March 7, 2015

Finest Hour 157, Winter 2012-13

Page 58

By Warren F. Kimball

In a moment you’ll know the rationale for the title of this piece, which I hope is enlightening, or at least amusing, on the trials of doing research in the pre-computer age. More importantly, I’d like you to consider two great men and the policies of their time, and how my interpretations and perspectives have or have not changed.

In the Beginning

It was Lloyd Gardner, my longtime friend and colleague at Rutgers, who told me, years later, that I took a huge chance in choosing to edit the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence, rather than churning out a few monographs. During the twelve years it took me to find, catalog, copy and comment on all their exchanges, I wrote a book about the Morgenthau Plan, some articles about diplomatic history, a few book reviews, and a long review that was a little controversial. But none of those would have impressed deans or promotion committees, so I guess I did take a chance. It was just too fascinating to ignore.

There was no secret in 1972, when I began, that lots of Churchill-Roosevelt messages had never been released. Privileged court historians like William Langer and Herbert Feis had cited documents not released elsewhere, which they’d seen in State Department records, to which they had (in those despicable words) “special access.” But not until 1955 did we actually see a volume in the foreign relations series cite a WSC-FDR exchange found at the Roosevelt Library.

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That was the key, because the archivists at the Roosevelt Library were ahead of the curve. They had been collecting Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence from an incomplete collection in FDR’s papers in the so-called Map Room files. (The White House Map Room imitated Churchill’s, which he always had on his travels, with maps of all the theaters of war. It was quite a show, and Roosevelt was impressed.)

This correspondence was clearly kept in the Map Room collection, but the collection was not known. Nobody referred to it, citations to the correspondence simply said “FDR Library,” and efforts were made to hide its existence, because, for political reasons, nobody wanted it to seem like the British were leading or had led FDR down a primrose path. Their correspondence was thus pushed aside. As everyone who works at the State Department Historical Office knows, once it is pushed aside, getting it un-pushed is a task.

Having talked to people at the Roosevelt Library, I knew the trove existed, but they told me they could not release or even discuss the contents. Well, I said, that would be a great project. I was there routinely for other things, so I’d always raise the subject. Finally, in 1972, they said the Map Room papers were coming out—actually they said the “Churchill-Roosevelt stuff” was coming out. I’ve not done research on whether there were negotiations among British and American archivists and security people, but the British papers were not released until August 1973. The delay was because the British documents had to be “organized,” which meant the Cabinet offices had to go in and clean up what they didn’t want released. (Back then the British “pre-weeded,” rather than look at it after it was in the archive, which is why they took longer.)

The decision to print all the correspondence came about for two reasons. First, the more I dug into it, the more uncomfortable I became taking anything out. After all, these are letters between two great leaders: every one seemed to matter. Second, I learned that Harold Langley, Manfred Jonas and Francis Lowenheim were doing a “selected” version—a good solid book. So I determined to publish the lot. Princeton University Press went along, although book editor Bill Hively later said he’d taken an oath on his mother’s grave never to do a three-volume collection of documents again.

Old scholars like to mutter about where they worked. I did it in my bedroom. I lived in a three-bedroom ranch house with three kids, a wife and two dogs, so something had to give. What gave was a corner of the large bedroom, where I did 90% of the typing. Truly, it started with a mechanical typewriter, though I later went to an electric. I used no carbon paper: “lose it and you lost it.” I tried to photocopy things as I went along. I still have some of the old notes. I can’t believe now that I did it that way, but in those days hard labor was a necessary evil.

I hope there’s a financial angel wondering what to do with a large sum of money, because I’m disappointed that no publisher or sponsor has been willing to pay for digitizing the correspondence. It’s copyright-free: all public documents, and Princeton has no problem authorizing an e-book.

I’m rather proud of the collection. I found only two errors of substance in the printed documents. One was an FDR message, the other a Churchill message. Each was an error on my part. (Although I could photocopy some of it well enough for typesetters, I had to type out most of it.)

In both cases these errors involved the words “no” and “not,” the most powerful negatives in the English language. If I had put in “no” or “not,” it would have changed the meaning of everything. Remarkably, only two people have found these errors: David Reynolds, while writing his In Command of History; and Diane Clemens, the Yalta historian. In each case, the missing negative utterly changed the meaning of what was said. Yet not a single book or review caught it. Take it for what it’s worth, an interesting thought about how careful we are, or how uncareful we aren’t.  (The negative is intended.)

The sources for the collection, which are routinely consulted, are the President’s files at the Roosevelt Library. They’re very complete, partly because he didn’t trust State Department security, and for good reason. You may recall the story of Tyler Kent, a code clerk in London who secreted away Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence and many other documents, hoping to blow the whistle on FDR colluding with the British. Roosevelt learned about it in 1940, and it scared him. FDR was quite happy if the State Department was last to learn what he was saying to Churchill. He had little confidence in them or their security. One Foreign Service officer, retiring during the war, actually read his retirement speech in the Gray Code—and everyone in the audience knew what he was saying. Think about that.

The other source was the British Public Records Office, now at Kew and renamed the National Archives, containing the wonderful Premier 3 and Premier 4 files, which fill in a lot of blanks.

I found twenty exchanges that were only in British files, mostly early in the war, because in February 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt began numbering their messages. At Churchill’s suggestion, he started at 25; FDR started with 101. I did choose to print a lot of drafts which were not sent or greatly altered, causing some people to scold, “You didn’t print the draft I needed to see.” If I’d printed all the drafts it would have been a five-volume collection and my editor would have had a coronary.

What Was Left Out

Everyone asks what’s missing from the collection. It’s really all there, save a few early messages that were added as an addendum to the original edition. I thought that when Ultra and all the various intelligence materials were accessed by scholars, there were bound to be some more messages, and I’ve kept a pretty close watch on that area, but I haven’t found anything. There are some tantalizing suggestions in the correspondence itself, that they would send classified attachments— really secret documents—but nothing has cropped up. I know some historian would like to needle me and say, “You missed this one,” but I haven’t found it.

What about telephone conversations? Alas they are gone, because no one kept a record of them. From the start of communications in 1939 they talked on the telephone until security people reminded them this wasn’t a very smart idea. We know the Germans were listening in—not much of substance there either. But then the Anglo-Americans did get a system called SIGSALY, precursor of digital encryption. (See Christopher Sterling, “SIGSALY: Beginning of the Digital Revolution,” Finest Hour 149: 31.)

There are fascinating stories about how SIGSALY was put together. Its prototypes were nicknamed “Green Hornets” (after the popular American radio melodrama), for the crackling sound heard by anyone attempting to listen in. Churchill was a little upset because someone overheard Roosevelt say that Churchill on SIGSALY sounded like Donald Duck, so he found reasons not to use it. Of course they did use it, although Truman used it more than Roosevelt. But again, few of these conversations were recorded. Occasionally, someone took a note, usually secondhand. Stenographers were forbidden to listen in, and security people would sometimes scold Churchill and FDR for raising sensitive matters in their talks.

Whatever the chance of missing messages, I’m convinced that there is nothing of substance left out—no dramatic change that would affect the historical assessment of Roosevelt’s or Churchill’s policies: what they were thinking about.

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

If you write a book and have a choice on when it hits the streets, consider carefully the dog days of July. It’s a slow news month, and on 11 July 1984 when the Correspondence was at last published, Edwin McDowell’s review appeared on the front page of The New York Times: “Roosevelt/Churchill Letters Depict Tensions.” Wow, what a revelation!

Shortly thereafter, a New Yorker cartoon portrayed the classic Wall Street executive, round head and slightly overweight, lecturing a pouting associate: “Oh, for God’s sake, Banwell. If Roosevelt could occasionally get testy with Churchill, I can occasionally get testy with you.” I bought the original and hung it over my desk.

Of course historians have long known that the Grand Alliance had testy moments, but conventional wisdom was that the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship was smooth and comfortable. It’s an impression created in part by Churchill’s insistence in a letter to then-President Eisenhower that he had taken great pains to ensure that his war memoirs, particularly the final volume, “contained nothing to impair the sympathy and understanding which exists between our two countries”—a preemptive strike on history, I call it. Churchill wrote with the Special Relationship in mind: no wonder the public was surprised to learn of tensions historians already knew about.

So it was that in July 1984, courtesy of Winston Spencer Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I had my Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame. It was nice, but you have to plan ahead: by October or November, to Princeton’s delight and my utter surprise, they had sold out the first printing: about 1500 sets. Thus I lost a whopping Christmas sale.

For some it was the perfect gift: “I am buying this for my husband for Christmas,” a woman told me at a book-signing, “because of that damn war. He talks about it all the time; it was the most exciting period of his life.” And they ran out of sets!

I couldn’t believe it. Bookstores were calling me, saying, “We need it. Talk to the printer!” Again I was the victim of 1980s technology: lining up a press in time. They tried to give advance purchasers a proof-of-purchase, but no wife, trying to buy a present for her banker husband, is going to take a certificate. I had my minutes of fame, but not fortune.

What We Still Need to Know

Churchill-Roosevelt exchanges do not stand alone. High politics is always supported by a vast structure of higher politics and bureaucratic politics (not sure if that is high or low) which shape, deflect, misunderstand, and even ignore the great leaders themselves. In fact, it’s kind of funny how often they are ignored.

So the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence had to have, I thought, some kind of a running gloss. That’s why I went with head notes. Of course this is the most transient part of the collection, because it’s based on scholarship then available to me. I finished the task in 1983, but I do think it stands up pretty well.

There is one huge gap in the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence: the wartime conferences. Churchill and Roosevelt met together eleven to thirteen times, depending on how you count. I always say thirteen, because I want to include the fascinating meeting at Great Bitter Lake at the end of the Yalta Conference. I finally decided to write an essay on each of the conferences, focusing not on all that was discussed, but on how those conferences moved along what was happening in the correspondence. I tried my best to do that. How successful I was is your judgment, not mine.

There are other gaps. I could look at how the British viewed the Americans and the Russians. As I’ve said too many times before, Stalin really was the ghost in the attic when it came to the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship. I could look at how the Americans viewed Stalin, Churchill and their messages. But I often complain that we have too little information, even today, about how Stalin assessed the Churchill-Roosevelt messages and initiatives, what he thought they implied. Certainly he didn’t always get them right.

Oleg Rzheshevsky published a wonderful book, War and Diplomacy: The Making of the Grand Alliance (Oxford: Taylor & Breach, 1996), which indicated that there was more in the Soviet archives than I’d been told during a Soviet/British/American joint project, where I’d represented the American side. For ten years, Soviet scholars had insisted Stalin didn’t take notes. He didn’t write memos. I think they said that simply because they didn’t see any.

War and Diplomacy was masterful in dealing with early debates about the second front. The most fascinating exchange was Roosevelt’s famous statement to Molotov that the Americans “expect” a second front in the autumn of 1942. A lot of people have made a fuss about that, saying it was a promise. Thanks to Rzheshevsky’s book, we know there was no promise. Molotov wrote Stalin: “Every time Roosevelt talks about the second front, he hedges, and he hems, and he haws, and he uses different, vague words to describe it.” If anybody was fooled, it wasn’t Stalin.

Good Russian historians are still working on the Soviet side of the correspondence. Vladimir Pechatnov is preparing a complete new edition of Stalin’s correspondence with Churchill and FDR. To date, he has found nothing new, nor did he expect to. The original Soviet publication from 1958 is complete. There are differences in words, but you have to remember, a document often has had three translations before publication. Translators tell me it takes about five Russian words to say the same thing as three English words. That accounts for everything I could find in differences between the Russian and American versions. Pechatnov claims that he has seen memoranda—not just Stalin drawing a wolf on a sheet of paper, as we all know he liked to do. That is promising, but the promise has yet to be fulfilled.

The other big gap in my volumes, besides the conferences and Russian background, is that I’m not sure we yet know how Stalin interpreted everything Churchill and Roosevelt were doing. We can extrapolate from his actions, but that’s not fully reliable. Similarly, we have little evidence about how the Chinese assessed U.S. and British actions and policies, or in my case, Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s policies. Early Chinese scholars of the war had no access to Chinese documentation. What we have now is even more difficult to access, because there are two Chinas with two separate archives. We do know scholars are working their way through that, but their focus is really on that iceberg—the Cold War— that keeps trying to submerge World War II.

Was World War II really global? Churchill saw the Pacific as a secondary theater, and to be honest, it’s not the subject of much Anglo-American high policy, because it was a U.S. theater. While Roosevelt didn’t agree with Admiral King to keep the British out, he certainly did not consult Churchill on decisions. All these are gaps I am hoping to see filled.

The Key Element: Leadership

Where am I in my assessment of Churchill, Roosevelt and their vast correspondence? In truth, I am not very far from where I was in 1984. Maybe I’ve unconsciously contradicted myself in those pages, or in my related books like Forged in War. Some new details, maybe, but I don’t think I have made major reversals. Part of it may be that I don’t h a v e a theory. I wrote once that to adopt a theory is to adopt a faith, and I guess I remain without faith. I’ve spent a career writing about high policy and leaders, and I remain convinced that Oscar Wilde and E.H. Carr framed the historiographical dilemma of great persons vs. great forces, though I think that Hegel was smarter. Wilde said: “It’s personalities, not principles, that move the age.” Carr said: “Simply numbers count.” But Hegel summed it up: “The great figure of the age actualizes the age.” That’s pretty good.

Churchill and Roosevelt are world-shaping figures who acted within the parameters of politics, culture, and history that existed. But there is an element in their story that comes out clearly in their correspondence: leadership. We all think we know how to write a brief definition of leadership. But try it and I guarantee you’ll throw away a whole pad of paper. It’s elusive. It’s like the Supreme Court decision about obscenity: “We don’t know what it is, but we know what it is when we see it.”

You see leadership in what Churchill and Roosevelt did—in their ability to motivate. As I’ve written before, can you imagine Cordell Hull evoking spontaneous cheers among U.S. soldiers in North Africa, as FDR did when he appeared there in 1942? Can you picture Lord Halifax, by sheer rhetoric, making a victory out of the Dunkirk disaster? Or as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. told the 1995 International Churchill conference: “Would Neville Chamberlain or Lord Halifax have rallied Britain in 1940? Would John Garner have produced the New Deal and the Four Freedoms?…Individuals do make a difference in history.”

Really, what Churchill and Roosevelt did was an amazing performance. And they did it time and time again. It was more than just rhetoric. People always equate rhetoric with leadership. No, that is how they delivered leadership. They were also leading effectively in what they did.

My impression in 1984, that the Grand Alliance was a little bit less grand than convention would have it, hasn’t changed, but I’ve softened it a tad. Bill Emerson, director of the Roosevelt Library back then, said that the final volume, subtitled Alliance Declining, should have been entitled, Alliance Triumphant. This tells you a lot about his generation and mine.

In spite of the defenses I have made of the Anglo-American Special Relationship—because I do think it still exists today—there was a lot of tension between the two great allies, more familiar now than in 1984: Roosevelt wanted economic and geopolitical advantage, but assumed the British were part of the Grand Alliance. Churchill called himself FDR’s “loyal lieutenant.” Some might find that a bit smarmy, but in reality he knew that Britain was not on a geopolitical par with America. Like any Englishman, he was sure he was smarter; but FDR assumed that the Special Relationship really worked. He honestly felt—and you see this in the correspondence—that he didn’t really have to schmooze Churchill to keep him happy.

It was Stalin he had to schmooze, because Stalin was the one they weren’t sure they could get into the family. Churchill and Roosevelt tried throughout the war to convince Stalin that he could trust them. Stalin honestly, I think, wanted the same result. But there were problems with what each could live with and feel comfortable with. That is for another lecture, because it is a long, hard story.

I am adamant that the Second World War was not the beginning of the Cold War. Something that I hinted at in the correspondence head notes, but have since pounded and tried to convince people of, is that this is the wrong way to look at World War II.

Churchill presented himself in his war memoirs as a prescient Cold Warrior. In reality he was ambivalent about how to deal with the Soviet Union. A delightful evidence of this emerges in his personal letters and private remarks: Often, when he talks about the “Bolsheviks,” he is talking about ideological Communism, of which he was an adamant foe; but if he talks about the “Russians,” he is referring to his allies—and mostly he talks about “Russians,” until after the Yalta conference.

Up through the Yalta talks, Churchill believed that there would be a great power condominium after the war. Who the great powers were, Churchill and Roosevelt didn’t always agree. Churchill muttered about France; Roosevelt muttered about China, primarily because he didn’t know what else to do. He certainly didn’t want the Russians in China—or the British, or for that matter the Americans. I think I have spent most of my career elaborating on those themes and trying to fill in the blanks; fill in the story from the outline you get in the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence.

Many of the important events in the war were outside the sphere of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s personal interest. I don’t mean their nations’—the United States had a global attitude, Britain a global empire—but in terms of their personal interest, where their leadership was required, many happenings were out of their reach, particularly domestic events in countries caught up in, or even neutral in, the war. I believe however that their correspondence provides a useful template for anyone studying the politics of the war, particularly the long-lasting political structure that they and Stalin established.

That template is still useful in studying today’s international structure, though it is changing, what with non-governmental organizations and groupings like the EU. Perhaps most relevant is Roosevelt’s concept of the “four policemen,” his ongoing pitch as the way to preserve the peace. Stalin first bought into it and then backed out. And Churchill bought into it, although he wanted more of a Euro-centric approach. I think that is a tremendously important point to make, and have worked twenty-five years to lay it out. You can’t understand everything through the prism of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence—but I think you will understand even less if you disregard it. It is a starting point for any study of World War II.

Finest Hour Senior Editor Warren Kimball, who edited Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence in 1984, recalled his experience at the History and Public Policy Program, sponsored by The National History Center and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, 30 January 2012. His audiotaped remarks, with questions and answers, may be found at http://xrl.us/bnzjgn.