Opinion of Franklin D Roosevelt

[Insula Dei]

Best president of the 20th Cenury, except pehaps for LBJ. (But LBJ has the whole Vietnam failure on his plate, so...)

[Insula Dei]

He was a good president except near the end, when he refused to step down earlier than he did.  If Truman had been at Potsdam, things would have been better for the following 50 years. 

You mean the rabid anti-communist Truman? I'm quite sure that FDR, one of the only foreign politicians who Stalin genuinely respected, was very much the right man for dealing with the USSR at that point in time. Truman would only have antagonized the Soviets and would probably have destroyed any chance of Soviet concessions on even the most minor of issues. Bear in mind that at Potsdam Stalin was negotiating from a position of great strength.

[Insula Dei]

He was a good president except near the end, when he refused to step down earlier than he did.  If Truman had been at Potsdam, things would have been better for the following 50 years. 

You mean the rabid anti-communist Truman? I'm quite sure that FDR, one of the only foreign politicians who Stalin genuinely respected, was very much the right man for dealing with the USSR at that point in time. Truman would only have antagonized the Soviets and would probably have destroyed any chance of Soviet concessions on even the most minor of issues. Bear in mind that at Potsdam Stalin was negotiating from a position of great strength.

Did Stalin really respect him?  I think Stalin believed he could easily control the President, and had little regard for him as a person.  The fact that a mutual goal existed between the two helped quite a bit as well.

With Stalin the notion 'respecting' is to be applied with all possible caveats, obviously. But he and FDR did have something going that Stalin and Churchill just plain did not, and the arrival of Attlee didn't affect USSR-GB relations like the arrival of Truman did USSR-US relations.

Stalin trusted FDR at the very least. Also, FDR had delivered on the 2nd front promise, even if that had happened much too late for Stalin's liking. And FDR wasn't trying to fug the USSR over at every step of the way, like Churchill was. On the other hand of course, the fact that FDR often appeared to be the most 'naive' of the Big Three must have helped Stalin to come to the point of trusting him. Churchill was the sort of ally you could have a Molotov-Eden agreement with, but you could not trust him once he was out of sight (cf. Operation 'Unthinkable').

As far as the mutual goal between the US and the USSR is concerned, we must not forget that Stalin and Roosevelt not only both wanted to defeat the Axis-powers, they also both wanted to end the European colonial empires (mainly in Asia).

[Insula Dei]

I don't really see what you think Truman could have done that FDR didn't do. The Red Army occupied (or at Jalta: was about to occupy) Poland, and the rest of the East Bloc. When (a)your opponent has troops on the ground, (b) your opponent thinks the issue at hand at least as important as you do and (c) you're not ready to go for all out warfare, you're in a very weak position diplomatically. Any concessions that the US was going to get out of the USSR would have to be gotten the soft way, rather than with hard words.

[Insula Dei]

Superior US army? How many divisions did the US even have in the European Theatre at that point in time? The Red Army was busy bulldozing the Wehrmacht, one of the fiercest battleforces the world has ever seen, over the longest frontline the world has ever seen. Sure, the US had the prospect of Nuclear Capacity, but after you've nuked your 2 or 3 targets, you still have that massive army that's had plenty of opportunity to get experienced in front of you. I don't think Stalin would have been very inimical to the idea of a direct military confrontation with the Western Allies.