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  Overall, Hopkins was elated to report to the president that he and Stalin had become chums, and FDR was delighted to hear that. The president relayed the exciting news to others: “Harry and Uncle Joe got on like a house afire. They have become buddies.”4

  After this meeting—the first of several Hopkins visits to Moscow—the presidential adviser began advising Roosevelt that Generalissimo Stalin should not be viewed as a Communist bent on the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of world revolution. “It is ridiculous to think of Stalin as a Communist,” Hopkins scoffed. “He is a Russian nationalist.”5 This “nationalism, not Communism” argument had also been made by Roosevelt's former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies—who, as we will see later in the chapter, was a remarkable dupe of Stalin and the Soviets. Receiving such advice from his inner circle surely colored the president's views on Stalin's USSR.6

  Harry Hopkins's primary mission was to determine what Stalin needed in wartime to repel Hitler, and thus what the despot wanted from America. On its face, that certainly was understandable, given the wartime alliance and given Hopkins's position as head of the Lend-Lease program. Yet Hopkins seems to have relished the chance to go well beyond the call of duty.

  “Lending” a Hand

  General John Deane, who was in Moscow to observe the budding political romance between Hopkins and Stalin, commented on how Hopkins carried out his mission with a zeal bordering on fanaticism.7 Sure enough, FDR's key aide commandeered Lend-Lease to provide Stalin with extraordinary benefits, to the tune of some $1.5 billion.

  To be sure, the primary U.S. goal was to stop Nazi Germany, and thus it was imperative for the United States to aid Stalin's USSR militarily in order to slow Hitler. American military aid—that is, conventional military aid—was especially necessary given that Stalin, under his recent bloody Great Purge, had annihilated tens of thousands of Soviet military officers—the human capital needed to defend against the Nazis.8

  On the other hand, no one on the American side would begin to consider nonconventional aid in the form of atomic-weapon assistance. Anyone who did that would surely be at least a dupe, and perhaps even a traitor. Early in the war the United States began the super-secret Manhattan Project, a crash program to develop the atomic bomb. It was so secretive that even Roosevelt's (later) vice president, Harry Truman, was not told of the project. We now know that by 1943 the Soviets had initiated their own program, and looked to America for “assistance.”

  The Soviets sought that assistance in several ways, including through intense espionage. In fact, some scholars have determined that the Soviets could not have gotten the bomb without the work of a network of spies pilfering the Manhattan Project design.9 Less well known is that the Soviets at times openly sought materials that could aid their nuclear development. In some cases they did this quite directly, almost as if to see what they could get away with.

  One notable example, based on newly available Venona transcripts, was laid out in the seminal work The Venona Secrets.10 This episode could not have been justified as merely another component of aiding Stalin with conventional means to repel Hitler.

  On February 1, 1943, an American chemical company called Chemator received its first Soviet request for various forms of uranium. Harry Hopkins's Lend-Lease program had approved Soviet requests for other chemicals via Chemator. Of course, a request for uranium, the element necessary for producing a nuclear bomb, was something altogether different.

  The loyal Americans working at Chemator did not know of the secret American atomic-bomb project, but nonetheless went to the U.S. government as standard operating procedure for such an unusual request. They were fully willing to deny the request if Uncle Sam said so. Instead, Hopkins's Lend-Lease granted permission to give the Soviets what they asked for—specifically, 220 pounds of uranium nitrate, 220 pounds of uranium oxide, and 25 pounds of uranium metal.11

  With that green light, the Soviets went wild, one month later ordering tons of uranium. This caught the attention of General Leslie Groves, the colorful, fiery military director of the Manhattan Project. Groves voiced angry concern to Lend-Lease officials about what was being so easily approved for Soviet purchase. It seemed to Groves, an engineer as well as a military general, that Lend-Lease was going far beyond conventional assistance to a wartime ally. Later he went public with his concerns in testimony before Congress. The general complained that Lend-Lease officials were exerting a “great deal of pressure … to give the Russians everything they could think of,” including “this uranium material.” Groves said he had personally wanted to veto the requests, but Hopkins and crew were doing their best to push the orders through. “We didn't want this material shipped,” Groves said during his congressional in testimony, “yet they [Lend-Lease] kept coming back and coming back.”12

  Groves did not say, and the congressmen did not ask, to what extent “they” at “Lend-Lease” were being directed by the director of the program, Harry Hopkins, the president's close friend and adviser.

  The Soviets, of course, got their atomic bomb—in 1949, far quicker than anyone had anticipated. In a flash, America lost its nuclear monopoly, and Stalin suddenly had enormous bargaining power.

  “He Likes Me Better”

  As a liberal Democrat pursuing the greatest expansion of federal power in the history of the republic, Franklin Roosevelt was like a magnet to people on the left side of the political spectrum. They surrounded him, enthusiastically signing up for the progressive cause. Many of these individuals, of course, were red-white-and-blue, God-and-country Democrats—obviously, in no way Communists. But there were others, some within the president's close orbit, who had Soviet interests at heart, or who at the very least were sympathetic to the Soviets. This made the task of dealing with the world's multiple threats even more difficult for the non-Communist/anti-Communist Democrats.

  That task was exacerbated as Stalin himself underwent a makeover at the hands of friends in the White House and certain left-leaning factions of the American press. Soon the Marxist autocrat became known as “Uncle Joe,” an egregious term of endearment intended to hoodwink Americans into thinking that Stalin was a gentle ally.

  President Roosevelt frequently used the moniker. Though it is hard to say whether he coined the term, it is clear that FDR was describing this ruthless killer in ingratiating terms long before the war—that is, before such warm words could be justified as necessary to strengthen a formal military alliance. As early as January 1934, less than a year into his presidency, and shortly after he extended diplomatic recognition to Russia—a step refused by his predecessors, Democrat and Republican—FDR referred to Stalin as “His Excellency.”13

  The form of address was hardly necessary. The phrase might be acceptable if the authoritarian were a king, but he was not. He was a Communist despot. This was a harbinger of the unnecessarily flattering tone Roosevelt would adopt toward the totalitarian.

  Some FDR historians and biographers have portrayed a president deeply torn over “crossing the bridge” with the “devil” Stalin.14 In truth, Roosevelt seemed more often enchanted than conflicted by Stalin, as can be seen in the historical record. A search of the Presidential Documents reveals that FDR was frequently more upbeat than ambivalent about the Soviet dictator.15 The president very often used words of eye-opening personal affection.

  Only three months after Pearl Harbor, for example, FDR wrote a note to Winston Churchill in anticipation of his first meeting with Stalin. “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department,” FDR boasted to Churchill on March 18, 1942. “Stalin hates the guts of all your people. He thinks he likes me better.”16

  Roosevelt and Stalin had never met. How would FDR have surmised that the Soviet leader liked him? This must have been the impression the president had been receiving around the White House, almost surely from Harry Hopkins directly. Likewise, Roosevelt had probably received this word from Joe Davies, his former ambassador to the USSR, wh
om he continued to consult.17

  The British prime minister must have raised an eyebrow upon reading that missive.

  Franklin, Harry, and a “Hunch”

  Another telling incident along this troubled road occurred in August 1943. FDR was contemplating the counsel of one of his truly expert Soviet advisers, a man who had been his first Soviet ambassador, from 1933 to 1936, and who now presciently warned the president of the “domination of Europe by Stalin's communist dictatorship.”18

  Who was this far-sighted adviser? None other than William C. Bullitt.

  Bullitt had come a long way since his Bolshevik romance three decades earlier—since the kiss he had planted on Stalin's pockmarked cheek. He had awakened to the reality of Soviet Communism: the purges, the forced famine in the Ukraine, the pervasive terror and desire for conquest. Bullitt also recognized the horror of the Soviet assault on religion, and the painful thrust of Marxist-Leninist morality and expansionary ideology. He was now one of the shrewdest observers of the Soviet Union.19

  As early as 1941 Bullitt had begun warning FDR that Communists were a threat not only abroad but also within the president's midst. In a July 1, 1941, letter, he cautioned the president: “Communists in the United States are just as dangerous enemies as ever, and should not be allowed to crawl into our productive mechanism in order later to wreck it when they get new orders from somewhere abroad.” Bullitt most assuredly knew of what he was speaking. He had been on their side. He warned FDR of a Stalinist “Fifth Column,” and of “public or underground Communist Parties.”20

  Bullitt was inspiring proof of a liberal who saw the evidence and was duped no more. He had lived up to his Yale undergraduate billing as “most brilliant.” He was not only informed but also prophetic.

  Sadly, though, he was a prophet unrecognized in his own land. President Roosevelt had other, more influential advisers who took a decidedly different view of Joe Stalin. What Bullitt told the president was not what Roosevelt wanted to hear. FDR replied:

  Bill, I don't dispute your facts [or] the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not and that he doesn't want anything 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 won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.21

  A stunned Bullitt argued with the president, informing the Hyde Park patrician that he was dealing not with a British duke but rather with “a Caucasian bandit, whose only thought when he got something for nothing was that the other fellow was an ass.”

  This was Bullitt's not-so-subtle way of instructing the leader of the free world—his president and commander in chief—that he was being duped, or, even less subtly, being made into Uncle Joe's jackass. He tried to tell FDR that there was no “factual evidence” that Stalin was a good or changed man, and to think otherwise was to be guilty of “the fatal vice in foreign affairs—the vice of wishful thinking.”22

  FDR, however, felt differently. As Bullitt's account suggests, Roosevelt liked Stalin. The Caucasian bandit had struck him as a good guy just looking out for his country—one he would work with to advance democracy and peace.

  The president told Bullitt: “It's my responsibility, not yours, and I'm going to play my hunch.”

  “We Are Going to Get Along Very Well”

  FDR's “hunch” was terribly misguided. It was not mere wishful thinking but a fatally flawed diagnosis from start to finish. Indeed, his appraisal of Stalin was one of the most naïve assessments of any major foreign leader in the history of the American presidency.

  But few liberal historians bother to include that statement in their accounts of Roosevelt and his relationship with Joseph Stalin. And the rare historians who do quote FDR's “hunch” typically remove the sentence “Harry [Hopkins] says he's not,” putting in an ellipsis instead.23 Of course, the Hopkins line is the most damning part of an extremely damning quotation, since ample evidence suggests that Hopkins's loyalty may have been divided. It is as if historians have not wanted to validate any allegations of anti-Communists who have maintained that FDR was duped by some of his closest advisers.

  The FDR-Bullitt exchange is, as we will see, just one of many instances in which Roosevelt conveyed a woefully misguided impression of Stalin. Obviously, the commander in chief's top priority was to defeat Hitler, and he needed Stalin's help to do that. To that end, he correctly ensured flows of U.S. materiel to help the USSR fight Germany. Allying with the Soviet Union was certainly justified in the circumstances of world war, given the lack of better options.

  Still, FDR's misplaced trust in Stalin cannot be attributed entirely to a difficult foreign-policy decision made in the interest of America's national security. The situation is more complicated than that.

  Some historians have argued that Roosevelt knew that Stalin was a thug but tried to assuage him to keep the Soviet dictator happy and away from further mischief. Unfortunately, to make this case is to rely on assumptions that the historical record does not seem to support.

  It is not simply that FDR frequently stated that he thought he could work with Stalin and that Stalin was a reasonable and good man. The New Dealer went much further, working proactively to promote a positive image of Stalin in America—in his radio addresses, and also (as we will see in the next chapter) through books and even a major film.

  Particularly disturbing was a fireside chat Roosevelt delivered on Christmas Eve 1943, shortly after he got cozy with the Caucasian bandit at the Tehran conference. At a time when countless Russian Christians prepared to celebrate Christmas in the gulag—by then, upwards of 90 percent of Soviet churches, monasteries, priests, monks, bishops, and nuns had been eliminated or imprisoned 24—the American president offered this warm account of the Soviets to his fellow Americans:

  To use an American and somewhat ungrammatical colloquialism, I may say that “I got along fine” with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.25

  FDR had, in effect, placed a Christmas candle in the window for Uncle Joe. Not only had Roosevelt been fooled by Stalin, but now he was fooling tens of millions of his own countrymen, who hung on his every word as they gathered around their radios for these chats.

  Nor can it be argued that the president's glowing words were mere public diplomacy, intended to boost the American public's wartime morale. FDR spoke of Stalin precisely that way in private as well. Even in his private correspondence to Churchill, Roosevelt had taken to calling Stalin “Uncle Joe.”26

  Getting “Fresh” with “Uncle Joe”

  The Tehran conference offers a window into FDR's efforts to win the heart of Stalin. When the Big Three leaders met at noon on November 30, 1943, Roosevelt deployed a plan to loosen up Stalin. He had bought a birthday gift for Churchill. “Winston,” he said, as he huddled with Churchill, Stalin, and representatives, “I hope you won't be sore at me for what I am going to do.” He began ribbing Churchill, who, as FDR later put it, “just shifted his cigar and grunted.” The president turned to Stalin and whispered, with an impish smile, “Winston is cranky this morning, he got up on the wrong side of the bed.”27

  FDR seemed to strike a chord with the villainous tyrant—one that enlivened the president. As Roosevelt later recalled to his secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, “A vague smile passed over Stalin's eyes, and I decided I was on the right track.” FDR pushed on, “teasing” Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars. “It began to register with Stalin,” the president told Perkins with delight. “Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally Stalin broke into a deep hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light.”28

  Rew
arded for his efforts, and invigorated, FDR now ramped up the charisma: “I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him ‘Uncle Joe.’ He would have thought me fresh the day before, but that day he laughed and came over and shook my hand.” This broke the ice, said the president, with brotherly love set to follow: “From that day on, our relations were personal, and Stalin himself indulged in occasional witticism. The ice was broken and we talked like men and brothers.”29

  FDR would leave Tehran “moved” by what he perceived as brother Stalin's sincerity, and by what he called “Stalin's magnificent leadership” of Russia. The patrician was impressed that such magnificence could radiate from a mere peasant who hailed from “one of the least progressive parts of Russia.” “He is a very interesting man,” summed up the president. More than that, said FDR, Stalin “had an elegance of manner that none of the rest of us [at Tehran] had.”30

  Again and again we see Roosevelt mischaracterizing Stalin. How could the American president hail this brutal totalitarian's “magnificent” leadership skills and his “elegance of manner”? The question has vexed FDR's admiring biographers.