Opinion of Franklin D Roosevelt

[angus]

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. 

[angus]

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.

Damn, I meant Yalta.  Post-war borders of Poland and Germany and such.  Anyway, Truman wouldn't have agreed to all that. 

[angus]

Very Bad President

I disagree with you about Roosevelt, but I love your signature.  Very droll.  I might steal it.

[angus]

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).

Alright, here's my two cents.  He was sick.  Very sick.  And by the time Yalta came along, he suffered frequent lapses of consciousness, seizures, and lapses of memory.  For several years before his death, and certainly in Tehran and Yalta, he was hemorrhaging in the brain.  He was tired all the time.  His physicians ordered him to rest, but he ignored those orders.  He knew what was going on, and he knew he was dying, but he pressed his service.  Some would call that commendable.  I can respect that.  But he should have passed the torch earlier.  He should have put Harry in charge.  Harry wasn't afraid to nuke Japan, and Harry wasn't afraid to speak roughly to Stalin.  Harry doesn't mind if he doesn't make the scene.  He's got a daytime job, he's doing alright.  He can play the honky-tonk like anything.  Savin' it up for Friday night.

Anyway, Harry wouldn't have allowed Stalin such advantage at Potsdam if Roosevelt hadn't set it all up at Yalta. 

I'm not saying Roosevelt wasn't great and good (I voted good because, as Mechaman said, "great" implies bigness.  As in, seven is greater than six.  Six is less than seven.  And they're all big.  Even Obama.  Whether you agree with him or not, he's big.  Not Jesus huge, or Elvis huge, or even FDR huge, but big nevertheless.  But good is special, and is reserved for those like FDR.)  He was bold during the depression and bold during the war.  But near the end he was a bit megalomaniacal, and I think that hurt the cause.  I think the Poles and the Germans and others suffered needless under the yoke of the Warsaw pact in a way that was greater than if Truman had been in charge starting from about late 1944.  And, given that Roosevelt understood how ill he was, and how his illness was affecting his job, there's a little stain on his record near the end.  At least that's my opinion. 

[angus]

Dude, we let the Russians have Berlin.  Folks like to blame it on Eisenhower, but those decisions don't get made by Generals alone.  And all that was agreed to at Yalta, by Winston and Franklin. 

To your other point, of course Stalin responds best to a hard slap in the head.  Oh, he likes a long, slow hand job just like the rest of us, but you don't get co-operation from people like Stalin.  You just get detente, at best.  And that's if you're Hitler.  Forgetaboutit.  Sternness was the way he should have been handled, and a show of the superior US Army. 

[angus]

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.

Obviously the Russians are huge.  But so is the USA.  And I don't think this thread wants to turn into Perry/Romney sort of slapfest.  ("Oh, yeah?  Well the US Army was battling two fascist superpowers at the time.  Successfully, I might add.  Did the Russians ever do that?!")  That would just be silly.

But we made huge concessions to the Russians.  This is objective, factual, and well-known.  That's not the speculative part.  My speculation is that such concessions would not have been made if a sick old man had stepped aside earlier.  There's also plenty of evidence that Winston would have gone along with a better deal for the Western powers if the US had wanted it.

[angus]

We've come a long way from the original question.  Lots of speculation.  But I think it's safe to say that East Germans and Poles were at an economic disadvantage compared to West Germans, Netherlanders, Danes, etc., during the period from 1949 till 1989.  Their per-capita GDP was lower, their rights as citizens were fewer, their ecologies were trashed, and their prospects for mobility were limited.  It did not have to be that way. 

Dead0man pointed out that it would have been asking a lot from our boys.  I think that's also true.  I think maybe that was a large part of the reason Eisenhower let the Russians take Berlin and the East.  The casualties would have been huge, and our forces were tired, and the Russians seemed willing to pay the price in blood.  I think that also the US and the UK didn't really predict how the next 50 years would play out, the "cold" war or its severity, or the economic conditions behind the curtain.  But mostly, Roosevelt was so far past his prime that he was making poor decisions.