The Daughters of Yalta

When FDR contracted polio, Anna thought her dream was lost for good. It was 1921, Anna was fifteen, and the Roosevelts were at their home on Campobello Island, in New Brunswick, Canada, for the summer. The day had started carefree and beautiful, the kind of day made for sailing and swimming. That afternoon, Franklin had begun to feel chills and a growing discomfort in his lower back. Two days later, he was paralysed from the waist down. He was only thirty-nine, but he would never walk unaided again. Gone were the horseback rides through the woods, and with it the dream that someday Anna would join her father as the custodian of Hyde Park. Anna was soon sent away to the Chapin School in Manhattan, and for the rest of her childhood she rarely saw her father without other people in the way – her omnipresent grandmother, the doctors and nurses, and FDR’s political colleagues, who now had to come to him. All she could do was watch as he struggled with his new crutches and steel braces. He swore each day that today he was going to walk the one thousand feet of the driveway. He would strain on the crutches, swinging his legs as the sweat ran down his face, but each day he would fail as Anna stood helpless and broken-hearted at the top of the drive, watching the man who had so often carried her on his shoulders, who had for so long stood as the infallible hero at the centre of her universe, as he struggled and failed, over and over again.

In a way, FDR’s heart failure, a terrible condition that no one wished upon him, was also a gift – a gift that Anna could not refuse. She quickly realised that she needed to take on a larger role in her father’s life if he was to live to see the end of the war. She and her father never discussed her role at the White House; she just naturally stepped into ever-expanding responsibilities. People across myriad military, government and civic institutions were constantly clamouring for an audience with the president. Given Dr Bruenn’s stipulation that FDR was to work no more than four hours per day, he could not possibly take all of the requested appointments; face-to-face interactions were exhausting. So Anna became his gatekeeper, determining who really needed time with the president and who could be fobbed off on somebody else. Sometimes she took the meetings herself and later gave FDR a summary of the discussion. She also tried to ease his burden in ways he was not aware of. After he went to bed, for example, she would sneak to the night pouch and remove whatever papers and requests she felt others could handle, so that he need not be bothered with them.

Had the public known what Anna was doing, there surely would have been an outcry. As it was, some people criticised her simply for living in the White House. One woman wrote Anna a scathing letter, scolding her for ‘grafting on the taxpayers’. It was bad enough that Anna was living in the White House at the taxpayers’ expense, the woman sniped – she had better not have the nerve to be taking a salary, too. The writer also implied that Anna was running the risk of turning out like her mother, whose excessive involvement in her husband’s administration was unseemly. This woman was clearly no admirer of FDR, but ‘at least he was elected’, she spat. No one had elected Eleanor; she was ‘only a meddlesome private person’ who had no place interfering in political affairs.

This woman’s vitriolic assault on the Roosevelt women aside, she did raise a valid concern. Surely Anna knew that taking papers out of her father’s pouch was inappropriate, but still she did not stop. She was desperate to do anything to help him. If she could have kept him from going to Yalta, she might have. The entire journey would take weeks; the conference itself would be gruelling. It might very well kill him.

The long voyage to Yalta had begun in darkness. At 10 p.m. on January 22, Roosevelt and his delegation made a furtive escape from Washington. Newspapers across the country were predicting that the Big Three would soon have another conference, but for the sake of security, no one in the United States, Britain or the Soviet Union would confirm where or when it would take place. The president had a secret train depot in the basement of the Bureau of Printing and Engraving annexe, an innocuous-looking concrete-and-limestone building on 14th Street SW, one block south of the National Mall; there, he boarded his armoured train car, the Ferdinand Magellan. In this way he avoided the prying eyes at Union Station, along with its steps, which impeded his progress by wheelchair. From Washington, FDR, his aides and his daughter travelled to Newport News, where the USS Quincy was waiting. For weeks the ship had undergone secret renovations to make it fit for the president, though it was almost impossible to conceal the work completely. In November Roosevelt had received a letter from a retired U.S. Army soldier, warning FDR that he had overheard two men in a restaurant in Middleburg, Connecticut, talking about a toilet bowl on the Quincy being raised nine inches to accommodate a certain person on an upcoming trip. The saying ‘Loose lips sink ships’ never seemed so appropriate. It became even more difficult to suppress the rumours that something was afoot when Roosevelt held his birthday party on January 21, nine days before his actual birthday, January 30. Having successfully evaded any local Nazi spies and paparazzi en route to Newport News, the entourage set off on the eleven-day, 4,883-mile voyage to the rendezvous with Churchill at Malta.

Among the few in Washington who knew Roosevelt was bound for another tripartite conference, the choice of Anna as his aide was a bit of a surprise. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins had assumed he would take one or more of his sons to assist him physically. General Edwin ‘Pa’ Watson, FDR’s longtime adviser, appointments secretary and close friend, who was often included in Roosevelt’s coterie, was among those the president had included in the Yalta delegation. Watson often had the task of helping the president stand in his heavy leg braces. While he could provide FDR with physical support, Anna provided something less tangible. As Watson explained to Perkins before departing, ‘Anna can do things with her father and with other people that the boys can’t … They can’t manage him … She can tell him, “You mustn’t see people. You mustn’t do that. You mustn’t talk with them. It tires you out. You’ll be no good tomorrow.” And she can also handle the other people. Without alarming them, she can handle them, and that’s why they’re going to take her.’

Shortly after they left Washington, John Boettiger wrote to his wife. ‘I HATE your being away,’ he told Anna, ‘but I am so thrilled that you are getting a chance to really be on the inside of a most historic meeting.’ He knew how valuable she was to her father and how much this trip meant to both of them, personally and for the future benefit of the world. The sense of being part of history was by no means lost on Anna. When she had moved back into the White House, she had promised not to keep a diary, so that all she heard and saw would remain confidential. But for this conference, she decided to make an exception, so she could later share her experience with John.

But before the next pages in history could be written, FDR would have to survive the trip. Much could go wrong even before they reached Yalta. For eleven days, FDR would be under the close observation of those travelling on the Quincy. These included not only personal friends like Watson, who were devoted to Roosevelt, but also some with their own distinctly political aspirations. The president’s party had hardly been at sea more than a few days before someone started asking about Roosevelt’s health. Jimmy Byrnes, a former South Carolina senator and Supreme Court associate justice, now serving as the head of the Office of War Mobilization and attending the Yalta Conference in this official capacity, quietly mentioned to Anna that FDR did not look too well. In his opinion, the president’s haggard appearance and open-mouth stares seemed to indicate that something more than FDR’s frequent sinus trouble was amiss. Anna had brushed him off, saying of course it was just his tricky sinuses. Sitting with his mouth open was merely a way to breathe more easily. Byrnes remained sceptical.

If Byrnes was already suspicious, others likely soon would be. The sinus explanation was unlikely to pass muster if FDR’s condition deteriorated further, so it was vital that Anna shield her father as much as possible. No one could know just how sick he was: not Byrnes, nor anyone else in the American delegation, but least of all Churchill and Stalin. The continued success of the alliance of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin was precariously balanced on the strong personal relationship among the three men. With victory so close at hand, it was imperative that nothing upset that balance.

Fortunately, the voyage to Malta allowed FDR time for plenty of rest. As the ship was travelling under radio silence, he was not obligated to respond to anything but the most urgent messages, to which he would reply via a complex system of couriers. Except for spending some time reading the briefing materials the State Department had prepared for the conference, he was free to relax in the sunshine on deck, nap in his cabin and organise his beloved stamp collection. Once they arrived at Yalta, Bruenn’s four-hour rule would have to be suspended for the duration of the conference. It would be impossible for Roosevelt to miss any of the multi-hour plenary sessions or the formal dinners, filled with toasting and speeches, which inevitably would last long into the night. Anna could try to make her father rest as much as possible during the mornings and early afternoons, but with the Americans all under one roof, it would be difficult to stop Secretary of State Stettinius, Harry Hopkins, or other Americans from wandering in to chat. Churchill posed another problem altogether. During their journey on the Quincy, he continued to bombard Roosevelt with cable after cable. Some dealt with important military and policy concerns, but mostly they consisted of complaints about the journey to Yalta and the accommodation there.

If the prime minister could wear a person down by cable, he was positively enervating in person. Churchill continued to insist on scheduling private audiences with FDR, but Anna could not allow them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that if Churchill pushed Roosevelt too hard, the president could very well die of exhaustion or stroke. Despite their alliance, Roosevelt had concerns greater than Churchill’s wounded feelings. With whatever energy he had left, he had to prioritise American interests as his principal object at Yalta. He could succeed only with cooperation, not just from the British, whose global power had waned considerably over the course of the war, but also from the Soviets.

First, Roosevelt was determined to save American lives, particularly in the Pacific. His generals projected that though their island-hopping strategy – the attacks on small, poorly defended Pacific islands that were well-positioned to serve as air bases midway across the ocean and support an eventual attack on the Japanese home islands – had thus far proved a success, even with recent victories in the Mariana Islands and the Philippines, they could not confidently envision launching a full-scale invasion of Japan itself for at least a year. Furthermore, fighting on the Japanese home islands would likely become a war of attrition. They believed the Allies would eventually win, but if the as-yet-untested wonder weapon failed, the cost of victory could possibly be as many as a million American lives over at least eighteen months of war. If FDR could draw the Soviets into the fight against Japan and thus hasten its conclusion, he could potentially save hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.

Roosevelt’s second objective was strategic, and somewhat personal. The Soviet Union had exponentially increased in power under Stalin’s leadership; it could no longer be perceived as a distant, mysterious hinterland on the fringe of Europe. Now it was imperative that the Soviets become part of the world order. In Roosevelt’s mind, the way to do this was by securing their participation in a global fraternity united by a commitment to peace. FDR’s hero Woodrow Wilson had tried to form such a fraternity: the League of Nations. As Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt had attended the 1919 peace conference in Paris and had seen first-hand the political jockeying and deal-making that ultimately doomed the league. Where Wilson had failed, Roosevelt was determined to succeed. In his vision of a world peace organization that would unite all nations, Soviet participation was crucial. As much as Roosevelt viewed Churchill as a longtime friend and partner, Stalin was the person Roosevelt believed he needed to woo at Yalta. He was confident that Stalin could be swayed by Roosevelt’s personal powers of persuasion.

Anna liked Winston Churchill well enough. She had met him when he had come to Washington in May 1943; she had been in Washington then to see her husband off to war. She found him a witty conversationalist, undoubtedly bright, yet also something of a rotund, comical eccentric whose liberal use of snuff produced enormous sneezes that ‘practically rock the foundations of the house’. It was, however, one thing to enjoy his company personally and appreciate the value he brought to the wartime partnership, but quite another to embrace his old-fashioned, imperialistic worldview. As Eleanor said in a letter to Anna only a month after the Americans had entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, ‘I like Mr. Churchill, he’s loveable & emotional & very human but I don’t want him to write the peace or carry it out.’

FOUR

February 2, 1945

Averell Harriman had travelled two thousand miles from Moscow to Malta and was prepared to brief Roosevelt on all matters related to Soviet-Polish relations, Soviet demands for reparations, and the cost of Stalin’s intervention in the war with Japan. After serving nearly a year and a half as ambassador to the Soviet Union, he had a better understanding of the internal workings of the Soviet regime than perhaps any other American. And yet, when lunch was announced and the president and prime minister headed to FDR’s suite on the Quincy, with Anna, Sarah, Ed Stettinius, Anthony Eden, Jimmy Byrnes and FDR’s chief of staff, Fleet Admiral William Leahy, Averell Harriman was not invited. Clearly it was not intended to be a working lunch.

For days, Harriman had been taking the blame for agreeing to hold the upcoming conference in such a remote, inhospitable location – to make matters all the more irritating, he had twisted his ankle badly on the rocky terrain of Malta. In truth, once Roosevelt had indicated he would agree to a meeting on the Black Sea, there was little Harriman could do to intervene. As he told Sarah Churchill, after nearly running her over with his car while racing to meet Stettinius’s plane at RAF Luqa two days earlier, ‘Well, it was there, or two worse places.’ For the man who had led a charmed life since birth, the conference was off to an inauspicious start.

Handsomer than many of the movie stars who frequented his resort and heir to one of the largest self-made fortunes in America, Harriman had never encountered an obstacle – in business, in sports or in the form of an actual mountain range – that he could not surmount through tenacity, ingenuity, a talented staff and sound investment. He had grown up in a mansion atop a mountain overlooking the Hudson River Valley. In the vast parkland below the house, the three brown bears that his father had captured on the scientific expedition to Alaska lived as pets in spacious cages, and there was a barn filled with several scores of polo ponies next to the base of a funicular. This mechanism transported everything from food to cars to ponies from the bottom of the mountain to the house. From the Union Pacific Railroad, to international shipping lines, to mining companies, to Newsweek magazine, to Brown Brothers Harriman, his banking firm, he had found success in nearly every business endeavour he attempted. He approached leisure with the same focus and drive. Rejecting time-consuming rounds of golf in favour of the speed and aggression of polo, he had become one of the top-ranked players in the nation; his team defeated the world-class Argentinians in the 1928 Cup of the Americas. It was only natural that he would eventually turn his attention to government. As Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease expediter, he took his relentless energy and business savvy to London, where he oversaw the distribution of more than $30 billion in aid to the British Empire.

Unfortunately, as the past few months had shown, working with the Soviet government was nothing like his previous business dealings, not even the investments he had made in the Soviet Union after World War I, when most businessmen had preferred to leave money on the table than do business in a country suddenly led by the Bolsheviks. There was a saying that Harriman and his staff used at the American embassy in Moscow: when ‘trading with the Russians you had to buy the same horse twice’. Over the past six months, Harriman had tried desperately to convince Roosevelt to change his approach to negotiations with the Soviets, but Roosevelt had resisted. If the luncheon snub in Malta was any indication, the president was not about to reconsider.

The lunch ended, but still Roosevelt did not summon Harriman. Instead of sitting down with his advisers or with the British delegation, as Churchill had intended when he suggested the rendezvous in Malta, Roosevelt and his daughter set off on a tour of Malta, scheduled to last an hour and a half, with the island’s governor general and his family. Anna invited Sarah Churchill to come along. Making the rounds of the island was a kind gesture to the local people, but time was running short. The American and British contingents were leaving for Yalta that night, and still the two delegations had had no substantive discussion about the conference. As Roosevelt drove away for his afternoon tour, Churchill returned to his ship to take a nap. For all the influence Harriman was able to exert, he might have remained at Yalta with Kathy.

It was not the first time during the war that Harriman felt that FDR had failed to address a problem head-on. Early in the conflict, Harriman thought that Roosevelt did not truly recognise the scope of the Nazi menace, namely, in the form of the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, which Harriman believed was capable of knocking Britain out of the war. Lend-Lease was a brilliant plan, but it was not enough. The Americans could send food and materiel across the Atlantic, but if German U-boats sank the convoys, the British would be left with next to nothing. If its people were starving, the government would have to surrender to Hitler. In the spring of 1941, Roosevelt knew American public opinion did not support a declaration of war on Germany, but Harriman was frustrated that the president was ‘unwilling to lead public opinion or force the issue’. The ambassador feared that the president was once again choosing to downplay a grave danger to American and Allied interests, thus revealing a naive understanding of the Soviet leadership’s true power and ambition.

It was convenient to forget that the Soviet Union had been in league with the Nazis for a year and a half at the beginning of the war. Averell Harriman had only recently begun his tenure as Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease envoy in London when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, in June 1941. By breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact of 1939, the Nazis drove the Soviets into alliance with Britain. Although the American public held a similarly hostile view towards both the Communists and the Nazis, there were undeniable benefits to this new alliance. With the Red Army fighting alongside the British, the Americans might not need to enter the war at all. Roosevelt extended $1 billion in Lend-Lease aid to the USSR. Averell supported Roosevelt’s decision wholeheartedly and looked at the alliance with the Soviets as a positive development for both the British and the still neutral Americans. He took a practical stance towards the situation, unconcerned with the Soviets’ beliefs about the structure of society, industry and the economy. All that mattered was that they opposed Hitler. ‘To put it bluntly, whatever it costs to keep this war away from our shores, that will be a small price to pay,’ he explained. (Self-interest may have bolstered his opinion: in July 1941, he still owned $560,000 in Soviet government notes from manganese contracts liquidated in 1928.)

Almost from the outset, however, Kathleen, then just twenty-three, was less convinced than her father that an alliance with Stalin would ultimately be worth the price. As a reporter in London, Kathy had quickly gained a perspective different from her father’s. Though most of the time the International News Service assigned her stories with titles like ‘Girl’s Cheery Song Helped Londoners Forget Their Woes’ or ‘Girl Reporter Finds Women Hang out Laundry as Usual’, her boss slowly began to give her war-oriented beats, at least those that senior reporters had neither the time nor interest to cover. Among them were press conferences with leaders from exiled European governments, from countries such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Poland; their prime ministers and kings had fled to London when the Nazis invaded. Just three years earlier, Kathy had been a student at Bennington College, writing her junior thesis on Nazi Germany’s increasingly hostile behaviour towards Czechoslovakia. Suddenly she found herself reporting on the tragic results of what she had pondered in theory. At these press conferences, the issue that raised the most immediate concern was not Nazi aggression, but rather Britain’s new alliance with the Soviet Union. The exiles were not pleased with the sudden rush of support for Stalin in Britain and the United States.

Neither Kathy nor her father particularly valued rest. In their suite at the Dorchester Hotel, father and daughter would stay up talking about the state of the world long into the night. Sometimes these conversations turned into healthy debate. ‘Since I’ve been [g]oing around in the free-gov’t circles,’ Kathy wrote to her sister, ‘I’ve found a very different Stalin feeling. (Different from Averell.) They distrust him and fear him and figure he’s doing a good job of out-smarting the Americans and the British.’ The exiled Polish leaders were particularly vocal. They argued that Stalin would look for any opportunity to seize Poland and install a de facto Soviet regime. Kathy believed them. Not until the late summer of 1944 would Averell realise that Kathy had been right to listen.

In October 1943, Roosevelt appointed Harriman ambassador to the Soviet Union. Despite the Poles’ continued warnings that Stalin could not be trusted, Harriman remained convinced that the Soviets’ objectives aligned with those of the West. Logically, the Soviets’ historical desire to have friendly neighbours made sense, especially on their vulnerable western border, where they had sparred with Poland since the reign of Catherine the Great and been attacked by invading forces, from Napoleon in 1812 to the Wehrmacht in 1941. But Harriman did not think Stalin would go so far as to impose Communist puppet governments in countries such as Poland, or take over completely. He believed the United States should be prepared to take a firm stance if the Soviets stepped out of line, lest the Americans risk ‘storing up trouble for the future’. However, like many westerners, including Churchill and Roosevelt, he believed in the power of strong personal relationships with Soviet leaders. Harriman was a businessman, and people liked to do business with people they liked. Did that not apply to Soviet politicians as much as to American industrialists or financiers?