Books: Yalta Revisited

ROOSEVELT AND THE RUSSIANS (367 pp.) —Edward R. Stettinius Jr.—Doubledav ($4).

It was a wonderful party. With an assist from some of the 14,000 bottles of wine and vodka Stalin had sent down to Yalta, F.D.R., Churchill and Uncle Joe were letting their hair down. They were further cheered because they had closed some pretty big deals. The next day, Feb. 11, 1945, the Crimean Conference would be over. Reminiscing, F.D.R. told the others how his recovery program had prevented disorder, maybe even revolution in the U.S. Churchill observed that Russia’s one-party system made politics easy for Stalin, and Uncle Joe allowed that one party was a great convenience. Perhaps to cheer Winnie, Joe also predicted that Labor would never govern in England.

Such good will was infectious. Always easily infected, handsome “Big Ed” Stettinius, U.S. Secretary of State, earnestly told Uncle Joe that if they all worked together after the war, every house in Russia could have plumbing and electricity. Statesmanship could go no farther.

“Road to Peace.” In Roosevelt and the Russians, ex-Statesman Stettinius warmly defends Yalta and all its works. His thesis: 1) Yalta was “a wise and courageous attempt by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill to set the world on the road to lasting peace”; 2) “Difficulties have developed, not from the agreements reached at Yalta, but from the failure of the Soviet Union to honor those agreements.” His book is a flat, deadpan report on the eight-day trading session that embittered many a champion of “open covenants openly arrived at.” It is the most complete report yet made and should be historically important, but many a reader will refuse to let Russian skulduggery take the whole rap for the Yaltese cross.

After reading Roosevelt and the Russians, many readers will still find it hard to condone the deal, made behind China’s back, by which Russia got control of Manchurian ports and rail lines, and President Roosevelt agreed that he would see to it that China swallowed her cup of tea. Nor will most readers fail to wonder how F.D.R. could blandly turn over the Kuril Islands, which control the short air route from Alaska to the Far East. The explanation Stettinius gives: U.S. military chiefs urged Roosevelt to get Stalin into the war against Japan at any cost. In his zeal to give F.D.R. a clean bill of health, Big Ed forgets that on Oct. 30, 1943, Stalin had promised Cordell Hull, with no strings attached, “clearly and unequivocally that, when the Allies succeeded in defeating Germany, the Soviet Union would then join in defeating Japan.”

“We Cannot Allow.” The Stettinius excuse for F.D.R.’s tragic weakness on the Polish issue is that the Russians were already in Poland. From a statesman, such reasoning seems to applaud the bankruptcy of statesmanship. Stalin was capable of straighter talk on the subject. Said he at Potsdam: “A freely elected government in any of these [eastern European] countries would be anti-Soviet, and that we cannot allow.” U.S. readers may wonder why the U.S. delegation could not have guessed that as well as Stalin.

Stettinius denies that F.D.R.’s health weakened his bargaining voice: the President believed that the U.S. could wean the Soviet Union “away from dictatorship and tyranny in the direction of a free, tolerant, and peaceful society.” At best it was a naive hope for a man come to trade with a proved champion of Lenin’s precept: “Use any ruse, cunning, unlawful method, evasion, concealment of truth.”