H-Diplo Roundtable- _From Truman to Roosevelt_- Mark Review
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/#miscamble

Reviewed Work:
Wilson D. Miscamble. _From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and
the Cold War_. Cambridge, England and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2007. 414 pp. ISBN-13: 9780521862448 | ISBN-10: 0521862442.

Roundtable Editor: Thomas Maddux
Reviewers: Frank Costigliola, Alonzo Hamby, Robert Jervis, Eduard Mark,
David S. Painter, Chester Pach.


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-------------------------------------------

Review by Eduard Mark, Department of the Air Force

One of the central questions around which the controversy over the
origins of the Cold War has developed is whether President Harry S.
Truman and his advisers continued or reversed the policies with which
Franklin D. Roosevelt had attempted to preserve the Grand Alliance. That
question Wilson Miscamble has made the subject of an interesting new
book. Professor Miscamble’s answer, in brief, is that the Truman
Administration strove in almost every way to continue Roosevelt’s
policies as its leading members understood them, although their efforts
were certainly complicated by the failure of the deceased President to
explain his plans to his Vice President or, for that matter, to anyone
else. In their effort to forge a decent postwar relationship with the
USSR, Professor Miscamble maintains, Truman and his advisers persevered
sedulously – although not without tactical changes -- until Soviet
actions forced them at length to reconsider matters. He finds the point
of inflection not in the first days or weeks of Truman’s succession, but
in the late summer of 1946 when Soviet pressures on Turkey persuaded the
President and most of his advisers that a firmer policy toward the
Soviet Union was required. Even then, however, there was no clean break
with the policy of attempting to find common ground with the Soviets,
which lingered fitfully into 1947, when a disillusioned George C.
Marshall returned from the Conference of Foreign Ministers convinced
that it was Moscow’s policy to allow Europe to lapse into ruin.

Professor Miscamble, whom I am pleased to say I have long known, is a
man of gentle disposition. But in the writing of this book he has
engaged himself with a passion not often seen in a field of history
which, more than many others, lends itself to a certain dryness.
“Revisionism” – in this instance, the contention that Truman and his
advisers quickly and with a will set themselves to reversing Roosevelt’s
policy of engagement with the Soviets – he would consign to condign
oblivion in the “historiographical dustbin.” (325) The passion Professor
Miscamble brings to this task will impress – or nettle - readers
scarcely less than the careful and scrupulous research with which he
reconstructs the evolution of Truman’s approach to the Soviet Union
during first years in the White House.

In my view, the question of whether Professor Miscamble succeeds in his
effort to demonstrate a fundamental continuity of intention between the
Roosevelt and Truman Administrations admits of no simple answer. I
hasten to add that, in my opinion, his demonstration that Truman and his
inner circle fully intended to preserve the wartime cooperation with the
Soviet Union, such as it was, is virtually conclusive. His conclusion
might, however, have been shaded somewhat if he had looked into the
activities of the military and the intelligence community. Whereas
Truman, as Professor Miscamble’s plausibly argues, continued to view the
USSR into 1946 as troublesome ally, the Joint Staff viewed the USSR as a
potential enemy by the fall of 1945, when consideration of war with the
Soviet Union actively began. A similar view obtained in the War
Department’s interim intelligence organization, the Strategic Services
Unit, by the first weeks of 1946.1 It is fair to say, too, that
diplomats tended to be somewhat less than sanguine when they
contemplated future relations with the Soviet Union.

But, as I have said, Professor Miscamble’s principal concern is Truman
and his closest advisers, and the reservations of soldiers and
intelligence officers had little practical effect on policy before the
summer of 1946. (Those of the diplomats were another matter, but our
author is not unaware of them.) The careful tracing of the evolution of
the thirty-third president’ stance vis-a-vis the Soviet Union on the
whole tends to sustains the basic thesis of this book. Miscamble’s
critique, moreover, of various arguments to the effect that there was an
abrupt and rather brutal abandonment of Roosevelt’s policies are
generally plausible. But I harbor withal reservations. These concern not
so much the principal question to which the author has addressed himself
as aspects of the interpretation of American and Soviet foreign policies
that frame his inquiry.

I turn first to the portrayal of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his policy
toward the Soviet Union. While Professor Miscamble is at pains to show
that Truman conscientiously strove to continue the work of his
predecessor, he is plainly of the view that this was not altogether to
his credit: “Regrettably, the Truman Administration expended too much
energy in 1945 and 1946 negotiating with the Soviets and, in a way,
attempting to reassure and place them and to reach amicable settlements
with them.” (326) It is not, I think, unfair to say that Miscamble
believes with Roosevelt’s approach to the Soviet Union was on the whole
foolish and misguided. Roosevelt, he writes,

Rather naively . . . relied on his hunches and intuitions and held the
hope that he could civilize or domesticate the Soviet ‘beast’ and
establish a personal connection with Stalin. Operating on this sad
delusion, Roosevelt fashioned a strategy toward the Soviets based on
personal connections and significant concessions aimed at reassuring
them of his bona fides.2

That these were elements of Roosevelt’s policy is certainly true, but
there was more. Whether FDR’s agreement with Churchill that even the
fact that the atomic bomb was under development should be withheld from
Moscow bore any relation his Soviet policy is to the best of my
knowledge uncertain, although I suspect that there was a connection at
some level. But it is quite certain that he refused to discuss postwar
economic aid to the Soviet Union at Yalta out of political calculation.3
It would have been provocative to tell the Soviets in so many words that
aid was conditional upon their behavior, but FDR’s silence on the
subject spoke volumes, coming as it did immediately after a Soviet
request for an enormous postwar credit. And, as has often been observed,
Roosevelt could hardly have been clearer at Yalta about what he expected
of the postwar elections in Poland. To couple that reminder with threats
would have been highly impolitic when he was still seeking so much of
the Soviets, particularly their participation in the war against Japan.

Also worthy of note are the constraints under which Roosevelt labored in
dealing with the Soviets. Surely the most important of these was the
danger that the Soviets would conclude a separate peace with Germany.
The Soviets admitted at the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in
October 1943 that the Germans had approached them, and even before then
Washington knew of contacts between the Soviets and the Germans in
Stockholm. In October 1943, when Ambassador William Standley returned to
the United States, Roosevelt asked him straightaway, “What do you think,
Bill, will he [Stalin] make a separate peace with Hitler?”4 Just days
before his death Roosevelt told Senator Arthur Vandenberg that
throughout the war he had been under “the awful pressure of a fear that
Russia would withdraw from the war and make a separate peace.”5 Even
now, none can say that this concern was not justified.6 Also important
was the tenor of the military advice that Roosevelt received. Throughout
the war the Joint Chiefs of Staff took the position that as the United
States, even in alliance with Britain, could not win a war against the
Soviets in Europe, and that concessions to Moscow were accordingly in
order to obviate the possibility of such a catastrophe. These warnings
the State Department placed in the presidential briefing books prepared
for both Yalta and Potsdam.7 And, in my judgment, they plainly had an
effect on Roosevelt. A case in point was his concern that the United
States should act as an “honest broker” between the British and the
Soviets (which Professor Miscamble mocks) lest Anglo-Soviet rivalry for
influence in Europe dangerously escalate derived from the warnings of
his military advisers.8

Professor Miscamble does not much concern himself with such questions of
Realpolitik because his perspective is informed by an ethical
perspective rather than a concern with power and national interests. His
position, if I am not mistaken, is that Stalin’s purposes were at once
so obvious and so utterly malign that the concessions to Moscow were
simply not in order, even consideration of them being evidence prima
facie of delusion. I am of the view that the situation that confronted
American policymakers in 1944 was rather more complicated than that.
While in retrospect Stalin’s dedication to the cause of ultimate
socialist revolution in Europe is not open to much doubt, that was not
at all clear in 1945.9 To many contemporaries it seemed that the
contradictions between socialism, as it was commonly understood, and
Soviet practice were so glaring that Stalin simply could not be a
Marxist of deep conviction.10 And if he was not a dedicated Marxist,
then he might be enough of a conventional Realpolitiker that national
interest had a significant place in his calculations. Even upon this
reading of Stalin there were dangers. Roosevelt himself publicly warned
that “the trend from Marxism to nationalism in Russia” might portend an
expansionism “no less disquieting than attempts at world revolution.”11
But there was a basis for the hope that the USSR’s obvious need for a
period of recuperation and a need for foreign aid might afford the
possibility of a modus vivendi. As John D. Hickerson later recalled,

the Russians had suffered so much. Their casualties, the devastation in
their country was terrific. We thought there would be a breathing spell
when they’d be trying to rebuild their country. That doesn’t mean that I
felt or my colleagues felt that the Russians has been converted to
Christianity and that we thought they would permanently behave, but we
thought it was so clearly in their interest.”12

The question of whether this calculation was wide of the mark is too
complicated for discussion here. Suffice it to say, however, that Stalin
himself, both privately and publicly, spoke of the preservation of the
Grand Alliance as being in the interest of his Soviet Union.13 How could
this have been, some readers will wonder at this point, if he also
sought a Communist Europe? The contradiction is more apparent than real
because the original wartime design was that the Communist parties
should seek their way to power through “bourgeois democracy” – that is,
by means to which the Western Allies could make no principled
objection.14 To that end, there was a careful tailoring of policies, and
even to many American observers the chances for success seemed fair or
better.

Now this policy, the national front strategy as I have termed it
elsewhere, did not succeed, nor did it long survive the war in anything
like its intended form. The reasons for this are many but some of them
bear directly on the thesis that it was from the first Soviet policy to
fasten in short order police regimes upon the countries of Eastern
Europe. The circumstances surrounding some of the first instances of
Soviet “interference” in Eastern Europe are complex and remain little
understood.15 Romania, for example, figures prominently in From Truman
to Roosevelt, as an example of brutal intrusion. But when the Red Army
entered that country, Stalin’s orders to his commanders were explicit:

“The entry of Soviet forces into Romania has been dictated exclusively
by military necessity and does not pursue other goals other than the
goals of overcoming and liquidating the continuing resistance of the
enemy’s forces . . . To be preserved without change . . . are all
existing Romanian organs of power and the system of economic and
political organization existing in Romania. The performance of religious
ceremonies is not to be hindered and houses of prayer are not to be
touched. Romanian customs are not to be infringed and Soviet customs are
not to be introduced.16

As Percy Biddiscombe showed some years ago, the change in Soviet policy
so evident in early 1945 had much to do with the discovery of a
German-directed conspiracy involving the Romanian Army and the
underground organizations of the Romanian Nazi Party and the Iron
Guard.17 Recently declassified signals intelligence, moreover, shows
that Anglo-American leaders not only knew of this plot but believed that
elements of National Peasant Party – much the largest political
organization in Romania – were complicit. The danger in Romania was
discussed at the highest levels of the British and American governments,
and largely explains why there was so little protest when the Soviets
imposed a government of their choosing in March 1945.18

There is a third subject about which I must acknowledge that I differ
from my distinguished colleague. The subject of spheres of influence is
obviously central of the origins of the Cold War. Professor Miscamble
largely embraces the thesis for which Marc Tractenberg argued in A
Constructed Peace – in essence, that at the instance of Secretary of
State James F. Byrnes the United States wrote off Eastern Europe at the
Potsdam Conference.19 Now Exhibit A for the argument that an appeasing
Byrnes consigned Eastern Europe to outer darkness is the recognition of
the Bulgarian and Romanian governments after the Moscow Conference of
Foreign Ministers, although both remained unrepresentative. Recognition
really represented only a tactical change. From the spring of 1945
Washington had hoped to make the governments of the former German
satellites more representative by withholding diplomatic recognition
from them. The British argued that this was a futile approach, and the
best hope of effecting political change in the satellites would be to
conclude as quickly as possible peace treaties that would entail the
withdrawal of the Red Army from the satellites. In October 1945
Ambassador W. A. Harriman visited Stalin at Sochi on the Black Sea.
During the course of their discussions Stalin convinced Harriman and
through him Byrnes and the State Department, that he really did not care
whether the United States recognized the interim regimes. Byrnes then
changed course and adopted the British view that early peace treaties
should be the primary objective. And that decision entailed recognition
of the still-unrepresentative governments of Bulgaria and Romania, as
otherwise the United States could hardly conclude treaties with them.
The diplomatic representatives in those countries, Maynard Barnes and
Burton Berry protested, but only until they understood the reason for
the change.20

To his credit, Professor Miscamble appears at some level to resist full
acceptance of the view that after Potsdam the United States consigned
Eastern Europe to a kind of diplomatic Ultima Thule in defiance of every
value that the government of the United States professed to represent
and every identifiable interest it possessed. Toward the end of From
Roosevelt to Truman Miscamble allows himself, with perhaps more insight
than he realizes, the statement that “To a great extent, some variation
of a ‘Finlandized” Eastern Europe is what American policy makers in 1945
and 1946 had hoped might satisfy Stalin . . .” (327-28) The thought here
seems to be that Truman and Byrnes hoped that Stalin would define some
sort of self-denying ordinance for himself. Actually, however, they went
to considerable lengths to help him “Finlandize” Eastern Europe. At the
core of Byrnes’s diplomacy was a major initiative that finds no mention
in From Roosevelt to Truman: a treaty of demilitarization for Germany,
which Byrnes presented to Stalin at the Moscow Council of Foreign
Ministers and for which he continued to press throughout the
negotiations of the peace treaties for Germany’s former satellites. This
initiative had had two purposes: to induce the Soviets to relent in
Eastern Europe by removing their fears of a revanchist Germany -- or
else to force them to show by rejection of the instrument that
“security” was only a pretext for prolonging the occupation of Eastern
Europe.21 But if their concerns were sincere, Byrnes offered them a
blueprint for a “Finlandized” Eastern Europe. The states of the region
could not threaten the USSR without German support, the very possibility
of which the proffered treaty of demilitarization would obviate. Byrnes,
moreover, took the initiative in the negotiation of treaties of peace
with the former satellites that effectively disarmed them while banning
fascist organizations and implicitly recognizing a Soviet right of
intervention against a resurgence of forces truly “unfriendly” to
Russia. This, in fact, was a model for “Finlandization that went someone
further than the actual “Finlandization” we know from a later period.22
But it was also a dispensation under the former satellites would have
remained free in their domestic affairs and hence not ready instruments
of aggression for the Soviets.

Professor Miscamble is correct to stress the effect upon the Truman
Administration of the Turkish crisis, which more than any other single
event of the year of the Cold War convinced American officials that
Soviet policy was at least potentially aggressive in dangerous ways. But
the other half of the process of reconsidering the Soviets’ challenge
was their seeming indifference to the deal that Byrnes had offered them.
Their bluff, as Truman said, had been called.23

The proposition that the United States abandoned Eastern Europe even
before the Cold War had begun distorts American diplomacy, rendering
incomprehensible not only the constant encouragement of the opposition
parties of the region but also equally telling if less familiar
initiatives such as radio propaganda to unsettle the communist-dominated
interim regime, the leaking to the press of diplomatic reports and
intelligence damaging to the Soviet position, and various actions of the
secret services such as the extensive contacts in 1946 between the
Central Intelligence Group and the partisan formations of the Romanian
opposition.24 The thesis also obscures much of the reason for
Washington’s reconsideration of Soviet motives in 1946 and, worse, one
of the principal reasons why the United States cared about European
developments in the first place. A Europe divided in the way that it
seemed likely to be at the end of the war was potentially threatening to
the United States. While Roosevelt anticipated an Anglo-Soviet
condominium over Europe, he and other policymakers, as we have seen,
feared the consequences of unbridled Anglo-Soviet rivalry, for therein,
seemingly, lay the only obvious cause of a new war. The danger of an
Anglo-Soviet war for the United States was that the British would surely
lose it, leaving the Soviets masters of Europe. This was precisely why
in 1946 the JCS urged resistance to the Soviet demands on Turkey. The
issue, as the Chiefs saw matters, was not Turkey but the Anglo-Soviet
war likely to result from Soviet intrusion into the Mediterranean, a
conflict that would leave the Soviets in control of Europe and the
United States without a militarily significant ally in Eurasia.25 But a
“Finlandized” Eastern Europe might buffer the Anglo-Soviet conflict,
sparing the United States the nightmare of a consolidated Eurasia. A
closely related fear was that Anglo-Soviet conflict might allow Germany
to rise from defeat by playing the victors off against each other. These
ideas were the received wisdom of the day, being featured in influential
works like William T. R. Fox’s The Super-Powers and a remarkable
manifesto prepared for the Joint Staff by virtually all the leading
figures in the infant discipline of international relations.26 The
concern with the dangers of Anglo-Soviet rivalry presciently predicted
the Cold War, save in one respect: there was little appreciation of just
how weak Britain would be after the war and even less that it would be
the fate of the United States to replace Britain as guarantor of the
European balance of power, with the dangers that entailed.

There were many reasons why America stepped in the breach in Britain’s
stead. But, as Melvyn Leffler has shown, none was so compelling as the
prospect of a Europe united against the United States, a dispensation
that would have united Germany’s science with Russia’s manpower and
pivotal geopolitical position. That would have been the “empire of the
world” about which Mackinder warned at the beginning of the twentieth
century. As Roosevelt put it in a radio address of 1941,

For if the world outside the Americas fall under Axis domination, the
shipbuilding facilities which the Axis powers would then possess in all
of Europe, in the British Isles and in Far East would be much greater
than all the shipbuilding facilities and potentialities of all the
Americas – not only greater but two or three times greater – enough to
win. Even if the United States threw all its resources into such a
situation seeking to double or even redouble the size of our Navy, the
Axis powers, in control of the rest of the world, would have the man
power and the physical resources to outbuild several times over.27

This danger did not disappear with the defeat of the Axis. Far from it.
Historians have often observed that the United States emerged from the
Second World War the most powerful nation of the world. This is a
reasonably accurate description of the existing situation in 1945. Yet
the potential dangers confronting the country were also considerable,
although they are much less familiar. After World War II the Soviet
Union stood closer to attaining “the empire of the world” than any
nation before it. The ironic outcome of the United States’ victory in
that struggle was that its strategic position was in fundamental ways
potentially weaker than it had been in 1940, its wealth and
technological supremacy notwithstanding. A victory of the Axis had
threatened the domination of Eurasia by an alliance of three dissimilar
and potentially rivalrous powers, not a single hegemon. Even if the Axis
had triumphed, moreover, immense labors faced its strongest members,
Germany and Japan. Hitler had entertained no expectation of conquering
the entire Soviet Union. He had rather planned to drive the Russians
beyond the Urals where, he thought, a struggle would rage essentially
forever. Japan’s great project, the subjugation of China, if possible at
all, would have been the work of generations. In 1946 the USSR’s
prospects were more propitious than those of the Axis had ever been, and
the dangers to the United States correspondingly greater. The relentless
progress of the Communists in China threatened the voluntary adherence
to the Socialist bloc of the world’s most populous state. Half of Europe
the Soviets occupied, and throughout the remainder Communist parties
flourished with plausible programs for electoral success. The “empire of
the world,” or something very like it, stood but a nearly decided civil
war and a few elections away from reality.

The reservations I have outlined about From Roosevelt to Truman are not
insubstantial. But I hasten to remind readers that the heart of the book
is a narrowly framed mise-en-scène at the center of which stands a
well-intentioned but limited president condemned to deal with the
uncertain legacy of his predecessor in the face of enormous
difficulties. And as that I recommend the work.

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