Haas Lawrence J. - Harry & Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World

O N THE MORNING OF April 12, 1945, Harry Truman, the vice president of the United States, and Arthur Vandenberg, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, awakened to a world in turmoila world that, with Franklin Roosevelts death later that day, they would inherit.

World War II was fast approaching its end, with U.S. troops slicing through Germany from the west and Soviet troops advancing from the east. With the Nazi regime collapsing, more of its liberated victimsprisoners of war, slave laborers, and concentration camp survivors; mostly men but also women and childrenwere wandering the streets, desperate for food, clothing, shelter, or a way out of Germany. Gaunt, dirt-caked, lice-infested, and malodorous, their skin sagging from skeletal bodies, they relayed tales of almost unimaginable horror. In Britains House of Commons, members merrily traded premature rumors that Hitler was dead. In France, the lights of Paris had returned recently for the first time since the war began to celebrate Allied victories on the western front, illuminating the Arc de Triomphe and Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Champs-Elysees and Place de la Concorde. In the Pacific, U.S. forces were progressing steadily against Imperial Japan, claiming land on nearby islands as Japanese citizens committed suicide in hordes rather than face capture.

For Truman and Vandenberg, however, the prospect of victory offered only limited satisfaction. As they could see, an America that was desperate for a reprieve from global tumult would not enjoy one. Already, the Soviet Union was presenting a huge new challenge for the United States, as the allies of war were fast becoming the rivals of an emerging postwar world. With misery and want plaguing vast stretches of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and beyond, Moscow and its Communist minions were seeking to exploit the chaos and expand the Soviet Empire first across Eastern Europe and then elsewhere. Attitudes about the Soviets were hardening in Washington where opposition grew to more Lend-Lease aid for Moscow, and across the country where Catholic leaders and Polish Americans condemned Soviet activities in Eastern Europe.

If Truman and Vandenberg had read the cables between FDR and Joseph Stalin in the weeks before Roosevelts death, they would have seen that U.S.-Soviet relations had deteriorated even more than they knew. In his final days, FDR complained bitterly that, in establishing puppet regimes in Eastern Europe, Stalin was breaking his promises at the Yalta Conference of February to allow for free elections in Poland and elsewhere. He also protested that, in Soviet-held territories, Soviet soldiers were preventing American soldiers from helping U.S. prisoners of war, some of whom were ill or wounded. The day before his death, FDR advised the State Department that it had higher priorities than the Soviet request for a $6 billion loan. Stalin, meanwhile, accused FDR and Britains Winston Churchill of seeking a separate peace with Germany to spare the lives of U.S. and British soldiers while allowing Russian soldiers to continue dying. Suspicious of U.S. and British motives, Stalin expressed his irritation by announcing that his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, would not attend the organizing conference of the United Nations, a top Roosevelt priority, which was scheduled to begin in San Francisco on April 25.