Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (147 page)

A
t Hyde Park holding Fala and comforting a young friend

W
ith Eleanor at Hyde Park

I
n his element

W
arm Springs, April 11, 1945

Roosevelt’s liaison to Chiang was General Joseph Stilwell, who despised Chiang. “Vinegar Joe” turned violently acidic in describing the generalissimo, as Chiang styled himself. “Peanut” was Stilwell’s private name for Chiang, and the appellation referred only partly to the shape of his shaved head. (Stilwell was mildly more respectful of Roosevelt, whom he called “Frank” in his diary.) Stilwell couldn’t decide whether Chiang was more hopeless as a general or as a president. “Peanut is really no dictator,” Stilwell remarked with regret. “He issues an order. Everybody bows and says ‘sure.’ But nobody does anything. He knows all about the smuggling and the rottenness, but he hasn’t the power to cure it…. Opium traffic in Yunnan still enormous. Guarded by soldiers. Big stocks of hoarded gas, cloth, and other commodities…. The Chinese Red Cross is a racket. Stealing and sale of medicines is rampant…. Malnutrition and sickness is ruining the army; the higher-ups steal the soldiers’ food. A pretty picture.”

In fairness to Chiang, the task before him was all but impossible. Beset by the Japanese for a dozen years, beleaguered by indigenous Communists for even longer, Chiang fought a war on two fronts. This was what outraged Stilwell, who argued that Chiang and Mao Zedong, the Communist leader, should bury the hatchet for the duration of the war against Japan. Neither was persuaded; with four thousand years of Chinese history behind them, each took the long view of China’s predicament. Japan was a problem of the moment, soon to be vanquished—by the United States if not by the Chinese. The real prize was control of the Chinese government.

Roosevelt’s time frame didn’t stretch thousands of years, but it did extend into the future, particularly with respect to China. The president flew from Tunis to Cairo, where he met with Chiang and Churchill. The British prime minister thought Roosevelt asked too much of the Chinese leader, and of China. “I was impressed by his calm, reserved, and efficient personality,” Churchill afterward wrote of Chiang. But he added that he “did not in those days share in the excessive estimates of Chiang Kai-shek’s power or of the future helpfulness of China.”

Roosevelt refused to be put off. As he had suggested to Elliott at Casablanca, China was going to be America’s postwar counterweight to Russia—and perhaps to Britain as well. At Cairo, Roosevelt affirmed China’s membership in what was coming to be called the Big Four. A dinner meeting in Roosevelt’s borrowed villa brought the president and Hopkins together with Chiang and Madame Chiang, the fascinating former Soong May-ling. Madame Chiang was one of three Soong sisters, daughters of an American-educated Methodist minister-entrepreneur and a beautiful, ambitious mother. The eldest of the three girls, Soong Ai-ling, was known as “the one who loves money” she married the richest man in China. The middle girl, Soong Ching-ling, called “the one who loves China,” married Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Republic of China. The youngest, Soong May-ling, “the one who loves power,” married Chiang Kai-shek. In the bargain she persuaded Chiang to give up Buddhism for Christianity. Madame Chiang’s mastery of English, which she had perfected at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, her beauty, which seemingly increased as she grew older, and her political astuteness, which hardly ever faltered, made her a favorite among American legislators and a formidable presence in Washington. Roosevelt never refused her a White House interview, and he had great difficulty refusing her requests on behalf of her husband.

At the Cairo dinner Chiang and Madame Chiang got Roosevelt to reiterate his support for China’s status as the postwar peer of America, Russia, and Britain. The Chinese minutes of the meeting—apparently the only record made—explained that “President Roosevelt expressed his view that China should take her place as one of the Big Four and participate on an equal footing in the machinery of the Big Four group and in all its decisions.” Chiang responded that China would gladly do so.

Roosevelt went on to inquire of Chiang’s opinions regarding postwar Japan. Ought the Japanese to be allowed to retain the institution of the emperor? Chiang answered that this question should be left to the Japanese to decide. Roosevelt asserted—again according to the Chinese minutes—that “China should play the leading role in the post-war military occupation of Japan.” Chiang again demurred, this time saying that China lacked the where-withal for such an occupation. “The task should be carried out under the leadership of the United States…. China could participate in the task in a supporting capacity should it prove necessary.”

R
OOSEVELT DELIBERATELY
kept his Cairo visit short, not wishing to give Stalin additional reason for thinking he and Churchill—and perhaps Chiang—were colluding against Russia. But the visit did include Thanksgiving Day, and the president hosted a dinner for Churchill and his daughter Sarah, who served as her father’s personal assistant; for Elliott Roosevelt, who had rejoined his father in a temporary similar capacity; for Robert Hopkins, who had likewise joined
his
father; and for several others. “Let us make it a family affair,” Roosevelt decreed, laughing.

Churchill afterward described the host’s bravura performance.

Two enormous turkeys were brought in with all ceremony. The President, propped up high in his chair, carved for all with masterly, indefatigable skill. As we were above twenty, this took a long time, and those who were helped first had finished before the President had cut anything for himself. As I watched the huge platefuls he distributed to the company I feared that he might be left with nothing at all. But he had calculated to a nicety, and I was relieved, when at last the two skeletons were removed, to see him set about his own share. Harry, who had noted my anxiety, said, “We have ample reserves.”

Toasts were offered, speeches made. After dinner the group adjourned to the villa’s main room, where several of the official meetings had been held. The tables, now empty of papers, were pushed against the walls. A phonograph played dance music. Sarah Churchill, the only woman present, was on her feet all night. “She had her work cut out,” her father said, “and so I danced with ‘Pa’ Watson, Roosevelt’s trusted old friend and aide, to the delight of his chief, who watched us from the sofa.” Churchill savored the memory. “For a couple of hours we cast care aside. I had never seen the President more gay.”

T
HE HARD WORK
began in Teheran. Roosevelt wouldn’t have gone clear to Cairo to meet Chiang, important though he intended for China to be. Cairo was a stop on the way to Teheran, where the most important conference of the war thus far would take place. Stalin had grudgingly agreed to leave the Soviet Union, but only for adjacent Iran. Roosevelt and Churchill, with consciences uneasy over their failure to provide a second front, humored the Soviet leader’s comparative immobility.

For several hours out of Cairo, Roosevelt’s Sacred Cow seemed a flying carpet. The plane winged east, crossing the Suez Canal at Ismailia before the pilot turned north to give the president a view of what most Americans still called the Holy Land and the inhabitants Palestine. The plane circled Jerusalem, its roofs shining in the morning sun. Across the desert to Mesopotamia—Iraq—they flew, traversing the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and spotting Baghdad off to the south. The pilot found the highway that ran from Abadan to Teheran. Paralleling the road was the railroad to Russia. “From the air we sighted train loads and motor convoys loaded with U.S. Lend-Lease supplies, bound from the Persian Gulf port of Basra to Russia,” Roosevelt’s log keeper recorded. The fair weather and clear skies allowed the pilot to follow the road through the mountain passes rather than climb over the peaks. The plane never exceeded eight thousand feet in altitude, almost a mile below some of the mountain tops.

Even before the Sacred Cow landed in Teheran, the skirmishing for position at the conference had begun. Stalin told Averell Harriman of his worry that the city was too dangerous for the kind of commuting that would be required between the American legation, where President Roosevelt presumably would stay, and the Russian embassy, where he, Stalin, would be. Teheran had been under German control until only a few months previous, and the city almost certainly continued to hide Nazi agents and sympathizers, who might take advantage of any assassination opportunity. Stalin explained that the Russian embassy compound was large and commodious; he would be happy for President Roosevelt to stay there. No such provision was necessary for Prime Minister Churchill, as the British legation almost adjoined the Soviet embassy, and in any event the British had a much larger presence in Teheran than the Americans did.