fought and in a circumstance in which FDR wanted Stalin’s eventual participation in the war against Japan. In this regard nothing can be definitively proved, but it seems clear that Roosevelt at least should have pursued a much more measured embrace of Stalin at the outset, and to have allowed advisers genuinely knowledgeable about the Soviet Union to guide his outlook as to the possibilities of long-term co-operation with the Soviet leader. The effort should have been less to win Stalin’s trust and more to win his respect.
A politician as devious and deft as Roosevelt would have been able to apply quid pro quo tactics with rare skill if he had chosen and as his ambassadors like Laurence Steinhart and Averell Harriman regularly recommended. The policy options were not simply between efforts to cooperate on the one hand and adversarial actions on the other. On the possible alternatives one might note the incisive analysis of Henry Kissinger who explored options as of December 1941 and again after the battle of Stalingrad, at which point he suggests “the issue of Eastern Europe’s future could have been raised without risking either a Soviet collapse or a separate peace with Hitler." He suggested that “an effort should have been made to settle the political structure of territories beyond the Soviet frontiers and to achieve for these countries a status similar to that of Finland.” (See Kissinger’s discussion in his Diplomacy pp. 406-22.) Whether such an arrangement was feasible can be questioned. That it should have been pursued more vigorously seems hardly open to challenge.
Remi Nadeau has it right in noting that “Roosevelt did not begin to exercise the full octave of escalation that he commanded short of a final break. This unsophisticated approach to Big Three politics was his tragic shortcoming until he died at the moment of victory over the common enemy.” It is hardly exculpatory to suggest that FDR wanted to avoid the burden of responsibility for starting any conflict with Stalin or that his co-operative efforts put the burden for the Cold War firmly on Stalin. Surely, statesmen must be judged not by their good intentions but by their real achievements and this applies to FDR as to any other. But the question remains: what could/should FDR have done?
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Dec '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Fr. Bill Miscamble:
...
Surely, statesmen must be judged not by their good intentions but by their real achievements and this applies to FDR as to any other. But the question remains: what could/should FDR have done? ·
FDR should have instructed George Patton to phone the White House when the 3rd Army arrived in Moscow. Not only would tens of millions of lives have been saved in Russia, China and Southeast Asia, but, also all of the enormous daily suffering that communism inflicted on the world could have been avoided.
Jun '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
FDR overstayed. By the end of the war he has a tired old man, more bad habit than president. That there was no appetite among the allies for more war goes without saying. Still, it would not have taken a war to back Stalin into his bloody Kremlin hole, especially given that America was then the sole nuclear power in the world. Being of Polish ethnicity I can attest, some sixty-five years after the war, Poles still curse the memory of Roosevelt. It is unclear what they think FDR might have done, but there is a desperate and haunting sense that he should have done more than he did do.
I see Roosevelt as having been arrogant, lazy, and grossly naive about Stalin in particular and the Soviets in general. But then what can you expect from a man who likely got most of his information about Soviet Russia from Walter Duranty. Pity he never spoke to my father, who, although not of the Ivy League, managed to matriculate in the gulag under Stalin.
As for Roosevelt's death in office, more's the pity it didn't happen some ten years before it actually did.
Edited on Oct 21, 2011 at 6:29pmMay '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
I am not by any measure a historian but, I wonder: Roosevelt was Woodrow Wilson's assistant secretary of the navy. Could Roosevelt's dream of the United Nations have been more than a little based on a nostalgic view of Wilson's League of Nations? It's a question without an answer, of course but, I wonder if it was in the back of his mind.
What should Roosevelt have done, prior to the events that led to V-E Day, 8 May 1945? Perhaps he should have been less presumptuous in the belief that the peace could be managed by four victor nations with highly dissimilar national interests. Should he have gone to war against the Soviets, with Europe as the battlefield, to prevent the rise of the Iron Curtain? I can't imagine any U.S. leader ever entertaining that idea, after the years of war and the strength of the Red Army in Germany at the time.
Far be it for me to second-guess Roosevelt, imperfect man he may have been. I'm just thankful that the Allies defeated the Nazis, and I'll settle for the wait-it-out stalemate of the Cold War.
Edited on Oct 21, 2011 at 12:17amJul '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
I'm with Cas on Roosevelt's state of mind by 1944. I have read a sample of the related correspondence and came away with the impression that he was obsessed with dismantling the British Empire while lacking the slightest focus for Soviet Imperialism. Perhaps this is somewhat flavored by the fact that the major military exercises in the generation leading up to WW I were centered on aggression from the British Empire. Invasions through Canada, landings in Maine and Florida, and the like.
I am unaware of a basis for that decision beyond keeping an enemy free Fortress America prepared for the worst in the absence of a realistic threat, but Roosevelt was vividly appalled by British Colonialism (a broad American sentiment to this day) and not very clear on the best levers to use diplomatically against a very aggressive Stalin, or how this original Axis member was likely to behave as the common threat was mastered.
In summary, his command of proper management of Soviet relations was as skilled and accurate as his infamous handling of the economy.
Jul '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Roosevelt was finished off by a brain hemorrhage long attributed to hypertension. Forty cigarettes a day contributed to that. But latest evidence suggests he died from melanoma, a fast-moving cancer that spread to his brain and abdomen. The mass in his brain at Yalta, where he made so many disastrous decisions, already rendered him unable to see out of one eye. FDR was a deeply devious man, unknowable even to those close to him. He thought totalitarianism would conquer the world unless the U.S. got into the war before the tottering British threw in the towel. He couldn't provoke Hitler in a casus belli, but the Japanese were clay in his hands. He boxed its rigid, fanatical leadership into a corner where war, always inevitable with them, came sooner than they wanted. Much of the evidence of the weeks and days leading up to Pearl Harbor, including our awareness that the IJN fleet was advancing on Pearl Harbor, is gone from the archives, but plenty remains. Gallup said 89% of Americans opposed entering the war. Roosevelt knew only a bloody nose would unify the country. Fatally for Germany, Hitler honored his alliance with Japan three days later.
Edited on Oct 21, 2011 at 6:15amOct '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Roosevelt's marginalization of Winston Churchill at Yalta was the beginning of his plan to bring down the British Empire and to promote the Soviet Empire... an empire more in sympathy with his own socialist/progressivist leanings. Roosevelt was one person, not two. His conduct of the war was the same as his conduct of the depression economy. A doctrinaire passion for the prevail of socialism in the world. Stalin was a compatriot and Churchill was an impediment.
By the time Truman got to Potsdam Churchill was marginalized and losing his reelection and was replaced by Clement Atlee, who also was in sympathy with socialist goals, and Harry Truman was hardly up to speed, and by the end of the conference preoccupied by the A-bomb, only days away from use.
As for the march of progressivism, Stalin represented the future of every progressivist movement, totalitarianism. Had the Wilson/Roosevelt move not been interrupted by Harding/Coolidge, America would probably have already been at the doorstep of totalitarianism. Perhaps handled more artfully then as Stalin did, but in the end oppressive nevertheless.
As for the League of/United Nations, it represents the ultimate goal of progressivism, a worldwide government from which no subject can escape. You cannot run out of other peoples money when you have all of it. Think of it, modern day feudalism with flush toilets and laptops in the castle. An oligarchs perfect universe. And all those subjects in hovels doing you bidding.
Edited on Oct 21, 2011 at 6:21amDec '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Kervinlee: ,,,
Should he have gone to war against the Soviets, with Europe as the battlefield, to prevent the rise of the Iron Curtain? I can't imagine any U.S. leader ever entertaining that idea, after the years of war and the strength of the Red Army in Germany at the time.
... I'm just thankful that the Allies defeated the Nazis, and I'll settle for the wait-it-out stalemate of the Cold War.
The question is what should we have done. In 1945, the US absolutely had the military power to defeat the Russian army. Not only did we have the war machine in Europe, but, the B29s in the pacific could have been moved to China where MacArthur could have staged and opened a second front. The US also had sole possession of the ultimate weapon. The outcome of a war to liberate Eastern Europe and terminate communism is not in doubt. There are times when war is not just the only solution but the only moral action.
The cold war was very dangerous. We had at least one near miss with nuclear war, luckily the Russians blinked. MAD was an insane way to live.
Edited on Oct 21, 2011 at 6:42amMay '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Actually, it doesn't lack an answer at all. Roosevelt was a Wilsonian and quite clearly hoped to achieve where Wilson failed, in creating an international organizational order based on left-liberal principles (effectively a "New Deal" for the world). When you look at the history of the formation of the UN, there was a very conscious effort to adjust for the mistakes made by Wilson. This also extends beyond the UN to the formation of the international economic regulatory regimes established at Bretton Woods and beyond. Stephen Schlesinger's Act of Creation is a good read on this topic.
May '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
jetstream
Kervinlee: ,,,
Should he have gone to war against the Soviets, with Europe as the battlefield, to prevent the rise of the Iron Curtain? I can't imagine any U.S. leader ever entertaining that idea, after the years of war and the strength of the Red Army in Germany at the time.
The question is what should we have done. In 1945, the US absolutely had the military power to defeat the Russian army. Not only did we have the war machine in Europe, but, the B29s in the pacific could have been moved to China where MacArthur could have staged and opened a second front. The US also had sole possession of the ultimate weapon. The outcome of a war to liberate Eastern Europe and terminate communism is not in doubt. There are times when war is not just the only solution but the only moral action.
The cold war was very dangerous. We had at least one near miss with nuclear war, luckily the Russians blinked. MAD was an insane way to live. · Oct 21 at 6:33am
Edited on Oct 21 at 06:42 am
Can't disagree with that. Thanks.
Sep '11
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Just want to point out that Solzenitsyn, in his "Gulag Archipelago", is very hard on FDR's and Churchill's apparent acceptance of Stalin. He offers a very critical, poignant view. Fabulous book!!!
May '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Kofola
Actually, it doesn't lack an answer at all. Roosevelt was a Wilsonian and quite clearly hoped to achieve where Wilson failed, in creating an international organizational order based on left-liberal principles (effectively a "New Deal" for the world). When you look at the history of the formation of the UN, there was a very conscious effort to adjust for the mistakes made by Wilson. This also extends beyond the UN to the formation of the international economic regulatory regimes established at Bretton Woods and beyond. Stephen Schlesinger's Act of Creation is a good read on this topic. · Oct 21 at 7:01am
Now, how do we get the UN to go the way of the League of Nations?
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Fr. Bill, if resting up gives you time to write such brilliant little essays, I'm almost happy you banged up your knee. Felix culpa. A happy fall indeed.
What should FDR have done? I've given this a lot of thought. Here's the best I can do: At a minimum--and this minimum, I confess, is just about all about which I feel certain--FDR should have left us, as did Churchill, with rhetoric making clear that the West, for all its faults, was fundamentally good, the Soviet Union, for all its virtues during the Second World War, fundamentally, as Reagan would later say, "an evil empire."
Churchill's comment that if Hitler invaded hell he would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons, his "iron curtain" speech, his comment, at Clarkson University in (as I recall) 1946, that strangling Bolshevism at its birth would have been of immense benefit to mankind--for all his wooing of Stalin during the War itself, Churchill left us a record of moral clarity.
FDR left us a moral muddle.
Edited on Oct 21, 2011 at 9:07amOct '11
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
What FDR should have done is listened to his advisors who had been talking for years about the dangers of recognizing the Soviet Union. I read a great article by Arnold Beichman about this. There was a memorandum dated July 27, 1933 from the State Department to FDR which said the followiing:
"The fundamental obstacle in the way of the establishment with Russia of the relations usual between nations in diplomatic intercourse is the world revolutionary aims and practices of the rulers of that country. . . . It would seem, therefore, that an essential prerequisite to the establishment of harmonious and trustful relations with the Soviet Government is abandonment by the present rulers of Russia of their world revolutionary aims and the discontinuance of their activities designed to bring about the realization of such aims. More specifically and with particular regard to the United States, this prerequisite involves the abandonment by Moscow of direction, supervision, control, financing, et cetera, through every agency utilized for the purpose, of communist and other related activities in the United States."
Roosevelt was completely naive and taken in by Stalin and he should have been paying attention to the people around him sounding the alarm.
Sep '11
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
At minimum, Peter is right on what FDR should have done. But could he have done more that would have made the spread of Communism more unlikely? Could he have projected force into central and eastern Europe? That would have been a difficult sell I think. The Soviets were our allies--and however awful and barbaric in their own right, the Soviets endured incredible losses and experienced directly Hitler's brutality. The war wouldn't have been won without them. So how does one turn on an ally at the end of the war and attempt to aggressively counter their influence by invading their backyard? I don't disagree that something like this should have happened. But could FDR have pulled it off even if he had been so inclined? I don't know.
Jun '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Flagg, I agree with you in that America and her exhausted allies had little desire to pursue yet another war after the debilitating war just concluded. But here is where we might disagree, and this moves me fully into Peter's camp, FDR should have taken a strong political stand in opposition to Stalin. In effect the stand Truman took, which has gone down in history as the Truman Doctrine.
I don't know that the world would have been much different as a result. But it is a shame to think that we just don't know, because the reality is Roosevelt never tried. In essence I am forced to stay with my original assessment on FDR, an exhausted president long past his best-by date.
Please, don't take this as a plea for America to fight all the world's battles, it is not. But America was then, as it still is, the leader of the free world, and what Peter describes is a Roosevelt who abdicated that position for whatever reason.
Edited on Oct 21, 2011 at 11:31amOct '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
At the end of the war we were not left to choose either continuing the war and moving on the USSR or leaving things as they were. FDR's sympathies towards socialism left America in the position of using the war against Hitler as an opportunity to raise the status of the USSR from collectivist reactionaries against feudalism to that of world leadership.
Even having made four years of mistakes in failing to realize who Stalin was, we could have at least held them back from European dominance by not stopping our military from occupying Berlin until after the Soviets got there first. Eisenhower dragged his feet for a few weeks, allowing the Russians to take the heaviest casualties but also the signing bonus from Yalta of a power center in Western Europe.
Edited on Oct 21, 2011 at 11:00amDec '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
raycon: At the end of the war we were not left to choose either continuing the war and moving on the USSR or leaving things as they were. FDR's sympathies towards socialism left America in the position of using the war against Hitler as an opportunity to raise the status of the USSR from collectivist reactionaries against feudalism to that of world leadership.
Even having made four years of mistakes in failing to realize who Stalin was, we could have at least held them back from European dominance by not stopping our military from occupying Berlin until after the Soviets got there first. Eisenhower dragged his feet for a few weeks, allowing the Russians to take the heaviest casualties but also the signing bonus from Yalta of a power center in Western Europe. · Oct 21 at 10:56am
Edited on Oct 21 at 11:00 am
That is the sad and disgusting reality. FDR could have set the conditions for an enduring world peace, instead, he enabled the emergence and spread of the plague called communism.
Sep '11
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Cas Balicki:
Edited on Oct 21 at 11:31 am
Cas,
No disagreement here. But beyond the right rhetoric and posture (which is important), I just don't know enough about military/strategic realities to say what any President might have done. Maybe getting to Berlin sooner (as raycon suggests) could have helped. But then we would have had to project force in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and where else? Otherwise I don't see what would have prevented the Sovietization of Central and Eastern Europe. Stalin had already begun building loyal cadres in each country (e.g., the Lublin Committee in Poland)--had been doing this for years in some cases. Again, I'm in no way excusing FDR's inexcusable blindness. Just trying to think hard about what was really possible. I would love to learn more about your father and his experiences.
Jun '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
Flagg, my father's story is not particularly unusual for its time and place. He had a great singing voice, a tenor, and sang in choirs in his part of the country. He was also involved in things such as the boy scouts. This involvement, modest as it was, conferred on him community leader status. When the Soviets invaded after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to capture their share of Poland, they arrested community leaders and shipped them to Siberia.
It was from Siberia that my father, along with all the other Poles so arrested, trekked out to join the British Expeditionary force fighting in North Africa and then Italy, where my dad was finally wounded and demobilized after Monte Cassino. The Polish Corps was formed under the command of Polish General Anders.
Stalin did nothing to aid the Polish Corps in their departure from Siberia, but he also did nothing to prevent the exodus. My father spoke little of this history, he was taciturn by nature, and getting his personal history was an exercise in pulling hen's teeth. One possible reason for this reticence is the fact that he was the sole survivor of his fighting unit.
Edited on Oct 21, 2011 at 8:01pmJun '10
Re: What Could/Should FDR Have Done?
As an aside, Flagg, I would only add that my sister is in possession of two boxes full of medals and battle ribbons that my father neither wore nor spoke of. There are a surprising number of medals.
I'm of the opinion, supported by my Polish pals, that we should ship them to the Polish national archives or museum, where they can be properly researched and cataloged. We may yet do this.