Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: The End of a Friendship and the Start of the Cold War
ON MAY 29, 1942, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, arrived in Washington, D.C. to try to convince the Americans to open a Western front. The conversation between Molotov and President Franklin Roosevelt began awkwardly, with Molotov—a man so gruff and bureaucratic that Lenin called him “Comrade Filing Cabinet”—struggling to make small talk. But the formality faded that evening, as they sat side by side on a couch, with cocktails, talking until each retired to his White House bedroom. When Molotov returned home a week later, he brought with him a promise of American preparations for a second front and a framed photograph of the president, signed, “To my friend Vyacheslav Molotov.”
What a difference three years would make. Molotov next visited Washington on April 22, 1945, just two weeks after Roosevelt died. With the war in Europe nearly won, the United States and the Soviet Union had already begun bickering over the fate of the continent. This time Molotov stayed across the street from the White House. His meeting with President Harry Truman did not go well. The two clashed over the Soviet Union’s brutal occupation of Poland; Molotov explained the Soviet need for a friendly government in Warsaw, and Truman accused the Soviets of reneging on previous agreements. When Molotov changed the topic, Truman got up. “That will be all, Mr. Molotov,” he said. Molotov left the meeting ashen. Within a year, George F. Kennan would write his “long telegram” outlining the logic of containment, and Churchill would speak of “an iron curtain” descending across Europe. The alliance was nearly dead, and the Cold War was alive.
How did a friendship that once seemed so promising sink so low? According to Frank Costigliola’s meticulous book, the U.S.-Soviet relationship fell apart primarily because Roosevelt was no longer around to keep it together. Like those admirers of John F. Kennedy who contend that the world would have been spared the worst of the Vietnam War had he not been shot, Costigliola argues that the Cold War could have been avoided had Roosevelt not suffered a fatal stroke early in his fourth term. “Especially because of Stalin’s suspicious, touchy nature,” he writes, “safe passage to peacetime collaboration required a U.S. leader with the emotional intelligence, elasticity, charm, and confidence of a Franklin Roosevelt rather than the personality of a Harry Truman.”