Abstract
Thanks to the fierce winter of 1944–45 in Moscow, historians have a written account revealing how dangerous emotions and divisive discourses developed among US and British officials. Spaso House, the huge, drafty American embassy building, was tough to heat. In December 1944, a kerosene stove was rigged up in the top floor room of Robert Meiklejohn, ambassador W. Averell Harriman’s secretary. Meiklejohn jotted in his detailed diary, ‘My room is very comfortable now,’ and it has become ‘the usual gathering place in the evening.’1 Evenings the ambassador, his daughter Kathleen, the Pentagon’s liaison to the Red Army General John R. Deane, embassy officials including George F. Kennan, British ambassador Archibald Clark Kerr and Kennan’s friend Frank K. Roberts, and liberated American POWs, clustered around the stove to review the day, gossip, and grumble. The Soviets dished out lots to grumble about. An embassy official ‘was going nuts here,’ Meiklejohn recorded, ‘as not a few people appear to do when they stay too long.’2 Many diplomats and journalists were frustrated with their personal lives. They suffered anger, sadness, and even depression from being deprived of ‘normal’ contact with Soviet citizens. The moods and cultural assumptions of these diplomats and journalists shaped how they interpreted Soviet policy and intentions.
Part of this essay was published in Diplomatic History in January 2010.
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Notes
For an account that minimizes the shift between presidents, see Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman (New York, 2007).
Vladimir Pechatnov, Stalin, Ruzvel’t, Trumen (Moscow, 2006) is based on both Russian and US archival sources. See recent assessments in
David B. Woolner, Warren F. Kimball and David Reynolds, eds., FDR’s World: War, Peace, and Legacies (New York, 2008).
See Frank Costigliola, ‘The “Invisible Wall”: Personal and Cultural Origins of the Cold War,’ The New England Journal of History, 64 (Fall 2007), 190–213.
Kemp Tolley, Caviar and Commissars (Annapolis, MD, 1983), 64.
See Frank Costigliola, ‘“Unceasing Pressure for Penetration”: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,’ Journal of American History, 83 (March 1997), 1309–39.
For an introduction to the theory, see Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-assessment (Oxford, 1985);
William Ian Miller, Humiliation (Ithaca, 1993);
Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York, 1993).
Geoffrey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion (Boston, 1995), 253 (emphasis in original).
Lord Moran, Churchill at War 1940–45 (New York, 2002), 162.
John R. Deane, The Strange Alliance (New York, 1947), 160.
A.H. Birse, Memoirs of an Interpreter (New York, 1967), 209.
Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars (New Haven, 2006), 331, 333.
Albert Resis, ed., Molotov Remembers (Chicago, 1993), 11, 19, 23, 44, 53, 55, 69, 77.
Irina Mukhina, ‘New Revelations from the Former Soviet Archives: The Kremlin, the Warsaw Uprising, and the Coming of the Cold War,’ Cold War History, 6 (August 2006), 405–6, 410.
Jonathan Walker, Poland Alone: Britain, SOE and the Collapse of the Polish Resistance, 1944 (Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2008), 204–61.
George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (Boston, 1967), 210–11;
William Larsh, ‘W. Averell Harriman and the Polish Question, December 1943–August 1944,’ East European Politics and Societies, 7 (Fall 1993), 544, 552.
Mark J. Conversino, Fighting with the Soviets (Lawrence, KS, 1997), 67.
Frank Costigliola, ‘I Had Come as a Friend’: Emotion, Culture, and Ambiguity in the Formation of the Cold War, 1943–45,’ Cold War History, 1 (August 2000), 116–17.
Pentagon generals, however, examined a list of similar complaints from Deane and judged them ‘irritating’ but ‘of relatively minor moment.’ Diane Shaver Clemens, ‘From War to Cold War: The Role of Harriman, Deane, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Reversal of Cooperation with the Soviet Union, April, 1945,’ The International History Review, 14 (May 1992), 280.
For Truman’s concerns about assuming the presidency and about the connection between height and presidential greatness, see Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York, 1980), 16;
Margaret Truman, ed., Where the Buck Stops (New York, 1989), 77–9. On the activities of Harriman and Deane in Washington, see Clemens, ‘Reversal of Cooperation,’ 293–303.
Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill & Roosevelt (Princeton, 1984), 3, 593–7.
Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 1929–1969 (New York, 1973), 213.
John Morton Blum, ed., The Price of Vision (Boston, 1973), 447.
Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger, eds., Journals 1952–2000 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (New York, 2007), 335–6.
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© 2011 Frank Costigliola
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Costigliola, F. (2011). Ambassador W. Averell Harriman and the Shift in US Policy toward Moscow after Roosevelt’s Death. In: Sewell, B., Lucas, S. (eds) Challenging US Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349209_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349209_3
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