How “Uncle Joe” Bugged FDR (The Lessons of History)

Anna · Jul 1, 2003

In recent years, the statesmanship of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in particular his handling of Soviet affairs, has come under attack in historical studies. The situation has reached such a pass that even a psychiatrist who examined FDR’s medical records has opined that toward the end of World War II the US President ceded the better part of Eastern Europe to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin because he was “gripped by clinical depression.”

Certainly the President’s moves can be questioned, but questionable policy can be founded on factors other than low spirits—which, in point of fact, were not generally observed in FDR at the time. Rather, the operant factors were: the President’s supreme confidence in his own powers of persuasion, his profound ignorance of the Bolshevik dictatorship, his projection of humane motives onto his Soviet counterpart, his determined resistance to contradictory evidence and advice, and his wishful thinking based on geopolitical designs—mindsets supported and reinforced by his appointed advisors. Taken together, these factors produced a false view of US-Soviet relations and inspired policy that had only superficial contact with reality. As an instance in point, they induced the President of the United States to do the unthinkable: walk into a surveillance trap, not once, but twice, and willingly.
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In the very year of the Teheran conference, he was reminded of hidden microphones when watching Mission to Moscow, a movie based on a book of that title by Joseph E. Davies, America’s second Ambassador to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 3 Produced in 1943 with the President’s blessing, possibly even at his explicit request, this blatant piece of propaganda was designed to drum up public enthusiasm for a political shotgun wedding: It colored Stalin as a simple, practical man with whom one could do business; rhapsodized about Soviet construction, government, and politics; and justified the Soviet blood purges, the Moscow show trials, and Stalin’s two-year pact with Hitler, which had ended when Hitler turned the tables on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Attempting to forestall any criticism of the Soviet system, Davies even contrived to make a brief for bugging. In one scene, set in the American Embassy in Moscow, the Ambassador’s assistants warn him of listening devices, but he rebukes them severely:

I say nothing outside the Kremlin that I wouldn’t say to Stalin’s face. Do you? . . . We’re here in a sense as guests of the Soviet government, and I’m going to believe they trust the United States as a friend until they prove otherwise. Is that clear?

When the assistant persists that still, after all, there may be microphones, Davies, played with aplomb by FDR’s favorite actor, Walter Huston, cuts him off: “Then let ’em hear! We’ll be friends that much faster!”
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For Stalin, bugging friend and foe was an essential part of politics. Since the early 1920s, he had kept a special telephone beneath his desk in the Kremlin for listening in on the private conversations of other Politburo members speaking on an exclusive line.13 Thus, all through the inner-Party struggle for succession, while leader Vladimir Lenin lay dying and for years after he died in 1924, Stalin was able to eavesdrop on all of his comrades, who spoke openly on the line, believing that, since there was no operator (as on the other Kremlin lines), the new “vertushka” (dial) phone was safe. It was not: Stalin magically knew all of their nighttime thoughts the next morning, outmaneuvered them every day, and eventually had most of them shot...
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How “Uncle Joe” Bugged FDR (The Lessons of History)

Anna Аксакал

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How “Uncle Joe” Bugged FDR (The Lessons of History)

Anna Аксакал

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