Roosevelt's Lost Alliances

How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War

Frank Costigliola

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400839520
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

How the Grand Alliance of World War II succeeded — and then collapsed — because of personal politics In the spring of 1945, as the Allied victory in Europe was approaching, the shape of the postwar world hinged on the personal politics and flawed personalities of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Roosevelt's Lost Alliances captures this moment and shows how FDR crafted a winning coalition by overcoming the different habits, upbringings, sympathies, and past experiences of the three leaders. In particular, Roosevelt trained his famous charm on Stalin, lavishing respect on him, salving his insecurities, and rendering him more amenable to compromise on some matters.Yet, even as he pursued a lasting peace, FDR was alienating his own intimate circle of advisers and becoming dangerously isolated. After his death, postwar cooperation depended on Harry Truman, who, with very different sensibilities, heeded the embittered "Soviet experts" his predecessor had kept distant. A Grand Alliance was painstakingly built and carelessly lost. The Cold War was by no means inevitable.This landmark study brings to light key overlooked documents, such as the Yalta diary of Roosevelt's daughter Anna; the intimate letters of Roosevelt's de facto chief of staff, Missy LeHand; and the wiretap transcripts of estranged adviser Harry Hopkins. With a gripping narrative and subtle analysis, Roosevelt's Lost Alliances lays out a new approach to foreign relations history. Frank Costigliola highlights the interplay between national political interests and more contingent factors, such as the personalities of leaders and the culturally conditioned emotions forming their perceptions and driving their actions. Foreign relations flowed from personal politics—a lesson pertinent to historians, diplomats, and citizens alike.

Chapter 1

A Portrait of the Allies as Young Men

Franklin, Winston, and Koba

In June 1905, twenty-three-year-old Franklin Roosevelt and his twenty-one-year-old bride, Eleanor, the favorite niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, embarked on a European honeymoon. They gravitated to London, Franklin's favorite city and the center of the world's greatest empire. They probably would not have considered vacationing in the backwater of czarist Russia, even if the incipient revolution there had not ignited. The couple were greeted with deference at a fashionable hotel and “ushered into the royal suite.”¹ Also accustomed to elite status was a cousin of the Duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill. Thirty-one years old in 1905, he had already served five years in Parliament. As a soldier for the British Empire he had killed “fanatic Dervishes” in the Sudan and had daringly escaped from a Boer prison in South Africa. He garnered fame and money by writing books about these adventures. He would soon enter the Government as undersecretary of state for the colonies. Roosevelt awaited a less exalted prospect: making up failed courses at Columbia University law school. Despite their differences in achievement, the two privileged cosmopolitans shared membership in a transatlantic elite. Each assumed his nation ranked as world leader. One can imagine them striking up a conversation, perhaps in a shop filled with the naval prints they both loved. It remains difficult, however, to picture either of them chatting with the brutal revolutionary from a remote corner of the Russian Empire who would come to London two years later on quite different business.

A gulf in language, geography, class, and ideology separated Roosevelt and Churchill from Joseph Dzhugashvili, who would later take the name Stalin. Born in 1878, the future dictator came to manhood in rebellious Georgia. Russians despised Georgians as supposed barbarians who spoke a “dog's language.”² Some geographers placed the province in Asia. Georgians hated dominance by the Russians just as they had earlier hated their Persian overlords. Stalin would later seek autocratic models from both the shahs and the czars. A go-getter who already boasted a record of arrests and escapes, the young revolutionary traveled to London in 1907 to attend the Russian Social Democratic Worker's Party Congress. He eluded czarist police by melting into the London slum quarter favored by Jewish immigrants who had fled Russian pogroms. Decades later, Arthur Bacon, a former errand boy, reminisced that the stranger had tipped him fifty times the going rate. Bacon added, “His favorite treat was toffee. I brought him some every day.” Perhaps the generosity stemmed from the provincial's misunderstanding British coinage. Or perhaps Dzhugashvili had cash from the bank robberies in Georgia that he was masterminding for Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.³ Years later, the dictator would advise a young diplomat bound for London to spend time “in churches listening to the sermons—the best way to learn English.”⁴

Despite the difficulty in drawing causal links between early experience and later policymaking, historians can suggest correlations between the cultural and emotional attitudes of the allies as young men and their later ideological and political positions. Throughout their lives, these men behaved as people and not just as cool minds separated from actual bodies. In the crucible of 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill forged not only their opposition to the Axis but also cultural kinship and commitment to democratic capitalism into a formidable alliance. By late 1943, however, these elements of mutuality were losing some of their force with Roosevelt. FDR was increasingly put off by Churchill's personality, resistance to dismantling the British

Empire, and resumption of London's traditional maneuvering against Russia. FDR and Stalin, both masters of manipulation and seduction, struck up a personal relationship at Tehran and Yalta. Each hoped personal ties could help bridge their political and cultural differences. While Roosevelt saw Stalin as a potential ally in the future dismantling of European empires, the dictator seemed to appreciate the president's readiness to divide Germany and to approve extracting from the defeated enemy reparations in kind to rebuild the Soviet Union.

Childhood and Youth

Decades before Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin became the Big Three, they were children growing up in very different families. The tight embrace of Franklin by his parents, the arms-length distance enforced by Randolph and Jennie Churchill, and the mix of brutality and support shown to “Soso” Dzhugashvili conditioned how those boys matured and how they would interact decades later. Despite the differences in their childhoods, each grew up considering himself a man of destiny. Roosevelt would go through life confident that his heritage, intuition, charm, luck, flexibility, determination, savvy, and good looks would enable him to triumph, eventually, over almost any obstacle. Churchill learned to craft his own world. As a child he stayed close to his affectionate and long-serving nanny, “Mrs. Everest,” while adoring his mother and idolizing his father from afar. He was determined to become the accomplished adult with whom his parents would gladly connect. Perhaps in reaction to the pain of his childhood, Stalin used brute force, or the force of his intelligence and magnetic personality, to claw his way to the top. Once there he eliminated even potential rivals.

Also formative for the three were their educational experiences, associations, and love affairs. Roosevelt and Stalin learned to attract people with glamor, guile, flattery, and self-promotion. Churchill developed his extraordinary talent at writing and speaking. In later years Roosevelt and Stalin would remain the seductive actors and Churchill the inexhaustible monologist. These future war leaders had divergent personal experiences with war. Churchill sought out battles in order to write about them for money while also proving his bravery. Roosevelt displayed more ambivalence about combat. Stalin avoided it while scheming day and night to overthrow the czarist system. They would also react in different ways to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The Churchills and Roosevelts toured Europe as members of the pre–World War I ruling classes. Kaiser Wilhelm II invited Winston to observe German military maneuvers as his guest. The monarch had also welcomed onto his yacht Sara Delano Roosevelt and her nineteen-year-old son, Franklin, who filched a well-chewed pencil from the Kaiser's desk.⁵ Quite different was the trip made by Dzhugashvili and the Russian revolutionaries in 1907. Their party congress had originally tried to meet in Copenhagen but was forced to leave after the czarist government pressured Danish authorities. They traveled to Sweden, only again to have to pack their bags for Britain.⁶ Dzhugashvili's Marxist ideology and Georgian/Russian national identity prejudiced him against the likes of Roosevelt and Churchill.

Aspects of ideologically tinged cultural difference would later also divide the U.S. president and the British prime minister. FDR prided himself as heir to the antimonarchism of Isaac Roosevelt, a captain in the Revolutionary War. At White House dinners he would needle Churchill by claiming to “remember very clearly that when I was seven or thereabouts…my mother took me to England, and we saw Queen Victoria.…Why I hated the old woman.”⁷ Quite different was the boyhood of Churchill. His mother, Jennie Jerome, though born in Brooklyn, New York, had taught her son to adore the queen.

Jennie starred in the sorority of young American women whose dowries were rescuing cash-strapped European nobility. Her father, Leonard Jerome, had risen from upstate New York farm boy to Wall Street speculator. His wealth enabled his wife, Clara, to hobnob with royalty in Paris and London. The Jeromes calculated Jennie's £50,000 dowry as well-spent, as the bridegroom, Lord Randolph Churchill, ranked as the son of a duke and a friend of the Prince of Wales. Leonard boasted about “the greatest match any American had made.”⁸ The old-money Roosevelts sneered at such commerce and deference. As president, FDR would address royals by their first names, as in “Cousin George” of Britain. A diplomat concluded that Roosevelt delighted in hosting kings and queens because “he considers himself royalty.”⁹

Despite Clara Jerome's anguish at the revolutionary overthrow of Emperor Napoleon III in 1871, she remained opportunistic enough to snap up his dinner china at auction. Another American benefiting from Europe's distress was Franklin's father, James Roosevelt. For fifteen dollars he purchased the emperor's sleigh, an elegant conveyance lined with wine-red velvet. Napoleon III had received it as a gift from Czar Alexander II, the ruler when Dzhugashvili was born. In 1881, the czar would be assassinated by revolutionaries. The two bargains hinted at twentieth-century forces that would shape the world of the Big Three: the decline of European monarchy, the rise of radical revolution, and the efforts by rich America to profit from the former while containing the latter.

In contrast to Winston or Joseph, Franklin as a boy was showered, indeed smothered, with loving attention from his parents. Sara Delano, whose wealthy family had arrived with the Pilgrims and claimed descent from William the Conqueror, was tall, beautiful, and twenty-six when she married James Roosevelt, a widower two inches shorter and twice her age. Their only child was born on January 30, 1882. He grew up at Springwood, an estate overlooking the Hudson River about eighty miles north of New York City. Franklin's parents seem never to have spanked him. They encouraged him to assert himself within “proper bounds.” After James's first heart attack in 1890, most of the parenting shifted to Sara, who doted on the boy. Whereas Jennie refused to visit Winston at school after he suffered a concussion, Sara refused to stay away after Groton quarantined Franklin because of illness. She recalled that “several times each day I would climb a tall, rickety ladder, and, by seating myself at the top, manage to see into the room and talk” with him.¹⁰ James died in 1900, leaving Sara $300,000, an amount dwarfed by her $1.3 million Delano inheritance.¹¹ Most of the Delano fortune stemmed from the opium trade and other nineteenth-century business in China, where young Sara had spent two years. The wealthy, still-attractive widow remained a catch. Yet she seems never to have considered remarrying. Instead she devoted herself to her son. Her meddling in Franklin's adult life would aggravate his wife and influence his children—while also saving his marriage and subsidizing his lifestyle. Living to see her adored boy elected president three times, she died in September 1941 amid the world crisis. For the rest of his life FDR wore a black armband.

“My son is a Delano,” Sara once claimed. “He is not a Roosevelt at all.”¹² Throughout his life FDR used “Algonac,” the name of the Delano estate, as a code word signaling “okay.” FDR would later tell a relative, “Our branch of Roosevelts hasn't got vitality; mine, such as it is, comes from the Delanos.” He described that energy as “a very convenient type because it can be turned on and off at will.”¹³ As president, FDR would turn the charm on and off to get what he wanted. He worked this manipulation on Churchill. He sought to get close enough to Stalin to do the same.

At eleven, Franklin received his own gun and developed what his mother called “an insatiable interest in shooting” and collecting bird specimens.¹⁴ He sailed the Hudson River and navigated treacherous currents off Campobello Island. He immersed himself in foreign stamps, geography, and history, lifelong interests sparked by stories of the Delanos’ business in China. She recounted that he “used to pore over Admiral [Alfred Thayer] Mahan's History of Sea Power until he had practically memorized the whole book.”¹⁵ What all these interests had in common was Franklin's determination, within the bounds of his mother's control and his father's illness, to secure—as he would try to obtain throughout his life—his independence and his command at the center. Shooting and sailing placed him in charge. Organizing specimens, stamps, and stories about nations, seas, and their past enabled him to construct around himself a meaningful, manageable world.¹⁶

Young Churchill also crafted a universe centered on himself, but he had to work within a more difficult family. After making and losing several fortunes, Leonard Jerome finished a loser. Randolph and Jennie Churchill also ran short of money. Winston inherited his parents’ sense of entitlement to costly travel, champagne, and residences. His financial strategy—“income should be expanded to meet expenditure”—would not always meet the target.¹⁷ A cousin recalled that “even by the standards of their generation,” Winston's parents “were pretty awful.”¹⁸ “What a care the boy is,” Jennie complained to her erratic husband.¹⁹ Winston's demand for attention also exasperated teachers. Decades later, those demands would also annoy FDR. The schoolboy begged his mother to write. “I have only had one letter from you this term,” he lamented one June.²⁰ Despite such appeals, Jennie did not visit when he had a sports day, a public speech, or a concussion that put him in bed for a week. Reading in the local newspaper that his father had given a speech nearby, Winston wrote, “I was very disappointed but I suppose you were too busy to come.”²¹

1.1. Years after this photograph of the young navigator was taken, an observer remarked of Roosevelt that “you could see the jawbones click, the great will in the jawbones.” (Reminiscences of Janeway [2003], CUOHRC, 71. Courtesy of FDR Library.)

His parents were busy. A dazzling orator, Randolph championed “Tory Democracy”—an alliance between the aristocracy and the working class—and rose to become chancellor of the exchequer by age thirty-six. He seemed a likely future prime minister. Yet he also endured nervousness and depression, which he tried to soothe by smoking some forty cigarettes a day. He suffered swings in mood, delusions, and partial paralysis. In 1886, he wrecked his political career by abruptly resigning from the Cabinet. He may have been afflicted with a brain tumor. At the time, however, many, including Winston, were informed by doctors that the illness was advanced syphilis.²² The once rising star flamed out at forty-six.

Winston had tried desperately to get close to his father, “who seemed to own the key to everything or almost everything worth having.” But when Winston offered to help his father write letters, “he froze me into stone.” Randolph rubbed in the rejection by befriending instead his son's schoolmate. Decades later, the son could still exclaim: “How I should have loved to have that sort of relationship with my father!”²³ It was only on his third try that the future war leader passed the examinatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Key Players
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - A Portrait of the Allies as Young Men: Franklin, Winston, and Koba
• Chapter 2 - From Missy to Molotov: The Women and Men who Sustained the Big three
• Chapter 3 - The Personal Touch: Forming the Alliance, January–August 1941
• Chapter 4 - Transcending Differences: Eden Goes to Moscow and Churchill to Washington, December 1941
• Chapter 5 - Creating the “Family Circle”: The Tortuous Path to Tehran, 1942–43
• Chapter 6 - “I've Worked It Out”: Roosevelt's Plan to Win the Peace and Defy Death, 1944–45
• Chapter 7 - The Diplomacy of Trauma: Kennan and his Colleagues in Moscow, 1933–46
• Chapter 8 - Guns and Kisses in the Kremlin: Ambassadors Harriman and Clark Kerr Encounter Stalin, 1943–46
• Chapter 9 - “Roosevelt's Death has Changed Everything”: Truman's First Days, April–June 1945
• Chapter 10 - The Lost Alliance: Widespread Anxiety and Deepening Ideology, July 1945–March 1946
• Conclusion and Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliographical Note
• Notes
• Index