The Lost Peace

Robert Dallek

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062016713
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

"Robert Dallek brings to this majestic work a profound understanding of history, a deep engagement in foreign policy, and a lifetime of studying leadership. The story of what went wrong during the postwar period…has never been more intelligently explored." —Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Team of Rivals

Robert Dalleck follows his bestselling Nixon and Kissenger: Partners in Power and An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 with this masterful account of the crucial period that shaped the postwar world. As the Obama Administration struggles to define its strategy for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Dallek's critical and compelling look at Truman, Churchill, Stalin, and other world leaders in the wake of World War II not only offers important historical perspective but provides timely insight on America's course into the future.

PART I
A WILDERNESS CALLED PEACE

1
LONDON, MOSCOW, AND WASHINGTON: FRIENDS IN NEED

The only thing worse than having allies is not having them.

—Winston Churchill

In the second half of 1944, as Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin laid plans to confer in the coming year about postwar arrangements, they tried to mute long-standing suspicions of each other’s intentions. Without continuing cooperation that had brought them to the edge of victory against powerful German resistance across Russia, the Middle East, Italy, and now Western Europe, Churchill and Roosevelt foresaw another period of international tension that could provoke a new global conflict in the not too distant future. Stalin was deeply cynical about his allies and even less confident about avoiding another war unless he could arrange Soviet territorial and strategic advantages that would inhibit the reemergence of Western anticommunism.

Yet however much Churchill and Roosevelt hoped they might find means to blunt differences with Moscow, they were also doubtful that the national and ideological competition between East and West would disappear and sharply reduce their reliance on traditional military, economic, and political instruments of defense against an aggressive adversary.

Between January 31 and February 11, 1945, the Big Three, as the leaders of Britain, Russia, and the United States were described in the last year of the war, met at Malta and Yalta to plan the postwar organization of Europe and Asia. Outwardly, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and their staffs were pledged to sustained cooperation. And the conversations among them gave little indication that their unspoken assumptions about each other jeopardized the future peace. Yet their personal and national histories made them doubtful about their allies’ intentions and prospects for postwar harmony.

Churchill’s life experience inclined him to see future strife with Moscow. Churchill “lived for crisis,” the historian A. J. P. Taylor said. “He profited from crisis. And when crisis did not exist, he strove to invent it…. He did not share the contemporary belief in universal improvement nor did he await the coming of some secular Heaven on Earth. He strove to ameliorate hardships without ever expecting that they would be finally removed.”

From his earliest days, Churchill had been ambitious for power and dominance, ambitions that were reflected in a combative personal nature. Combined with his long-standing fear of the Soviet Communist threat to Great Britain’s world position, this character made Churchill as much an adversary as a compliant friend to Stalin and Russia.

Churchill was born in November 1874 into a British noble family. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the son of the seventh duke of Marlborough, was a distant figure, who had little involvement in his son’s rearing. To Winston, his absent father was more an idealized representative of the family’s values than a flesh-and-blood character with whom his son directly engaged. As a boy, Winston imbibed the heroic attitudes of his class and times. He dreamed of “military glory,” of the chance to join the ranks of Britain’s greatest heroes who had rescued the nation from defeat and humiliation and received the Victoria Cross from the sovereign. His ambitions resembled those of earlier generations of English noblemen. The principal difference between Winston and most of his privileged contemporaries is that they outgrew their boyhood fantasies, and he never relinquished them.

After a time at Harrow School, where he exhibited behavior problems and performed poorly, Winston sought admission to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, which he won on his third try, demonstrating his keen determination to become an army officer. At Sandhurst, he seemed to find his calling, earning high marks and graduating eighth in a class of 150 in 1894. Eager for action and adventure that would test his courage, satisfy a yearning to serve queen and country, and expose him to dramatic events that he could record for a larger public in articles and books that could make him famous, Churchill won postings to the British Empire’s outlying regions of Pakistan, Egypt, and the Sudan. He was not disappointed: exhilarating combat against seemingly primitive tribesmen gave him the chance to feel heroic and write newspaper stories that put him before potential British voters.

In 1899, Churchill unsuccessfully stood for a seat in Parliament. Although intent on trying again in the following year, he used the time between elections to serve as a correspondent in South Africa, where the British were fighting the Boer War. Captured by the Boers and held as a POW in Pretoria, he had the satisfaction of escaping after a month and then rejoining the army to participate in successful campaigns in South Africa and the Sudan.

In 1900, after returning to Britain, Churchill won election to Parliament as a Conservative, but soon found himself in opposition to his party’s support of the protective tariff. Shifting his allegiance to the Liberal Party, he established himself as a national figure, his reputation as an independent maverick feeding his self-image as a courageous battler who put principle above slavish party loyalty.

Between 1908 and 1919, Churchill held a succession of cabinet posts, including First Lord of the Admiralty during World War I, where he shouldered responsibility for a failed invasion of the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli that compelled his resignation and threw him into one of the periodic depressions he called his Black Dogs. Unlike so many other contemporaries, who saw the failure at Gallipoli and the larger cost of the war in blood and wealth as reasons to turn away from force in response to international conflicts, Churchill found relief in action. His down moods induced aggressive deeds more than passivity. In November 1915, he rejoined the army to command a battalion in France.

During subsequent service in the War Office, Churchill was an architect of the Allied intervention in Russia after the revolution of 1917 had turned into a conflict between Communists and defenders of the czarist regime. Churchill was no admirer of the Russian monarchy, but he thought that “Bolshevism should have been strangled in its cradle.” In the 1920s, he praised Italy’s Benito Mussolini for fighting communism. In his war memoirs, after Il Duce had become Adolf Hitler’s ally, suffered defeat, and been lynched in Milan by anti-Fascist partisans, Churchill described him as an “adventurer,” but justified his assumption of dictatorial powers as a response to communism.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, Churchill opposed the pacifism that had developed as a reaction to wartime losses and postwar European tensions threatening another war. In the 1930s, he was also critical of Spain’s Republican government, which was supported by the Communists in a civil war with Francisco Franco’s Fascists. In response to Italo-German intervention in the fighting that helped Franco defeat the Republic, Churchill favored a policy of strict Anglo-French neutrality.

Although he would later be on record as regretting the Fascist victory, Churchill continued to see Spain’s Marxists as a dreadful alternative. With the goal of “absolute power,” they had inflicted a reign of terror on Spain characterized by “wholesale cold-blooded massacres of their political opponents and of the well-to-do.” If he had been a Spaniard, he later wrote, the Communists “would have murdered me and my family and friends.” He continued to believe that Britain’s best course had been “to keep out of Spain.”

Churchill was as vocal about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, which he described after the Munich concessions to Hitler on Czechoslovakia as a “defeat without a war.” He said of Chamberlain, “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.”

Churchill wisely advocated rearmament against the Nazi menace, and favored an alliance with Soviet Russia to deter Hitler from an attack on Poland. The defense of Britain’s national security trumped his anticommunism. He condemned the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of August 1939 as “an unnatural act” that only totalitarian despots could have signed and then survived the repressed public condemnation in their respective countries. “The fact that such an agreement could be made,” Churchill asserted, “marks the culminating failure of British and French foreign policy and diplomacy over several years.”

Churchill also saw the pact as a demonstration of how “crafty men and statesmen” can be “misled by all their elaborate calculations.” It would take only twenty-two months for Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union to reveal the hollowness of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Governments with “no moral scruples,” Churchill added, gain only temporary advantages from betraying their true interests. “The Russian nation in its scores of millions were to pay a frightful forfeit.”

For Churchill, the 1930s have been described as the wilderness years, a time when his views were largely out of sync with the national mood that favored appeasement and avoidance of war at almost any cost. His determination to persevere through this difficult period rested on convictions that he was right and that his public positions would eventually be vindicated. His affinity for what he could see as heroic opposition to wrongheaded popular sentiment helped sustain him through a phase of personal depression over the public’s blindness and his political isolation.

The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 restored Churchill’s public influence. The war brought him back into the government as First Lord of the Admiralty. Germany’s conquest of Poland, followed by Hitler’s successful spring offensive in the West, toppled Chamberlain’s government and elevated Churchill to the post of prime minister, where he famously offered nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Churchill’s inspirational rhetoric at the time of Britain’s peril, especially after the fall of France in June 1940, when Britain stood alone against Hitler’s triumphant military, was partly a function of the inner struggle against despair that had plagued him throughout his life. In the aftermath of Hitler’s 1939–40 victories, when so many of his countrymen feared for Britain’s future, Churchill’s personal history made him the nation’s perfect leader. Having struggled through periods of defeat and renewed success, Churchill could impart a message of hope during a time of loss. He rallied Britain with words that he could have told himself in past moments of hopelessness. It was a marvelous example of how one man’s life experience could serve a whole nation in its struggle to chase away gloom and turn retreat into a sustained fight for victory.

In rallying the nation, Churchill drew once again not only on his personal experience with overcoming setbacks but also on his affinity for the hero’s role—the fulfillment of long-standing fantasies of power in the service of valiant deeds. “In my long political experience,” Churchill wrote later, “I had held most of the great offices of State, but I readily admit that the post which had now fallen to me [of prime minister] was the one I liked the best…. Power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.” Fighting Hitler perfectly suited Churchill’s attraction to a contest with someone he identified as pure evil. It gave him “enormous vitality.” He found the energy to work almost nonstop in his drive to destroy Hitler and the Nazis. They were ideal enemies for someone who craved a contest with wickedness that could give him the wherewithal to resist his affinity for depression and immobility.

In June 1941, after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Churchill unhesitatingly identified Britain as Stalin’s ally. “The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism,” Churchill declared in a radio address the night of Hitler’s attack on Russia. “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it.” But the realities of defeating Hitler required a different approach to the Soviet Union. The primary goal was “to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.” Churchill promised to fight him by land, sea, and air until “we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated his peoples from its yoke.”

When Churchill’s private secretary asked if his reputation as an arch anti-Communist was not being compromised by aid to Moscow, he replied, “Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler…. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” His implicit reference to Stalin as the devil was a telling expression of how he viewed the Soviet dictator: a useful ally in the struggle against Hitler and Nazism, but a ruthless tyrant nonetheless who after the war would likely revert to a reach for world power through the eclipse of Britain and the extension of communism around the globe.

In December 1941, when Stalin pressed British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, who had come to Moscow for conversations, to agree to postwar Soviet control of the Baltic states and eastern Poland, Churchill refused, telling Eden that the Soviets had acquired this territory “by acts of aggression in shameful collusion with Hitler. The transfer of the peoples of the Baltic states to Soviet Russia against their will would be contrary to all the principles for which we are fighting this war and would dishonour our cause.”

Yet in October 1944, with Soviet armies moving decisively into southeastern Europe, Churchill met with Stalin in Moscow to discuss the fate of the Balkans. The sixty-seven-year-old Churchill and the sixty-five-year-old Stalin showed the effects of age and the burdens of their wartime responsibilities. Churchill was short, fat, and stoop-shouldered, his ruddy complexion betraying his years of heavy alcohol consumption. A damaged left arm from a childhood accident, facial scars from a smallpox attack at the age of seven, a yellowish complexion, and tobacco-stained teeth made the diminutive Stalin a match for the imperfect Churchill.

Together, hunched over a table in the Kremlin, they cynically divided up responsibility for the postwar Balkans: the Soviets were to have 90 percent control in Rumania, 75 percent in Bulgaria, and 50 percent in Hungary and Yugoslavia, with an equal share of power for Britain, which would have 90 percent dominance in Greece along with the United States. Churchill suggested burning the paper on which they recorded what they called the percentages agreement. He feared the reaction to their disposal “of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner.” But Stalin, who had no qualms about eventual public knowledge of how great power arrangements were made, urged Churchill to keep the paper. In the same meetings, Churchill emphasized to Stalin how essential their friendship was to a future without war. “Perhaps it is the only thing that can save the peace for our children and grandchildren,” he said. “Hopes are high for the permanent results of victory,” he added.

The percentages agreement with Stalin speaks volumes about Churchill’s belief that unless he reined in Soviet ambitions in the Balkans by acknowledging their respective spheres of control, Moscow would impose itself on all the countries in the region. It was also Churchill’s way of buying big power peace at the cost of small nations’ autonomy. The division of power was the kind of language Churchill and Stalin understood. While Stalin agreed to Churchill’s proposal, it was only a temporary arrangement that served the war effort. Who controlled what in the Balkans, Stalin believed, would be decided not by a paper pledge but by who had troops on the ground. “How many divisions does the pope have?” Stalin famously asked an adviser who warned him against open verbal clashes with the Vatican.

Roosevelt was no less mindful of power considerations. In August 1943, almost two years after an Anglo-American agreement for joint research on atomic energy, and a year after development and manufacture of a bomb had begun, the president and prime minister signed an agreement promising not to use an atomic weapon against each other or against a third party without mutual consent. They also agreed not to share information about atomic development with another country unless both saw it as acceptable. It was an unspoken commitment to exclude the Soviet Union from knowledge that could help it build a bomb, or to give Britain a military advantage in a postwar Europe over which London and Moscow would presumably exercise greatest control.

A year later, after a second Anglo-American conference in Quebec to discuss postwar arrangements, Churchill and Roosevelt traveled to the president’s home at Hyde Park, New York, where they made their exclusion of Soviet access to their knowledge of atomic development more specific. In an aide-mémoire of a September 19, 1944, conversation, they agreed that the Russians were not to share in the control and use of atomic power. Because the Danish physicist Niels Bohr had urged both Churchill and Roosevelt to reach an agreement with Moscow on international control of atomic energy, they included a proviso that said, “Enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps should be taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information, particularly to the Russians.”

After discussing this agreement with the president, Vannevar Bush, the chairman of the president’s Military Policy Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote a coworker on the atomic project: “The President evidently thought he could join with Churchill in bringing about a US-UK postwar agreement on this subject by which it would be held closely and presumably to control the peace of the world.” Bush knew that atomic research had not been and could not remain the exclusive province of one or two nations. While Britain and the United States might win the race, currently against Germany, to build an atomic bomb, eventually scientists in other nations, who were part of an international community of atomic researchers, would duplicate what the British and Americans had achieved. Trying to exclude the Soviets from knowledge that London and Washington were forging ahead on atomic research would do little else than arouse old suspicions that the West intended to prepare itself for the defeat of communism.

Roosevelt’s suspicions of Stalin and Soviet intentions were never as strong as Churchill’s. Like Churchill, Roosevelt was part of a native aristocracy. It was a nobility of wealth, however, rather than bloodlines, even though Franklin’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, prided herself on being able to trace her ancestry back to European aristocrats and Mayflower émigrés. Unlike Churchill, who had spent his childhood largely in the care of hired help, Roosevelt’s boyhood was marked by close ties to his parents. His father, James Roosevelt, “showered him with attention … affectionately teaching him to sled, skate, toboggan, ride, fish, sail, and farm. Sara also doted on the boy, keeping diaries with almost daily records of his achievements,” as if she were anticipating his fame.

Like Churchill, Franklin also burned with ambition, although it seems to have been less the product of neediness or a compulsion to satisfy a yearning for attention, regard, and unqualified love. Franklin’s drive for distinction seems to have originated more in a sense of entitlement—a gentleman’s right to govern and see to the well-being of those less endowed than he was. Franklin Roosevelt’s idea of the presidency, some said, was Franklin Roosevelt in the presidency.

Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s reach for power and fame was not simply the birthright and altruism of a privileged man. Few of his classmates, who were also indulged by attentive parents and learned the obligations of Christian gentlemen at Groton and Harvard, devote...