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  Conrad Black, a highly sympathetic biographer of President Roosevelt, finds the Tehran episode “particularly alarming”—so much so that he does not want to believe it. Black somewhat dismissively notes that the episode is based on the account of Frances Perkins, though FDR told it to Perkins, and though, as Black acknowledges, Perkins was “generally a reliable source.” Black judges that the details of the story were “undoubtedly embellished”—not by Perkins but by FDR. Thus, says Black, any smidgen of “damage to Roosevelt's reputation” ought to come from the possibility that the president would be so “self-serving to have given such a fraudulent account to a valued colleague.”31

  In fact, nothing from this account is hard to believe. There is no reason to think it was fraudulent. No one is on record claiming that it was fraudulent, including the subject and the witness. To the contrary, it is consistent with FDR's record toward Stalin.

  Again, it is understandable that Roosevelt, locked in an unavoidable alliance with the Soviet Union, would do what he could to try to forge a relationship with Stalin for the sake of America and its vital foreign relations. Using his charm to soften the tyrant, the president would make the best of a bad situation in order to advance peace. As Frances Perkins put it, “He had gone prepared to like Stalin,” but he also had gone “determined to make himself liked.”32 That door had to swing both ways. To focus on this aspect of Roosevelt's career is not to dismiss his entire presidency, which most presidential scholars—this historian included33—have judged successful, even great.

  Even conceding this, however, one must acknowledge that FDR never seemed to see the brutality of Stalin. The evidence, going back to the first twelve months of his presidency, sometimes suggests admiration. And it is not as if indications of Soviet totalitarianism were not available at the time. Remember, FDR's Democratic predecessor Woodrow Wilson had recognized the viciousness of the Bolsheviks years earlier.

  After discounting Frances Perkins's account of Tehran, Black does not deal with Roosevelt's own, written account of the meeting one year later in a letter to Churchill. In a note dated November 30, 1944, FDR celebrated: “I shall never forget the party with you and UJ [Uncle Joe] a year ago and we must have more of them that are even better.”34

  The president wanted more such unforgettable parties with Uncle Joe—now nicknamed with an even more affectionate “UJ,” another FDR term of endearment.35 Publicly and privately, Franklin Roosevelt conveyed little skepticism toward the mad tyrant.

  In fact, in the days immediately following Tehran, Roosevelt estimated that after the war his biggest area of difficulty would involve not Stalin and the Soviets but Churchill and the British. “The President said he thought we would have more trouble in the Post War world with the English than with the Russians,” recorded Attorney General Francis Biddle.36

  “Everything” Stalin Wanted

  The key question is whether President Roosevelt went overboard to get Uncle Joe to like him—and if so, when and where.

  On this, Frances Perkins had more to say. Conrad Black does not report these interesting thoughts either, despite the fact that they can be found in the exact paragraphs from which he quotes other Perkins material. FDR lamented to his labor secretary that “for the first three days [at Tehran] I made absolutely no progress. I couldn't get any personal connection with Stalin, although I had done everything he asked me to do [emphasis mine].”37

  If Roosevelt had done everything Stalin asked of him, that would be a real problem.

  FDR did not stop there. He continued expressing his frustrations to Perkins: “I had come there [to Tehran] to accommodate Stalin. I felt pretty discouraged because I thought I was making no personal headway [emphasis mine].”38

  The president had gone to Tehran to accommodate Stalin? Yes.

  That was Perkins's prelude to FDR's account that followed—his teasing of Churchill and breaking the ice with Stalin, his getting “fresh” with “UJ.”

  No matter how noble FDR's wartime intentions—and his wartime goal was indisputably a good one—real dangers lay in his misjudgment of Joseph Stalin, particularly if the president did “everything [Stalin] asked me to do” and whatever he could to “accommodate Stalin.”

  Consider the recent conclusion of historian Wilson D. Miscamble:

  He [FDR] either downplayed or simply failed to appreciate the ideological chasm that divided the democracies from Stalin's totalitarian regime. He largely ignored the evidence of Soviet culpability for the appalling Katyn Massacre [in Poland] and, in general, he refrained from criticizing the Soviets.… Roosevelt's complaisance cannot be explained away simply by his recognition of the military necessities for defeating Germany. It rested upon the tragic misperception that he could build a bond of friendship with his Soviet opposite.39

  It is difficult to dispute any of Miscamble's statement.

  Roosevelt's poor judgment of Stalin would have tragic consequences. What was the source of his misperception? It seems clear that FDR was misled—that is, duped—into a terribly naïve view of Stalin at least in part by bad advisers, some of whom may have had loyalties elsewhere.

  Katyn Cover-up

  In the previous quotation, Wilson Miscamble makes reference to another regrettable FDR misjudgment, one frequently ignored by historians: the president's refusal to concede Soviet culpability in the Katyn Wood massacre, one of the worst war crimes of the twentieth century.

  The roots of this atrocity date back to September 1939, when the Nazis and Bolsheviks jointly annihilated and partitioned Poland. The Soviets seized thousands of Polish military officers as prisoners of war. The Poles’ fate was sealed on March 5, 1940, when Stalin signed their death warrant, condemning 21,857 of them to “the supreme penalty: shooting.” The surviving NVKD document, sent by the diabolical Lavrenti Beria to “Comrade Stalin,” features Stalin's handwritten signature on top, followed by signatures from Politburo members Marshal Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Anastas Mikoyan. Corresponding signatures also appear in the left margin from “M. [Mikhail] Kalinin” and “L. [Lazar] Kaganovich.”40

  In that spring of 1940 the prisoners were taken to three primary execution sites, the most infamous of which became the namesake of the crime: the Katyn Forest, located twelve miles west of Smolensk, Russia. There, these Polish men were slaughtered like farm animals. The Bolsheviks covered their crime with a thin layer of dirt.

  In April 1943, after the Germans had betrayed the Hitler-Stalin Pact and advanced with lightning speed into Soviet territory, they discovered the mass graves and immediately tried to turn the atrocity into a wartime propaganda coup to split the Big Three Allies. The Soviets, being masters of lies, responded by blaming the massacre on Hitler and his goons. Stuck in between was the rest of the civilized world, which sought to determine which of the two sets of devils had done the dirty deed.

  Not helping the situation on the American side was the Office of War Information (OWI). This group was penetrated by Communists and filled with liberal dupes, who through their information campaigns generated many more dupes among the wider public.

  OWI was one of the Communists’ greatest infiltration successes of the 1930s and 1940s.41 Elmer Davis, a liberal, had been a popular radio commentator when FDR hired him to run OWI, where he was plainly duped on matters related to the Russians and Poland, and on Katyn especially. Davis and his agency's reporting on certain aspects of Poland's experience was so egregious that as early as June 1943 it caught the attention of Ambassador Jan Ciechanowski of the Polish government-in-exile and also of Congressman John Lesinski of Michigan. Congressman Lesinski, another Democrat alert to the chicanery of Communists, went to the House floor to denounce OWI's lousy coverage of the Soviet crimes in Poland. Lesinski's complaints riled Davis.

  Lesinski and Ciechanowski decried the Communist penetration at OWI, especially the Polish-language section. These charges were accurate, though Davis attacked them as “lies.”42 The head of OWI was apparently unable to distinguish the kings
of lies (in Moscow) from the truth-tellers (in America).43

  OWI's dubious reporting on Katyn became a scandal. Davis had personally gone on-air giving the Soviet spin. Polish exile groups rightly accused OWI of a blackout on the real story of Kremlin complicity. Ambassador Ciechanowski said OWI's broadcasts on Katyn were so bad that they “could only be termed pro-Soviet propaganda.” He maintained that “notorious pro-Soviet propagandists and obscure foreign communists and fellow travelers were entrusted with these broadcasts.” This further infuriated Elmer Davis.44

  Aside from OWI, other leftists followed the Soviet line on Katyn. One was Corliss Lamont, who in May 1943 produced a pamphlet dismissing the Katyn Wood massacre as a “Nazi-inspired charge.”45 Lamont's response was no surprise, given his dim view of Poland, which he had portrayed as a “fascist” aggressor toward the USSR in Russia Day by Day.46

  So where did President Roosevelt stand on Katyn?

  The president was inclined to give “UJ” the benefit of the doubt. Nonetheless, he realized the need to delegate an official who could take a close look. In 1944 he dispatched George Earle as a presidential special emissary on the Balkans to conduct an investigation into Katyn.

  George Howard Earle III was an interesting character. Born in December 1890, he had been an excellent athlete, outdoorsman, adventurer, and all-around fun-loving guy. He first served FDR as a minister to Austria in 1933 and 1934 before being elected governor of Pennsylvania. He served one term as governor, from 1935 to 1939, and then during World War II he became a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. President Roosevelt chose his fellow Democrat as emissary to the Balkans in part because Earle maintained informed contacts there, especially in Bulgaria and Romania.

  Tasked with investigating Katyn, Earle soon learned the obvious truth: the Soviets had created the killing field. But when he brought his news home, FDR was not exactly agreeable. The president had already consulted with Elmer Davis's boys at OWI, and by this point he had made it a habit to turn a blind eye toward things anti-Soviet—especially anything that impugned Stalin's “elegance,” “magnificence,” and “stalwart good humor.” Earle had been warned about this, as he later admitted in testimony during a congressional investigation of Katyn. An old friend, Joe Levy of the New York Times, had warned him: “George, you do not know what you are going to get over there [in the White House]. Harry Hopkins has complete domination over the president and the whole atmosphere over there is ‘pink.’”47

  Earle learned soon enough what he was going to get. He made his case to FDR: “About this Katyn massacre, Mr. President. I just cannot believe that the American president and so many people still think it is a mystery or have any doubt about it. Here are these pictures. Here are these affidavits and here is the invitation of the German government to let the neutral Red Cross go in there and make their examination. What greater proof could you have?”48

  Earle was exactly right, as the Soviets decades later would concede under Mikhail Gorbachev. But Roosevelt disagreed, replying: “George, they [the Nazis] could have rigged things up. The Germans could have rigged things up.”49 FDR was accepting the Soviet line.

  As Earle put it, Roosevelt was adamant that the Katyn claims were “entirely German propaganda and a German plot.” The president said to his special emissary: “I'm absolutely convinced that the Russians didn't do this.”

  An amazed Earle responded: “Mr. President, I think this evidence is over-whelming.”50 It was.

  And it was also no great surprise. The Soviets had been shipping captured Poles into Russian territory from the first months after the joint Soviet-German invasion of Poland in late 1939. This was hardly a secret. FDR (or his staff) could have opened the April 15, 1940, New York Times and read, “The Soviet authorities are transporting a large part of the population of Eastern Poland into inner Russia.” Surely the Poles were not being escorted to a tea party with Uncle Joe at the Kremlin. They were given “only fifteen minutes to leave their homes,” added the Times, and “even seriously ill persons are forced into the unheated emigration trains.”51

  But FDR refused to believe George Earle's report of Soviet war crimes against Polish military officers. Earle saw Roosevelt's denial of Katyn as a microcosm of an even greater and more dangerous denial. The emissary expressed his trepidation of the overall “Russian situation,” describing how the USSR had done its best to “deceive” the American people. The Soviet leadership, he told FDR, had done this not only with Katyn but “also primarily, the most important of all, by this dreadful book of Joe Davies, Mission to Moscow.” This “dreadful” book was written by FDR's former ambassador to the Soviet Union. Davies's book had “made Stalin out to be a benign Santa Claus,” said Earle, and had sadly “made such an impression on the American people.”52 (Here, Earle could not have known that he was digging himself in an even deeper hole, since, as we shall see in the next chapter, the president was head of the Davies fan club, eager to promote the book on a grand scale.)

  FDR was getting annoyed with Earle. “George,” the president lectured his fellow Democrat, “you have been worried about Russia ever since 1942. Now let me tell you. I am an older man than you and I have had a lot of experience.” Roosevelt then explained why his colleague's concerns were overblown.

  The emissary again pressed the evidence on Katyn, urging the president to “please look over” the photos and affidavits. Roosevelt did, but to no avail. George Earle later expressed his great frustration with the president, saying he had felt “hopeless.”53

  The affair did not end gently. When Earle asked Roosevelt for permission to go public with his concerns about Katyn, Uncle Joe, and the workers’ paradise, he got a testy rebuke from the grandfatherly New Dealer. On March 24, 1945, FDR wrote coldly to his fellow Democrat:

  I have noted with concern your plan to publicize your unfavourable opinion of one of our allies, at the very time when such a publication from a former emissary of mine might do irreparable harm to our war effort.… To publish information obtained in those positions without proper authority would be all the greater betrayal.… I specifically forbid you to publish any information or opinion about any ally that you may have acquired while in office or in the service of the United States Navy.54

  If the stern message was not clear enough, it was followed by a gesture far more disconcerting—an almost unbelievable response that FDR hagiographers have ignored for seven decades. According to Earle, shortly after he received this letter from the president, he was greeted by two FBI agents while fishing on a remote pond in Maryland. The agents delivered a letter announcing the former governor's immediate assignment to the island of Samoa, seven thousand miles away, where he had been appointed assistant head of the Samoan Defense Group. The president himself had made the assignment though the U.S. Navy.

  FDR had exiled his old friend.55

  Earle's surviving son candidly tells this story today. The son says that his father was bitterly disappointed, and “very upset that the president had done that to him.” “I think it was very unusual and very autocratic,” says his son. “Because, I mean, in a democracy you can't do that sort of thing, but the president thought in wartime he could do it and he did it. Of course, he got away with it.”56

  February 1945: Yalta

  Franklin Roosevelt's misperception, his obviously misplaced trust in “Uncle Joe.” was nowhere as destructive as at the Yalta Conference. The most damaging of FDR's dealings with Stalin came there, that first week of February 1945.

  One agreement signed at Yalta provided for “free and unfettered elections … on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot” in the nations of Eastern Europe. But Stalin and his cronies snapped the agreement like a twig. For the next forty-plus years they made Eastern Europe the Soviet Communist bloc, with the totalitarian USSR dominating the historic, proud nations of the region, installing puppet leaders like Georgi Dimitroff in Bulgaria.

  It should have been no surprise that Stalin would break his vow of elec
tions. President Roosevelt—and certainly his advisers—should have known the Soviets’ record of cynically exploiting words like “democracy” and “elections” without meaning them. The Soviets, in fact, had already staged phony elections in Poland, back in October 1939, one month after the USSR invaded eastern Poland. Then, as always, the discussion of elections was a sham.57

  Thus, many have charged that FDR and crew “sold out” Eastern Europe at Yalta. Some scholars have made this case, and even Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush publicly expressed that perspective (in some form).58 The view is especially common among the people of Eastern Europe. Nowhere is Yalta more hated, and FDR more cursed, than in Poland, even today.

  Of course, not everyone agrees that Roosevelt was guilty of “selling out” Eastern Europeans. “The claim that Roosevelt betrayed Eastern Europe at Yalta,” writes Jacob Heilbrunn, a fair, thoughtful writer from the political Left, “is an old right-wing canard.” He dismisses the thought as “cheap historical revisionism,” as a “slander against Roosevelt,” that “belong[s] to the Ann Coulter school of history.”59 (Actually, long before Ann Coulter criticized FDR on Yalta, other popular conservative authors did so; for instance, John Flynn, in his 1948 book The Roosevelt Myth, called Yalta “The Final Betrayal.”) Heilbrunn notes that the territory FDR supposedly ceded to the Soviets at Yalta “was already in their possession.” He says that Roosevelt had no choice but to cut a deal with Stalin, since doing otherwise would have “seriously jeopardized” the first priority: the common battle to defeat Nazi Germany.