ROOSEVELT'S LOST ALLIANCES
How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War
Frank Costigliola
Princeton Press; 435 pages; $24.95
After Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine and Russian troops made their poorly disguised forays into western Ukraine, several commentators suggested that the world was witnessing the real endgame of the Cold War. The uninhibited triumphalism of the West after the Russian humiliation in Afghanistan and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, this line of thinking goes, has left deep scars on the Russian psyche, which Mr Putin has tried to heal with his brazen conquests in Chechnya, Georgia and now Ukraine.
It is a temptingly attractive explanation but a partial one. The history of this strange half-century stand-off is far more complex than the binary terms in which it was projected by politicians, from Winston Churchill to Ronald Reagan, and analysts, from George F Kennan to John Lewis Gaddis (also Kennan's biographer). With Roosevelt's Lost Alliances, historian Frank Costigliola has courageously attempted a nuanced pre-history. Rather than recounting the well-worn narrative, he focuses on "tracing the political consequences of the relationships, personalities, emotional relationships … and cultural assumptions" of the Big Three leaders of the victorious Allies - Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, the monolithically powerful Joseph Stalin and, later, Harry Truman. Professor Costigliola's broad contention is that relations between the two post-World War II superpowers could have followed a very different trajectory if Roosevelt had not died in April 1945, before Allied victories over Germany and Japan were complete.
This much has long been recognised: Truman, the inexperienced and insecure former draper from Missouri, determinedly sidelined by Roosevelt, has borne the brunt of the blame for falling prey to the hawks in the administration and pursing an approach that hardened attitudes between the former allies. Among the intriguing "what-ifs" of history is his decision to refuse to share technology for the atom bomb with the Russians (which turned out to be pointless anyway since there were no shortage of spies to pass on those secrets to Stalin).
It was also clear that the handsome, magnetic Roosevelt was inclined to view Stalin's post-war claims with more sympathy than the British because, as Professor Costigliola points out, his wealthy, privileged personal background "predisposed him to an emotional belief that postwar co-operation was necessary and worth the risk". He was ready to take that risk, Professor Costigliola adds, because of "what became known as 'Roosevelt luck'" - the same luck that had enabled him to defy polio "to win six straight elections including third and fourth terms as president". Gifted with an empathy that Churchill, the hardline imperialist and instinctive racist, lacked, he understood well the motives for Stalin's desire for a cordon sanitaire and his pathological aversion to another German invasion.
The result of Professor Costigliola's approach is an invaluably detailed recreation of the political atmospherics of the war - the fact that the book occasionally strays into the realm of pure gossip does it no harm. At the centre of this story are the inherently sociable Roosevelt's aides, lovers and hangers-on, each of whom exerted some measure of influence on the president's thinking. Professor Costigliola presents an ecletic cast of characters who are all too human - some eccentric, some downright wild. Measured against the rigid moralities of today's American press, most would have been destroyed by personal scandals in no time.
Among Roosevelt's intimate circle was Marguerite "Missy" LeHand, his indispensable secretary (and almost certainly his lover) till her stroke in 1941, depriving the president of his closest confidante at a key moment. Then there was Harry L Hopkins, the unstable, alcoholic friend and advisor who fell out with his mentor and tried (unsuccessfully) to rehabilitate himself under Truman.
At one remove was Averell Harriman, first Roosevelt's Lend-Lease representative in London and later ambassador to Moscow. Deeply involved in an affair with Churchill's daughter-in-law, Pamela, (who appeared to have slept her way through Anglo-American war-time establishment), Harriman came to subscribe to the British aversion for the Russians. He was, thus, increasingly sidelined by Roosevelt during the talks at the Crimean resort of Yalta, the last time the Big Three met, but found a ready ear in Truman.
Of course, deteriorating relations was not a one-way dynamic. By the mid-forties, the Stalinist police state reasserted itself, including the surveillance of foreigners. Like many Anglo-Americans at the time, Harriman's anti-Sovietism was also provoked partly by the rape and loot that marked the Red Army's progress through East Europe, and partly by an ingrained racism against the "Asiatic" Russians. Kennan, author of the famous Long Telegram that set out the contours of the Cold War conflict, was one influential inheritor of this approach.
This growing ideological distance also explained Roosevelt's cooling relationship with Britain's wartime prime minister. Churchill thrived on the so-called "special relationship", forged, he mistakenly believed, on a shared understanding of race and kinship. Professor Costigliola traces Roosevelt's growing exasperation with Churchill's implacable imperialism and chicanery towards Stalin. Many histories focus on the friendly body language of the two leaders at the Atlantic Conference in 1941. A rare photograph during the Yalta Conference of February 1945 probably expresses Roosevelt's views more accurately: visibly gaunt from the heart ailment that would kill him soon, he is glaring angrily at Churchill as the latter holds forth.
Indeed, as much as Professor Costigliola's page-turning account of flawed personalities struggling to come to terms with the biggest crisis of the developed world, the photographs in this book are worth the steep cover price. The one on the cover, showing Stalin at his most charming and gallant, probably captures best the tragedy of the lost alliance.
