Posted on 05/13/2004 3:08:45 PM PDT by Zack Nguyen
The Lessons of History
How “Uncle Joe” Bugged FDR
Gary Kern
In recent years, the statesmanship of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in particular his handling of Soviet affairs, has come under attack in historical studies. The situation has reached such a pass that even a psychiatrist who examined FDR’s medical records has opined that toward the end of World War II the US President ceded the better part of Eastern Europe to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin because he was “gripped by clinical depression.1”
Certainly the President’s moves can be questioned, but questionable policy can be founded on factors other than low spirits—which, in point of fact, were not generally observed in FDR at the time. Rather, the operant factors were: the President’s supreme confidence in his own powers of persuasion, his profound ignorance of the Bolshevik dictatorship, his projection of humane motives onto his Soviet counterpart, his determined resistance to contradictory evidence and advice, and his wishful thinking based on geopolitical designs—mindsets supported and reinforced by his appointed advisors. Taken together, these factors produced a false view of US-Soviet relations and inspired policy that had only superficial contact with reality. As an instance in point, they induced the President of the United States to do the unthinkable: walk into a surveillance trap, not once, but twice, and willingly.
Normally, in order to avoid the possibility of intelligence leaks and personal embarrassment, as well as to ensure physical safety, traveling US presidents stay in their own country’s embassies or other diplomatic buildings, whose tables and walls have been swept by instruments able to discover listening devices. But when Roosevelt went abroad to meet Stalin, he wanted very badly to please him, holding him to be a key figure in the postwar division of powers, and so did not insist on such accommodations. Consequently, at the conference in Teheran (November 1943) and again at Yalta (February 1945), he stayed in Soviet quarters and was bugged like no other American president in history.
FDR’s Acquaintance With Bugs
Roosevelt was no stranger to technical surveillance. In 1939, piqued by an incident in which he believed that the press had deliberately misquoted him, he had a secret recording system installed in the White House as a means of self-protection. Since German tape-recording technology had not yet found its way to America, something had to be invented. FDR’s assistants took the problem to David Sarnoff of the Radio Corporation of America. In June 1940, Sarnoff personally presented the President with a “continuous-film recording machine” that made use of motion-picture sound film. Set in a wire cage in a room beneath the Oval Office, the device was activated either by the President using a switch inside his desk drawer or by his technician down below throwing a switch on the machine itself. A single microphone poked out through a lamp on FDR’s desk.
Between 23 August and 8 November, 1939, during his campaign for an unprecedented third term, the President recorded fourteen of twenty-one press conferences held in his office, plus a number of private conversations, the latter possibly by mistake. It seems that he never used the system to entrap anyone, and no one knows why he stopped it. Relatively innocent by today’s standards of invasion, it nevertheless demonstrates that the President was acquainted with listening devices before his conferences with Stalin.2
In the very year of the Teheran conference, he was reminded of hidden microphones when watching Mission to Moscow, a movie based on a book of that title by Joseph E. Davies, America’s second Ambassador to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 3 Produced in 1943 with the President’s blessing, possibly even at his explicit request, this blatant piece of propaganda was designed to drum up public enthusiasm for a political shotgun wedding: It colored Stalin as a simple, practical man with whom one could do business; rhapsodized about Soviet construction, government, and politics; and justified the Soviet blood purges, the Moscow show trials, and Stalin’s two-year pact with Hitler, which had ended when Hitler turned the tables on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Attempting to forestall any criticism of the Soviet system, Davies even contrived to make a brief for bugging. In one scene, set in the American Embassy in Moscow, the Ambassador’s assistants warn him of listening devices, but he rebukes them severely:
I say nothing outside the Kremlin that I wouldn’t say to Stalin’s face. Do you? . . . We’re here in a sense as guests of the Soviet government, and I’m going to believe they trust the United States as a friend until they prove otherwise. Is that clear?
When the assistant persists that still, after all, there may be microphones, Davies, played with aplomb by FDR’s favorite actor, Walter Huston, cuts him off: “Then let ’em hear! We’ll be friends that much faster!”4
This cinematic scene was based on an actual incident. In 1937, when a bug was discovered directly over the Ambassador’s desk at the US Embassy in Moscow, the real Davies laughed it off. If the Soviets wanted to listen in, he told his incredulous staff—which included George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and other skilled State Department diplomats—they would only obtain proof of America’s sincere desire to cooperate with them.5
FDR strongly approved of the film. In his assessment of Soviet politics, he was much closer to Davies, his second Ambassador, than to his first, William C. Bullitt.6 Contrary to Davies, Bullitt never missed an opportunity to warn FDR of Stalin’s treachery. In a typical exchange, Roosevelt responded:
Bill, I don't dispute your facts; they are accurate. I don't dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not and that he doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.7
FDR’s hunch, Hopkins’ glowing reports on Stalin, and Davies’ boundless trust in the Soviet regime were the President’s counters to the admitted facts about Hitler’s recent ally, history’s greatest mass-murderer, and the sole ruler of a party and state dedicated to worldwide communism.8
[CUT....]
Stalin’s Acquaintance With Bugs
For Stalin, bugging friend and foe was an essential part of politics. Since the early 1920s, he had kept a special telephone beneath his desk in the Kremlin for listening in on the private conversations of other Politburo members speaking on an exclusive line.13 Thus, all through the inner-Party struggle for succession, while leader Vladimir Lenin lay dying and for years after he died in 1924, Stalin was able to eavesdrop on all of his comrades, who spoke openly on the line, believing that, since there was no operator (as on the other Kremlin lines), the new “vertushka” (dial) phone was safe. It was not: Stalin magically knew all of their nighttime thoughts the next morning, outmaneuvered them every day, and eventually had most of them shot.14
Stalin’s intelligence arm, the NKVD, or People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, extended all manner of mechanical eyes and ears throughout the nation to reinforce the Bolshevik party’s totalitarian control. Closed borders, internal passports, censored presses, political purges, and forced-labor camps—all of these features of the Soviet system were common knowledge in the 1930s and 1940s, as even Mission to Moscow acknowledged, but FDR, like Davies, brushed them aside. He wanted no criticisms from Bullitt, Standley, or anyone worried about the Soviet massacre of Polish officers in Katyn Forest, for example. To keep the war effort united and to work for postwar democracy, he wanted to please Iosif (“Joseph”) Stalin, whom he liked to call “Uncle Joe.” His primary purpose was to makes friends with a man widely believed to have murdered his wife, liquidated his closest political comrades, and ordered the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in August 1940. As Thomas Fleming notes in The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II, Churchill once said that making an alliance with Stalin would be the same as “shaking hands with murder.” But that was before he, too, warmed up to Uncle Joe.15
I'd like to include one vignette that I think sums up the almost criminal incompetence of Roosevelt and his gang in dealing with the Soviet Union:
Having spared FDR the horror of riding one mile each day through the Persian streets, having appropriated his space and nullified his Secret Service, Uncle Joe drew him into a warm embrace. He told him that after the war he would grant freedom of religion, private ownership, and greater democracy in the Soviet Union, the name of which he would change back to Russia. Roosevelt, delighted with these unbelievable concessions, let Joe know that he could draw the postwar borders of Poland and reassume control of the Baltic republics with perhaps “some expression of the will of the people, perhaps not immediately after their re-occupation by Soviet forces, but some day.” Uncle Joe’s word—Stalin said he “understood”—was good enough for FDR.
That says it all. One of the more annoying characteristics of many leftists is that they assume they are so smart, so glib, so gifted at repartee, so endowed with good intentions that no one could possibly resist their charm and eloquence. Therefore they cannot possibly fail. Though this can and has happened with conservative politicians, I see it most often exhibited amongst the left. You saw it with FDR, LBJ, Clinton and Kerry.
The more I read about our national response to Communism in the 1930's and 1940's, the more amazed I am that we were blessed with victory.
FDR had been told we would have a million Americans killed when we invaded Japan. Japan like the Muslims believed that if you died killing an American you went to heaven and your family did also.
FDR and Truman after him were trying to get Stalin to help us defeat the Japansese. FDR and Truman figured that if we lost a half million and Russia lost a half million that was better than us losing a million.
HST and FDR were trading eastern Europe for a half million American lives.
Today we would rather Americans die than have a Iraqi get shamed. To many an American life is not worth a snail darter fish.
Odd thing is that it is Capitalism perverted by the Left in the form of cultural warfare or politics with a capital in Hollywood.
This Michael Moore film ripping off a Great Film has me hopping made.
The Culture War is intensifying.
The reporter asked the KGB agent if Harry Hopkins was a KGB agent and he sort of laughed and said something like "Lets just say he was very helpful to us" I took it to mean that he was a volunteer agent probably not completely under their control but still an agent of the Soviet Union.
Old Gumlegs (as W.C. Fields referred to him) was a socalist, so he saw no problem with a Communist. It was the next stage up! FDR ranks as one of the worst Presidents in history IMHO. Made the Great Depression worse, knew about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance and sold out his country to the f-ing Russians and socialism.
FDR did untold damage to the entire free world. No wonder the democRATs revere him so much.
bump for monday
That's very true. I was thinking of Newt Gingrich, who never seemed to have things under control. Also, George W., during the 2000 primary, seemed to believe he had it won already. A couple of quick losses were lessons he didn't forget.
I think he has also got over the idea that he could charm the likes of Teddy Kennedy and Tom Daschle.
Unbelievable. After reading this artilce, I'd believe just about anything.
There uncomfortable fact about a lot of leftists is that they saw the USSR as an "interesting idea." Some seemed to take a more reaslistic view. I divide American liberalism between folks like HArry Truman, who were big-government progressives, and John Kerry/Hillary Clinton/Moveon.org, who are aggressive cultural Marxists and want to remake American society in their own secualr humanist image. To the latter group, it's like a religious calling.
I regard FDR as somewhere in between, if that's possible. He was just ambivalent about Communism.
"FDR ceded the better part of Eastern Europe to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin"
Says it all.
Are you aware that there is already a FReeper by the name "tet68"?
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