America swaggers into the fray
Roosevelt invites his Soviet counterpart to a face-to-face meeting – and keeps Churchill out of the loop
11 APRIL 1942
Although American president Franklin D Roosevelt provided increasing material aid to Britain and then the USSR during 1941, the USA remained officially neutral until December. Then Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war catapulted America into a global conflict for which the country was ill-prepared. It was not until the spring of 1942 that the president began to take the initiative in diplomatic relations with the Kremlin.
Roosevelt had no intention of playing junior partner to Churchill, however warm their personal relationship – as he made clear in a chatty letter to the prime minister on 18 March. “I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”
Considering that Roosevelt had never met Stalin and they had exchanged little more than a dozen messages, this was pretty rich – but the breezy tone and brash self-confidence were typically Rooseveltian. The belief that he could handle Stalin became the president’s mantra until the day he died.
Roosevelt was much less of a letter writer than Churchill. And many of the messages came from his aides or bureaucrats, with FDR adding occasional personal touches. The president’s real aim was to deal with the Soviet leader face-to-face – thereby, he hoped, getting the measure of the reclusive dictator and winning his trust. On 11 April 1942 he made it clear to Stalin that he wanted the earliest possible meeting of the two of them, without Churchill – whom he saw as a reactionary Victorian, out of touch with a world that was moving to the left and out of the age of empire.
“Perhaps if things go as well as we hope, you and I could spend a few days together next summer near our common border off Alaska,” read his letter to Stalin (an early draft of which is pictured above right). In the meantime, he asked the Soviet leader to send Vyacheslav Molotov – his foreign minister and right-hand man – to discuss “a very important military proposal involving the utilisation of our armed forces in a manner to relieve your critical western front.”