Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (63 page)

Recently inaugurated for a fourth term, but greatly aged by twelve years of governing a fractious nation through the Depression and the war, Roosevelt was in poor health. He came to Yalta with three goals: to establish a meaningful United Nations; to persuade the Russians to declare war on Japan and thereby to hasten the end of that part of the war; and to decide the fate of Poland, that sizable chunk of territory that had been at the heart of the war since Germany and Russia both invaded it.

Of these three issues, Russian commitment to the war against Japan was uppermost in Roosevelt’s mind. Work on a secret weapon to be used against Japan was still going on, but even the few who knew of the existence of the Manhattan Project held no great hopes for the atomic bomb’s usefulness. Roosevelt had to consider the advice of his generals, like MacArthur, who conservatively estimated that a million American casualties would result from the eventual invasion of Japan. To Roosevelt and Churchill, obtaining Stalin’s commitment to join the fight against Japan was crucial. To Roosevelt’s generals, it was worth any price.

Stalin knew that.

Roosevelt and Churchill, who had held most of the cards during the war, found themselves in the dangerous position of dealing with the master of the Soviet Union from a position of weakness. Stalin finally agreed to enter an anti-Japanese alliance, but the price was substantial: the Soviets would control Manchuria and Mongolia, and would be ceded half of Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands, off northern Japan; a Soviet occupation zone would be created in Korea; and in the United Nations, a veto power would be given to the major nations, of which the Soviet Union was one, along with the United States, Great Britain, France, and China (still under the wavering control of Chiang Kai-shek’s American-supported Nationalists).

Later it would be said that Roosevelt, the “sick man” of the Yalta Conference, had given away Poland (and the rest of Eastern Europe). In fact, he couldn’t give away what wasn’t his to give. The Red Army and Communist partisan forces in Eastern Europe held control of almost all this territory. In private, Churchill urged Eisenhower to continue pushing his armies as far east of the Elbe River as possible, a position with which U.S. General George Patton was in complete agreement. But Ike disagreed. Patton had to pull back, and the Russians “liberated” Czechoslovakia, eastern Germany, and Berlin.

At Yalta, the Polish issue was “solved” by redrawing its borders and, in a replay of Versailles, adding lands that had been Germany’s. In the spirit of Allied unity, Stalin agreed to guarantee all Eastern European countries the right to choose their governments and leaders in free elections. Roosevelt believed that a United Nations, with American commitment (which the League of Nations lacked), could solve problems related to these issues as they arose. Perhaps more tragically, Roosevelt saw his personal role as the conciliator as a key to lasting peace.

As the historian James McGregor Burns wrote in
The Crosswinds of Freedom
, “Holding only weak hands in the great poker game of Yalta, Roosevelt believed he had won the foundations of future peace. It was with hope and even exultation that he and his party left Yalta for the long journey home. Above all he left with confidence that, whatever the problems ahead, he could solve them through his personal intervention.”

How did FDR die?

Any hopes Roosevelt had of maintaining peace through his personality went to his grave with him. On April 12, 1945, Roosevelt suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while resting at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he was staying with his longtime mistress, Lucy Rutherford. His death left the nation and much of the world dizzy and disoriented. Even the Japanese issued a sympathetic message. He was still vilified by many, but to most Americans, FDR had been an immutable force, a Gibraltar-like presence on the American scene. He had guided America as it licked the Great Depression and the Nazis. To younger Americans, including many of those in uniform, he was the only president they had known.

Practically beatified by a generation of Americans, Franklin D. Roosevelt appears, more than fifty-five years after his death—like Washington, Lincoln, and other “great men” of American history—less a saint than a man flawed by his humanity. He was foremost a politician, perhaps the greatest ever in America, and like all politicians, he made bargains. There are large questions left by his legacy. For instance, although he was greatly admired and overwhelmingly voted for by blacks, FDR’s approach to the question of blacks in America was confused. His wife, Eleanor, consistently pushed for greater social equality for blacks and all minority groups. But American life and the Army remained segregated, although blacks slowly reached higher ranks, and war contractors were forbidden to practice segregation.

Another lingering question has concerned his response to the Holocaust. Prior to the American entry into the war, the Nazi treatment of Jews evoked little more than weak diplomatic condemnation. It is clear that Roosevelt knew about the treatment of Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and about the methodical, systematic destruction of the Jews during the Holocaust. Clearly, saving the Jews and other groups that Hitler was destroying en masse was not a critical issue for American war planners.

The Pearl Harbor issue also refuses to go away. Few historians are willing to go so far as to condemn Roosevelt for sentencing 2,000 Americans to die when they might have been saved. Instead, the consensus is that his military advisers underestimated the abilities of the Japanese to reach Hawaii, and exaggerated the U.S. military’s ability to defend itself against such an attack. The internment of Japanese Americans during the war is an everlasting stain on Roosevelt and the entire nation.

In a private light, FDR was later shown to have carried on a long-term relationship with Lucy Rutherford. If revealed, this secret might have brought him down. But in contrast to what has befallen politicians in more recent times, no stories about FDR and Rutherford ever appeared, much less film or photographs. He was protected by the press and the Secret Service, just as John F. Kennedy would be for sexual behavior far more indiscreet and dangerous than Roosevelt’s love affair had been.

Yet FDR’s legacy remains. Just as Washington was “the indispensable man” of his time, so was FDR in the era of Depression and war. If history does come down to the question of personality, was there another man in America who could have accomplished what Roosevelt did? Despite flaws and contradictions, he knew that a failure to improve the nation’s economic and psychological health might produce a victory for the forces of racism and militarism that produced different leaders in other countries. Few presidents—none since Lincoln during the Civil War—held the near-dictatorial powers Roosevelt commanded during the Depression and the war. Yet, if he was a quasi-dictator at the height of his political power, FDR’s overall record is certainly benign. The same economic shock waves that brought Roosevelt to power produced Mussolini and Hitler, demagogic madmen with visions of world conquest, who ruled brutal, racist police states. Like many another canonized American hero, Roosevelt was far from sainthood. Yet consider the alternative.

Must Read:
No Ordinary Times: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

AMERICAN VOICES

H
ARRY
T
RUMAN,
from his diaries (as quoted in
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes):

We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates valley Ersa, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.

Anyway we “think” we have found a way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexican desert was startling—to put it mildly. . . .

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leaders of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capital or the new.

He & I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will give them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made to be the most useful.

Did the United States have to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Okay, Mr. President. Here’s the situation. You’re about to invade Japan’s main islands. Your best generals say hitting these beaches will mean half a million American casualties. Other estimates go as high as a million. General MacArthur tells you that the Japanese will continue guerrilla-style resistance for ten years. Based on horrific battle experience—from Guadalcanal to Okinawa—you believe the Japanese will fight to the death. They have 6 million battle-hardened troops who have shown complete willingness to fight to the death for their homeland—a samurai tradition of complete devotion to the divine emperor that is incomprehensible to Americans. Japanese civilians have jumped off cliffs to prevent capture by Americans, and there are reports that mainland Japanese civilians are being armed with sharpened bamboo spears. But you also remember Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March and other wartime atrocities committed by Japanese. Vengeance, in the midst of a cruel war, is not incomprehensible.

Now you have a bomb with the destructive power of 20,000 tons of TNT. It worked in a test, but it may not work when you drop it out of a plane. Why not give a demonstration to show its power? Your advisers tell you that if the show-detonation is a dud, the Japanese resistance will harden.

Modern history has presented this pair of options—the Big Invasion versus the Bomb—as “Truman’s choice.” It was a choice Truman inherited with the Oval Office. President Roosevelt had responded to Albert Einstein’s 1939 warning—a warning Einstein later regretted—of the potential of an atomic bomb by ordering research that became the Manhattan Project in 1942. Known to only a handful of men, Truman not among them, the project was a $2 billion (in pre-inflation 1940s dollars) effort to construct an atomic weapon. Working at Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67), atomic scientists, many of them refugees from Hitler’s Europe, thought they were racing against Germans developing a “Nazi bomb.” That effort was later proved to be far short of success. The first atomic bomb was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Truman was alerted to the success of the test at a meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, a city in defeated Germany.

Before the test detonation, there were already deep misgivings among both the scientific and military communities about the morality of the bomb’s destructive power. Many of its creators did not want it to be used, and lobbied to share its secrets with the rest of the world to prevent its use. Truman ignored that advice. With Churchill and China’s Chiang Kai-shek, he issued the Potsdam Declaration, warning Japan to accept a complete and unconditional surrender or risk “prompt and utter destruction.” Although specific mention of the bomb’s nature was considered, this vague warning was the only one issued.

When the Japanese first failed to respond to, and then rejected, his ultimatum, Truman ordered the fateful go-ahead. It was a self-perpetuating order that took on a life of its own. After Hiroshima, nobody said, “Don’t drop another one,” so the men proceeded under the orders they had been given.

Almost since the day the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, critics have second-guessed Truman’s decision and motives. A generation of historians has defended or repudiated the need for unleashing the atomic weapon. The historical justification was that a full-scale invasion of Japan would have cost frightful numbers of American and Japanese lives.

Many critics have dismissed those estimates as implausibly high, and say that the Japanese were already nearing their decision to submit when the bombs were dropped. A study made after the war by a U.S. government survey team reached that very conclusion. But coming as it did a year after the war was over, that judgment didn’t help Truman make his decision.

Other historians who support the Hiroshima drop dispute that criticism. Instead, they point to the fact that some of the strongest militarists in Japan were planning a coup to topple a pro-surrender government. Even after the Japanese surrender, Japanese officers were planning kamikaze strikes at the battleship on which the surrender documents would be signed. The view that accepts “atomic necessity” offers as evidence the actual Pacific fighting as it moved closer to Japan. And it is a convincing exhibit. Each successive island that the Americans invaded was defended fanatically, at immense cost on both sides. The Japanese military code, centuries old and steeped in the samurai tradition, showed no tolerance for surrender. Indeed, even in Hiroshima itself, there was anger that the emperor had capitulated.

But were the bomb and an invasion the only options? Or was there another reality? A top-secret study made during the period and revealed in the late 1980s says there was, and destroys much of the accepted justification for the Hiroshima bombing. According to these Army studies, the crucial factor in the Japanese decision to surrender was not the dropping of the bombs but the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan. These documents and other recently revealed evidence suggest that Truman knew at Potsdam that Stalin would declare war against Japan early in August. Nearly two months before Hiroshima, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall had advised the president that the Soviet declaration of war would force Japan to surrender, making the need for an American invasion unnecessary. It was a fact with which Truman seemed to agree.