In response to:
Neoconservative History from the January 16, 1986 issue
To the Editors:
If there is an art to making someone else seem foolish without claiming to be wise oneself, then this is an art Theodore Draper has yet to learn about. And is Mr. Draper really so wise? Is it wise to deny, as he does [NYR, January 16], that President Roosevelt was in fact responsible for his own foreign policy (with respect to Eastern Europe) during the last great war? According to Mr. Draper, the President did not make a gift of Eastern Europe to the Soviets. Eastern Europe became theirs by force of arms. The Red Army had taken it. Quite so. But it had been a tradition of American policy, long before Roosevelt’s presidency, not to recognize acquisitions of territory by force of arms. Yet President Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s incorporation of a part of Poland into the Soviet state, and a part of East Prussia into Poland. (This was a devilishly clever move of Stalin’s, for it made Poland dependent for its security on Russian arms.) Now it was not up to the Red Army to acquiesce politically to the acquisitions it had made by force. This was for our President to do or refuse to do. Our whole policy toward Eastern Europe was dependent on his decision in this matter.
Mr. Draper claims that the President’s policy toward Poland would have been “satisfactory”—whatever that means—if only Stalin had kept his pledged word and permitted free democratic elections in Poland. (Instead of which Stalin jailed the members of the Polish government in London we sent to take part in these elections.) Now these are my questions for Mr. Draper: Does he think President Roosevelt was foolish enough to expect Stalin to keep his word in such a matter? And why should Stalin have risked a political defeat, even a minor one, in Poland, which according to Mr. Draper was already his by force of arms? And if Roosevelt had by that time come to some understanding of Stalin’s ways, then he was worse than foolish in his policy making; he was the accomplice of Stalin—as is Mr. Draper by defending him—in the enslavement of Eastern Europe.
And just one point of logic. If the President really thought that Stalin, famed for perfidy, would keep his pledged word and permit elections in Poland, then isn’t it just reasonable, and not nastily neoconservative, to infer, as Mr. Draper will not, that he was overly trustful of Stalin?
Lionel Abel
New York City
To the Editors:
Theodore Draper writes: “The Western allies did not give away anything at Yalta that they actually had.” From my limited Czech perspective, I wonder. General Patton’s Third US Army liberated Pilsen, a city divided from Prague by some seventy miles of very good highway, on May 5, 1945. On that day, the nearest Red Army units were engaged in heavy fighting in Berlin, some 350 miles away. On that day, also, an uprising broke out in Prague which involved Prague’s citizen army in fierce struggle with SS units that entered the city from the south. They were trying to secure Prague railway stations for Marshal Schörner who hoped to transport most of his army group, fighting the Soviets in Moravia, westward and surrender it to Patton. On that same day, in the afternoon, American army negotiators reached Prague, got in touch with the headquarters of the Czech insurgents and offered that the Third Army would move to Prague—a matter of an hour for the Sherman tanks—and rid the city of the Germans. Josef Smrkovský, much later a minister in Dubcek’s government, and the Communist éminence grise in the headquarters, refused this offer and asked only for weapons. Nevertheless, Patton, reportedly, intended to proceed on to Prague, but was prevented from doing so by his superiors. And yet another action began that same day: Marshal Konev’s units, still fighting in Berlin, were given orders to turn south and march on Prague. It took them four days to reach, utterly exhausted, the Czech capital.
I don’t know how else to explain these strange military maneuvers except by some agreement somewhere where the Western allies did indeed “give away something they—if not actually, then practically—had.”
Josef Skvorecky
Amherst, Massachusetts
To the Editors:
I’ve only just seen Theodore Draper’s article on “neoconservative historians.” In it he insists that he has “read and reread” the Churchill–Roosevelt correspondence, finding nothing about Roosevelt’s credulity toward Stalin and about Churchill’s “cautionary advice.” Therefore “all these charges against Roosevelt have been invented by Nisbet; they are not in the correspondence.”
Turn first to Roosevelt’s letter to Churchill dated March 18, 1942. “I know you will not mind my being brutally frank with you when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”
If I may stray from the correspondence for a moment, there are two equally revealing comments along this line, the first cited by Ambassador Bullitt in an article written after the war, the second by Secretary Hull in his Memoirs: “I think that if I give him everything I possibly can, and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything, and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace” (Bullitt, Life magazine, August 30, 1948). Secretary Hull gives us a remark by Roosevelt to Churchill at the Cairo Conference: “You have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood, and you just don’t understand how a country might not want to acquire land if they can get it.” I should emphasize that it is of the Soviet Union, not the US, that Roosevelt speaks.
So much for credulity. Mr. Draper should not think the kind of remark Roosevelt made to Churchill in the March 18, 1942 letter was a simple vagary, the thought gone after the utterance. It is a matter of common record in the diaries, memoirs, and historical studies that Roosevelt repeatedly sought private meetings with Stalin, all British including Churchill excluded. Indeed he wrote Stalin early in the war suggesting private meetings between the two of them.
As to credulity and Churchillian “cautionary advice,” it is hard to know where to begin in the correspondence. May I suggest the following as samplers: discussion of a cross-Channel Anglo-American assault, first in 1942, then 1943; of the frightful and militarily unacceptable losses by the British and Americans in their convoys to Murmansk—not to forget Stalin’s sneers at the losses and frequent taunts respecting British and American courage; the unilateral present by Roosevelt to Stalin of one-third of the surrendered Italian navy (Stalin hadn’t even asked for it); of the British Empire’s immediate dissolution as a win-the-war measure, with Roosevelt adducing, of all people, General Hurley and Chiang Kai Shek in support of his suggestion.
Mr. Draper tosses a red herring at me in his remark that the Yalta Conference, though unmentioned by me in my Commentary article, would be the “prime test” of my case. Far from it. My interest was solely in what happened after the Yalta Conference; to wit, Stalin’s rape of Poland despite his declaration to the contrary at Yalta. I will add here that Roosevelt’s chief mistakes at Yalta have always seemed to me his refusal to join Churchill in a proposal for a high commission to supervise the Polish postwar election and establishment of a new government, and his gratuitous promise to Stalin that all US troops would be out of Europe within two years.
For a very feast of credulity and cautionary advice I recommend the telegrams exchanged by Churchill and Roosevelt between March 8 and April 11, 1945. Among the subjects treated are the sovietization of Eastern Europe—begun before the Yalta Conference—the blatant domination of Poland by Stalin, and Eisenhower’s extraordinary, unilateral notice direct to Stalin that the Anglo-American forces would not enter and occupy Berlin. Firebell in the night is a better description than “cautionary advice” for much of Churchill’s cables to Roosevelt on these matters. Let Mr. Draper judge for himself whether there is incomprehension, indifference, or credulity in Roosevelt’s replies: for example in the message that ends in “I very much hope, therefore, that you will not send any message to Uncle Joe at this juncture—especially as I feel that certain parts of your proposed text might produce a reaction quite contrary to your intent.” Churchill’s reply reads: “I wonder what you have in mind. We might be able to improve the wording. But I am convinced that unless we can induce the Russians to agree to these fundamental points of procedure, all our work at Yalta will be in vain.”
Roosevelt was a sick, a dying man, when that interchange took place. But in strict fairness, his still credulous attitude toward Stalin goes directly back to his letter to Churchill in early 1942 that he could handle Stalin. Not, apparently, until two days before his death did Roosevelt wearily say—under stimulus by Harriman and General Deane in Moscow as well as Churchill—that either Stalin was breaking his word to him or else other people had come into charge.
The larger point of my Commentary piece was that Rooseveltian credulity toward Stalin and the Soviets became one of his legacies to the American people. I don’t censure Roosevelt nearly as much as I do the long line of Henry Wallaces and George McGoverns whose credulity has lasted forty years and shows little sign of diminishing.
Robert Nisbet
Washington, DC
Theodore Draper replies:
The first paragraph in Lionel Abel’s letter requires clarification. It refers to “Stalin’s incorporation of a part of Poland into the Soviet state, and a part of East Prussia into Poland.” It neglects to mention that the part of Poland incorporated into the Soviet state had been Russian territory incorporated into the Polish state after World War I. The post–World War II boundary put Poland back to the so-called Curzon Line, which the British had proposed in 1920 and which Poland had then rejected. The Treaty of Riga of 1921 had pushed the Polish border far beyond the Curzon Line almost as far east as Minsk in the former Russian territory. The primary responsibility for Polish policy during World War II rested with the British, who had the Polish government in exile in London. Churchill had strongly pressed the “London Poles” to accept a return to the Curzon Line; Roosevelt followed Churchill’s lead in this matter. The Polish leader, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, was deposed by the London Poles because he accepted Churchill’s advice. Churchill also advocated compensating the Poles with East Prussia in return for going back to the Curzon Line (letter to Roosevelt, May 25, 1944). The whole subject is far more complex than Abel suggests.
