The Truman Doctrine was an American foreign policy designed to contain Communism by giving Greece and Turkey economic aid. Gaining the support of the Republicans who controlled Congress, President Harry S Truman proclaimed the Doctrine on March 12, 1947. It stated that the U.S. would support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent their falling into the Soviet sphere. The Doctrine shifted American foreign policy towards the Soviet Union from Détente to, as George F. Kennan phrased it, a policy of containment of Soviet expansion. It is often used by historians as the starting date of the Cold War.
On the 4th of February 1945 the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin) convened at Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula. It was the second of the large war time conferences, preceded by Tehran in 1943, and succeeded by Potsdam (after Roosevelt's death) later in 1945.
The Soviet leader refused to travel farther than the Black Sea Resort of Yalta in the Crimean Riviera for the next meeting and, once again, Churchill and Roosevelt took long trips to attend the Yalta summit.
Each of the three powers brought his own agenda to the Yalta Conference. Roosevelt was lobbying for Soviet support in the Pacific War concerning the invasion of the Empire of Japan; Churchill was pressing for free elections and democratic institutions in Eastern Europe (specifically Poland), while Stalin was attempting to establish a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe which the Soviets thought was essential to Soviet national security. Additionally, all three of them were trying to establish an agenda as to how to govern post-war Germany. In 1943 a thesis by William Bullitt prophesied the “flow of the Red amoeba into Europe” and ironically enough, Stalin had the military advantage. The Soviet Union was physically in control of most of Eastern Europe. While the Allies had their hands full with the invasion of France, at great cost the Soviet Red Army had penetrated the eastern borders of the Third Reich. At the time of Yalta, Russian Marshall Zhukov was only forty miles from Berlin. Moreover, Roosevelt hoped to obtain a commitment from Stalin to participate in the United Nations. Concerning the first topic on the Soviets' agenda — Eastern Europe — the subject of Poland immediately arose. Stalin was quick to state his case with the following words:
"For the Russian people, the question of Poland is not only a question of honor but also a question of security. Throughout history, Poland has been the corridor through which the enemy has passed into Russia. Poland is a question of life and death for Russia."
Accordingly, Stalin made it clear that some of his demands regarding Poland were not negotiable: the Russians were to keep territory from the eastern portion of Poland and Poland was to compensate for that by extending its Western borders, thereby forcing out millions of Germans. Stalin promised free elections in Poland, notwithstanding the recently installed Communist puppet government. However, it soon became apparent that Stalin had no intentions of holding true to his promise of free elections. The elections, which were held in January 1947 and resulted in the official transformation of Poland into a socialist state by 1949, were widely considered rigged in favour of communist parties.
Roosevelt's concern about the USSR entering the Pacific War on the side of Allies can be seen as misplaced. In fact, some argue that Stalin was anxious to reverse the humiliation and territorial losses during the Russo-Japanese War, and hoped to extend Soviet influence into East Asia. However there is some dispute to whether Roosevelt would ever allow Soviet troops to land in Japan, as can be seen by President Truman's decision to drop the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, effectively preventing an invasion.
A room of the palace where the Big Three met.Roosevelt met Stalin's price, hoping that the USSR could be dealt with through the U.N. Some Americans later considered Yalta to be a 'sellout,' because it encouraged the Soviets to expand their influence into Japan and Asia and also because Stalin eventually violated the terms by forming the Soviet bloc. Furthermore, the Soviets agreed to join the United Nations given the secret understanding of a voting formula with a veto power for permanent members in the Security Council, thus ensuring that each country could block unwanted decisions. Some critics suggested that Roosevelt's failing health (Yalta was his last major conference before he died from a cerebral hemorrhage) was to blame for his seemingly poor judgment. At the time, the USSR had troops in much of Eastern Europe with a military about three times as large as Eisenhower's forces.
The Big Three had ratified previous agreements about the postwar division of Germany: there were to be three zones of occupation, one zone for each of the three dominant nations (France would later get a portion when the USA and Great Britain divided up parts of their zones and gave them to France). Berlin itself, although within the Soviet zone, would also be divided into three sectors, and would eventually become a major symbol of the Cold War because of the division of the city due to the infamous Berlin Wall, constructed and manned by the Soviet-backed Communist East German government.
The Big Three had further decided that all original governments would be restored to the invaded countries and that all civilians would be repatriated. Democracies would be established, all territories would hold free elections, and order would be restored to Europe, as declared in the following official statement:
"The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice."
[edit] The meeting
The meetings of three leaders took place in the Grand Livadia Palace.The conference was held in Yalta, a resort town on the Crimean peninsula in the Soviet Union (now in Ukraine). The American delegation was housed in the Tsar's former palace, while President Roosevelt stayed at the Livadia Palace where the meetings took place. The British delegation was installed in Prince Vorontsov's palace in Alupka. Key members of the delegations were Edward Stettinius, Averell Harriman, Anthony Eden, Alexander Cadogan, and Vyacheslav Molotov. According to Antony Beevor, all the rooms were bugged by the NKVD. Stalin arrived by train on February 4. The meeting started with an official dinner that evening.
[edit] Major points
Key points of the meeting are as follows:
There was an agreement that the priority would be the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. After the war, Germany would be split into four occupied zones, with a quadripartite occupation of Berlin as well, prior unification of Germany.
Stalin agreed to let France have the fourth occupation zone in Germany and Austria, carved out from the British and American zones. France would also be granted a seat in the Allied Control Council.
Germany would undergo demilitarization and denazification.
German reparations were partly to be in the form of forced labor.
Creation of an allied reparation council with its seat in Moscow.
The status of Poland was discussed, but was complicated by the fact that Poland was at this time under the control of the Red Army. It was agreed to reorganize the Provisionary Polish Government that had been set up by the Red Army through the inclusion of other groups such as the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity and to have democratic elections. This effectively excluded the Polish government-in-exile that had evacuated in 1939.
The Polish eastern border would follow the Curzon Line, and Poland would receive substantial territorial compensation in the west from Germany, although the exact border was to be determined at a later time.
Citizens of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia were to be handed over to their respective countries, regardless of their consent.
Roosevelt obtained a commitment by Stalin to participate in the United Nations once it was agreed that each of the five permanent members of the Security Council would have veto power.
Stalin agreed to enter the fight against the Empire of Japan within 90 days after the defeat of Germany. The Soviet Union would receive the southern part of Sakhalin and the Kurile islands after the defeat of Japan.
A "Committee on Dismemberment of Germany" was to be set up. The purpose was to decide whether Germany was to be divided into several nations, and if so, what borders and inter-relationships the new German states were to have.
A new organization, (the United Nations) should be set up to replace the failed League of Nations.
[edit] Legacy
Churchill, Roosevelt and StalinYalta was the last great conference before the end of the war in Europe and the death of President Roosevelt, and the last trip Roosevelt took abroad. To observers he appeared already ill and exhausted. Arguably, his most important goal was to ensure the Soviet Union's participation in the United Nations, which he achieved at the price of granting veto power to each permanent member of the Security Council. Another of his objectives was to bring the Soviet Union into the fight against Japan, as the effectiveness of the atomic bomb had yet to be proven. As a reward, Soviet Union was allowed to seize Sakhalin and Kuril Islands, which used to be under Japanese sovereignty, and some other privileges in colonial China remained intact.
The Red Army had already removed Nazi forces from most of Eastern Europe, so Stalin obtained his goals: a significant sphere of influence as a buffer zone. In this process, the freedom of small nations was sacrificed for the sake of stability, which meant that the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia would continue to be annexed by USSR.
Allegations about Yalta would play a significant role in United States politics during the Cold War. American conservatives alleged that decisions reached at Yalta were a betrayal of the Eastern European nations that resulted in their domination by the Soviet Union. During the McCarthy period, Yalta was a centerpiece of accusations that the Democrats were "soft on communism."
The alternative opinion is that there was little Roosevelt or Churchill could have done to prevent Stalin from dominating the Eastern European nations short of war with the Soviet Union, since the Red Army already controlled those Eastern European territories. With the war in the Pacific theatre far from over, and the atomic bomb still two months from completion, Roosevelt likely wanted to improve his negotiating position once the atomic bomb was introduced. Stalin had agreed at Yalta to the principle of a liberated Europe, which stated that liberated peoples would have the right to democratic self government. Stalin also agreed that Poland would hold democratic, free elections as soon as feasible. In the alternative opinion, the problem was not the Yalta Conference Agreement itself, but rather Stalin's violation of the Yalta Conference Agreement.
THE YALTA BETRAYAL
Felix Wittmer
1953
Chapter 1. CLAIMS AND FACTS
IN APOLOGY for the Yalta disaster, Sumner Welles wrote
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "He could not then
know that the co-operative relationship with Stalin
that he had established would break down almost immedi-
ately after his death."*1*
Raymond Gram Swing claimed that "none of the
negotiators could have believed that the cold war would
be on in three years."*2*
"A bad bargain?" John Gunther asked with reference
to the Far Eastern Yalta concessions. "Perhaps it may
seem so now. But as of that time, early in i945, it
seemed very good."*3*
Such is the trite and dreary tenor of the writings
with which the New Deal-Fair Deal diplomats, colum-
nists, authors, and professors have flooded the land.
"Don't blame Roosevelt and his advisors," they ad-
monish us. "Don't blame his followers, and Don't blame
us who once waxed rich riding the bandwagon. In
those days it made sense to trust the Kremlin."
What kind of sense? if I may ask. Such postulates,
aimed at preserving a bankrupt administration and
saving the prestige of baleful blunderers, are absurd.
Fact is that flirtation with the Kremlin was the fad
of tragically ignorant progressives who guided the na-
tion in the years of crisis, and that Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, under the continuous influence of the First
12
Lady, was obsessed with turning his charms on Uncle
Joe Stalin.
Fact is that Roosevelt, warmhearted and vigorous,
but also excessively conscious of his own importance,
surrounded himself with a gang of myopic yes-men
who, like Harry Hopkins, George C. Marshall, Joseph E.
Davies, and Elliot Roosevelt, frivolously praised the
Soviet Union to the skies.
Fact is that the President's Senate-approved cabinet
officers often were not consulted before Roosevelt took
decisive steps, and sometimes they were not informed
after he had taken them.
Fact is that under Roosevelt's monolithic leadership,
sensing his determination to establish hail-fellow-well-
met relations with the Soviet dictator, the pinks and
reds of the alphabet-soup agencies and the legions of
blueprint saviors of the world outdid one another in
proclaiming the glory of the Kremlin, and that the
professional Sovietmongers had a field day that seemed
never to end as they took over large areas of our
government, radio, and press.
Fact is that the slap-happy indulgence toward the
Soviet Union of Roosevelt and his palace guard per-
mitted the cynical conspirators of world revolution to
cover our government and industry with a network of
Moscow-trained and Moscow-guided spies, to set up
an incredible system of fronts, and to infiltrate and
corrupt every branch of our public life, including the
schools and the churches.
Fact is that Roosevelt, eager to succeed where
Woodrow Wilson had failed, dreamed of creating a
better and more peaceful world through legal instru-
13
ments, and in pursuit of his illusions obtruded himself
upon Joe Stalin with every imaginable gift, including
eleven billion dollars' worth of lend-lease, the security
of eighty million eastern Europeans and hundreds of
millions of Chinese, and the lives of several millions of
the best friends free society possessed.
Fact is that Roosevelt and his left-wing cohorts
ignored the warnings of more discerning Americans,
from Robert Lansing and Bainbridge Colby to Herbert
Hoover and Douglas MacArthur; ignored the hideous
and immoral teachings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin;
ignored the chain of broken pledges, the mass murders
in the Ukraine, the trial purges, the slavery in Siberia,
and the utter disreputability of the brazen liars from
Moscow.
Fact is that Stalin and Molotov could hardly believe
their eyes and ears when they first met Hopkins and
Roosevelt; that, once assured of their mystic credulity,
they played our war leaders for all they were worth;
once more pulled the timeworn stunt of 1935-39, pre-
tending that international communism was dying out;
masqueraded under the flag of reborn nationalism;
staged the publicity hoax of the return to religious
freedom; fed us, with the help of scoundrels and dupes
in our midst, the humbug of China's "agrarian reform-
ers"; and went on toasting us, signing useless documents,
and grabbing while the grabbing was good.
Fact is that no "co-operative relationship with Stalin"
ever was, nor could have been, established, and that
the Yalta "bargain," whether "as of that time" or as
of any other time, to men who can name a dictatorship
when they see it, never "seemed very good."
14
Chapter 2. The Roosevelts Take Communism Lightly
NOW, LET US View the record.
On November 16, 1933, when the Roosevelt ad-
ministration recognized the U.S.S.R., the latter pledged
itself to refrain "from interfering in any manner in
the internal affairs of the United States." That was less
than three weeks after the foundation of the American
League Against War and Fascism, the treasonable,
Kremlin-directed outfit which in 1937 became the
notorious American League for Peace and Democracy.
Followed the America Youth Congress, 1934; League
of American Writers, 1935; National ***** Congress,
1936; Abraham Lincoln Brigade, with it's numerous
affiliates, 1937-38; the American Congress for De-
mocracy and Intellectual Freedom, 1939, and many
more big-sounding traps for impractical would-be
saviors of the world.
Soviet secret-police thugs, in the guise of diplomatic
and consular officials, traveled all over the United States
to bore from within, confuse, bribe, corrupt, grab.
Soviet gold was offered more openly than ever before.
In the most spectacular of early transactions, Elliott
Roosevelt and Anthony Fokker, on February, 28, 1934,
each received half a million dollars for selling fifty
15
military planes to the Soviet government.*4* Ever since,
Elliott has loved the Soviet cause.
When, in the following year, the CIO was founded,
Moscow maneuvered Lee Pressman, of the old Ware
government spy apparatus, into the position of general
counsel. In record time, the Communists within the
CIO achieved a dominant position. By 1938 a list of
280 salaried CIO organizers, who were members of the
Communist party, was handed to the House Committee
on Un-American Activities.*5* But President Roosevelt
reprimanded Martin Dies, at a Herald Tribune forum in
New York,for investigating the agitators of CIO
sit-down strikes. "There is no one interested in Com-
munism," he told the chairman of the committee on
August 14, 1936, "no one at all. I've heard it all my
life. There is no menace here in Communism." *6*
By this time Washington was teeming with seasoned
Soviet spies, such as John Abt, Noel Field, Alger Hiss,
Charles Kramer, Victor Perlo, Mary Price, Bill Reming-
ton, Vincent Reno, George Silverman, Nathan Gregory
Silvermaster, Henry Julian Wadleigh, and Harry Dex-
ter White. Yet, when in September, 1939, after Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union had become allies, Adolf
Berle reported to the President the alarming Whittaker
Chambers revelation concerning the spy ring of Alger
Hiss, Roosevelt shrugged his broad shoulders and advised
him to "go jump in the lake." *7*
It was in 1939 that Roosevelt made a decision which,
for a considerable period of time, was to turn the tables
of history in favor of the Communist world revolution.
Over the heads of treaty major generals and fourteen
senior brigadiers, George Catlett Marshall was made
16
Chief of Staff; Six years previously, Marshall's nomina-
tion to the rank of general, upon the adverse routine
report of the Inspector General, had been blocked by
the champion of anti-Communism, General Douglas
MacArthur. The two persons with the most incisive
influence on Roosevelt -- the First Lady and the ex-social
worker, Harry Hopkins -- both favored Marshall. Both
favored the Soviet Union.
Soon afterwards, confident of his ability to evaluate
Communism without ever making the effort to study it,
and prodded by his consort, the President exhibited an-
noyance with the probings of the House Un-American
Activities Committee into the "anti-imperialist" doings
of the Stalinoid peace fronts. (The Comnmunazi phase
was then in progress.) The hostile attitude of the New
Deal hierarchy notwithstanding, the committee sub-
poenaed the leaders of the America Youth Congress, a
subversive outfit dominated by a crew of radicals from
the Young Communist League.
Their morale boosted by the public support of the
First Lady of the land, the young revolutionaries found
the hearings most hilarious and did their level best to
turn them into a farce. The landlady of the White
House herself attended the hearings, and afterwards
entertained her young friends in the Executive Mansion.
The First Lady's very close friend, Joseph P. Lash,
who in 1937 had described his defection from the
Socialist party in the Communist weekly, New Masses,
through a great part of the hearings made a gay and,
spectacular nuisance of himself. On various occasions
one of Mrs. Roosevelt's star boarders, he was at the
very time of these congressional hearings a White House
17
guest. Another officer of the American Youth Congress,
Abbott Simon, staff member of the Communist publi-
cation, Champion, for at least two weeks slept in
Lincoln's bed.
In the spring of 1941, the young radicals of the
congress, as guests of Mrs. Roosevelt, were regaled with
a picnic on the White House lawn. The President, to
please his zealous spouse, addressed her maladjusted
proteges from the South Portico. When he admonished
them to condemn not merely the Nazi regime but all
dictatorships, he was booed by the First Lady's guests.
Soon afterwards,many of these young folks picketed
the White House as representatives of the American
Peace Mobilization. Among them was Joseph Cadden,
one of Mrs. Roosevelt's White House boarders.*8*
18
Chapter 3. Aiming to Please the Kremlin Man
Much was forgiven when, on June 22, 1941, Hitler's
Wehrmacht rolled into the Russian plains. Now Russia
was on the right side of the fence. Now it was proper
for Roosevelt's pal, Joseph Edward Davies, in Mission
to Moscow, to pay his "respect and admirations" to
butcher Andrei Vishinsky. Freda Kirchwey, inveterate
Communist fronter, in the Nation of June 28, spear-
headed the new drive, opining that our leaders were
"too sensitive to the general distrust of Communism
and the Soviet Union."
In reality, our "leaders" were fairly quick in obliging
the most ardent champions of the Soviet cause. It
was in July, 1941, that Moscow learned of President
Roosevelt's to send one Harry L. Hopkins to
the Kremlin in order to "negotiate" lend-lease. Who
was this Hopkins? For a number of days, no pertinent
information from the Soviet Embassy in Washington
was available. Consequently, the Kremlin readied itself
for a stiff and prolonged bargaining bout.
Top-notch bargainer Vyacheslav M. Molotov was
hurriedly appointed chairman of a committee which
was to determine in advance how far the U.S.S.R. might
have to go in yielding to American demands. The
19
inspection of lend-lease distribution on Russian soil, in-
cluding the admission of American military advisers
into the Soviet lines. It was willing to give us conces-
sions for mining manganese ore as well as special privi-
leges in the Baku and Volga oil fields. In was even
prepared to give us a solemn pledge to maintain freedom
of speech and religion.
Yet, a day or two before the arrival of Hopkins,
Molotov -- for once allsmiles -- informed comrades
Mikoyan, Vassilensky, Trainin, and Bogolepov that the
committee was adjourned for good. "A man at the
very highest level of the Roosevelt administration,"
which means a spy either in the White House or in the
State Department, had notified the Soviet authorities
that "Mr. Hopkins will demand no concessions what-
ever. The sole wish of Mr. Hopkins," Molotov assured
the tovarisches, "is to ask nothing and give everything.
What he wants is to keep us in the fighting -- and that
is all. Mr. Hopkins is completely on our side and may
be trusted absolutely." *9*
President Roosevelt had been fearful that tovarisch
Stalin might not fully appreciate his unmitigated good
will and might mistake him for an economic royalist.
At least, the impeccable record of the former social
worker and Works Progress Administrator as lavish
spender of the American taxpayer's money, he hoped,
would impress the master of the Kremlin.
The President was happy and relieved when Deputy
Santa Claus Hopkins brought the good news upon his
return from the social pilgrimage to Moscow. Comrade
Stalin had unconditionally accepted our generous offers!
"Harry and Uncle Joe got on like a house afire,"
20
Roosevelt stated triumphantly. "They have become
buddies." *10*
In order to safeguard transportation of lend-lease
material to Russia, British and Soviet troops late in
August, 1941, occupied Iran. Naturally, the political
agents of the secret police, the "agitprops" who had
graduated from the Lenin Institute in Moscow, came
along, to exploit whatever resentment and hostility to
the imperialist warmongers of the West they might
encounter or stir up. The Tudeh party, founded early
in 1942, at once began to plow the ground fear the
Communist revolts which followed World War II.
21
Chapter 4. Roosevelt's Hunch
HARD PRESSED by the Nazi armies, Stalin put on a
show to please his temporary friends from the West.
Ambassador Maisky proclaimed adherence to the At-
lantic Charter -- which hardly cost his government a
kopek -- but continued to insist on the incorporation of
Finnish land, the Baltic States, and eastern Poland. Stalin
-- for the time being -- discreetly ordered the "offensive"
pictures of Marx and Engels removed from places which
allied visitors might frequent, and portraits of national
idol like Generals Kutuzov and Suvorov put in their
place. On top of the Lenin Mausoleum, on November 7,
he invoked the heroes of Czarist Russia -- Alexander
Nevsky, Kuzma Minin, Dimitry Pozharsky, Alexander
Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov. The tunes of Old
Russia acquired dialectic materialist tactical signifi-
cance. "It is ridiculous to think of Stalin as a Commu-
nist," Hopkins instructed us. "He is a Russian national-
ist." Thus, it was suggested, we didn't have a thing to
worry about.
After Pearl Harbor, we rushed headlong into the ad-
venture of brotherhood with the Soviet. Fronts like
the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, the National
Council of America-Soviet Friendship, the American
Committee for Yugoslav Relief, and American Relief
for Greek Democracy, as World War II unfolded, as-
sumed an ominously swelling significance. Our First
22
Lady, whose influence on the Chief Executive over-
shadowed even that of the lend-spend-crazy Hopkins,
figured as honorary chairman of the latter two outfits.
An endless stream of American equipment poured
into Russia. Over fifteen million tons of cargo, in more
than 2,500 ships, were delivered. Hundreds of thou-
sands of trucks; motorcycles, and combat vehicles, and
millions of tons of petroleum produces and foodstuffs,
bolstered the Soviet Armies. "Our policy," writes Major
General Deane, "was to make any of our new inventions
in electronics and other fields available to Russia." *11*
Each month the General received a revised list of secret
American equipment about which Russia could be informed.
In addition, with evident high-level protection inside
our government, we shipped, year after year, millions
of pounds of atomic bomb materials."*12* In 1943 our
government issued export licenses for delivery of atomic
bomb materials to the U.S.S.R."*13* Restrictive orders
of the Manhattan Project anyhow were by-passed by
the Canadian Radium and Uranium Corporation, an
American firm with the "right" contacts in Wash-
ington." *14*
Our "friends," the Soviet pilferers, grew so bold
that soon they exported baggage without passengers,
batches of fifty black suitcases per throw. Every two
or three weeks another batch of fifty, guarded by
armed Soviet courtiers, passed through our assemblage
and transit base at Great Falls, Montana. One single
batch of fifty, later in the war, contained 3,800 pounds
of oil refinery maps. *15* Everything, from the blueprints
of the B-36 Super-Fortress, which had shown up on
23
Harry Dexter White's desk in the Treasury Depart-
ment, *16* to photostats of our confidential reports from
the embassy in Moscow, was speeded on to the U.S.S.R. *17*
Roosevelt, the genial donor, on March 7, 1942, issued
a directive to every government agency concerned to
give priority to shipments to the U.S.S.R., "without
regard to the effect of these shipments on any other part of
the war program." *18* There was no objection to all
this from the Chief of Staff.
In matters of foreign policy, the President worked
more and more on his own. "I know," he wrote to the
Prime Minister, in March, 1942, "you will not mind
my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I
can personally handle Stalin better than either your
Foreign Office or my State Department." *19* Although
he hardly needed much prodding, the Presi-
dent actually fell ever more compellingly under the
pro-Soviet spell of the Hopkins-First Lady-George C.
Marshall triumvirate. In 1942 he still had enough inde-
pendence of judgment left to decide against the suicidal
cross-channel operation which Stalin and Marshall
urged. Considering that our troops weren't even hard-
ened enough for the African campaign, Prime Minster
Churchill was undoubtedly right when he called the
Marshall scheme "the only way in which we could
possibly lose this war." *20* Soon afterwards, Admiral
Leahy, a patriot with common sense, was made chair-
man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, at least nominally,
became Marshall's superior.
Roosevelt, who had not been a student of history,
or of Russia, or of Communism, like a wild gambler
based his pro-Soviet policy on a hunch, as Adolf Hitler
24
had followed his "inner voice" when he invaded the
Soviet Union. "I just have a hunch," Roosevelt told
William C. Bullitt, "that Stalin... doesn't want any-
thing but security for his country, and I think that if
I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing
from him in return, noblesse oblige, he wouldn't try to
annex anything and will work with for a world of
democracy and peace." *21*
The President did not explain why there should be
any noblesse in a character who once had organized the
mail-couch robbery of Tiflis and, as late as the thirties,
through butcher Vishinsky, had liquidated most of his
accomplices of the Bolshevik Revolution, almost the
entire staff of his army, and almost all of the "Fathers"
of the Soviet constitution of 1936.
"If I can convince him," Roosevelt said to Ross
McIntire when talking of Stalin, "that our offer of co-
operation is on the square, and that we want to be
comrades rather than enemies, I'm betting that he'll
come in. And," the President added with a grin, "what
helps a lot is that Stalin is the only man I have to con-
vince. Joe doesn't worry about a Congress or a Parlia-
ment. He's the whole works." *22*
How it fitted into the pattern of the Atlantic Charter
that Uncle Joe was "the whole works," Roosevelt like-
wise did not demonstrate. Nor did he comment on the
grin of some fifteen million slave laborers in Siberia,
or of more than six million Balts who had been "incor-
porated," or of the Calmyks, Chechen-Ingush, Crimean
Tarters, and Volga Germans who had been given the
twentieth-century treatment known as genocide.
"Queer thing about hunches,"" Roosevelt mused when
25
talking to Francis Perkins. "Sometimes they are right,
and sometimes they are awful." *23*
Whether Roosevelt's Kremlin appeasement hunch was awful
will be up to history to decide. That the life and
happiness of hundreds of millions, and the fate of freedom
and Western civilization largely depended on this man's
hunches, there can not be any doubt whatever.
26
Chapter 5.Sabotage Inside the Government
INFATUATION with Uncle Joe, following top-level ex-
ample, became a ritual in the Washington hierarchy.
Thus, General Joe Stilwell, who already in the thirties,
as a military attache in China, had preferred the Com-
munists to Chiang,*24* on January 16, 1942, was appoint-
ed our commander in the China theatre. The Advisory
Committee of Postwar Foreign Policy, which was set
up on February 12, 1942, and whose existence was kept
a secret, comprised such stout friends of the Soviet
Union as Dean Acheson, Ester C. Brunauer, Lauchlin
Curry, Lawrence Duggan, Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins,
Philip C. Jessup, Archibald MacLeish, George C. Mar-
shall, Henry Julian Wadleigh, Henry Agard Wallace,
and Harry Dexter White.*25*
On May 19, l942, pressured by Communist union
officials of the American Communications Association,
CIO, the executive branch of our government issued
the first official order to sabotage the security system
which the American people, through their duly elected
Congress, had established for the protection of their
Armed Forces. On that day, Secretary of the Navy
Frank Knox, in his office, informed Rear Admiral Adol-
phus Staton that Communist radio operators were not
to be removed from their ships.
Less than half a year before, Congress, with the one
dissenting vote of Communist favorite Vito Marcan-
27
had enacted Public Law 351, which authorized
the Secretary of the Navy to have all radio operators
with a subversive background taken off their ships.
Rear Admiral Staton, recipient of the Congressional
Medal of Honor, headed the administrative board which
assisted the Secretary in executing the law. Attending
to his duty, the Admiral had recommended the re-
moval of a number of Communists. Now, in the pres-
ence of the Assistant Secretary, Ralph A. Bard, Vice-
Admiral F. J. Horne, Rear Admiral T. S. Wilkinson,
Rear Admiral S. C. Hooper, Captain J. B. W. Waller,
Lieutenant Commander F. C. B. Jordan, Lieutenant
Commander F. G. Caskey, and Lieutenant K. Baarslag,
the Secretary of the Navy instructed Rear Admiral
Staton "that, in the opinion of the President, member-
ship or suspected membership in the Communist Party
was not sufficient to deprive a radio operator of his
job." *26*
Expounding a memorandum bearing President Roose-
velt's initials, Secretary Knox brushed aside the ob-
jections of Rear Admirals Staton and Hooper, declaring
that the order came from the President himself. Realiz-
ing that the presidential command defied the law of
the land, he refused to put it in writing. Consequently,
the Communist radio operators returned to their ships
and Rear Admirals Hooper and Staton were put on
the inactive list.
Along such lines of brazen infiltration by the dis-
integrators of the American way, Duncan C. Lee, des-
cendant of General Robert E. Lee and a member of
the Silvermaster spy apparatus, in the early summer of
1942 was appointed confidential assistant to General
28
"Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic
Services. For double insurance, Maurice Halperin, even
though on the secret list of Communist sympathizers,
was allowed to stay on the staff of OSS. Because of
his access to the secret cable room, he could secure copies
of our undercover reports from every part of the
world.*27*
Actual traitors were so well entrenched in our gov-
ernment that, instead of being shot, they were often
promoted even after our intelligence agents had detect-
ed their associations and activities. When official re-
ports on master spy Nathan Gregory Silvermaster war-
ranted his removal from the Board of Economic War-
fare, Harry Dexter White, a veteran traitor of the old
Chambers apparatus and also special assistant to Secre-
tary Morgenthau, pulled the strings to keep him in his
sensitive position.*28* Blind trust of the Bolsheviks, fanci-
ful though it may seem, was the official standard.
29
Chapter 6. Professionals Front for the Soviet Union
IN EVERY phase of public life -- in our government, in
education, in Hollywood, and even in many churches --
the Godless Soviet Union was vaunted as a model of
the new "pragmatic" morality. Scores of professors of
New York University and Columbia University vied
with the Sovietists of Harvard and Chicago and New
York's New School for Social Research in championing
not merely our "gallant ally," but the equivocal causes
of the Communist fronts. Bishops and college presi-
dents presided over banquets and conferences which
were sponsored by such flourishing red outfits as the
National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. A
man of cabinet rank, like Harold L. Ickes, in his emo-
tional shortsightedness, rivaled Vice-President Wallace
and the First Lady in publicly supporting the expanding
and multiplying Communist fronts.
The millionaire lawyer and amateur diplomat, Joseph
Edward Davies, who had been our ambassador to the
U.S.S.R in the thirties, stumped the country in every
direction to exhort Americans never to toe the fascist
line by indulging in criticism of the beloved Soviet
Union. "By the testimony of performance and in my
opinion," Davis shouted at a "giant mass rally" which
was held under the auspices of Russian War Relief, Inc.,
30
in the Chicago Stadium, on Sunday, February 22, 1942,
"the word of honor of the Soviet government is as safe
as the Bible.... The Soviet Union stands staunchly for
international morality." Mme. Ivy Litvinov shared the
platform with the man whom Roosevelt soon was to
send to Moscow on a special mission, and ambiguous
Edward C. Carter, manipulator of pro Soviet intrigues
inside the Institute of Pacific Relations, presided.*29*
Somewhat more guardedly, but following suit never-
theless, Under Secretary Welles stared in an official
memorandum, published in the Daily Worker of Oc-
tober 14, 1942, that our government "has in fact viewed
with skepticism many alarmist accounts of the 'serious
menace' of 'Communism' in China." Years after the
war, Earl Browder, wartime head of the Communist
party, was to testify before the Tydings Committee
that the China policies of the Communist party, toward
the end of 1942, "were in fact adopted by the State
Department."
Wild-eyed professors, social-minded pastors, and ec-
centric artists emulated Roosevelt's favorites in bally
hooing the bizarre merger of tyranny and freedom.
Charlie Chaplin, Hollywood darling of the pinko fringe
in the Daily Worker of October 19, 1942, raised him-
self to grotesquely heroic stature by exclaiming, "They
say communism may spread out all over the world. And
I say -- so what?"
As 1942 faded out, even the New York Times had
adopted the "New Look" toward the U.S.S.R. 1n
mellowed Christmas attitude, on December 25, 1942
it wondered if the party line was ever again to "pass
into a new phase of international materialism" and
determined that "the thing is not easy to imagine."
31
Chapter 7. Patient Stalin Versus Impetuous Roosevelt
AT THE beginning of 1943 the first rays of victory
appeared on the horizon. In May and June, 1942, the
Japanese had been defeated in the battles of the Coral
Sea and Midway; the Nazis had been halted at Stalin-
grad on September 12 and the Afrika Korps had been
routed at El Alamein on October 23. Our invasion of
Africa in November had made it possible for Roosevelt to
meet with Churchill at Casablanca in January, 1943;
but Stalin, the gangster-turned-statesman, preferred to
be wooed from afar.
Cordell Hull, in his Memoirs, has referred to no less
than four occasions on which President Roosevelt vainly
tried to persuade Stalin to consent to a meeting. In the
spring of 1942; in January, 1943; in May, 1943; and
again in August, 1943, Roosevelt made official in-
quiries regarding a rendezvous with the chief of the
proletarian world revolution, but was rebuffed.*31* After
all, the Generalissimo had a war on his hands. A fairy
could not have been more elusive than entrancing
Kremlin Joe.
Like an impetuous youthful lover who is attracted to
an exotic woman of some experience, the Groton gradu-
ate in the Casablanca phase of the war betrayed eager
annoyance as the enigmatic cobbler's son from trans-
32
Caucasia still kept him waiting. 1n the meantime
though, the President was going to show to the Kremlin-
ite, and also to the world, what a mighty warrior he
really was. During luncheon at Casablanca, on January
23, 1943, in the company of Churchill, Hopkins, and
son Elliott, Mr. Roosevelt expressed the idea of "un-
conditional surrender"" as our ultimatum for Germany.
"It was Father's phrase," Elliot proudly reported,
and "Harry took an immediate and strong liking to it."*32*
Harry always displayed an immediate and whole-
hearted liking for whatever idea emerged from the mind
of the Boss. Usually it was something "progressive
something almost as bold as what the boys in the
Kremlin might have figured out. Yet, though Harry
and Joe had become "buddies," Harry had not fathomed
Joe sufficiently to realize that the chief of the world
revolution would postpone the announcement of such
a policy until after the Nazis were routed.
Actually, in his Order of the Day of November,
1942, Generalissimo Stalin had stated, "It is not our
aim to destroy all military force in Germany, for every
literate person will understand that this is not only
impossible in regard to Germany... but it is also
inadvisable from the point of view of the future."
Again on February 23, 1943---one month after Father
Roosevelt hit upon the Casablanca notion of uncon-
ditional surrender -- Stalin stated for public consump-
tion that "it would be ridiculous to identify Hitler's
clique with the German people and the German state."
The Vozhd then was working on Field Marshall Fried-
rich von Paulus, who just recently had surrendered with
more than twenty Nazi generals at Stalingrad. He
33
would not want to stir the last anti-Nazi into resistance
against the Allies by any scare talk about unconditional
surrender. Later, when the Nazis lay in the dust, it
would still be time to drop the mask and proclaim a
change of policy.
Thus it was not until February 12, 1945 -- the day
after he signed the Yalta Declaration -- that Stalin came
out with a statement which matched the rash Casa-
blanca announcement of Mr. Roosevelt. The Kremlin-
ite always knew how to use deception on the grand
scale as a major global weapon.
The February 12 (1945) communique proclaimed
the Soviet government's "inflexible purpose... to dis-
arm and disband all German armed forces; break up
for all time the German General Staff...remove or
destroy all German military equipment... remove all
Nazi and militarist influence from public office and
from the cultural and economic life of the German
people."
As to a policy for 1943, Stalin wished to divide the
Germans, not to inflame them to forge unity.
34
Chapter 8. Credulity Triumphs Over Warnings
THERE WERE some warnings on our side. Demaree Bess,
in the Saturday Evening Post of March 20, 1943, pre-
dicted that, irrespective of Atlantic Charter generalities,
the Russians, at the end of the war, would seize what
they could. Wendell Willkie, in the March issue of
Reader's Digest, referred to Soviet concentration camps
he had seen, and Max Eastman, in the July issue of
Reader's Digest, at the height of the war, told the facts
about Soviet world conspiracy and terror. The New
Leader, of course, week after week revealed the folly
of our Soviet idolatry.
Such manifestations of common sense were lost in
the din of the war and the toasts and the propaganda
tornado of the Communist-soaked Office of War In-
formation. Preparing for the moment when the Com-
munist armies would overrun Poland, the Soviet gov-
ernment, on April 26, 1943, with total disregard for
our side, broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish
government in London. Sumner Welles, on that day,
expressed his indignation to Ambassador Ciechanowski.
It was, however, not the action of the Kremlin which
aroused his anger. It was the Poles who infuriated him
because they had been courageous enough to ask the
International Red Cross to investigate the Katyn mas-
35
sacre. It was all "German propaganda," he concluded.*33*
The Kremlin could do no wrong.
On May 19, 1943, when Joe Davies was in Moscow
on a special mission, Stalin confided that he would not
mind meeting Roosevelt -- alone. He evidently found
Roosevelt more "understanding" than Churchill.
Three days later the boss of all the tovarisches (and
all the slaves), with a stroke of his pen, dissolved the
Comintern. Venerable Cordell Hull, trying to express
the entire world upheaval in post-Victorian niceties,
reasoned cautiously that neither Roosevelt nor he him-
self "could definitely say... what the dissolution of
the Comintern now portended."*34* Anyone who knew
anything about Communism could. Ciechanowski in
vain, of course, warned Sumner Welles. George Papan-
dreou, Greece's liberation hero, already in July, 1945,
told his government in exile that the dissolution was a
fraud.*35*
It was shortly after the dissolution of the Comintern
that patriotic Rear Admiral Staton, who had been con-
cerned about the President's efforts to sabotage Counter-
intelligence in the Armed Fores, was discharged from
active duty. By that time Counter-Intelligence officers
had obtained irrefutable proof that the Communist
party had developed an extensive plan to abolish the
Armed Forces' counter-subversive system.*36*
Two weeks later, Mr. Gary, counsel of the Cox
Committee, House of Representatives, asked the rear
admiral to testify on the White House efforts to protect
Communists in the Armed Forces. Staton complied, in
executive session. Before he could appear in public
hearings, Adlai Ewing Stevenson, assistant to Secretary
36
Knox, instructed him~ that "there were White House
orders" forbidding him to testify." Patriots who re-
fused to fall for Stalin's fraud were thus silenced by
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his obedient top-level
minions.
America fell for frauds in a big way in l943. When
Stilwell, at the Trident Conference in Washington, de-
nounced Chiang Kai-shek as "a fool and ignoramus,"
our State Department fell for it. When, on June 24,
John P. Davies "reported" to the State Department that
the Chinese Communists "moved away" from world
revolution, the Department fell for it. When, on
June 15, Lattimore the Innocent instructed slick Joe
Barns to replace the non-Communist Chinese of OWI
with Communists, OWI -- rather willingly -- fell for it.
When, on July 14, Lattimore's old pal of the Yenan
days, Thomas A. Bisson, in Far Eastern Survey, called
Communist China the "democratic China," our journal-
ists, teachers, and ministers fell for it. When, in July
and August, 1943, Chinese Communist hordes -- in the
midst of the war -- joined with the Japanese armies to
crush the Kuomintang troops, and the Mao lobby "in-
structed" America that Chaing was "brutally" attack-
ing the ragged but valiant Communists, America trag-
cally fell for it.
37
Chapter 9. Fear of the Soviet Union
REPLACEMENT of Ambassadors Maisky and Litvinov,
who were known as friends of the West, by tough and
surly Fedor Gusev and Andrei Gromyko in August,
1943, gave our top-level diplomatic the jitters. The
Western allies by this time had become painfully aware
of several distinct Nazi-Soviet peace fliers. As Roose-
velt's wartime consultant, W. Averell Harriman, years
later officially particularized,*38* it was, up to Yalta,
Roosevelt's principal war objective to keep Stalin from
breaking his treaty obligation of December, 1941, i.e.,
to prevent his negotiating unilaterally with his former
ally, our common enemy. How, at Teheran and Yalta,
we could trust an ally who, we continuously feared,
might at any time quit fighting, Mr. Harriman did not
elucidate.
At any rate, at the first Quebec Conference in
August, 1943, when elusive Uncle Joe once more was
"too busy" to join his allies, i.e., unwilling to make any
commitments concerning the fate of intended European
satellites, the stewards of future America freedom
decided to base our policy on a document called"
Russia's Position," "a very high-level United States
military strategic estimate."
Russia's postwar position in Europe [The document stated] will
be a dominant one. With Germany crushed, there is no power in
Europe to oppose her tremendous military force. It is true that
38
Great Britain is building up a position in the Mediterranean vis-a-vis
Russia that she may find useful in balancing power in Europe.
However, even here she may not be able to oppose Russia unless
she is otherwise supported.
The conclusions from the foregoing are obvious. Since Russia
is the decisive factor in the war, she must be given every assistance
and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship. Likewise,
since without question she will dominate Europe on the defeat of
the Axis, it is even more essential to develop and maintain the most
friendly relations with Russia.
Finally, the most important factor the United States has to
consider in relation to Russia is the prosecution of the war in
the Pacific. With Russia as an ally in the war against Japan, the war
can be terminated in less time and at less expense in life and re-
sources than if the reverse were the case. Should the war in the
Pacific have to be carried on with an unfriendly or a negative
attitude on the part of Russia, the difficulties will be immeasurably
increased and operations become abortive.*39*
Wether or not the enigmatically taciturn George
Catlett Marshall was the author of the document, he
certainly sanctioned it, and his patron-collaborator,
Harry Hopkins -- Stalin's "buddy" -- was the man who
took it along to Quebec. Russia was to be "given every
assistance," and "every effort" was to be made "to ob-
tain her friendship" because, following the war -- thanks
to lavish lend-lease and the Casablanca folly of uncon-
ditional surrender -- she was to play an overpowering
roll in Europe. The document also suggested that we
induce our great Communist friend to participate in
the war against Japan, even though Uncle Joe had
twice before informed our emissaries -- Harriman in
August, 1942, and Pat Hurley in April, 1943 -- that he
would do just that.
There, at Quebec, George Catlett Marshall, as he did
throughout 1943 and afterwards, opposed not only
39
Balkan diversions but even a Mediterranean campaign. *40*
Whatever might interfere with Stalin's coming seizure
of eastern Europe, George Catlett Marshall--and Hopkins, of
course--automatically opposed. Whatever operation
directed our forces westward, i.e., away from land masses
the Kremlin hoped to bolshevize, Marsdhall and Hopkins
championed.
40
Chapter 10. Humbuggery and Thievery
ANOTHER startling hoax which those entrusted with
American leadership -- ignorant or otherwise -- did not
evaluate correctly was perpetrated on September 4,
1943, when, after an interregnum of two Decades,
Stalin permitted his stooges of the Orthodox Church to
go ahead and elect a pliable patriarch. America duti-
fully hailed Communist Russia's "return to religion";
Stalin, of course, merely elaborated a scheme for using
the Church as an instrument to mislead the Orthodox
millions of the Balkans and to attract the Orthodox
faithful of the Middle East to the Soviet cause.
Even circumspect Cordell Hull was by then taken
in by the Kremlin's professional deceivers. He literally
oozed elation when, in October, 1943, at one of Mos-
cow's tovarisch banquets, the Kremlin boss graciously
turned toward him and told him "clearly and unequi-
vocally- that, after Germany's collapse, "the Soviet
Union would [then] join in defeating Japan." Hull
seemed amazingly oblivious of the fact that he had gone
to Moscow "to defend the cause of Poland as he would
defend the cause of his own country."*41*When he ap-
proached Molotov about this weighty matter, the latter
wouldn't even discuss that little item of some twenty
million people.
The more he was spurned, the more Cordell Hull
talked himself into enthusiasm over the Russians and
41
over his success with them. "Of course," he told Jim
Farley at the time, "there are matters like boundary
disputes and other matters which can wait until the
war is over. On the whole, I feel like the fellow who
went in on a flush pot with a lone ace and drew three
more."*42*
The New York Times hailed Hull "Returning In
Triumph," and the ailing Secretary, carefully side-
stepping the disgraceful Polish issue, told a hushed joint
session of Congress on November 18, 1943 that Marshal
Stalin "was one of the great statesmen and leaders of
the age." Otherwise noted as an astute and rational
statesman, Hull in this instance worked up an emotional
prophesy which does not sta¯d up very well. "There
will no longer be need for spheres of influence," he
told the joint session, "for alliances, for balance of
power or for any other of the special arrangements
through which the nations strove to safeguard their
security or to promote their interests." America, whose
sons were dying on the battlefields of freedom, applaud-
ed; but there were thoughtful citizens who frowned
upon the "greatness" of Stalin as well as the "success"
of the Moscow Conference.
While such humbuggery was going on, one night,
long after midnight, scientist X read a complicated
formula on the construction of the atomic bomb to
Moscow-trained Steve Nelson, alias Mesarosh, who
handed it to Vice-Consul Peter Ivanov, who handed it
to Secretary of the Embassy Vassili Zublin, who
promptly took off for Moscow. And when, in the
middle of 1943, Major General Alexander Ivanovich
Belayev, after an unauthorized nonstop flight from
42
Washington in a radar-equipped plane carrying several
thousand pounds of secret data on American aviation
arrived in the fatherland of the socialist world revo-
lution, Joseph E. Davies -- millionaire Soviet lover and
Roosevelt's trusted special ambassador -- as Victor Krav-
chenko testified, "with 99 per cent certainty," kissed
him in the by then customary affectionate manner.*43*
"In certain respects," Secretary of the Interior
Harold L. Ickes told the Congress of American-Soviet
Friendship in November, 1943, "we could do well to
learn from Russia; yes, even to imitate Russia."*44* Our
government, then, was full of Sovietist quacks.
43
Chapter 11. The Balkans for the Reds
AT LAST, after pleading for two years of bountiful
lend-lease contributions, Roosevelt was rewarded by
the elusive master of all the Russians with the pleasure
of a personal meeting. The President, because of his
physical condition, had hoped that the conference might
be held somewhat closer to home, at least not farther
east than Basra; but Stalin, who wanted our armies to
stay in the West, was quite emphatic about our Presi-
dent coming all the way to the East; in Teheran, he
insisted, the conference should be held, and in Teheran.
It was.
On his way the President stopped in Cairo to confer
with Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek. Stalin,
ally of Shinto Japan, would not bother to meet the
feudal Chinese reactionaries. Jovially and magnani-
mously, Roosevelt promised to Chiang the return of
Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores; a few days
later, at Teheran, smitten with elusive Joe'' entrancing
personality, he agreed with Stalin that Russia should
obtain warm-water ports in the Pacific. That meant
Port Arthur and Dairen -- Chinese ports -- and, there-
fore a pledge of honor was broken in record time.
Placing more reliance on the Communist secret police
than on our own America service, Roosevelt, to pro-
tect himself against potential Nazi assassins, followed
Stalin's gracious invitation to reside at the Soviet Em-
44
bassy. Why Churchill might be less endangered, or
why the Prime Minister's life might be less worth
preserving was not discussed.
The infirm Hull had hoped that something concrete
concerning the territorial and political integrity of
Poland and the other nations of eastern Europe might
be worked out at Teheran. Stalin and Molotov, of
course, were determined to side-step such specifications,
they preferred to be specific regarding concessions of
Chinese land and property, about which Chiang Kai-
shek was to be left in the dark.
The primary aim of the Soviet diplomats, however,
concerned the areas to which the armies of the Western
allies were to be confined. Up to Teheran there still
had been a chance for the West in some way to par-
ticipate in the liberation of eastern Europe. General
Mark Clark has assured us that the British, fearing the
bolshevization of Europe from the Baltic to the Adri-
atic, had by no means given up their endeavor to make
us realize the desirability of a military thrust into and
through the southeastern section of the Continent.
Even King George had made it his business to win
over the President to this project, through Mark Clark.
General Sir Harold R. Alexander "on several occasions"
suggested "to cross the Adriatic and move through
Yugoslavia." Explicitly, General Clark stated: "There
was no question that the Balkans were strongly in
the British mind, but so far as I ever found out, the
American top-level planners were not interested."
In order to achieve his aim of keeping the armies (and
therewith the influence) of the bourgeois-parliamen-
tary-capitalist-"imperialist" West out of the eastern
45
domain, Stalin commandeered (and relied heavily up-
on) the support of American opinion makers -- the
Communists and Soviet sympathizers inside the OWI,
editorial scribes of PM and other journalistic echoes of
Pravda, and in general the thousands of our Communist-
fronting intellectuals.
Dozens of Communist and pro-Communist news-pa
pers and magazines, 70 per cent of which were of the
foreign-language category, ridiculed the idea of breach-
ing Hitler's festung Europa by piercing through the
"soft underbelly" as "British imperialism," Such publi-
cations as the Finnish dailies Eleenpain and Tyomies, the
Lithuanian newspapers Laisve and Vilnis, the Russian
Russky Golos (of that time) and the Shchodenni Visty
(the Ukrainian Communist daily of the International
Workers Order) of New York City, by arousing latent
national loyalties for "the old countries" among citizens
and non-citizens of more recent arrival, served the
Communist internationalist master plan of eventual
proletarian world revolution.
When Stalin realized that Roosevelt, who at Quebec
still had toyed with the Churchillian notion of some
action in southeastern Europe, made the big leap and
fully endorsed the Marshall-Hopkins-Stalin version of
no action either in eastern Europe or in the eastern
Mediterranean, he seized his prey with the swiftness of
a tiger. Not only did he treat any talk of Western
military forays into eastern Europe as superfluous; he
now was bold enough flatly to recommend a "third
front" in southern France. The farther west our own
troops might be diverted, the better for the cause of
the proletarian world revolution.
46
Operation Anvil, i.e., the secondary invasion of south-
ern France, appealed to Stalin more than he was willing
to admit; for in order to carry out Anvil, General
Clark's army in Italy had to be weakened, and conse-
quently deprived of its otherwise certain victory over
General Kesselring's badly mauled Nazi contingent.
Once Roosevelt had actually agreed even to this di-
versionary measure, any landing of the Anglo-American
forces on Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast was out of the
question, and the Balkans were safe for democratization
in the Soviet style.
"Stalin," General Clark repots, "...throughout the
Big Three Meeting and negotiations at Teheran was one
of the strongest boosters of the invasion of southern
France. He knew exactly what he wanted in a political
as well as a military way; and the thing that he wanted
most was to keep us out of the Balkans, which he had
staked out for the Red Army.... I never could under-
stand why, as conditions changed and as the war
situation changed, the United States and Britain failed to
sit down and take another look at the overall picture
with a view to eliminating or reducing the scope of
Anvil if something better was offered.... A campaign
that might have changed the whole history of relations
between the Western world and Soviet Russia was per-
mitted to fade away."*45*
President Roosevelt evidently thought that the British
idea of some action in the Balkans rather than in south-
ern France was extremely funny. "Whenever the P.M.
argued for our invasion through the Balkans," the
magnificent hunch player chuckled as he recalled the
Teheran plenary sessions in the presence of son Elliot,
47
lt was quite obvious to everyone in the room what he
really meant. That he was above all else anxious to
knife up into central Europe, in order to keep the Red
Army out of Austria and Rumania, even Hungary if
possible. Stalin knew it, I knew it, everybody knew it...
"Trouble is, the P.M. is thinking too much of the
postwar, and where England will be. He's scared of
letting the Russians get too strong." Son Elliot (big-money,
quick-money), Soviet trader, photographer-
soldier and would-be statesman, ever anxious to be in-
cluded among the so-called liberals, agreed with
Father.*46*
48
Chapter 12. The Failure of Teheran
THE TEHERAN CONFERENCE occurred long before
Americans were told that the nation's survival de-
pended on a fourth term of the one and only who could
"handle" Kremlin Joe. Yet, even at Teheran, Roosevelt
was not always master over his mind. "An extremely
high authority who may not be identified" described
Roosevelt's condition as follows: "The President looked
physically tired at Casablanca; but his mind worked well.
At Teheran there were signs of loss of memory."
At Yalta he could neither think consecutively nor ex-
press himself coherently."*47* This was the man who
in the course of a decade, had made it sufficiently
clear that advisers of a strong contrary opinion were
not welcome. This was the man upon whom the fate
of the West mostly depended.
Naturally, the American delegates at Teheran, in un-
qualified accord with the Marshall-Hopkins document
of the first Quebec Conference ("Russia's Position")
did everything possible to please the boss of the world
revolution. Germany was, of course, to be dismembered.
That a totally prostrate and defenseless Germany would
open the gates to the barbarian, collectivist, world
revolutionary flood was not openly mentioned.
Secretly it was agreed to let Russia have not only
eastern Poland but also part of Finland, the Baltics
States and chunks of Roumania. It was secretly agreed
49
to support the Yugoslav Communist, Joseph Broz Tito,a
nd desert our pro-Western, antitotalitarian friend,
GeneraI Mihailovich. Secretly it was also agreed to
encourage "people's democracies," which were "friendly
to Russia," all along the Soviet boundaries. As everyone
knows, upon his return to the United States, Roosevelt
told a practically captivated joint session of Congress
that no secret arrangements had been made.
At one of the "spirited" banquets the lord of the
Kremlin toasted to "unity"" in dispatching at least fifty
thousand German war criminals before firing squads" as
fast as we capture them." (Which, in quantity and
speed would have broken the record of the Katyn
massacre.) Churchill immediately jumped from his
seat, vigorously protesting against such an outrage to
our Western sense of justice; but genial F. D. Roosevelt, ever
mindful of the document, "Russia's Position,"
offered a Rooseveltian compromise. Not fifty thousand
but a mere forty-nine thousand five hundred leading
Nazis, he suggested, might be liquidated without due
process of law. Mathematically speaking, the President
of the United States thus sided 99 per cent with the
Bolshevik outlaw and knave against Western decency
and justice, Elliott Roosevelt, who had not even been
invited but who, on the spur of the moment, had been
invited by Stalin to come in anyhow, expressed the hope
that hundred of thousands of Germans would be
mowed down in battle. While the Prime Minister fumed
and the British guests kept stony silence, Joe Stalin,
"hugely tickled" and "beaming with pleasure," rose
from his seat to swing an arm around the shoulders of the
Roosevelt scion. The hearts of Joe and Elliott were
beating in unison.*48*
50
Chapter 13. New York's Pinks Oblige the Kremlin
NEW YORK's "inside" and "behind-the-scenes" com-
mentators and assorted vanguard troubadours, who have
assigned to themselves the weighty task of setting the
proper "progressive" tone for sophisticated Americans
obliged the Kremlin in their own inimitable fashion.
Drawing from that treasure of depth insight
for which the New Yorker has long been renowned,
Howard Brubaker pontificated in the issue of De-
cember 11, 1943 (p. 52): "The Cairo Conference put
an end to the old custom of kicking China around. In
the future, China will be cast in the role of a star player
instead of as the ball." If Roosevelt and Hull, who
discussed China with Stalin and Molotov, by any chance
picked up that gem of New Yorker wisdom, it may
be assumed that they promptly entered a chain of
activities which ended with a double bromo-seltzer.
Freda Kirchwey, idol of New York City's more im-
patient world reformers, with her habitual finality in-
formed the dwellers of Park Avenue as well as other
Americans in the Nation (December 11, 1943, p. 683):
"No longer will China, like a very poor relation, be
expected to suffer and do its duty, but not to ask for
an equal voice in the council of the Allies." As
Miss Kirchwey could not help discovering some day the
51
ice of Russia turned out to be a bit more equal than
that of China.
And the New Republic, in whose offices such heralds
of Soviet "economic democracy" as Bruce Bliven, Mal-
colm Cowley, George Soule, Michael Straight, and Stark
Young pooled their grey matter to chart the course of
the brave new world, instructed wide-eyed Americans,
on December 13, 1943 (p. 835), that "the great and
shining achievement at Cairo and Teheran was a meet-
ing of minds of the four leaders." Considering that
Stalin had declined to meet with Chiang Kai-shek physi-
cally we may be permitted to wonder if, in the in-
scrutable vision of the New Republic's pundits, the
minds of the two statesmen possibly met by means of
telepathy.
George Washington, had he returned to his country at
that time, would probably have been somewhat amazed
to see the new-fangled, self-proclaimed "leader of
minds" hailing the "meeting" of minds of the free
with the minds of tyrants. Perhaps he would have done
some thing drastic; perhaps he would merely have spoken
a few simple words, admonishing our citizens once more
to "raise a standard to which the wise and the honest"
may repair."
While there had been various understandings among the
Teheran conferees -- about Soviet warm-water ports
(at the expense of China) and the incorporation of
Baltic, German, Polish, and Roumanian lands in the
U.S.S.R., and about the necessity of "friendly" govern-
ments along the Soviet boundaries -- President Roosevelt
was determined to assuage the American people that no
secret agreements had been made. Before he returned
52
home to tell the nation in one of his fireside chats
that Stalin was "truly representative of the heart
and soul of Russia" and that we were "going to get
along very well with him and the Russian people--very
well indeed," *49*
Roosevelt once more stopped in Cairo.
53
Chapter 14. Treason in Cairo and Treason in Washington
THE gentlemen of the President's entourage, as
their limousines rolled through the streets of Egypt's
capital, searched a little beyond the anticipation of
toasts and oratorical fireworks, they might have dis-
covered much to dispel the official optimism of the
party. As an example, the Soviet Legation in Cairo,
which had been established less than half a year before
(as a direct result of our trust-the-Kremlin policy),was
at that very time distributing revolutionary litera-
ture and sowing the seeds of anti-Western, "anti-
imperialist" revolts. Along these lines Soviet legations
in Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad were soon to be
opened (in the summer and fall of 1944) and the Tudeh
party in Iran, guided by the very Soviet officials who
were supposed to supervise the flow of American lend-lease
to the U.S.S.R., ever more openly agitated against
the Anglo-Saxon "exploiters."
By 1944 Iran's mushrooming, Soviet-financed Tudeh
press openly called the British and Americans "fascists,"
"reactionaries," and "imperialist." Similarly, David
Zabaslavsky, Pravda mouthpiece, on January 5, 1944, de-
nounced as amenable a fellow as One World Willkie
as "a political gambler." War and the Working Class,
in Moscow, on January 15 attacked the Greek resistance
54
fighters under Zervas as being "fascistic," in contra-
distinction to the "democratic" Communists of Greece.
Pravda, on January 17, accused the British of attempt-
ing to negotiate a separate peace with the Germans.
Roosevelt's hymns on "unity" with the Bolsheviks not-
withstanding, the war of the allies was definitely on.
Oddly, our "experts" -- from the White House to Park
Avenue - did not see it.
While the hunch-playing world savior, at Teheran,
indulged in grotesque fraternization with the cynical
enemy of Christian civilization, Commander Floyd G.
Caskey, wartime head of Counter-Intelligence in the
Office of Naval Intelligence, by way of duty absented
himself from Washington to attend a course at the
Advanced Naval Intelligence School. During his ab-
sence, anti-Communist records in the Navy were
systematically eliminated on a substantial scale in various
places.
When Caskey returned to Washington, in January,
1944, the lieutenant commander whom he had left in
charge of the Anti-Communist section informed him
that, under orders, he had destroyed the entire file of
approximately one hundred thousand cards relating to
Communists and fellow travelers, known and suspected.
Though copies of the cards, in alphabetical order, re-
mained in the general files of Naval Intelligence, the
destruction of the centralized Red Desk file virtually
terminated that section's work. A few months later
Commander Caskey, whose expert knowledge on Com-
munist characters was now deemed superfluous, was
permanently assigned to other duties.*50*
After years of taking ever more potent doses of pro-
55
Communist injections in daily contact with Harry
Hopkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Felix Frankfurter's
un-American proteges, the President was totally un-
able to fathom the depth of Soviet addiction to which
he had sunk. A slave to the delirious illusion of appeas-
ing the Communist barbarians, Roosevelt himself was
responsible for the foolish order of January 1, 1944,
which, with the backing of Lieutenant General Joseph T.
McNarney, Deputy Chief of Staff, abolished the entire
setup of the Counter-Intelligence Corps in the War
Department.*51* By the will of the man in the White
House, who surrounded himself with pro-Soviet schem-
ers like David K. Niles and Lauchlin Curry, the War
Department issued the order of February 19, 1944,
which purposely disorganized the counter-subversive
reporting system of the Armed Forces.*52*
On May 19, 1944, the day after he learned of a
recently issued secret order to destroy the War Depart-
ment records on subversives, Senator StyIes Bridges, a
member of the Military Affairs Committee, demanded
an explanation from Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
The latter, as well as the Chief of Staff, seemed puzzled.
Lieutenant General McNarney, Marshall's deputy, was
"vague, evasive and obstructive." Bridges told him "he
could forgive an officer who makes a mistake or loses
a battle, but that an officer who betrays the security
of his country should be taken out and shot." That
brought McNarney down to earth. He admitted that
the order had been issued from his office, but added that
it had come from "higher authority."
The following day George C. Marshall, in a "hell-
raising mood," demanded that Bridges desist from black-
56
ening the reputation of the Army by an investigation.
Bridges said it was up to the Chief of Staff himself "to
keep a clean house." After much wrangling, Stimson
in a letter of May 27, 1944, promised to prevent the
destruction of records on subversives.*53*
It was in the same month of May that. Mrs. Earl
Browder, a Russian Communist of a most un-American
political past, who had entered the United States il-
legally, was permitted to become a citizen. According
to the sworn testimony of ex-Communist Howard
Rushmore, State Department and Immigration Service
officials insisted that they performed this treason-aiding
act upon the urgent requests of Secretary Hull and
Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.*54*
57
Chapter 15. Henry Wallace, Soviet Asia Expert
REGARDING thousands of ominous signs, the Wash-
ington bigwigs and their intellectual helpers though-
out the nation vied with one another to lick the
boots of the Kremlin criminals. Columbia University's
Nathaniel Peffer, veteran contributor to Communist
magazines and IPR confederate of Lattimore, Field,
and the like, in the New York Times of May 14, 1944,
polished up the old story of China's "agrarian reformers."
Vice-President Wallace, newly discovered Far East
and Soviet Russia expert, celebrated July 4, 1944, in
Chita, Soviet Siberia. Accompanied by such stalwarts
of the Communist-manipulated Institute of Pacific Re-
lations as John Hazard, Owen D. Lattimore, and John
Carter Vincent, he then was engaged in an official fifty-
two-day, twenty-seven-thousand-mile junket to Soviet
Asia and China. In a merry whirl of ballets, operas, folk
dances, and banquets the credulous Soviet idolater then
fraternized with Sergei Arsenevich Goglidze and Ivan
Nikoshov, dreaded masters of the Soviet Siberian slave-
labor camps.
Even after the completion of World War II, in 1946,Mr.
Wallace whooped it up for the beloved Soviet
Union in a book, entitled Soviet Asia Mission, in which
he described his record-shattering experience of per-
58
sonal contact and "inspection on the spot." According
to the title page, the book was done "with the collabo-
ration of Andrew J. Steiger." In sworn testimony be-
fore the McCarran subcommittee, on October 17, 1951,
Mr. Wallace admitted that most of the book had actu-
ally been written by Mr. Steiger, a person who has
been identified under oath as a member of the Communist
party. To Joseph Fels Barnes, Owen D. Lattimore, and
Harriet Lucy Moore, all of whom have been named
under oath as Communist party members, Mr. Wallace
expressed his gratitude for their "invaluable assistance
in preparing the manuscript."
No doubt the cows in southern Siberia had much in
common with the cows of Iowa. That Henry Agard
Wallace is a good man at agriculture and cattle breed-
ing, no one will probably deny. Whether his enchant-
ment at beholding Simmenthaler cattle in Siberia was
a sufficient basis for glorifying "the common man"
the Kolyma gold fields and the forced labor camps of
Magadan is quite another matter. From the view point
of our Republic, at any ate, it may be respectfully
doubted that Owen D. Lattimore and John Carter
Vincent were especially suited to counsel the Vice-
President of the United States of America.*55*
Upon his return from the whirlwind journey Mr.
Wallace was hailed by the CIO, OWI, the National
Council of American-Soviet Friendship, the American
Slav Congress, and other mushrooming Communist
fronts as a world figure of the century of the common
man. Now that he had actually "been there," he felt
he could speak with authority. Immediately upon
touching American soil, i.e., on July 9, 1944, over a
59
wide broadcast hookup he told his people all
about his "wonderful trip," the "splendid disposition
on "the part of Russian scientists" and the "utmost con-
fidence" of Soviet Asia's forced labor bosses "in the
leadership of President Roosevelt."
There was, of course, no reason for the NKVD mon-
sters of Siberia's Department of Penal Labor Camps to
withhold their confidence from the President of the
United States. Mr. Wallace himself explained their
confidence aptly when he told the nation: "I found
American flour in the Soviet Far East, American alumi-
numin Soviet airplane factories, American steel in
truck and railway repair shops, American compressors
and electrical equipment on Soviet naval vessels, Ameri-
can electric shovels in open-cut coal mimes, American
ore drills in copper mines of Central Asia, and Ameri-
can trucks and planes performing strategic transporta-
tion functions in supplying remote bases." *56*
Mr. Wallace had not "found" the tons of secret
formulae and data, nor the heavy water for hydro-
gen bombs, which relay teams of Soviet espionage
agents, with the connivance of high American govern-
ment officials, had rushed to the U.S.S.R., through our
lend-lease air base at Great Falls, Montana, and, by
mysterious clearance, through such ports as Seattle and
San Francisco. Had he noticed them, he probably would
have been even more ecstatic.
At that time, in 1944, the Institute of Pacific Re-
lations, which according to the Senate Committee on
the Judiciary "disseminated and sought to popularize
false information including information originating
from Soviet and Communist sources," *57* published a
60
fifty-six-page pamphlet, Our Job in Asia, which was
allegedly written by our Vice-President. "The Rus-
sians," the author of the pamphlet claimed, "have
demonstrated their friendly attitude toward China by
their willingness to refrain from intervening in China's
internal affairs." Some years later -- on October 17,
1951, to be precise -- when testifying before the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee, Wallace saw himself
compelled to admit: "It begins to look, for the time
being at any rate, that my size-up as made in 1944 was
incorrect."*58*
61
Chapter 16. Soviet Fans and Soviet Spies
Mr. WALLACE, who "had been there," had been wrong.
It is not recorded that our First Lady of that era, who
had not "been there" but who sang the same tunes, has
ever recanted her own misleading pronunciamentos of
those tragic days. Has Mrs. Roosevelt ever apologized
for using her considerable power to bring the composer
of the Hammer and Sickle Song to our shores? What
else was the protege of the First Lady if not an enemy of
our freedoms?
As a mere matter of routine, Mrs. Roosevelt joined
the chorus of the CIO and Wallace and the Communist
fronts (which she so zealously supported) in chanting
eulogies of the fatherland of the socialist world revo-
lution. "Russia," Eleanor Roosevelt said on August 4,1944,
"gives assistance in providing higher education to all
deserving students. It can easily be said," she ob-
served, "that we might borrow from that nation."*59*
And Professor Owen D. Lattimore, that ubiquitous
and lofty counselor of the Roosevelt administration, on
August 23, in Far Eastern Survey -- an IPR publication
intoned another little anthem in honor of the Soviet
Union's progressive policies toward the minority peoples.
Years later, of course, the McCarran hearings proved
that "Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning
in the 1930's a conscious articulate instrument of the
Soviet conspiracy." *60*
62
Yet even Drew Pearson, who kept the crafty and
trusted Communist party official, David Karr on his
pay roll, and who, because of his charges of "anti-Soviet
bias in the State Department," had been branded a
"chronic liar" by the President himself, in his column on
March 29, 1944, published a long list of Soviet "slaps"
at the Western allies. And on May 4, 1944, Prime
Minister Churchill asked Anthony Eden to draw up a
one-page paper setting forth "the brute issues between
us and the Soviet Government which are developing in Italy,
in Roumania, in Bulgaria, and above all in
Greece."*61*
It thus seems bizarre that Sumner Welles, as late as
195l, should still,attempt to keep alive the legend of
"co-operative relationship" between Stalin and Roose-
velt, and that Raymond Gram Swing, as late as 1949
should be amazed that "the cold war" was "on" three
years after Yalta. Hot or cold, the war was "on" long
before the Yalta Conference started; in fact, it had
been "on" ever since, in 1917, Lenin of the one-track
mind betrayed democracy in Russia.
The FBI knew full well that our war with Russia
was "on." Was it too much for our chief policy maker to
acquaint himself with the bare facts of betrayal in
midstream? To learn how Sidney Hillman's "Comrade
Big," Lee Pressman, though "employed" by the CIO
was still placing communist stooges in sensitive
government spots; and how the IPR cabal, on Moscow's
orders, stabbed anti-Communist Chiang in the back
while he was loyally fighting on against superhuman
odds? But Roosevelt ever since Teheran, had been a dying
63
man A British dignitary who had not seen him for
fourteen months was "shocked beyond belief at the
way the President had deteriorated."*62* When he saw
the President again after some time had elapsed, Admiral
King "was alarmed... by the state of his health."*63*
Mme. Chiang was "shocked by the President's looks."*64*
Henry L. Stimson was "much troubled by the Presi-
dent's physical condition."*65* James F. Byrnes was "dis-
turbed by his appearance."*66* James A. Farley received
reports from "hundreds of persons, high and low...
that he looked bad, his mind wandered, his hands shook,his
jaw sagged, and he tired easily."*67* About one third
of the crucial year of 1944 - the year in which America
did not want to change horses in midstream -- Roosevelt
was away from the White House, trying to regain
strength. Seven specialists were attending him in the
spring of 1944.
The President was recuperating at Hobcaw Barony,
South Carolina, when in April, 1944, the atomic spy,
Clarence Hiskey, approached John Hitchcock Chapin
in an attempt to secure a new contact with Metallurgi-
cal Laboratories for the Kremlin's ace agent, Arthur
Alexandrovich Adams. By doctor's orders, Mr. Roose-
velt was on a four-hour working day when, in October,
Adams entered the automobile of New York Vice-consul
Pavel Mikhailov, shortly before he vanished for-ever,
after six years of guiding high-treason activities
in the United States. Did the President suffer from one
of his cerebral occlusions when, in 1944, the FBI was
able to reproduce uncontrovertable evidence that Adams
possessed the most secret data on the atomic plant at
Oak Ridge, Tennessee? Was it too much for our Chief
64
of State, who suffered from arteriosclerosis and a heart
condition, to bother about the national significance, of
the meeting of Martin David Kamen, of Berkeley's radi-
ation laboratories, with Vice-Consul Gregory Kheifets
(of the Soviet office in San Francisco) who, on July 1
accepted from him classified information on the urani-
um pile, only to depart three days later for father
land of world revolutionary socialism? *68*
Was it too much for the President, who more and
more frequently experienced comatose lapses, to learn
that the sinister Morganthau Plan was devised by
none other than Harry Dexter White, assistant to the Secre-
tary of the Treasury and at the same time obedient tool
of Nathan Gregory Silvermaster's spy apparatus?
Here was the crowning glory of Moscow's brazen
treachery, and the tragic irony of President Roosevelt's
appeasement gamble. A plain common traitor -- highly
esteemed by Secretary Morgenthau -- was the principle
author of the criminal policy which was to "reduce
Germany to a country primarily agricultural and pas-
toral," to "close down the Ruhr areas," flood her mines,
have our own occupation forces withdrawn, and have
Germany policed by Russian and, mainly, Soviet satel-
lite armies. How is it possible that President of
the United States, who soon was to campaign for his fourth
term, was "frankly staggered" and "had no idea how he could
have initialed this: that he had evidently done so without
much thought"?*69* Was this the man who felt a compulsion
to become President just once more to save America and to
save the world?
While this macabre situation prevailed, the Soviet
65
government--long before Yalta--betrayed the world of the
free in China, Italy, Poland, Roumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria,
Greece, and with her legions of agents and dupes, right
here in the United States of America.
66
Chapter 17. The Kremlin Moves in Italy, Poland, and Roumania
Just two days after we had intimated that, in deference
to democratic standards, we would not recognize the
Badoglio government in Italy -- the savage conqueror
of Ethiopia had been rather close to Mussolini for some
time -- Marshal Badoglio, on March 13, 1944, announced
that he and Stalin had agreed to exchange ambassadors.
It sounded pitiful when, on March 17, Cordell Hull,
who in November had so triumphantly orated on
"unity" -- let it be known that he had asked the govern-
ment of the U.S.S.R. for "an explanation of its uni-
lateral action." Molotov was not interested in such
trivialities. Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Communist
party of Italy, immediately returned from Moscow
with a host of graduates of the Lenin Institute, to pre-
pare the peninsula for the Communist seizure. By
April 21 Communist Togliatti was minister in a "de-
mocratized" Badoglio cabinet.
While the three Roosevelts, Hopkins, Marshall, Wal-
lace, Ickes, the OWI, and the busy scribes and commen-
tators were plugging the Moscow line, the Kremlin
ruthlessly crushed heroic Poland, for whose liberty His
Britannic Majesty's Government, in September 1939
had gone to war. "The time of liberation is at hand.
Poles, to arms! There is not a moment to lose!" Thus
67
the Soviet Polish radio in Moscow on July 29, 1944, at
eight-fifteen in the evening. Then the Polish resistance
fighters rose. But the Russians, for sixty-three days,
denying they knew anything about it, refused to drop
weapons and food and so caused the flower of the cham-
pions of liberty inside Poland to be massacred by the
half-crazed though methodical Germans. At the very
time at which Prime Minister Mikolajczyk flew to Mos-
cow, the Kremlin cynically "recognized" the puppet it
had set up (the Lublin Committee) as the new Polish
"people's government."*70*
While Roumania, through contacts in Cairo, Ankara, and
Madrid, was frantically imploring the West to save her
from the onrushing collectivist hordes, Anthony Eden
assured the Turkish foreign minister "that the Soviet
leaders had radically changed their natures, that "they
had gone democratic and could now be trusted. "And our
own Office of War Information, which was honeycombed
with alien and native Communists, praised Russia's
"new democracy" and the "innocent nature of Communism.*71*
The Soviet government pro-claimed another avowal of its
high moral principles; but by November butcher Vihinsky
arrived to "restore internal order."
An incurable League of Nations fan like President
Eduard Benes, when finally (in March, 1945) and
hurriedly signing a Russo-Czech pact of friendship (of
the suicidal "United Front" variety), in all probability
acted in comparative good faith; but the British states-
men when yielding to Soviet intransigence, must have
known that eastern Europe was headed for a blood bath
in which their very friends -- the conscious advocates of
68
individual liberty -- were going to perish. Deep in their
hearts they must have known that the Yalta Conference,
for which they were getting ready, would be another
and more ghastly Munich.
There is an excuse for the British which, at that,
they might be loath to admit. President Roosevelt, by
dint of America's industrial superiority, had become
the supreme and decisive diplomatic exponent of West-
ern civilization. Therefore, once Roosevelt and Stalin
were in agreement, Churchill -- for the sake of harmony
and unity -- had grudgingly to submit and -- for the
sake of appearance - had to talk as if the situation were
not really quite so bad.
In fact, even shortly before Yalta Harry Hopkins
confided to Elliott Roosevelt that the P.M. had "another
southern invasion up his sleeve." The two New Deal
characters "smiled over this latest effort to get Allied
soldiers into the Balkans ahead of the Russians."*72* From
the Soviet point of view, there was good reason to
smile; for the Kremlin had by then won that fateful
political battle 100 per cent.
It was rather pitiful to observe Churchill, by then
bickering for the very spheres of influence which Cordell
Hull, but a few months earlier, in his "triumphant"
address before the joint session of Congress, had de-
claimed dead and buried forever. Could we get as much
as 50 per cent influence in Yugoslavia? Or perhaps 40
per cent? Or at least 25 per cent? If the Russians
were to take over Bulgaria, was it not fair that we
assert our influence in Greece? In other words, if the
Communists in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were to lay
low the bourgeois lovers of parliamentary procedures,
69
might it not be a fair deal to keep British troops in
readiness for any possible skirmishes with the Moscow-
supported Greek guerrillas?
The Moscow high command of world revolution was
entirely willing to let the Right Honorable Winston
Spencer Churchill, as well as Mr. Eden, keep face. It
did not alter the realities of eastern Europe one iota,
however, when the Prime Minister, as late as December
15, 1944, told the House of Commons: "We still recog-
nize the Polish Government in London as the Govern-
ment of Poland, as we have done since they reached our
shores in the early part of this war."
70
Chapter 18. Double-Talk to Keep Us Paralyzed
As to the position of the Soviet conspirators in the
coming postwar world, what mattered was to keep
Roosevelt and American public opinion in line. The
Communist party and the Communist-fronting liberals
of the arts and professions had done mighty fine spade
work for that Kremlin effort. The fact that Roosevelt,
Hopkins and Hull (the latter resigning in November,
1944) were sick to death also played straight into the
hands of the Soviet Union's political strategists.
In accordance with the official Marxist-Leninist doc-
trine of temporary compromise with the "complex and
whimsical zigzag of history," it was now necessary to
hold off the Americans just long enough to let eastern
Europe be occupied by Soviet soldiers. Once that amaz-
ing fait accompli was established, the Kremlin might
concentrate on fooling them in another part of the
world -- the Far East.
For the time being, in the period preceding the Yalta
Conference, Roosevelt and the Americans were to be
kept in ignorance with regard to Soviet long-range
plans. They were to persist in their lovely slumber
dream and to hope that some sort of friendship with
the "vigorous, new economic democracy" of our "gal-
lant ally" would become the basis for future world peace.
71
Thus the obsession of Roosevelt and the fervent prayer
of millions of high-minded but world politically naive
Americans -- the honest hope for peace -- became Ameri-
ca's weakness and Soviet Russia's strength in a game in
which the participants played for entirely different
stakes.
The trite and mendacious siren song of living peace-
fully "side by side," played in the thirties for Roy
Howard, Harold Stassen, and other Americans who
were willing to listen, was now to be offered in brass-
enriched, deafening orchestration. It was now necessary
for the tacticians of dialectic materialism to make
Americans believe that Communism was definitely,
finally, and irrevocably dead.
Consequently, such old reliables of the Soviet lectures
tables as loquacious busybody Joseph Edward Davies,
Ear1 Browder, and the paid agent, "Czarist General"
Victor A. Yakhontoff, renewed their platform antics
to make Americans toe the line. Such centers of politi-
cal confusion and degeneracy as the National Lawyers'
Guild, Russian War Relief, and the National Council
of America-Soviet Friendship, through the distribu-
tion of films, books, pamphlets, and magazines, as well
as by sending our expert speakers "free of charge" and
by staging "patriotic" rallies, managed to convince
Americans that the Russian Bear had turned into a snow-
white dove.
72
Chapter 19. Magic Turns Party into Picnic Club
THE HOAX was officially launched on May 23, 1944
twelve days prior to the invasion of Normandy -- when
at a jumbo rally in New York's Madison Square Garden
Earl Browder moved, was seconded, and was unani-
mously so ordered to dissolve the Communist party.
Banners hailing "Our Soviet Friends" and the "Demo-
cratic Coalition" set the tone.
Comrade Browder, who now became Brother Brow-
der, announced the birth of the "Communist Political
Association," which he described as "a non-party org-
ganization of the American working class dedicated to
the traditions of Washington, Jefferson, Paine, Jackson
and Lincoln, under the changed conditions of modern
industrial society."*73* Therefore, what could be more
"democratic," patriotic, and "American" than to join
that innocent picnic club of the "new economic demo-
crats," e.g., the Communist Political Association?
Could anyone envisage Raissa Browder's husband as
a "democrat"? You could not? Now you see him, now
you don't. When the war was over, and most men of
character, intelligence, and other leadership qualities in
eastern Europe had been put six feet or less under-
ground, bourgeois Brother Browder was to be expelled
as a betrayer of the "principles" of the proletarian world
revolution. It would, of course, be a cardinal crime
73
against dialectic materialism and the new people's so-
ciety ever to let any sentiment of any kind interfere
with the strategy and tactics of the Soviet high com-
mand. For the time being, Brother Browder served the
purpose.
Black was white, and white was black. The Com-
munists were "democrats." Good republicans, worried
over the governmental infringement upon America's
greatest contribution to Western civilization -- our
Constitution -- were "fascist." The party became a
"political association"; the Young Communist League
became the American Youth for Democracy; the Com-
munist Workers School, the Jefferson School of Social
Science; Marx became Washington; Engels, Jefferson;
Lenin, Lincoln. Stalin, of course, merged with Roose-
velt into one gigantic mythical, "new democratic"
character.
The great Roosevelt, who, more capably than either
Churchill's Foreign Office or his own Communist-
infiltrated State Department, "handled" gallant Krem-
lin Joe, now had little time left for such trifles as losing
the few million East Europeans who, because of their
breeding and background, would be the best guarantors
of a civilizations of men rather than of robots. Though
ever more often talking incoherently and losing himself
in a jungle of uncontrolled, reiterative, and embarrass-
ing phrases, he now turned his mind to larger and even
more supreme pursuits. Upon accepting his fourth
nomination, he went off "to inspect Pacific island bases,"
which was another way of saying that he was too ex-
hausted to go back to Washington, where the President
of the United States belongs. Thinning out rapidly, he
had to take another shot at recreation.
74
Chapter 20. Communists Lay Down the Law
Harry S Truman, whom the kingmakers chose as Mr.
Roosevelt's running mate, was advised by the President
himself to "clear everything with Sidney." This means
that, for the man who was to succeed the President of
the United States within less than a year, it was neces-
sary to cultivate the most revolutionary labor leader in
the nation as an indispensable measure to obtain the
required votes. Russian-born Sidney Hillman had
learned on Soviet Russian soil how revolutionary plots
are engineered. The CIO, which he then headed, was
well known at the rime to be controlled by the Com-
munists.
When Harry Truman walked into the smoke-filled
room in the Stevens Hotel in Chicago (where he was
"cleared" by America's foremost Marxists), the widely
known Communists (who later turned out to be es-
pionage agents), John Abt, Lee Pressman, and Nathan
Witt, were on hand." Less than three months later,
on October 17, 1944, Mr. Truman welcomed "the sup-
port of Browder or anyone else who will keep President
Roosevelt in office abd win the war and win the peace."*75*
Yet it is fair to say that Harry Truman, who as vice-
presidential candidate shook hands with the Communist
agents, was less of a dupe than his predecessor, the Vice-
75
President who had made the pilgrimage to Soviet Asia
and who had visibly and admittedly enjoyed the com-
pany of Siberia's slave-labor bosses. This is the depth
to which our government -- and a wide segment of the
public -- had sunk. This is the contaminated atmosphere
in which the Yalta pact was to be "negotiated."
In line with the deception which the traitors from
without and within, through the White House itself,
perpetrated on the free American people, the War De-
partment, on December 30, 1944, issued a secret order
which destroyed the official barriers against the Com-
munist traitors in the Armed Forces. It expressly con-
doned "divided loyalty" and established as a guiding
rule that "the subversive-suspect should be given the
benefit of all reasonable doubt."
When questioned by the House Military Affair Com-
mittee, which investigated the matter, Assistant Secre-
tary of War John J. McCloy upheld the theory "that
a soldier could be 49% loyal to Russia and 51% loyal
to America." The man whom years later, in a critical
period of the cold war, the Truman-Acheson adminis-
tration was to send to Germany as High Commissioner,
to teach the Germans democracy, did not know that
loyalty to America excluded loyalty to the fatherland
of the Communist world conspiracy.
In this spirit of utter confusion, McCloy and Mc-
Narney subsequently commissioned nine characters who
had already been adversely reported upon by counter-
subversive officials.*78* And by March 4, 1945, jailbird
Browder rejoiced in the Daily Worker because John J.
McCloy and Major General Clayton Bissell (the senior
Intelligence officer in the War Department) had con-
76
firmed the information that Communist affiliation was
no longer any "bar to promotions in the Armed Forces,
especially the officers' commissions and special services."
A few months later, in mid-1945, Colonel Charles A.
Drake, on orders, had a crew of about eighteen officers,
forty to sixty WACS, and a few civilians work in rota-
tion for several weeks to destroy antisubversive records.
This was done despite the solemn promise of Secretary
Stimson, of May 27, 1944.*78*
Stupidity, treason, and rottenness had penetrated the
core of the American government when the moribund
President was getting ready for the construction of
everlasting peace. Dumbarton Oaks, with Alger Hiss
as executive secretary, appropriately laid the ground.
Browder, who in the general starry-eyed delirium of
brotherly merger had gone to the extreme of offering to
clasp J. P. Morgan's hand (but whom the Moscow high
command had already marked for the ax), with bour-
geois deviationist fervor cheered the President on.
The day before the fourth inauguration, January 19,
1945, Frances Perkins, who worshiped the ground on
which Roosevelt stood, was frightened by his pallor.
"Don't tell a soul," she begged of her secretary. "
can't stand it. The President looks horrible. I am afraid
he is ill."*79* Four days later, the man whom neurologists
believed to suffer from a cerebral disturbance, boarded
the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Quincy, for Yalta.
77
Chapter 21. Ignorance and Treason Set Yalta Stage
Now, Roosevelt hoped, he would complete his
immortal work, a permanent peace organization, by
convincing the Kremlin thug that the President of the
United States was a freehanded, noble, magnanimous
gentleman. Had he familiarized himself with the back-
ground material which his secretary, Lieutenant Wil-
liam M. Rigdon, held in readiness for him and the dele-
gates, he might have doubted the wisdom of gentlemen
negotiating with gangsters. (Kremlin Joe certainly had
no objection to Roosevelt being the gentleman.) Was the
President afraid of looking at the facts? Or was he
merely too feeble to dig into them?
"Later, when I saw some of the splendid studies," James
F. Byrnes relates, "I greatly regretted they had not
been considered on board ship. I am sure the failure
to study them while en route was due to the President's
illness. And I am sure that only President Roosevelt,
with his intimate knowledge of the problems, could have
handled the situation so well with so little prepara-
ation.
Mr. Roosevelt's hunch and charm, and the compe-
tent advice of Alger Hiss, who was one of the American
architects of the Yalta pact, no doubt made up for any
lack of background knowledge.
78
Ironically, the American Yalta delegates were even
more efficaciously separated from their British colleagues
than had been those at Teheran. The British stayed at
the old Vorontsov Villa at Alupka, a half hour's drive
west from Livadia Palace, where the Americans were
housed. The Soviet delegation resided at Prince Yusu-
pov's Koreis Villa, halfway between their guests, sym-
bolically splitting the Anglo-Saxon "axis" in two.
America preparations had been elaborate. Private
cable service with Washington had been established;
but our cable ship, the U.S.S. Catoctin, because of
German mines, was based at Sevastopol, some eighty
miles away. Our overland cables, obligingly, were
guarded by Soviet riflewomen. What gentlemen would
ever surmise that women might indulge in a bit of
tapping?
79
Chapter 22. Yalta Apologias Don't Stand Up
THE FINALITY of the Yalta surrender -- in exchange for
protocoled promises and United Nations generalities,
neither of which the Soviet government at any time
took seriously -- cannot be disputed. Soviet apologists
insist that Stalin had to be coaxed into breaking the
Matsuoka pact and into joining us in the Pacific war by our
signing away the strategic areas of our faithful
Chinese ally; but Stalin, throughout the war, had as-
sured us through Harriman,*81* Hurley,*82* and Hull*83* that
he would "come in" anyhow. In 1943, to Hull, the
promise had been made "without any strings to it."
By 1944, when the matter was again discussed with
Harriman, Stalin -- encouraged by the unceasing flow of
Roosevelt-Hopkins. donations -- specified his con-
ditions: "provided that the United States would assist in
building up sixty divisions in Siberia" and "provided
the political aspects of Russia's participation had been
clarified."*84*
Chinese history - the knowledge of which would have
constituted valuable background material for our Yalta
delegates -- has taught us that whoever controlled the
north finally gained possession of the entire land. It
had been that way from Han through Yuan to the
Manchu dynasty. Therefore, an American statesman
should have done everything in his power to prevent
Communist seizure of Manchuria.
80
Dean Acheson, in the summer of 1951, decided that
Russia's participation in the war against Japan was
sought at Yalta because "it was the then military opin-
ion, concurred in by everyone, that The~ reduction of
Japan would have to be brought about by a large-scale
landing on the islands."*85* As anyone might know, that
happened to be specifically General Marshall's opinion,
which was not "concurred in" by General Henry H.
(Hap) Arnold, Admiral Ernest J. King, Admiral Wil-
liam D. Leahy, General Douglas MacArthur, and Ad-
miral Chester W. Nimitz. Dean Acheson likewise
claimed that "at the time these agreements were entered
into at Yalta, we did not know whether we had
atomic bomb or not."*86* Yet, Major General Leslie R.
Groves, the man who knew, shortly before the Yalta
Conference made a special effort to inform the Presi-
den~t that the atomic bomb was a 99 per cent certainty
and would be ready in August, 1945. Had Roosevelt
still been in his pre-Teheran condition of health, he
might, in 1945, have familiarized himself with the back-
ground facts of which Secretary of State Dean Goodwer-
ham Acheson appeared to be ignorant in 1951.
The official, notarized statement of July 13, 1951
by W. Averill Harriman, wartime ambassador to the
U.S.S,R., contending that "nothing that was done at
Yalta contributed to the loss of control over China by
Chiang Kai-shek,"*87* may be termed fanciful. If some
world conference, through sheer economic pressure,
compelled us to "internationalize" Minneapolis and to
grant a lease on Chicago to the Soviet Union, and to
have our railroads to these cities "jointly operated by
a joint Soviet-American Company," and if this con-
81
ference insisted that "die pre-eminent interests of the
Soviet Union shall be safeguarded," could we then earn-
estly claim that we still "retained full sovereignty in
America"?
It seems somewhat capricious on the part of Mr.
Harriman to suggest that Chiang Kai-shek willingly and
even happily "accepted" the terms of the Yalta pact by
signing the Sino-Soviet agreements of August 14, l945,
which were ratified by Nationalist China on August 24,
l945. What choice did Chiang Kai-shek have? Was his
country, geopolitically, anything but a power vacuum?
As his lone alternatives lay between the U.S.S.R. and the
U.S.A., was it not slightly better to obey the orders
of the American President (even though the latter was
baffled and ill-prepared to understand Communism or
world affairs) rather than embrace Joe Stalin spontane-
ously?
"The Yalta understanding," Mr.Harriman empha-
sizes, "was implemented by the Sino-Soviet agreements
which, had they been carried out by Stalin, might have
saved the Chinese National Government."*88* Can any
man who still is able to distinguish between the
American and the Soviet way of life believe in earnest
that Stalin might carry out any agreement which at
the times does not suit the particular "zigzag phase"
of the Soviet policy of proletarian world conquest?
Only daily injections of Communist propaganda doses,
administered by commentators, editorial writers, book
viewers, lecturers, professors, ministers, artists, and
other "white collar toilers"" could pervert and debauch
public opinion to such an extent that Americans in the
82
highest places could possibly take gangsters for trust-
worthy statesmen.
Had Stalin acted in good faith, he would have ad-
vised the President that Japan was already exhausted.
As, by virtue of the Matsuoka pact, he was allied with
our enemy, his diplomatic spies - of the embassy and
the consulates -- kept him informed about Japan. In
fact, the Japanese Foreign Minister, on the very eve
of Yalta, told the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo that a
settlement was quite possible. Consequently, our con-
cessions of territory which did not even belong to us,
besides being immoral and illegal, were based on igno-
rance and stupidity. There are chose who believe that
they were based on treacherous submission to the idols
of the Communists' world revolution.
83
Chapter 23. Betrayal of Friends and Principles and Ourselves
THE SAME Roosevelt who urged Britain to give up
Hong Kong, and who demanded that the French with-
draw from Indochina, saw nothing imperialistic in go-
ing the Bolsheviks a stranglehold on Manchuria, the
strategically important Kuriles, Sakhalin, Outer Mon-
golia, and the ports of Port Arthur and Dairen. What
a hue and cry our liberals would have raised had it been
suggested that some "imperialist" Western power obtain
a port or two.
New Deal fan Robert E. Sherwood correctly explains
that Roosevelt was "tired and anxious to avoid further
argument."*80* Could America and Western civilization
afford a tired man to give the key to China to our most
implacable foe? ("He who controls China controls the
world," Lenin had prophetically proclaimed.) How
tired, we may ask, was Stalin? How tired was General
Marshall?
To soothe his conscience otherwise, the President in-
sisted on "free and unfettered elections in Poland."
"How long will it take you to hold free elections?" he
wearily and fearfully inquired.
"Within a month's time," Molotov replied, they could
be held.
Polish elections were held on January 19, 1947, which
84
was twenty-three months later. They resulted, as the
whole world predicted, in a resounding victory for
Communism. According to Soviet standards, they were
"free."*90*
The chief originator of the Atlantic Charter did not
even oppose Stalin's insistence on the use of war prison-
ers as slave laborers. Worse than that, he agreed to have,
all fugitive Soviet nationals or citizens of satellite na-
tions, including hundreds of thousands of General
Vlasov's firmly anticommunist "Russian Liberation
Movement" and tens of thousands of POW's who elected
to stay this side of the Iron Curtain, returned to the
Soviet Union. The President of the United States, who
meant to lay the foundation of global freedom, stands
thus guilty of contravening the Geneva Convention
and conniving in the most hideous of all of Joseph
Stalin's political purges.
"With this shameful agreement as their authority,"
the Saturday Evening Post of April 11, 1953, comment-
ed editorially (p. 12), "Russian MVD agents strode
through the displaced-persons camps after the war and
put the finger on thousands who had managed to escape
the Soviet tyranny. These miserable victims were herd-
ed into boxcars and driven back to death, torture or
the slow murder of the Siberian mines and forests.
Many killed themselves on the way. Also under a Yalta
agreement, the Russians were permitted to use German
prisoners in forced labor as an item in 'reparations
account.' For such inhumanities there is no excuse."
Secretary of State Stettinius, who had succeeded Hull
in November, 1944, cannot be blamed for these tragic
blunders; for, being totally ignorant of foreign affairs,
85
he was not meant to be more than Roosevelt's errand
boy and a pleasant companion for sharing the joys of
diplomatic convivialities. Hopkins, on the other hand,
although like Roosevelt a dying man, did get out of
bed just long enough to encourage and supervise Roose-
velt's quixotic ventures in totalitarian appeasement.
"The Romans have given in so much at this con-
ference," the President's number one diplomacy fancier
noted, "that I don't think we should let them down."*91*
In comparison with the human tragedy of handing
prisoners of war and political refugees to Communist
torturers and executioners, Roosevelt's concession of
three United Nation votes for the U.S.S.R.-- which,
significantly, he kept a secret -- though irritating and
hardly excusable, was a pleasant gesture. Only Stalin's
interpreter and Alger Hiss are said to have witnessed
this particular submission of Roosevelt to the dictator's
desires.*92* Years later, in testimony, traitor Hiss claimed
that "it is an accurate and not immodest statement to
say that I helped formulate the Yalta agreement to
some extent."*93*
The Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe is full
of the usual high-sounding phrases about the creation
of "democratic institutions of their own choice," "the
right of all peoples to choose the form of government
under which they will live," and the solemn pledge of
the three powers that they "will jointly assist the people
in any European liberated [sic] state."
86
Chapter 24. The Exultant Mood
SHERWOOD reports that "the mood of the American
delegates, including Roosevelt and Hopkins, could be
described as one of supreme exultation as they left
Yalta"*94* How supreme and exultant, does he think,
was the mood of Roumania's venerable peasant leader,
Dr. Juliu Maniu, when, as a ressult of our betrayal,
he vanished into a Communist jail? Or of the resistance
hero, General Mihailovich, when he was executed at
the behest of our intermittent friend, Marshall Tito?
Or of Jan Masaryk, when he perished by way of de-
fenestration? Or of Cardinal Mindszenthy when, in
rather prolonged sessions, his chemical components were
readjusted to the pattern of a more useful citizen of a
"people's democracy"?
How could a great nation like America, which sacri-
ficed so much in every corner of the globe, be guided
into such abject surrender and such a hollow travesty of
"global unity"?
At home in America, Freda Kirchwey, in the Nation
of February 17, 1945 (p. 169), raved that "the com-
munique issued jointly at the close of the conference
is a most impressive list of achievements." Considering
Miss Kirchwey's impressive list of Communist fronting
it is likely that she has been impressed to this very day.
Yet even the New Republic, whose editors, Bruce Bliven,
George Soule, Michael Straight, and Stark
87
Young, were not known for vigorous opposition to the
Communist encroachment, in its issue of February 19
(p. 243) admitted that "on the whole, the results at
Yalta represent a substantial victory for Stalin."
The New Yorker's trusted "progressive" mouthpiece,
Howard Brubaker, in the issue of February 24 (p. 59),
referred to the Crimea Conference as "a brilliant suc-
cess" which "delighted the liberty-loving world." Had
Mr. Brubaker forgotten Lubianka prison and the sick-
ening executions of even Stalin's closest comrades?
Would he regard the slaughter of tens of thousands of
decent Balts as "a brilliant success"? Where was the
omniscient commentator's foresight? Where his imagi-
nation? Was he then unable to envisage the orgies of
pillage, rape, and murder which the Communist hordes
would stage among those European bourgeois who be-
lieved that the property which they had acquired by
industry and thrift was their own? Could the clever
esthete not foresee the not exactly delightful mock
trials which Tsola Dragoicheva's black widow squads
were going to stage all over unhappy Bulgaria?
But Mr. Brubaker had always been eager to express
in crisp and fashionable phrases what was held to be
bon ton in the smarter circles of literary New Yorkers.
It may therefore be considered as quite likely that the
mouthpiece "hit the spot." Yalta, in the eye of New
York's intellectual vanguard, was "it." If old Europe
and China lay prostrate before the "new people's de-
mocracy," so much the better.
In exactly the same vein, one page further in ex-
actly the same issue of the New Yorker, Mollie Panter-
Downes reported from London that "people here...
88
appeared to be especially pleased by the announcement
that the headquarters of the reparations commission
would be in Moscow." Who were these "people" whom
the London reporter had interviewed? How would
these "people" have cherished the idea of doing a stretch
of reparations labor somewhere in the mines of the Ural
Mountains? And were our sophisticated New Yorkers
really pleased to learn that a war which was meant for
liberty had opened the gates to tyranny? But "exul-
tation" reigned from Roosevelt, the cheerful giver,
down to the more perverted literary wretch of New
York's vanguard aristocracy.
Mr. Roosevelt's feverish exultation, nevertheless, must
have been of a somewhat artificial variety. Did he put
on a show for the world? Or for America? Or for
some of the people he knew who could not help raising
their eyebrows at Yalta? Or perhaps for his own self,
to quiet unpleasant doubts which made him lie awake
before it was time to get up?
89
Chapter 25. Haunting Hunches
THE President had been feeling uneasy about the
outcome of his world peace gamble long before the
Crimea Conference was staged. Indications of the
Soviet leaders' bad faith had been accumulating with
frightening rapidity. When even left-winger Pearson
had found it proper to enumerate the Kremlin's official
"slaps" at us, there must have been something wrong
with the Soviet attitude.
Is it possible that President Roosevelt had left Lieu-
tenant Rigdon's background data untouched because
he feared that the bare facts might weaken his determi-
nation once more -- in one grand finale -- to outdo him-
self as the genial and bountiful donor who could break
any heart, and finally to clinch his long-frustrated pur-
suit of elusive Kremlin Joe by a spectacular marriage
symbolique de dipiomatie?
What if Kremlin Joe, whom he had so devotedly
served, was basically no better than a common prostitute
in whose book the word "loyalty" merely existed as one
of the tricks reserved for country yokels? What if he --and
therefore America -- should have to pay the price
of folly which thousands of dupes before him, genera-
tion after generation, had paid? Was he, psychologi-
cally, perhaps on a level with distinguished but romantic
fools who, from Catullus to Toulouse-Lautrec, saw their
loftiest dreams dragged through the mud because they
90
treated the underworld in terms of honorable society?
"I just have a hunch that Stalin... doesn't want
anything but security for his country, and I think that
if I give him every thing I possibly can and ask for
nothing in return, noblesse oblige...." These words
surely must have run from Roosevelt's subconscious
again and again, to plague him.
Had Stalin ever obliged? When had he disclosed
noblesse? The thought was maddening. He, Roosevelt
had gambled on the noblesse de coeur -- the loftiness of
hear-of the anti-individualist, anti-heart "Man of
Steel." He had attempted to melt the coeur d'acier-
the heart of steel -- of the robber of Tiflis, the five-time
convict of Siberia, the man who had coldly purged
millions of Ukrainian peasants because they wanted to
cultivate their land the way they pleased and bravely
resisted collectivization of their farms.... Stalin, the
knave who had Bukharin, Tomsky, Rykov, Radek,
Zinoviev, Kamenev, and most of his other "comrades"
broken in prison cells so that they could testify against
themselves and be cast on the trash heap of streamlined
humanity,... Stalin, the fiend who had ordered the
"liquidation" of more than two million "deviationists"
of his own Communist party ...
Fantastic thoughts must have weighed on the mind
of the man who had set out to "handle" Kremlin Joe.
Long before he went to Yalta, Roosevelt realized that
Stalin might not work with him "for a world of democ-
racy and peace." But if that was the case, if Stalin "did
not come in" (to use the words Roosevelt had spoken
to the White House physician), then the "bet" was
lost, then every move he had made on the global chess-
91
board was false, and his entire political strategy,
from A to Z, had been based on a monstrous hoax. "
Queer thing about hunches...Sometimes they are
right and sometimes they are awful."
92
Chapter 26. Ding-Dong Show to Quiet Doubts
CHURCHILL's words had caused him anguish, on De-
cember 16, l944, less than two months before the Yalta
Conference opened. Couldn't the old P.M. ever adjust
himself to the new time? Was it really necessary to
have told the world the day before that His Majesty's
Government still recognized the Polish government in
London as the government of Poland, "as we have done
since they reached our shores in the early part of this
war"?
The President had been frightened then. What if
Stalin took up the challenge and told Churchill off
before the whole world? The chasm between East and
West would be unbridgeable. Yalta would be off...
would collapse like the proverbial house of cards, before
it was even started.
Immediately, on that same December 16, Roosevelt
had implored the Marshal-Tovarisch to refrain from
any public commitment with the Lublin Poles. The
toverisch had taken his time in answering. Was that
romantic wooer Roosevelt getting cagy? Was he getting
fussy? Was he writhing under the grip which had been
tightened ever since Teheran?
On December 27, 1944, Kremlin Joe deigned to sug-
gest to the impatient capitalist world reformer that he
93
might as well mind his own business. The Groton grad-
uate who had pursued the love of the "Man of Steel"
with everything he -- and his nation -- had, felt dis-
mayed. Was the ground slipping away from under his
feet? Was he sinking into a morass of Soviet deceit and
trickery and cynical laughter? Had he heard shrieks?
Were those the shrieks of the millions of individuals --
every one with, a soul which the Atlantic Charter was
supposed to protect -- who were to be cast before the
idol of the robot state, as a gesture of good will, a sort
of offering, twentieth-century style?
Roosevelt did not wait eleven days to dispatch his
reply. On December 29, 1944, in one of his ever less
frequent moments of clarity of mind, he sent another
missive to Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. he had felt
hurt by the brusque message, he told the diplomatic
bride-to-be with whom, symbolically, he was to middle-
aisle it at Yalta. The message had "disturbed and deeply
disappointed him."
As a reply to that frustrated lover's groaning and
whining, the government of the U.S.S.R. ushered in
the Year of Yalta by announcing, on January 5, 1945,
that the provisional government of Poland, with which
it had dealt de facto ever since its birth, was now official-
ly recognized. Let Roosevelt make the best of it.
Wouldn't he ever grow up? What else did he expect,
considering that the Lublin stooges had been hand-
picked by the Politburo in the first place?
All of that, let us bear in mind, had happened before
the Yalta Conference took place. When, on February
12, the Yalta Declaration was made public, the Lublin
puppet boys grew uneasy. Why should their provisional
94
government "be recognized on a broader democratic
basis?" Was the West going to play any tricks on them?
But Stalin, who had gone through the motions of the
marriage de convenance at Yalta, calmed the tovarisches
of the Lublin "people's democracy" by entrusting his
crony and personal representative, Nikolai A. Bulganin,
with a special message.
"The Yalta Declaration," Bulganin told the Lublin
stooges on February 17, 1945 (less than a week after
it was signed), "is a scrap of paper.... You will be the
Government of Poland, no matter how those elections
turn out and whatever might happen in the mean-
time. Be steadfast and have faith in Stalin!"*95*
At about this time, on February 13, 1945, Professor
Arthur Upham Pope, a vice-chairman of the National
Council of American-Soviet Friendship and a perennial
booster of the Soviet causes, in the Daily Worker (p. 7),
indicated the right "line" by calling the Polish govern-
ment in London a group of "reactionaries" and exhort-
ing the future Fifth Amendment Americans to back
the Lublinites. The crypto-Communists and other
worshipers of "dialectic materialism" in the editorial
offices of hundreds of respectable newspapers knew
where to look for their cues.
On the same day, February 13, 1945, Senator Elbert
D. Thomas (Democrat, Utah), referring to the publi-
cation of the Yalta Declaration, exclaimed; "mark
this day down as one of the great days of world history."
The Honorable Warren R. Austin (Republican, Ver-
mont), who, significantly, was later to represent us at
the United Nations, said of Yalta: "It's the answer to
a prayer."*96*
95
But on February 24, 1945, in violation of the Yalta
pact -- which had been signed on February 11 -- the
U.S.S.R. indicated her unwillingness to co-operate in
the Allied Control Councils in Bulgaria, Hungary, and
Roumania, and on February 27, Andrei Y. Vishinsky,
in another violation of the Yalta pact, insisted by an
official demarche that King Michael of Roumania sub-
stitute Communists and Communist tools for certain
members of his cabinet. Despite these Soviet mani-
festations of contempt for the agreements which had
been signed at the Crimea Conference, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, on March 1, 1945, told a joint session of
Congress that "more than ever before, the major Allies
are closely united." It must be left to each one of us
to conjecture how the President might have felt when
our "bipartisan" Congress wildly cheered his optimistic
pronunciamento.
96
Chapter 27. The House of Dreams Collapse
THE VERY next day, on March 2, 1945, it was the
embarrassing duty of Ambassador William Averell Har-
riman to inform the man who had gambled his life's
work and his nation's safety on a cordial understanding
with the directors of Operation World Revolution that
the Soviet government declared itself unable to broaden
Poland's provisional government. Consequently, a few
graduates of Moscow's Lenin Institute who years before
had betrayed their country, Poland, by becoming natu-
ralized citizens of the Soviet robot state, as the core of
the Lublin government were to represent Poland ex-
clusively before Mr. Molotov, Mr. Harriman, and Sir
A. Clark Kerr.
A few days later, President Roosevelt talked to
Arthur H. Vandenberg, the one-time isolationist sena-
tor from Michigan whom, in deference to bipartisan
national unity, he had nominated as a delegate to the
San Fransico Conference, where his dream-child, the
United Nations, was to be born. Vandenberg had been
feeling uneasy about this unity in what might turnout
to be a tragic error and "had been making stern public
remarks about what he regarded as Russia's sinister
designs upon Poland."
Harassed by the organized smear of America's pinko
cohorts in every type of public communication and
"information," and quite willing to protect the Pres-
97
dent against any additional embarrassment, Vandenberg
had offered to withdraw. "Just between us, Arthur,"
the President said, "I am coming to know the Russians
better."*98* How nice it would have been had the Presi-
dent of the United States known the Russians several
presidential terms earlier.
By March 27, in a message to Prime Minister
Churchill, Roosevelt confided that he had been, "watch-
ing with anxiety and concern the development of the
Soviet attitude." Deploring the Bolshevik terror and the
open breach of the Yalta promise, he stated that he
was "acutely aware of the dangers inherent in the
present course of events, not only for the immediate
issue involved but also for the San Francisco Conference
and future world co-operation."*99*
On April 1, eleven days before his death, in a tragi-
cally disillusioned message to Stalin, the President ex-
pressed his "concern" over the "apparent indifferent
attitude" of the Soviet government with regard to "the
carrying out, which the world expects, of the political
decisions which we reached at Yalta."*100*
Learning of the betrayal of China -- which was yet
a secret deal -- Roosevelt's old and faithful friend and
servant, Ambassador Pat Hurley, hurried back to Wash-
ington. "If anybody can straighten out the mess of
internal Chinese politics," the President had told his
son Elliot at the and of the Teheran Conference, "he's
the man.... Men like Pat Hurley are invaluable. Why?
Because they're loyal."*101*
The President could not help admitting to the am-
bassador that, on the last day of the conference, in a
state of utter exhaustion, he had signed the shameful
98
document. His grief and remorse, in addition to his
state of health, must have made him look pathetic.
"Go ahead," he told his friend, "ameliorate it or set
it aside, and return to the fundamental principles that
you have been fighting for, because they are mine."*102*
Soon, indeed, Pat Hurley and other loyal servants
of their country, who stood by principles, were to be
ousted from the Department of State. The Acheson-
Hiss-Marshall-Jessup era -- the Truman era -- was to un-
fold. Harry Dexter White, the deceiver and spy who
drafted the Morgenthau Plan, in the year of Roosevelt's
eclipse was to be promoted to Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury. Henry Morgenthau, his boss, whose views
so often had seemed removed from reality, on the eve of
the President's death, "thought he was quite normal."*103*
Emaciated, pallid, and trembling, the once ebullient
donor and magnificent hunch player had come to the
end of the road. The illusion to which he had sacrificed
the principles of the Atlantic Charter, the lives of free
men, and the honor of his country, had vanished in the
clouds. Stricken with despair, the President died a
broken man.
One question to Messrs. Gunther, Swing, and Wells:
Can you really look Americans straight in the eyes,
gentlemen, when you still declare that it made sense --
as of any time -- to "bargain," "'negotiate," and "co-
operate" with the criminals of the Kremlin?
THE END
-----------------------------------------------------------
REFERENCES
1. Sumner Welles, Seven Decisions That Shaped History (New York:
Harper, 1951) p.170.
2. Raymond Swing, "What Really Happened at Yalta," New York Times
Magazine, Feb. 20, 1949, p 10.
3. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect: A Profile in History (New York:
Harper, 1950, p 359.
4. John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, (New York: Devin-Adair, 1948) p.241.
5. Ibid, p 192.
6. Ibid, p 193.
7. Whittiker Chambers, "I Was the Witness," Saturday Evening Post,
March 1, 1952, p 102.
8. Flynn, op.cit. pp.253-255; see also California Legislature, Joint
Fact Finding Committee, Fourth Report, Un-American Activities in California,
1948: Communist Front Organizations; (Sacramento, CA, 1948) p. 180.
9. Richard L. Stokes, "A Tragic Tale of Lend-Lease," Human Events, April 1,
1953, pp. 1, 2.
10. Flynn, op.cit., p 340.
11. John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance: The Story of Our Efforts at
Wartime Co-operation with Russia (NY:Viking, 1947) p. 49.
12. US House of Representatives, 81st Congress, 2nd Session, Committee
on Un-American Activities, Hearings Regarding Shipment of Atomic
Material to the Soviet Union During World War II (DC, US Gov Printing
Office [GPO], 1950), pp. 1156 ff.
13. NY Times, December 8, 1949, p. 1.
14. US House of Representatives, Hearings Regarding Shipment of Atomic
Material...p. 967.
15. Ibid, p 922.
16. Isaac Don Levine, "Stalin's Spy Ring in the U.S.A.," Plain Talk,
December 1947, p 3.
17. US House of Representatives, Hearings Regarding Shipment of Atomic
Material...p. 1160.
18. Deane, op.cit., p. 89.
19. Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, (The 2nd WW vol IV) (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin), p 201.
20. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, (NY: Harper, 1948), p 590.
21. William C. Bullitt, "How We Won the War and Lost the Peace," Life,
August 30, 1958, p. 94.
22. Ross T. McIntire, White House Physician, (NY:Putnam, 1946), p. 171.
23. Francis Perkins, The Roosevelt I IKnew, (NY:Viking, 1946), p. 352.
24. Joseph Alsop, "Why We Lost China: I, The Fued Between Stilwell and
Chiang," Saturday Evening Post, January 7, 1950, p. 47.
25. Alfred Kohlberg, Studpidity, Treason or Irrationality? (LA:First
Congregational Church, 535 Hoover St, 1952), p. 18.
26. Major Hamilton A. Long, America's Tradgedy-Today, (NY:Post Printing), pp.
15-25.
27. Elizabeth Bently, Out of Bondage, (NY:Devin-Adair, 1951), p. 182, see
also pp. 263, 264.
28. Ibid, pp. 164, 165.
29. Special Report by Conrad Komorowski in New York Daily Worker, February 25,
1942, p. 5.
30. US Senate, 81st Congress, 2nd Session, Hearings Before Senate Foreign
Relations Committee [Tydings Committee] on State Department Loyalty
Investigation, Part 1, April, 27, 1950 (GPO), pp. 686, 687.
31. Cordell Hull, Memoirs (NY:Macmillian, 1948), Chapter 90, pp. 1249 ff.
32. Elliot Roosevelt, As He Saw It, (NY:Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1946), p.
117.
33. Jan Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1947),
p. 159.
34. Hull, op.cit, p. 1252.
35. Max Eastman, "The Greeks Knew Too Much," Plain Talk, October 1949, p. 19.
36. Long, op.cit., p. 12.
37.Ibid, p. 21.
38. US Senate, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East,
Hearings Before Committee on Armed services and Committee on Foreign
Relations, Part V, Appendix, (GPO, 1951) p. 3341.
39. Serwood, op.cit., pp. 748-49.
40. William d. Leahy, I Was There: The Personal Story of teh Chief of Staff to
Presidents Truman and Roosevelt; Based on his Notes and Diaries Made at the
Time; (NY:Whittlesey House, 1950), p. 175.
41. Flynn, op.cit., p. 345.
42. James A. Farley, Jim Farley's Story: the Roosevelt Years, (NY: Whittesey
House, 1948), p. 362.
43. US House of Representatives, Hearings Regarding Shipment of Atomic
Material...p. 1187.
44. The Freeman, June 18, 1951, p. 592.
45. Mark Clark, Calculated Risk, (NY: Harper and Row, 1950), pp. 368-71.
46. Elliot Roosevelt, op.cit., pp. 184-85.
47. William Henry Chamberlain, America's Second Crusade, (Chicago: Regenery,
1950), p. 206.
48. Elliot Roosevelt, op.cit., pp. 186-91.
49. Sherwood, op.cit., p. 804.
50. Long, op.cit., pp. 26-27.
51. Ibid, p. 12.
52. Ibid, p. 13.
53. Ibid, pp. 28-31.
54. US Senate, 81st Congress, 1st Session, Committee on the Judicary, Hearings
Before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturealization, September 14,
1949, Part II, (GPO), p. 785.
55. Henry A. Wallace, Soviet Asia Mission, (NY:Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946),
Atuhor's note and pp. 116-39.
56. Ibid, pp. 187-93.
57. US Senate, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session, Committee on the Judiciary,
Institute of Pacific Relations, Report No. 2050, p. 223.
58. US Senate, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Committee on the Judiciary,
Institute of Pacific Relations, Part V, pp. 1302, 1206.
59. As reported by International News Service.
60. US Senate, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session, Committee on the Judiciary,
Institute of Pacific Relations, Report No. 2050, p. 224.
61. Churchill, Closing the Ring, (The 2nd WW vol IV) (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin), p 708.
62. Gunther, op.cit., p. 353.
63. Sherwood, op.cit., p. 849.
64. McIntire, op.cit., p. 175.
65. Henry L. Stimson, On Active Service in Peace and War, (NY:Harper, 1948),
p. 575.
66. James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, (NY:Harper, 1947), p. 22.
67. Farley, op.cit., p. 363.
68. US House of Representatives, 80st Congress, Special Session, Committee
on Un-American Activities, Report on Soviet Espionage Activities in
Connection with the Atom Bomb, September 28, 1948 (US Gov. Printing Office)
pp. 181, 182.
69. Stimson, op.cit., p. 581.
70. Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, The Rape of Poland; Pattern of Soviet Agression,
(NY: Whittlesey House, 1948), p. 70.
71. Reuben M. Markham, Rumania Uner the Soviet Yoke (Boston: Meader, 1949), p.
169.
72. Elliot Roosevelt, op.cit., p. 231.
73. Angela Calomiris, Red Masquerade: Undercover for the FBI, (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1950), pp. 141-142.
74. Kohlberg, op.cit., p. 23.
75. As quoted by International News Service.
76. Long, op.cit., pp. 13, 14.
77. Ibid, p. 39.
78. US House of Representatives, 79th Congress, 1st Session, Military Affairs
Committee, Record of Hearings, October 31, 1945 (GPO), pp. 963 ff.
79. Perkins, op.cit., p. 394.
80. Byrnes, op.cit., p. 23.
81. Deane, op.cit., p 226.
82. Leahy, op.cit., p 147.
83. Hull, op.cit., p 1309.
84. Deane, op.cit., p 247.
85. US Senate, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East,
...Part III...p. 1845.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., Part V, Appendix, p. 3340.
88. Ibid.
89. Sherwood, op.cit., p. 867.
90. Byrnes, op.cit., p. 32.
91. Sherwood, op.cit., pp. 861, 862.
92. Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky, Seeds of Treason, (NY: Funk and
Wagnalls, 1950), p 108.
93. Ibid.
94. Sherwood, op.cit., p. 869.
95. Rear Admiral Ellis M. Zacharias and Ladislas Farago, Behind Closed Doors;
the Secret History of the Cold War, (NY:Putnam, 1950), p. 58.
96. NY Daily Worker, February 14, 1945, p. 3.
97. Byrnes, op.cit., p. 53.
98. Arthur H. Vandenberg, Jr, "Vandenberg's Privat Papers," NY herald Tribune,
March 26, 1952, p. 29.
99. Byrnes, op.cit., p. 54.
100. Ibid., pp. 54, 55.
101. Elliot Roosevelt, op.cit., p. 204.
102. US Senate, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, Military Situation in the Far East,
...Part IV, ... p. 2887.
103. Letter of Henry a. Wallace to Felix Wittmer, March 26, 1952.