A constructed Peace The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963
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| Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (New York: Dutton, 1975), p. 690.
8. This is one of a number of key areas in the interpretation of Cold War history where left and right join hands in misconception. On the left, it is commonly assumed that at Yalta Poland, and a fortiori the rest of eastern Europe, were accepted as part of the Soviet sphere of influence. The "Yalta policy" is seen in this quarter as a realistic accommodation to Soviet power in this part of the world, a sensible recognition of Soviet security requirements, and an essential part of a policy of postwar allied cooperation. The West is condemned, not for accepting the Soviet domination of eastern Europe, but for trying to "undo" the Yalta agreement, especially after Roosevelt died Harry Truman took over as president. For some representative examples: Athan Theoharis, "Roosevelt and Truman on Yalta: The Origins of the Cold War," Political Science Quarterly 87 (1972): 220-221; Diane Clemens, Yalta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 215, 269, 279; Robert Messer, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 42, 50-51, 56-58. On the right, it is also commonly assumed that Yalta represented the West's acceptance of a Soviet free hand in eastern Europe, only this time the policy itself is condemned. See especially Edward Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland (New York: Wiley, 1958), pp. 350-351, 442-444. The argument is still very much alive in Europe today. The idea that at Yalta the "Anglo-Saxons" had divided up Europe with Russia has long been a common view especially among French Gaullists; see, for example, Charles de Gaulle's own Mémoires d'espoir: le renouveau (Paris: Plon, 1970), p. 239. The myth plays an even more important role today in eastern Europe. In the early 1990s, this interpretation of Yalta as a betrayal of eastern Europe was used, particularly by the Czech president, Vaclav Havel, but by other eastern European leaders as well, to shame the West into extending NATO security guarantees eastward. See "Czech Leader Pushes for Open NATO," New York Times, October 22, 1993, and especially the references to Havel's speech on the "third betrayal of the West," Munich and Yalta being the first two "betrayals" and the refusal to expand NATO being the third. For the use of the argument by other countries in the region, see "NATO Commitment Sought by Poland," New York Times, December 12, 1993; "Hungary is First Nation to Accept NATO Membership Compromise," New York Times, January 9, 1994. 9. See Bruce Kuklick, American Policy and the Division of Germany: The Clash with Russia over Reparations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), pp. 103-113; John Lewis Gaddis, United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 189-197. 10. William Leahy, I Was There (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950), p. 323; Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1950), p. 869. 11. See, for example, Cadogan diary, February 10 and 11, 1945, and Cadogan to Halifax, February 20, 1945, in David Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (New York: Putnam, 1972), pp. 707, 709, 717. See also Roy Douglas, From War to Cold War, 1942-1948 (New York: St. Martin's, 1981), pp. 71, 73. Churchill's reaction was typical. "I am profoundly impressed with the friendly attitude of Stalin and Molotov," he wrote Attlee on February 17. "It is a different Russian world to any I have seen hitherto." Quoted in Joseph Foschepoth, "Britische Deutschlandpolitik zwischen Jalta und Potsdam," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 30 (1982): 675 n. 2. 12. Roosevelt to Churchill, March 11 and March 29, 1945, in Roosevelt and Churchill, pp. 668, 689. "Facing-saving formulas": Theoharis, "Roosevelt and Truman on Yalta," p. 221. 13. Note, for example, the tone of Byrnes's comments in a meeting with Molotov on September 16, 1945, FRUS 1945, 2:196-197, and also Harriman's views, cited in John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p. 17. Even at the height of the Cold War, American leaders were very much in favor of a solution of this sort. Secretary of State Dulles, for example, told the Soviet foreign minister in October 1957 that the USSR was "entitled to a sense of security," and that "if a relationship could be developed with other bordering countries similar to that between Finland and the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, with a sense of independence and yet close relations, this would be a very acceptable solution." Dulles-Gromyko meeting, October 5, 1957, Declassified Documents References System [DDRS] 1991/925. Dulles in fact had long favored a solution whereby Soviet relations with the Eastern European countries would evolve into "something like a Finnish relationship." Dulles-Churchill meeting, April 12, 1954, Dulles Papers [DP], White House Memoranda series [WHM], box1, Meetings with the President, Eisenhower Library [DDEL], Abilene, Kansas. See also Dulles memorandum (for Eisenhower), September 6, 1953, FRUS 1952-54, 2:460; Dulles meeting with Bulganin and Khrushchev in 1955, in Merchant's "Recollections of the Geneva Summit," Merchant Papers, box 2, Mudd Library [ML], Princeton; and Dulles at Chiefs of Mission meeting, May 7, 1957, FRUS 1955-57, 4:597. Note also Dulles's evident approval in 1947 of the idea of a "spheres of influence" arrangement for Europe; see n. xxx below. On this issue, see also Eduard Mark, "American Policy toward Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1946: An Alternative Interpretation," Journal of American History 68 (September 1981): 313-336, and Fraser Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York: Oxford, 1986), p. 131. 14. In November 1944, Roosevelt told Arthur Bliss Lane, a career diplomat who had just been named ambassador to Poland, that Stalin's idea of a "Poland under Russian influence," which could serve "as a bulwark to protect the Soviet Union against further aggression," was "understandable." In June of that year (according to Polish ambassador Ciechanowski's memoirs), the president had told the non-Communist Polish leader Mikolacyzk that Russia could "swallow up Poland if she could not reach an understanding on her terms," and that "when a thing becomes unavoidable, one should adapt oneself to it." A few days later, he reminded the Polish representatives that "you cannot risk war with Russia. What alternative remains? Only to reach agreement." Arthur Bliss Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to the American People (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1948), pp. 58 (quoting Ciechanowski's account), 67. 15. Sto sorok besed s Molotovym: Iz dnevnika F. Chuyeva [One Hundred Forty Conversations with Molotov: From the Diary of F. Chyev] (Moscow: Terra, 1991), p. 76, extracts translated in Woodford McClellan, "Molotov Remembers," Cold War International History Project [CWIHP] Bulletin, no. 1 (Spring 1992), p. 19. For a full translation, see Felix Chuev, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, Conversations with Felix Chuev, ed. Albert Resis (Chicago: Dee, 1993). 16. For the negotiations, see FRUS 1945, 5:110-210. 17. Roosevelt to Churchill, March 11, 1945, in Roosevelt and Churchill, p. 668. See also ibid., pp. 674, 690. 18. See Roosevelt and Churchill, documents 510, 512, 513, 515, 517, 518, 528, 529 and 534. 19. Roosevelt to Churchill, March 29, 1945, ibid., p. 690. 20. The Declaration is to be understood as a gesture which, as Secretary of State Stettinius said at the time, would serve "to reassure public opinion in the United States and elsewhere." Quoted in Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy, p. 136n. Alperovitz's general argument about the Declaration (pp. 135-136) is quite persuasive. 21. For the basic story, see Messer, End of an Alliance, chapters 3 and 4, and esp. pp. 52, 56-58. Messer says that what Byrnes was doing was at variance with Roosevelt's Yalta policy of simply trying "to put a good face on the division of Europe" (p. 57), although much of his argument is to the effect that Roosevelt was still pulling the strings. See esp. p. 60, where he comments on FDR's approval of "his salesman's" performance. The point that the manipulation of American public opinion via Byrnes was meant to put pressure on Russia was developed explicitly by Harbutt, Iron Curtain, pp. 86-92. For Roosevelt's own speech on Yalta, see Department of State Bulletin [DOSB], March 4, 1945, pp. 321-326. Messer, moreover, implies that Byrnes was bamboozled by Roosevelt, but this was not the case: Byrnes clearly understood the heart of the Yalta agreement. See the notes of his background meeting on February 26, 1945, with Arthur Krock of the New York Times, Krock Papers [KP], Box 1, p. 153ff, ML. 22. Harriman to Stettinius, March 25, 1945, and Stalin to Roosevelt, April 9, 1945, FRUS 1945, 5:180, 201-204. 23. Truman to Stalin, April 23, 1945, FRUS 1945, 5:258-259; Harry Truman, Memoirs: Year of Decisions (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955), p. 81. 24. White House meeting, April 23, 1945, FRUS 1945, 5:252-255. This did not mean that he was ready to face the possibility that a showdown with Russia might lead to armed conflict, but simply that the United States was not so dependent on Soviet military cooperation in the war that it could not afford to risk Russian displeasure. 25. Truman, Year of Decisions, pp. 79-82. 26. See Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 32-33. Note also Byrnes's views, cited in Lloyd Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, from Munich to Yalta (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1993), pp. 242-243, and Truman's comment on May 25 that every time he read the Yalta agreements, "he found new meanings in them." Robert Ferrell, ed., Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), entry for May 25, 1945, p. 28. 27. Hopkins-Stalin meeting, May 27, 1945, FRUS Potsdam, 1:38-39. See also Douglas, War to Cold War, p. 96. 28. On U.S. passivity on the Polish question at this time, see Davis, The Cold War Begins, pp. 237, 244-248, 251; Geir Lundestad, The American Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, 1943-1947: Universalism in an Area not of Essential Interest to the United States (New York: Humanities Press, 1975), pp. 111, 206-211; and Harbutt, Iron Curtain, p. 115. The U.S. ambassador to Poland, Arthur Bliss Lane, had made no secret of his view that the American government should take a tough line on the issue. But his advice was ignored, and (as he himself put it) "for some reason Mr. Byrnes did not consider my presence necessary" at Potsdam. Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed, p. 128. 29. Note especially his anger at actions taken by the U.S. representative in Bulgaria in August 1945, an attitude at variance with America's public stance at the time. Michael Boll, Cold War in the Balkans: American Foreign Policy and the Emergence of Communist Bulgaria, 1943-1947 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), p. 150. 30. Quoted in Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 129. Yergin has Dulles at this point blocking this policy by threatening "a public attack on Byrnes as an appeaser," and this is in line with a common interpretation which holds that Byrnes was simply interested in avoiding trouble by accommodating Soviet demands, and that he changed course in early 1946 only because the domestic political climate within the United States had shifted sharply in an anti-Soviet direction. But a more recent study has shown that even at this time Byrnes was taking a tougher line on eastern Europe than Dulles, who, incidentally, was already thinking not in Wilsonian but rather in spheres of influence terms. See Ronald Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (New York: Free Press, 1982), pp. 281-282, 314-321. Note also Dulles's reply to a suggestion in June 1947 that it might be "possible and desirable to reach an agreement dividing Europe at the Elbe." He by no means rejected the idea out of hand, but replied simply that "it would be quite impossible to attain this effectively by agreement until we have first attained it in fact." Council on Foreign Relations discussion, June 6, 1947, p. 10, Dulles Papers, 1947: Council of Foreign Ministers File, ML. 31. On the Moscow agreement on Rumania and Bulgaria, see Davis, Cold War Begins, pp. 328-329, and Messer, End of an Alliance, pp. 153-154. The closest students of American policy in late 1945 present a good deal of evidence demonstrating U.S. passivity toward eastern Europe and the government's recognition of special Soviet interests in the area, but they are reluctant to come out and say directly that the United States was writing off the area. Lundestad (p. 102) even says explicitly that the Moscow agreement did not mean that America was "writing off" the region "as being completely within the Soviet sphere." Routine declarations about democracy and free elections are taken quite seriously, especially by Davis, even though it hard to see what impact they had on anything that was actually done. Eduard Mark also thinks that Byrnes did not "abandon" Rumania and Bulgaria at Moscow. The secretary's aim, he says, was to institutionalize an "open" Soviet sphere, where the local countries would have a good deal of domestic political autonomy "in the hope of preventing its consolidation into an exclusive sphere" marked by tight control exercised through Communist police states. Mark, "American Policy," p. 329, esp. notes 82 and 83. My own view is that while a "open sphere" was for Byrnes and most American policy-makers the optimal solution, they did not really think that it was within reach; and that Byrnes, in particular, accepting realities for what they were, was willing in effect to accept total Soviet domination of the area. 32. Byrnes remarks of July 24, 1945, quoted in Walter Brown diary, cited in Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 118. 33. See Pruessen, Dulles, p. 319. 34. See William Taubman, Stalin's American Policy: From Entente to Détente to Cold War (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 124; Lundestad, American Non-Policy, p. 245; and Yergin, Shattered Peace, pp. 146, 150. 35. See especially Leffler, Preponderance of Power; Lundestad, American Non-Policy, esp. pp. 73-106; and Mark, "American Policy." 36. Walter Brown diary entry, July 24, 1945, quoted in Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 118. 37. See Kuklick, American Policy, chapter 2, and Gaddis, United States and the Origins of the Cold War, chapter 4. 38. See especially Paul Hammond, "Directives for the Occupation of Germany: The Washington Controversy," in Harold Stein, ed., American Civil-Military Decisions: A Book of Case Studies (University of Alabama Press, 1963). 39. John Morton Blum, ed., From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of War, 1941-1945 (Boston, 1967), p. 351. On the Morgenthau Plan, see especially Warren Kimball, ed., Swords or Ploughshares? The Morgenthau Plan for Defeated Nazi Germany, 1943-1946 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1976). 40. Quoted in Edward N. Peterson, The American Occupation of Germany: Retreat to Victory (Detroit: Wayne State, 1977), p. 21. 41. On the "unconditional surrender" policy, see Michael Balfour, "The Origins of the Formula 'Unconditional Surrender' in World War II," Armed Forces and Society 5 (1979): 281-301, and Raymond O'Connor, Diplomacy for Victory: FDR and Unconditional Surrender (New York: Norton, 1971). 42. Stettinius to Winant, April 10, 1945, FRUS 1945, 3:221. Note also the judgment of Emile Despres, the State Department's adviser on German economic affairs. Apart from the Yalta conference, Despres wrote, "the progress to date on economic planning for Germany has been slight. Not only has discussion at the intergovernmental level been meager, but divergences among government departments on basic issues have prevented the formulation of an agreed American position." Despres memorandum, February 15, 1945, ibid., p. 412. Roosevelt himself had instructed the State Department in September 1944 not to sound out the British or the Russians on the treatment of German industry after the war, and the following month he told the Secretary that he disliked "making detailed plans for a country which we do not yet occupy." Roosevelt to Hull, September 29 and October 20, 1944, FRUS Yalta, pp. 155, 158. See also Gaddis, United States and the Origins of the Cold War, pp. 106-107; Robert Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), chapter 16, esp. pp. 227-228; Clemens, Yalta, p. 38; and Hans-Peter Schwarz, Vom Reich zur Bundesrepublik (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1966), pp. 105-119. 43. Draft instrument for the unconditional surrender of Germany, July 25, 1944, FRUS Yalta, pp. 110-118; Grew to Truman and Matthews-McCloy telephone conversation, both May 12, 1945, and Matthews to Murphy, May 14, 1945, with Bedell Smith to Hull, May 10, 1945, in FRUS 1945, 3:289-90, 294-7. 44. Protocol on zones of occupation and the administration of Greater Berlin, September 12, 1944, FRUS Yalta, pp. 118-121. On this issue, see especially William Franklin, "Zonal Boundaries and Access to Berlin," World Politics 16 (October 1963): 1-31. 45. Stettinius to Roosevelt, January 19, 1945, and Roosevelt to Stettinius, January 23, 1945, FRUS 1945, 3:173, 173n. Note, also the discussion in a high-level meeting, March 15, 1945, ibid., p. 454. For the text of the November 14, 1944, agreement, see FRUS Yalta, pp. 124-127. 46. Murphy, Diplomat among Warriors, pp. 231-233. 47. See, for example, Anderson to Collier, July 16, 1945; Collier to Warner, July 30, 1945; Bullard to Eden, July 11, 1945, with Eden Minute; and especially Eden to Churchill, July 17, 1945; in Documents on British Policy Overseas [DBPO], series I, vol. 1, The Conference at Potsdam, July- August 1945 (London: HMSO, 1984), pp. 322-323, 1201, 166, 168, 353. 48. See Bruce Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 255-270; for British views, see DBPO I, 1:10, 29-30, 171, 542, 544, 547. 49. McClellan, "Molotov Remembers," pp. 17, 19. 50. See especially the wording of the "Agreement Regarding Entry of the Soviet Union into the War Against Japan," February 11, 1945, FRUS Yalta, p. 984, and Molotov's remarks in a meeting with Bevin, September 23, 1945, DBPO I, 2:317-318. 51. Potsdam conference, plenary meeting, July 23, 1945, FRUS Potsdam, 2:303, 313. 52. Potsdam conference, plenary meeting, July 23, 1945, DPBO I, 1:585. 53. Stimson diary for July 23, 1945, FRUS Potsdam, 2:260n. 54. Eden to Churchill, July 17, 1945, DBPO I, 1:352-354; Victor Rothwell, Directory: polisci -> faculty -> trachtenberg trachtenberg -> The United States, France, and the Question of German Power, 1945-1960 polisci -> Transylvania university committee on program and curriculum polisci -> Pos 6933: History of American Political Thought Course Description polisci -> Urban politics political science polisci -> International political economy polisci -> J. B. Weter History Honors Fellowship, Stanford University (1965-66) polisci -> Handbook on Migration and Social Policy trachtenberg -> The Economic Decline and Soviet Foreign Policy trachtenberg -> Assessing Soviet Economic Performance during the Cold War: a failure of Intelligence? Download 2.48 Mb. Share with your friends:
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