[Enchante]

"No, he wasn’t just a leftist, he was surrounded by Communists, and was probably covertly a Communist himself, although probably he never carried a card."

Certainly he was incorrigibly soft on communists, and invincibly naive about the real nature of "Uncle Joe" Stalin who Roosevelt persisted in viewing through rose-clouded spectacles to the very end. I don't think Roosevelt ever consciously wanted rule by any communist party, but I do think he was hopelessly ignorant and naive about the implications of Yalta, etc. Roosevelt was the classic liberal machine politician who thought that he could beguile and coopt and manipulate Stalin, never grasping that Stalin had been through an immensely tougher, more ruthless school of "hard knocks" than any NY pol.

[Verginius Rufus]

There are some indications that in the interval between Yalta and his death, FDR was becoming upset with Stalin over his violation of his promises...but whether he would have taken the course Truman took is debatable. In the early years of the Cold War there was a school of thought that it was all Truman's fault, that if FDR had lived our relationship with Stalin would have been fine. That element supported Henry Wallace in 1948.

That's the measure of the difference between the Democratic Party of the late 1940s and the Democrats of today--in 1948 Wallace got 1 million votes to Truman's 24 million, but the Wallaceites are the overwhelming majority of today's Democrats. Joe Lieberman is a relic of the old Truman type...and he was defeated in his party's primary in 2006.

[MplsSteve]

The final sentence is your post is most telling. It reminds me of a sentence from the book “Backlash”.

It goes like this: “Roosevelt cloaked his guile with a personal charm reputed to be so overpowering that some political foes were said to shrink from private encounters with him lest they succumb to his wiles”.

In that, Stalin was one of the few who was not swayed by Roosevelt’s persona.