Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership - Softcover

Butler, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307741818 ISBN 13: 9780307741813

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In Roosevelt and Stalin, Susan Butler tells the story of how the leader of the capitalist world and the leader of the Communist world became more than allies of convenience during World War II. They shared the same outlook for the postwar world, and formed an uneasy yet deep friendship, shaping the global  stage from the war to the decades leading up to and into the new century. The book makes clear that Roosevelt worked hard to win Stalin over, by always holding out the promise that Roosevelt’s own ideas were the best hope for the future peace and security of Russia. Stalin, however, was initially unconvinced that Roosevelt’s planned world organization, even with police powers, would be strong enough to keep Germany from starting a new war. In the end we see how Stalin’s opinion of Roosevelt evolved and how he began to view FDR as the key to peace.  Roosevelt and Stalin is a revelatory portrait of this crucial, geopolitical partnership.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Butler was a freelance writer whose work regularly appeared in the New York Times. Her interest in journalism dates back to  Bennington where she was the editor of the student newspaper. She later earned an MA at Columbia University from the School of Arts and Sciences.

She is the author of East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart, which was the basis for the movie Amelia, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere, and My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Crossing the Atlantic in Wartime

On Thursday morning, November 11, 1943, the twenty-­fifth anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I, President Roosevelt left the White House in an open convertible and swept through the capital, the Stars and Stripes and the presidential flag flying from the front of the car. He was on his way to pay homage at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. There was a holiday air in the city: flags were on display, and banks were closed for the day. As the president’s car reached the cemetery and proceeded to the tomb, a twenty-­one-­gun salute, fired from the latest antitank guns, boomed out across the Potomac valley.

At eleven o’clock, the exact hour the armistice had been signed, Roosevelt stood bareheaded between General Edwin “Pa” Watson, his military aide, and Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, his naval aide, in front of the tomb. The day was chilly and raw, the trees almost bare; there was a cold wind. Over the president’s shoulders was the dark navy dress cape he frequently wore on short trips from the White House. An army bugler flanked the group on one side; a soldier holding a big wreath of yellow and russet chrysanthemums stood on the other. An army band struck up “The Star-­Spangled Banner,” after which there was the customary moment of silence. Admiral Brown then took the wreath and laid it on the tomb for the president. Four ruffles of muffled drums were heard, and the bugler blew taps.

Following the brief ceremony, the sounds of a second twenty-­one-­gun salute boomed out across the valley as the president’s car wound its way out of the cemetery.

The House of Representatives marked the day with commemorative speeches, most of which voiced the sentiment that ways must be found to make the coming peace more durable than the last. The Senate was not in session.

Roosevelt was in the tenth year of his presidency, the country almost two years into World War II. As darkness fell and rain started, the president again left the White House by car, but unlike in the morning he slipped out unobtrusively. He was on his way to the marine base at Quantico, Virginia, where the USS Potomac, the sleek white 165-­foot presidential yacht, a Coast Guard cutter to which an upper deck and a cabin had been added, awaited. It would take him on the first leg of the 17,442-­mile trip through submarine-­infested waters to Tehran, Iran, more than halfway around the world. There, for the first time, he would meet Joseph Stalin, the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, the renegade. It would be a momentous occasion for both of them and for the world.

With Roosevelt was his closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, in charge of the Lend-­Lease program providing the massive aid flowing to the Soviet Union; his chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy; his personal physician, Vice Admiral Dr. Ross McIntire; Admiral Brown; General Watson; and his physical therapist, Lieutenant Commander George Fox. The president’s car arrived at a dark, seemingly deserted dock far away from intrusive eyes, where the Potomac awaited. Aboard the Potomac all was in readiness.

Exactly six minutes after the presidential party stepped onto the ship, it headed down the Potomac River bound for Cherry Point, Virginia, in the Chesapeake Bay, sixty-­three miles distant, where it anchored for the night.

A little after 9:00 the next morning the Potomac approached the USS Iowa, anchored out in the bay in deeper water. It drew up alongside, and in the very light, cool morning air Roosevelt was placed in a sort of bosun’s chair rigged from the rear sundeck of the Potomac and swung aboard the Iowa’s main deck just abreast of number three turret. When the transfer of the rest of the party was completed, the Potomac vanished into the distance, ordered to cruise out of sight and away from its well-­known home berth for the next week, to create the impression, in case any journalist noticed the president’s absence, that he was off on another private pleasure cruise aboard what some called the Floating White House because of the large amount of time he spent on it.

Roosevelt had always loved the sea. As a young boy at Campobello Island in Canada, where he summered, he had learned to sail his father’s sailboat the Half Moon, a forty-six-­foot cutter, taking it out every chance he got and handling it with ease. After he contracted polio at thirty-­nine and lost the use of his legs, he had invested in a houseboat that he kept in Florida waters and lived on for months at a time.

Now he was looking forward to the voyage of the Iowa, the navy’s newest, largest, fastest battleship. It had been specially fitted out for him: an elevator installed, ramps built over the coamings and deck obstructions to accommodate his wheelchair. As in all places where FDR lived, in the bathroom there was a tub with metal railings that FDR could grasp to raise himself up, a toilet bowl exactly the height of his wheelchair, and a mirror low enough so he could shave sitting down. His favorite leather-­upholstered reclining chair was also in his quarters.

Half an hour after he was swung aboard, the big ship was under way. Waiting to greet FDR were all the top brass of the U.S. Armed Forces: General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army; H. H. “Hap” Arnold, commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces; General Brehon B. Somervell, chief of Army Service Forces; Admiral Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet; and Admiral William Leahy, the president’s chief of staff; plus four other generals, three more admirals, and about fifty staff officers of subordinate rank. At Roosevelt’s request, no honors were rendered as he came aboard, and because of wartime restrictions his flag was not flown. Also aboard were the eight Secret Service men who always guarded the president.

So began Roosevelt’s trip to meet Joseph Stalin, a meeting he had been trying to arrange for two years and had gone to extraordinary lengths to bring about.

He and Churchill had chosen Casablanca as a meeting place the previous January because they thought there was a good chance Stalin would agree to meet them there. “We are trying to get Stalin to come,” Roosevelt had confided to Mike Reilly, supervising Secret Service agent at the White House, as he briefed him on the trip, firmly adding, “I won’t go any further than Casablanca to meet him.” But in the face of Stalin’s objections to every location he suggested, the president’s resolve had crumbled: now he was going thousands of miles farther.

The Tehran meeting had been planned to promote Roosevelt’s dearest objective, the establishment of an international organization, a more effective version of the League of Nations, of which every nation would be a member. Such an organization, he believed, was the best, indeed the only, way to maintain a peaceful world. It would supply a forum where any member nation could state its grievance and where all nations could converse. In certain situations it would also have the authority to act. Roosevelt planned that there would be four superpowers—­the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China—­that would act as the world’s four policemen. These four, with greater powers than other nations, would enforce order after the war was won.

Stalin was critical to the president’s plan. The war had changed nations in unforeseen ways. Postwar, only two superpowers would remain: America and Russia. Without the membership and support of the Soviet Union, Roosevelt realized, there...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307741818
• ISBN 13: 9780307741813
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 640
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland