FDR and the Soviet Union: The President's Battles over Foreign Policy (review)

Presidents routinely complain about the difficulty of implementing their policies in the face of an intractable federal bureaucracy. Glantz, a foreign service officer in the State Department, helps to explain the sources of presidential frustration in a fascinating and important account of the conflict between Franklin D. Roosevelt and the bureaucrats in his own government about U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. According to Glantz, Roosevelt came into office believing good relations with the Soviet Union were critical to America's national security and strategic interests. As early as his first year in office, he saw in the Soviet Union a potential ally against Germany and Japan. But so suspicious of the Soviets were most of the career officers in the State and War Departments, including the Russian experts, that they resisted Roosevelt's overtures to the Soviets at almost every step of the way. In 1933, they opposed diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union; in 1941, following Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, they opposed unconditional military aid to the Soviets; and throughout the war, they opposed Roosevelt's plans to include the U.S.S.R. as a full partner in the postwar world.

In typical fashion, Roosevelt usually tried to maneuver around his internal critics rather than to fire or reassign them. During World War II, instead of dealing with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin through the American ambassador in Moscow and his embassy staff, he dealt with the Soviet premier personally or through trusted advisers, such as Harry Hopkins. In 1942, Roosevelt even authorized a private meeting between Stalin and Wendell Willkie, the man that he had defeated for the presidency two years earlier—a meeting to which the U.S. Ambassador William H. Standley was not invited. In the ongoing battle with his subordinates, Roosevelt usually prevailed, although not without difficulty. In the end, however, as the author maintains, those same subordinates found, in Roosevelt's successor, Harry S Truman, a sympathetic ear.

Glantz clearly sides with Roosevelt rather than her professional forebears in the foreign service. In her view, he was more foresighted and realistic than they, and his determination to cultivate good relations with the Soviets stemmed not from naiveté or ignorance but from a clear-eyed understanding of the benefits of cooperation for both countries. By contrast, most of his diplomatic and military personnel not only allowed hostility to the Soviet Union to cloud their professional judgments but also to distort the intelligence that they provided the White House. The most serious example of faulty intelligence was the nearly unanimous prediction from U.S. diplomatic and military officials that the Soviets could not hold out against the German invasion in 1941 and that therefore U.S. military aid to them would be a waste of resources.

Agreement with Glantz's depictions of a Roosevelt and his bureaucratic antagonists is not a prerequisite for finding this book rewarding. To this reviewer at least, despite Glantz's impressive research in American, British, and published Russian sources, her Roosevelt is more prescient and realistic—more of a strategic thinker—and his critics more bullheaded and biased that the evidence can support. But the chief value of this book is not its interpretation but its attention to the second and third-tier bureaucrats and diplomats who, even if they did not get their way during Roosevelt's administration, were an essential part of the diplomatic and military history of his administration. As such, Glantz's study is a welcome addition to a literature that remains, in both domestic and foreign policy, top-heavy with works on Roosevelt to the exclusion of other key players and institutions.