Since the end of the Cold War there has been considerable reviewing of President Roosevelt's policies toward the Soviet Union. Most notable has been the essay of Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who has argued that the 1989 counter-revolution in Central Europe vindicates President Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy, which, he says, had been criticized for its “naiveté” about Stalin.
However, I argue that, from the time he took office in 1933, FDR ignored informed assessments from within the State Department of the nature of Soviet diplomacy and that, consequently, the peoples of Central Europe for some four decades paid the price. As sources for my rebuttal of Schlesinger, I cite the writings and memoirs of American diplomats Charles Bohlen, Averell Harriman, Loy Henderson, and George Kennan, participant-observers in the development of Soviet-American diplomacy between 1933 and 1945. I begin with a discussion of Professor Schlesinger's article, as he is the most authoritative of FDR's defenders.
The eminent Pulitzer Prize–winning historian's op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal (June 21, 1990) was titled “FDR Vindicated.” Professor Schlesinger's theme was that, despite longtime disparagement of President Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy, especially the 1945 Yalta agreement, the successful counter-revolutions in Central Europe were really “the fulfillment of Roosevelt's purposes at the Yalta conference.”
“Roosevelt was much criticized too for naiveté,” wrote Professor Schlesinger, “in supposedly thinking that he could charm Stalin into amiable postwar collaboration. . . . FDR's determination to work on and through Stalin was, it seems in retrospect, founded on shrewd insight. As Walter Lippmann once observed, Roosevelt was too cynical to think he could charm Stalin.”
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