Alger Hiss at Yalta a Reassessment of Hiss’S Arguments Against Including Any of the Soviet Republics As Initial UN Members

Home , Alger Hiss, Dean Acheson, Herbert Romerstein, Isaac Don Levine, Leo Pasvolsky, Svetlana Chervonnaya

Alger Hiss at Yalta A Reassessment of Hiss’s Arguments against Including Any of the Soviet Republics as Initial UN Members

✣ Henry D. Fetter

The decades-long controversy over whether State Department official Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent, and the nature and extent of his activities if he was, has largely been fought with documents—“immutable evidences,” as U.S. At- torney Thomas F. Murphy labeled them in his summation at the close of Hiss’s second trial for perjury—from the “Pumpkin Papers” at the controversy’s initiation to the Venona decryptions of Soviet intelligence documents that clinched the case for Hiss’s guilt in the eyes of most historians.1 Amid that flood of documentation, one item continues to hold an intriguing place in the debate, a short memorandum Hiss prepared during the Yalta conference entitled “Arguments against Inclusion of Any of the Soviet Republics among the Initial Members [of the United Nations]” (hereinafter referred to as the Hiss Memorandum).2 Hiss, at the request of Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., was participating in his capacity as acting director of the State Department Office of Special Political Affairs. His remit was to lend his ex- pertise to the conference’s deliberations on the proposed postwar international organization, about which key questions of structure and operation remained unresolved.

1. U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, “United States v. Alger Hiss,” Transcript of Record (hereinafter cited as “Hiss Transcript”), pp. 4672–4673. That the controversy continues, however, is attested by a recent argument for Hiss’s innocence. Joan Brady, Alger Hiss Framed: A New Look at the Case That Made Nixon Famous (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016). For Hiss’s guilt, see Har- vey Klehr, “The Agony of Alger,” The New Criterion, Vol. 36, No. 1 (September 2017), pp. 64–68 (reviewing Brady’s book). 2. United States Delegation Memorandum, Attachment 1, “Arguments against Inclusion of Any of the Soviet Republics among the Initial Members,” in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (hereinafter referred to as FRUS, Malta and Yalta), pp. 746–747. In a footnote to the memorandum, the editors of the volume state, “author not indicated but presumably Hiss” (p. 746 n. 2). When the volume was published in 1955, Hiss conﬁrmed that he was the author. “Hiss Identiﬁes Yalta Notation,” The New York Times,17March 1955, p. 79.

Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 2020, pp. 46–88, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_00925 © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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As the composition of the U.S. delegation to the upcoming Big Three conference at Yalta was being determined in late December 1944 and early January 1945, Stettinius suggested to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that “we might want someone who had been a keener student” than Stettinius himself “of the technical angles of the international organization.” Hiss, who had served as secretary of the Dumbarton Oaks “conversations” among the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China on that subject in the summer of 1944, was designated to fill the role.3 Hiss later described his activities at Yalta: I was primarily responsible for the United Nations topics which were rather numerous and of considerable importance. The most important objective was to obtain agreement on voting procedure in the Security Council. Other topics were fixing the date and place of the United Nations Conference and determining the governments to be invited. . . . The determination of nations to be invited was of particular importance to us as we wanted all of the Latin Ameri- can countries to be invited; the Russians on the other hand wanted only nations actually at war with the Axis.”4 The subject matter of the Hiss Memorandum lies squarely within the range of issues on which Stettinius had expressed the need for the assistance that Hiss was assigned to provide. The memorandum is dated 8 February 1945, the day after the fourth Yalta conference plenary session, during which Soviet Foreign Minister Vy- acheslav Molotov had demanded membership in the contemplated postwar international organization for “three or at least two of the Soviet Republics as original members” (specifically, the Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Lithua- nian republics).5 The memorandum has been characterized by, among many others, Roosevelt’s Yalta interpreter Charles E. Bohlen as a “closely reasoned argument against admitting the Soviet republics.”6

3. Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Calendar Notes, 30 December 1944, in Box 243, Edward Reilly Stettinius Jr. Papers, 1918–1949, Accession MSS 2723, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Charlottesville, Virginia (hereinafter referred to as “Stettinius Papers”); and Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Summary of Conversation, 1 January 1945, in Box 236, “Telephone Summaries and Transcripts 1–6 January 1945 (Hyde ﬁle, Telephone Summaries etc.),” Stettinius Papers. 4. Alger Hiss, “Memorandum of Duties in the Department of State 1944 until January 15, 1947” [prepared for his lawyers], ca. September 1948, cited in Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case, rev. ed. (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 313. All references to Weinstein’s Perjury are to the revised (1997) edition. 5. Charles E. Bohlen, Minutes of Fourth Plenary Session, 7 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 712. 6. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 1929–1969 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), p. 194.

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My aim in this article is not to assess the nature and extent of Hiss’s role at Yalta or the claims that have been made by former Soviet intelligence officers that Hiss undermined U.S. interests by disclosing confidential information about U.S. positions and objectives to Soviet officials during the conference.7 My goal here is more limited: to explore whether the memorandum is evidence that Hiss was not a Soviet agent (at least at the time of the conference) or whether it is no more than a “puzzling anomaly,” as one proponent of Hiss’s guilt has characterized it.8 The exploration involves consideration of the emergence of the Soviet republics issue at the Dumbarton Oaks “conversations” in August- September 1944, along with U.S. State Department and presidential preparations for Yalta, the decision to include Hiss in the U.S. delegation at Yalta, and the way the deliberations on—and resolution of—that issue at Yalta became entangled with issues concerning voting procedure in the UN Secu- rity Council (the veto question) and the right of countries, principally in Latin America, to become founding members of the UN despite their failure to have embraced the United Nations Declaration prior to the Yalta conference. The article then analyzes the text of the memorandum more closely than it has been examined before and considers whether the circumstances of its preparation, as well as its contents, are consistent with the evidence that Hiss was still a Soviet agent at the time of the Yalta conference.9 When the memorandum was released to the public in 1955 as part of the overall collection of Yalta papers, Hiss claimed that it expressed both “his personal convictions” and the official policy of the State Department.10 My analysis here does not contend, as some have alleged, that Hiss was responsible for the U.S. decision to support initial UN membership for the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet Republics. However, it does consider the extent to which arguments put forth in the memorandum diverged from the position of the State Department and thereby raise the possibility that Hiss took advantage of the opportunity he enjoyed as a trusted and expert adviser to promotee a case that was at odds with U.S. interests.

7. As noted (but discounted) in S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Viking, 2010), p. 357. 8. Christina Shelton, Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012), p. 149. 9. For Hiss’s alleged espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union at the time of Yalta, see John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 18–27; Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 267–269; and Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 132–134. 10. “Hiss Conﬁrms His Yalta Memo,” NewYorkHeraldTribune, 18 March 1955, p. 6; and “Hiss Identiﬁes Yalta Notation,” p. 79.

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The Hiss Memorandum in the Hiss Debate

The question of the admission of several Soviet republics, in addition to the Soviet Union itself, to “initial membership” in the UN has played so long a part in the Hiss controversy that it may even be said to belong to the “prehis- tory” of the Hiss case. As early as July 1945, American Affairs, a journal with a limited circulation, published an article by Isaac Don Levine, a confidant of Whittaker Chambers, claiming that, during the Yalta conference, Premier Stalin found an occasion, at the termination of a session, to chat with President Roosevelt when all the other American delegates, with the exception of one had left the room. The one was Alger Hiss, deputy director of the office of Special Political Affairs in the State Department. . . . With the aid of the Soviet interpreter, and in the absence of the official American interpreter, Stalin pressed President Roosevelt for consent to the Soviets having three votes at the world organization, one each for the Soviet Union, for the Ukraine and the White Russian Republic. The President, in the presence of Mr. Hiss, yielded, with the proviso that the United States would also ask for three votes at San Francisco.11 Hiss brought up Levine’s charge in his initial interview with the Federal Bu- reau of Investigation (FBI) in March 1946.12 [I]n July 1945 ...afriendconnectedwithReader’sDigestadvised[Hiss]that Isaac Don Levine had written an article claiming that at the Yalta Conference, Hiss had persuaded the late President Roosevelt to agree to the admission of the Ukraine and Byelorussia to the United Nations at a meeting where Roosevelt, Hiss and Stalin were present. Hiss said that this was a fabrication because he had never met with Roosevelt and Stalin alone, and besides he does not speak the Russian language.13

11. Isaac Don Levine, “Yalta Aftermath,” American Affairs, Vol. 7, No. 3 (July 1945), pp. 163–168. As a prefatory note states, American Affairs “is a publication that is not for sale. Subscriptions are not solicited. Its circulation is limited to Members and Associates of the National Industrial Conference Board.” Levine initiated and attended the meeting between Chambers and Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle, Jr., in August 1939 at which Chambers first leveled his accusations against Hiss and other alleged Communists in the U.S. government. See Weinstein, Perjury, pp. 328–330. 12. Hiss met with the FBI at the suggestion of Secretary of State James F. Byrnes to rebut the charges of Communist affiliation that had been brought to Byrnes’s attention. See Weinstein, Perjury, pp. 317– 318. 13. Memorandum of Hiss interview with FBI, 7 March 1946, The Internet Archive, https://archive .org/stream/AlgerHissWhittakerChambers/Hiss%2C%20Alger-Whittaker%20Chambers-Misc%20 Field-1#page/n7/mode/2up. That Hiss did not speak Russian was not a significant rebuttal. Roosevelt did not speak it either, and Levine did not write that Hiss had met with Roosevelt and Stalin “alone” but acknowledged that a Soviet interpreter was present. However, Hiss might not have seen the text of Levine’s article. Instead, he perhaps relied on what his friend had told him about it. According to the FBI memorandum on the interview, Hiss did not claim he had opposed the extra votes for the Soviet

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Two years later, on 5 August 1948, when Hiss first testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in response to Chambers’s accusation that he had been a Communist Party member in the 1930s, Hiss wrong-footed his congressional interrogators by denying responsibility for the Yalta agreement to support UN membership for the Soviet republics (effectively according the Soviet Union three votes in the General Assembly) by saying, “I had nothing to do with the decision that these votes be granted. I opposed them.”14 When the Yalta documents, including the Hiss Memorandum, were declas- sified and published in March 1955, Hiss—who by then had recently completed a 44-month prison term for perjury and was continuing to maintain his innocence (as he did until his death in 1996)—asserted authorship of the unsigned memorandum and told the press that the document expressed “my personal conviction” as well as State Department policy.15 Over the years, varying interpretations of the memorandum have been advanced, reflecting conflicting opinions about Hiss’s guilt or innocence. Hiss’s recorded opposition to the Soviet proposal has long furnished ammuni- tion for those challenging accusations that Hiss was a Soviet agent who served Soviet interests at Yalta (or at any time). Jeff Kiseloff, managing editor of the Alger Hiss Story website, writes that at Yalta

Hiss took a forceful anti-Soviet position, according to ofﬁcial conference notes released in the 1950s, arguing strongly against the Soviet Union’s request to increase its voting strength by admitting three constituent Soviet republics as independent members of the U.N. (the equivalent of admitting Vermont to the U.N.).16 Another Hiss sympathizer, Lewis Hartshorn, writes, “Hiss was opposed to the extra Assembly votes allotted to the Soviet Republics....(Acurious

republics, as he told the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948 when he testiﬁed in response to Chambers’s charges. 14. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings Re- garding Communist Espionage in the U.S. Government, 80th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, DC, 1948), p. 656. See also Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 227; and Weinstein, Perjury , p. 13. Chambers in his own testimony to the committee, did not claim that Hiss had committed espionage, only that he had been a Communist. Chambers did not charge Hiss with espionage until he responded to Hiss’s subsequent defamation lawsuit against him. See Weinstein, Perjury, pp. 153–154. 15. “Hiss Identiﬁes Yalta Notation,” p. 79; and Peter Kihiss, “Hiss Says His Job at Yalta Was U.N.,” The New York Times, 19 March 1955, p. 4. 16. Jeff Kisseloff, “101 Errors in Ann Coulter’s ‘Treason,’” posted on the New York University webpage connected with the Tamiment Library.

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position to take if Hiss was a Soviet agent, as the myth has it).”17 Stephen C. Schlesinger’s history of the origins of the UN cites the memorandum to challenge identiﬁcation of Hiss as Soviet agent “ALES” in a Venona cable: “unless Hiss was playing a double game at Yalta he was an unlikely candidate for Soviet honors. At the Crimea Conference, he had opposed the addition of other Soviet states to the U.N.”18 Two leading experts on Soviet espionage in the United States, John Haynes and Harvey Klehr, write that, even accepting the truth of Chambers’s allegations about Hiss’s activities and the documents he produced in their support, “what was until recently left open was whether Hiss’s betrayal of the United States continued beyond the 1930s.” However, they argue that, based on additional evidence that has come to light with the Venona documents and KGB ﬁles, “there is little doubt that Hiss’s service to Soviet intelligence continued beyond the 1930s and at least until 1945.”19 For those convinced of Hiss’s guilt, the memorandum thus has presented a conundrum defying easy explanation. S. M. Plokhy, in his detailed account of Yalta, concludes: “If Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy, as the new evidence suggests, then his performance at Yalta was puzzling.” Plokhy writes that there is “little doubt that Hiss was a longtime Soviet agent, still active at the time of the Yalta Conference” but his Soviet contacts were “most probably interested in military rather than political matters. This is the conclusion one draws from what is known about Hiss’s espionage activities and the position he took at Yalta on the membership of the Soviet republics in the United Nations.”20 Frank Costigliola similarly writes that “evidence from Soviet records indicates that although Hiss passed military information to his Soviet handlers, he was not asked to give them any political information. In fact,

17. Lewis Hartshorn, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the Case That Ignited McCarthyism (Jeffer- son, NC: McFarland, 2013), p. 97. 18. Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Boulder, CO: West- view Press, 2003), pp. 106–107. 19. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 170, 172; Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), pp. 285–286, 338–339; and Weinstein, Perjury, pp. 324– 327. For a contrary reading of the Venona evidence, see Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya, “The Mystery of Ales,” American Scholar, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Summer 2007), pp. 20–35. For a powerful rebuttal of Bird and Chervonnaya, see Eduard Mark, “In Re Alger Hiss: A Final Verdict from the Archives of the KGB,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer 2009), pp. 26-67. See also John Ehrman, “The Mystery of ‘Ales:’ Once Again the Alger Hiss Case,” Studies in Intelligence,Vol.51 No. 4 (2007), pp. 687–701. 20. Plokhy, Yalta, pp. 356–357.

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at Yalta he advised Roosevelt to stand ﬁrm against the Soviets on several issues.”21 Christina Shelton, whose book on Alger Hiss is subtitled, “Why He Chose Treason,” acknowledges “that Hiss’s motivation to insist on no extra seats for the USSR is unclear. Perhaps it was a distraction, a feint from everything else that was compromised in Stalin’s favor.”22 Shelton’s argument echoes one that was advanced by the prosecution at Hiss’s second perjury trial. When the defense presented evidence that Hiss had written an internal State Department memorandum during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact that advocated the relaxation of the Neutrality Act to permit U.S. aid to the Allies at a time when the Communist Party opposed such assistance, prosecut- ing attorney Thomas Murphy replied by arguing, “why wasn’t it good tactics to take the opposite [of the] Communist position. . . . When you are a spy you do what spies do. You would be an awful spy if you went around with a sign on you.”23 Sam Tanenhaus, the biographer of Chambers, can explain the Hiss Mem- orandum only by speculating that on some issues (the integrity of the United Nations, the establishment of the Marshall Plan) Hiss might side with the United States, while on other issues (the sharing of military secrets) he might favor the Soviets. . . . Hiss [and others] functioned less as moles than as ideological freelancers, sampling various positions, trimming the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union, perhaps even priding themselves on the contradictions. These were not dual loyalties; they were negotiable loyalties.24

Dumbarton Oaks: The Emergence of the Soviet Republics Dispute

The question of separate UN membership for the constituent republics of the USSR was ﬁrst raised by the Soviet Union at the Dumbarton Oaks

21. Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Prince- ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 489 n. 227. 22. Shelton, Alger Hiss, pp. 149–150. 23. Hiss Transcript, p. 4742. See also pp. 2545–2546 (Exhibit 4 x K, “Memorandum Dated September 26, 1939 by Alger Hiss Entitled ‘Neutrality-Legal Questions’”). With respect to that exhibit, defense counsel had noted, “This is a memorandum on Neutrality in which Mr. Hiss expresses the suggestion of helping the Allies immediately following the Hitler-Stalin Agreement which was anti-Communist in its viewpoint” (p. 4634). 24. Sam Tanenhaus, “Tangled Treason,” The New Republic, 5 July 1999, pp. 29–36.

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conference in August-September 1944. From the start, the question was entangled with the dispute over which countries would be eligible for initial membership in the proposed international organization. Going into the Dum- barton Oaks “conversations,” the Soviet authorities had proposed that the “initiators and founder-members of the organisation are the United Nations, i.e. those States which have signed the declaration of 1 January 1942, or who have subsequently adhered to it.”25 The United States, with British support, sought initial membership for the “associated nations” of Latin America (Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela), in addition to the United Nations.26 On 28 August 1944, in the deliberations about membership criteria for the proposed organization, the U.S. delegates “made clear” their position that “countries which have broken relations with Germany and are cooperating in the war effort”—designated as the “Associated Nations”—should be entitled to initial membership, along with the signatories to the Declaration by United Nations. When the conference then discussed the drawing up of a “tentative list” of initial members, Soviet Ambassador to the United States Andrei Gromyko, who led the Soviet delegation at Dumbarton Oaks, put forth the demand that each of the sixteen Soviet republics be included.27 Gromyko’s request caught the U.S. delegates off-guard, despite warnings of such a possibility. Both Bohlen, the State Department specialist on Soviet affairs, and U.S. Ambassador to Moscow W. Averell Harriman had raised the issue in 1944 in response to amendments to the Soviet constitution that pur- ported to grant the constituent republics of the USSR control over their own foreign relations.28 Still, the British and U.S. delegates at Dumbarton Oaks

25. “Memorandum on an International Security Organization by the Soviet Union,” 12 August 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 1, p. 708. 26. “[United States] Tentative Proposals for a General International Organization,” 18 July 1944, quoted in Harley A. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation 1939–1945 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 1949), Appendix 38, pp. 595–606; and Robert C. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 94. 27. “Informal Minutes of Meeting No. 6 of the Joint Steering Committee,” 28 August 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 1, pp. 742–743. 28. Chares E. Bohlen memorandum, 3 February 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 4, p. 812 (“this change was forecast by reports from London of the Soviet insistence that if the British Dominions were represented on the War Crimes Commission so should the constituent republics of the Soviet Union”); and Harriman to Secretary of State, 6 February 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 4, pp. 822–823. Harriman’s cable presciently advised that the “the Soviets, may well have in mind the advantage of having more than one vote at international conferences, similar to the British Commonwealth and to what they appear to believe we have through the control they have publicly indicated they consider we have over the American Republics.” See also Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, p. 318 n. 19.

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were left “breathless” by the Soviet request and argued that separate membership for each Soviet republic “would raise great difficulties.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull said he was “amazed” when informed of the Soviet request, and President Roosevelt dismissed it as “absurd.” Under Secretary of State Stet- tinius, who chaired the U.S. delegation at Dumbarton Oaks (and who in late November 1944 succeeded Hull as secretary of state), clamped a tight lid of secrecy over the Soviet initiative and insisted that they refer to it only as the “X-matter” even in internal State Department communications.29 In the face of U.S. and British opposition to Gromyko’s initiative— including a cable from FDR to Stalin requesting that the proposal be with- drawn, at least for the time being—the Soviet delegates held their ground, although they agreed not to press the matter further at Dumbarton Oaks.30 But Soviet leaders continued to rebuff U.S. efforts to include the “associated nations” as initial members of the proposed UN organization and insisted that the Dumbarton Oaks recommendations not contain any list of “proposed initial members.”31 Accordingly, Stettinius reported, agreement was reached to confine the Chapter on Membership to the single statement that membership in the organization would be open to all peace- loving nations. Reference to initial members was eliminated since agreement could not be reached that the nations which are associated with the UN but are not actual belligerents should be among the initial members.32 The finalized “Dumbarton Oaks Proposals” did not identify the initial members of the prospective international organization.33

29. See Ruth B. Russell, A History of the United Nations Charter (Washington, DC: Brookings Institu- tion Press, 1958), pp. 433–434; Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, pp. 317–318; and Thomas M. Campbell and George C. Herring, eds., The Diaries of Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., 1943–1946 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), p. 111 (hereinafter referred to as the Stettinius Diaries). 30. Franklin D. Roosevelt to J. V. Stalin, 1 September 1944, in Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Truman (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), p. 158. Roosevelt’s letter states, “Deferring the question now would not prejudice later discussion once the Assembly has come into being. The Assembly would have full authority to act at that time.” 31. “Informal Minutes of Meeting No. 8 of the Jt. Steering Committee,” 31 August 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 1, p. 757; and “Informal Minutes of the Joint Steering Committee of the Washington Conversations,” Meeting No. 13, 12 September 1944, in Box 3, Papers of Leo Pasvolsky, Library of Congress. At the meeting on 12 September, the Soviet Union did accept the U.S. proposal that the organization be called the United Nations. Stettinius Memorandum to Secretary of State Hull, 12 September 1944 in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 1, p. 795. 32. “Progress Report on Dumbarton Oaks Conversations—Twenty-Eighth Day,” 20 September 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 1, p. 829; and Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, pp. 100–101. 33. “Progress Report on Dumbarton Oaks Conversations—Twenty-Eighth Day,” p. 829; and “Dum- barton Oaks Proposals,” 7 October 1944, in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, Appendix 43, pp. 611–619.

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The Soviet Republics Dispute, from Dumbarton Oaks to Yalta

In the ﬁrst week of January 1945, President Roosevelt told Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to the United States, that he hoped that Stalin would not pursue the matter of separate international organization membership for the Soviet republics, despite Stalin’s prior insistence that “I hope to have an opportunity of explaining to you the political importance of the question [of membership for the Soviet republics] raised by the Soviet Delegation at Dumbarton Oaks.”34 On 11 January, Roosevelt briefed members of the Senate Foreign Re- lations Committee, disclosing for the ﬁrst time the Soviet demand for separate membership for the Soviet republics, although he “made a special point . . . of the ridiculousness” of the proposal (as presidential adviser James F. Byrnes would later characterize it) by saying that, if the Soviets pressed the claim, he would counter with a demand that each of the 48 states of the United States also be granted membership.35 Roosevelt said “he thought that Stalin would yield on the request for sixteen votes,” which he assumed was no more than a bargaining ploy.36 Ambassador Gromyko had, in fact, continued to press for separate UN membership for all of the Soviet republics in meetings with State Department international organization specialist Leo Pasvolsky in early January, but there is no evidence that Roosevelt knew about those efforts.37

34. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 511; Halifax to Foreign Ofﬁce, 5 January 1945, quoted in Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, p. 616 n. 35; and Stalin to Roosevelt, 7 September 1944, in Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Truman, pp. 158–159. 35. Carl Levin, “Roosevelt May Counter Russia on Peace Force,” New York Herald-Tribune,18Jan- uary 1945, p. 1; Stettinius Diaries, p. 214; Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 103; Hiss notes in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 857; and “The Stettinius ‘Record,’” in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 442. “‘The Stettinius “Record,”’ as explained therein, consists of what the Secretary described as ‘a record of my principal ofﬁcial activities in Washington . . . based on personal conversations, letters, cables, press reports and considerable other material” (p. 429). 36. Stettinius Diaries, p. 214; and “The Stettinius ‘Record,’” p. 442. 37. Leo Pasvolsky, “Memorandum of Conversation,” 12 January 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 72. A memorandum to Roosevelt summarizing the meetings with the Soviet ambassador, including the fact that Gromyko “reiterated the importance which his Government attaches to the admission as initial members of their republics,” was drafted but not sent to the president. “Draft Memoran- dum from the Secretary to the President,” in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 77–78. At the 11 January meeting, when Gromyko contended that the republics “have their own constitutions and deal independently with their own foreign affairs,” Pasvolsky “asked him whether he really thought that they are independent countries as we commonly understand the term. He said that, of course, they are, even though they are also very intimately connected as members of a federation.” Pasvolsky then notes, “I made no attempt to argue the point, saying merely that we have had no new thoughts.” Pasvolsky, “Memorandum of Conversation,” 13 January 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta,p.75.

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In a memorandum of 23 January to Secretary of State Stettinius outlin- ing the “recommended action on points [respecting the postwar international organization] which must be decided at the Three-Power Meeting,” Pasvolsky did not mention that Gromyko had reiterated the Soviet position in meetings with him.38 The “X-Matter” simply appears to have dropped off the U.S. radar as the convening of the Yalta conference approached. U.S. briefings and discussions in preparation for the conference focused instead on the means of satisfying the Soviet concern (shared, at least initially, by Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill with respect to their own countries) that the powers of the organization might be exercised against it without entirely gutting the legitimacy and effectiveness of the world organization. In advance of the Yalta conference, the State Department prepared a briefing book for President Roosevelt to review while en route to Crimea. The briefing book, as Stettinius recalled, was supposed to contain “everything that could possibly come up,” with the exception of the Soviet demand at Dumb- arton Oaks, and repeated thereafter, for separate representation for the Soviet republics.39 The briefing book paper on the “Nations to Be Invited to the United Nations Conference” dealt only with the question of whether countries (chiefly in Latin America) that had not yet declared war on Germany but were “associated with the United Nations” should be invited to the founding conference of the international organization. The United States had proposed their admission at Dumbarton Oaks, with the Soviet Union maintaining that

38. Pasvolsky, “Memorandum for the Secretary,” 23 January 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 81– 82. 39. “ERS-WJ Conversations re ‘Roosevelt and the Russians,’” 4 November 1948,” in Box 876, Stet- tinius Papers. The section of FRUS, Malta and Yalta entitled “Negotiations and Recommendations on Principal Subjects” contains both the papers that were actually included in the briefing book Stettinius presented to the president and also, as the editorial note prefacing this material explains, additional documents “designed to show in broad outline the pre-conference status of the principal subjects which came up for discussion at Malta or Yalta. . . . Briefing Book papers will be found at the end of each subject dealt with in this chapter except for the last six subjects, on which there were no studies or recommendations in the Briefing Book.” “Editorial Note,” in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 41–42. Ac- cording to Plokhy, Yalta, p. 185, “the briefing book issued to members of the U.S. delegation at Yalta predicted that it [the Soviet republics issue] would resurface once agreement had been reached on voting procedure in the Security Council.” However, the documents referenced by Plokhy (Yalta, p. 419 n. 4, citing FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 48–49, 52, 75)—a memorandum from Pasvolsky to the secretary of state reporting on Pasvolsky’s conversations with Gromyko in January and two memoranda to the president in November 1944—were included in the Yalta documents volume for background only and are not identified as “Briefing Book Papers.” These preconference documents are not included in the briefing book on file in the National Archives. See “Briefing Book for Yalta Conference,” in Box 3, Record Group (RG) 43.4.1 (World War II Conferences-Yalta), U.S. National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, MD (NARA).

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the conference be limited only to countries that had declared war on Ger- many.40 The paper advised that

the question of which nations should be invited to the Conference may arise in discussion of the voting problem since, apparently, the Soviet view was advanced chiefly for bargaining in that connection. The question will more certainly arise if the voting problem [in the Security Council] is solved, since such agreement will remove the main obstacle to calling the Conference.41 The paper did not address the Soviet proposal that the Soviet republics be invited or outline a proposed U.S. response if the issue was raised.42 On 31 January 1945, before flying on to Malta together, presidential adviser Harry Hopkins and Bohlen briefed Stettinius in Naples on their recent meetings in London with British officials. They informed the secretary that although the British shared U.S. opposition to the pending Soviet proposal for separate postwar organization membership for all sixteen Soviet republics, “the fact that each of the British dominions—including India, which was not then self-governing—was to have a separate vote . . . made the British decide that for reasons of tactics the primary burden of opposition had to be carried by the United States.”43 At Malta the next day, when Stettinius, along with Hiss and H. Freeman Matthews (director of the State Department Office of Euro- pean Affairs), reviewed the issues left open at the Dumbarton Oaks conference that required resolution at Yalta with British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and his Foreign Office advisers, the Soviet republics issue was not discussed.44 Nor was the issue addressed when Roosevelt met with Stettinius, Harriman,

40. “Nations to Be Invited to the United Nations Conference,” in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 91. The brieﬁng book paper identiﬁes six Latin American countries—Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Chile—along with Egypt and Iceland, as the “Associated Nations.” 41. Ibid. 42. Despite the failure to “brief” the issue in preparation for the Yalta conference, Stettinius later claimed that Roosevelt told him, when the two of them met one morning early in the conference, that he remained ready to express “unalterable opposition” to any renewed Soviet demand for individual memberships for each of the sixteen republics, although there is no contemporaneous record of him doing so—or of considering the issue at all in advance of the Soviet decision to raise the issue at the plenary session on 7 February. Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949), p. 117. 43. Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians, p. 55; and David Reynolds, Summits, Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2007), p. 127. 44. The issue was not included “among the relatively minor points” noted by Stettinius “which should be agreed on at the forthcoming conference if the United Nations conference is to be held promptly.” “Notes on Meeting with Mr. Eden, etc. February 1, 1945,” in “Crimea Conference Meetings— Photostat Copies of Agenda for Meetings, Notes on Meetings, etc. January 15–February 11, 1945” Folder, Box 276, Stettinius Papers; and Minutes of the Meeting of Foreign Ministers, 1 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 498–507.

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Bohlen, State Department European Affairs ofﬁcial H. Freeman Matthews, and Hiss at the Lividia Palace on Sunday morning, 4 February, prior to the opening of the conference, to review what Stettinius described as “seven major topics which he [Stettinius] thought the President should be prepared to discuss with the Prime Minister and Marshall Stalin” based on a “Memorandum of Suggested Action Items for the President” that the secretary presented to Roosevelt.45

The Inclusion of Hiss in the U.S. Delegation at Yalta

Hiss entered the State Department in 1936 and in April 1944 was appointed special assistant to the director of the newly created Office of Special Political Affairs, the office entrusted with planning for the proposed postwar international organization. Hiss had taken part in the numerous planning meetings held within the State Department in advance of the Dumbarton Oaks Con- ference in August 1944.46 Charged with responsibility for the conference’s ad- ministrative arrangements, he had worked closely with then Under Secretary of State Stettinius and had served as the conference’s executive secretary.47 The close relationship Hiss forged with Stettinius during the conference endured after the war and even survived Hiss’s indictment for perjury.48 Hiss was named deputy director of the Office of Special Political Affairs in November 1944 and at the time of the Yalta conference was serving as the office’s acting director (beginning in late January 1945). He was formally appointed director in March 1945 and in that capacity reported to Special Assistant to the Secretary of State (for International Organization and Security Affairs) Pasvolsky (who reported in turn to Under Secretary of State Joseph G. Grew).49 Hiss later explained that at Yalta he

45. FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 564–569; and Stettinius Diaries, pp. 235–236. 46. For the activities of Hiss and the Ofﬁce of Special Political Affairs in connection with planning for the proposed postwar international organization, see Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Prepa- ration, pp. 208–210, 215–216; Graham H. Stuart, The Department of State (New York: Macmillan, 1949), pp. 392, 407; Alger Hiss, United Nations Oral History Project, 13 February 1990, pp. 1– 3, http://dag.un.org/bitstream/handle/11176/89612/HissTranscript.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y; and Alger Hiss, Recollections of a Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1988), p. 94. 47. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, pp. 292–293. 48. See Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians, p. 31; and Statement of Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Re- garding Alger Hiss, 20 May 1949, in Box 803, Stettinius Papers. 49. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, p. 571; and Appendix (“Reorganization of the Depart- ment of State” and accompanying organization chart) in FRUS, 1944, Vol. I, pp. 1525–1526.

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was primarily responsible for the United Nations topics which were rather numerous and of considerable importance. The most important objective was to obtain agreement on voting procedure in the Security Council. Other topics were ﬁxing the date and place of the UN Conference and determining the governments to be invited. The determination of nations to be invited was of particular importance to us as we wanted all of the Latin American countries to be invited; the Russians on the other hand wanted only nations actually at war with the Axis.50 Hiss’s presence at Yalta can be attributed to the interplay between Roo- sevelt’s desire to conduct a brand of personal diplomacy that eschewed over- reliance on State Department personnel and Secretary of State Stettinius’s self-professed need for experienced assistance in meeting his own primary responsibility at the conference: securing agreement among the Big Three on issues regarding the proposed postwar international organization that had gone unresolved at Dumbarton Oaks. Roosevelt’s invitation to the secretary to accompany him to Yalta came only after planning for the conference was well underway and was made during a discussion about the lack of progress in establishing the postwar organization.51 Stettinius’s professed need to be ac- companied by a specialist on international organization planning then led to Hiss’s presence at the conference. Roosevelt’s wartime diplomacy had left the State Department and Secre- tary of State Hull on the sidelines with only a limited role in conducting relations with U.S. wartime allies. Hull did not participate in any of Roosevelt’s wartime overseas summits during his tenure at State. The president instead relied mainly on HarryHopkins (who attended the conferences in Casablanca, Cairo, and Tehran) for both counsel and interaction with British and So- viet leaders. Roosevelt’s preferred channel with the State Department was his old Groton classmate Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, whose policy differences with Hull, his nominal superior, were only worsened by the president’s penchant for bypassing the secretary and dealing directly with Welles. Welles’s forced departure from the department in September 1943, when Hull capitalized on reports of a homosexual scandal involving Welles to force his resignation, further estranged Roosevelt from working closely with the department on foreign policy.52

50. Hiss, “Memorandum of Duties in the Dept of State 1944 until January 15, 1947,” ca. Sept 1948, cited in Weinstein, Perjury, pp. 313. 51. Stettinius Calendar Notes, 30 December 1944, in Box 243, Stettinius Papers. 52. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 421; James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (New York:

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When Roosevelt ventured to Tehran in late November 1943 to meet with Churchill and Stalin for the first meeting of the Big Three, his party did not include any State Department officials from Washington.53 Nor did he provide the department with minutes of the conference for months thereafter.54 Roosevelt’s efforts to arrange a second Big Three summit began in the summer of 1944.55 State Department personnel duly began compiling mate- rials for a conference briefing book and had completed many papers by the middle of November.56 Perhaps because long-serving Secretary of State Hull was expected to resign after the presidential election for health reasons (Hull resigned on 27 November) and would have been an unlikely attendee in any event, Roosevelt held off on designating any officials from the department to participate in the conference as negotiations with Britain and the Soviet Union over conference logistics were being conducted throughout the autumn. The conference location (Yalta) and date (early February) were not finalized until the start of the new year.57 Stettinius, a former steel company executive who had entered government service as a war production administrator, “did not have the training or experience in world politics to originate substantive foreign policies,” in the judgment of historian Walter Johnson, who assisted Stettinius in the writing of his memoir.58 After working with him closely on that project, Johnson concluded that Stettinius “felt insecure as Secretary of State” and deferred to President Roosevelt as the maker of foreign policy.59 Stettinius, Johnson writes, “felt that his own responsibilities consisted of . . . implementing decisions, and serving as a two-way ‘messenger’ between the Department and the

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 350; Stuart, The Department of State, pp. 381–382; and Don- ald F. Drummond, “Cordell Hull,” in Norman A. Graebner, ed., An Uncertain Tradition: American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth Century (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), pp. 194–195, 201– 203. 53. See the list of American participants in the Tehran conference in U.S. Department of State, FRUS: The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1943), pp. 462–463. Bohlen, who was stationed in Moscow at the time, acted as the president’s interpreter, a role he repeated at Yalta. 54. Stettinius Calendar Notes, 11 February 1944, in Box 239, Stettinius Papers. 55. Roosevelt to Stalin, 17 July 1944, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta,p.3. 56. Memorandum from James G. Dunn (Director of the Ofﬁce of European Affairs) to Under Sec- retary of State Stettinius, 10 November 1944, quoted in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, “Editorial Note,” p. 42. 57. Roosevelt to Churchill, 30 December 1944, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 23–24; and Roosevelt to Churchill, 3 January 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 27. 58. Walter Johnson, “Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.,” in Graebner, ed., An Uncertain Tradition, p. 215. 59. Walter Johnson, “Random Thoughts on Operation Stettinius,” 24 March 1949, in Folder 13, Box 19, Walter Johnson Papers, University of Chicago Library.

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President.”60 According to Robert Dallek, “Stettinius appealed to Roosevelt as someone who would not challenge his control over policy formation.”61 The carryover of unfinished business from Dumbarton Oaks may well have been the primary reason for Stettinius’s—and Hiss’s—presence at Yalta. At Dumbarton Oaks, the Soviet Union had opposed the U.S. (and British) proposal that a great power should refrain from voting in connection with disputes to which it was itself a party. Soviet leaders instead insisted that no action be taken on any dispute without the unanimous consent of the great powers. The meetings had ended without agreement on this question.62 Roo- sevelt’s personal effort to resolve the disagreement with Gromyko then failed, as did the president’s follow-up correspondence with Stalin.63 In the months after the conclusion of the Dumbarton Oaks conference, State Department officials, including Hiss, had worked on a revised formula for great-power voting in the international organization’s “Security Council” that would alleviate Soviet concerns. On 5 December 1944, Roosevelt autho- rized transmittal of a lengthy message to Ambassador Harriman in Moscow for personal delivery to Stalin setting forth a revised version of the U.S. proposal at Dumbarton Oaks on Security Council voting, together with an explanation of the president’s thinking on the matter.64 Two weeks later, on 22 December, Stettinius updated Roosevelt on the ongoing efforts to gain Soviet and British approval of the U.S. proposal, recently revised, for voting in the Security Council of the proposed international organization and the president “indicated some displeasure at the fact that things were moving so slowly in this field.”65 Not until 22 December did Roosevelt, during a brief stopover in Wash- ington while en route to Hyde Park after three weeks at Warm Springs, Geor- gia, inform recently appointed Secretary of State Stettinius that he wanted him to attend the upcoming conference with Churchill and Stalin, which Roosevelt said would probably be held in the Crimea because “he did not

60. Johnson, “Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.,” p. 215. 61. Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, p. 503. 62. “Progress Report on DO Conversations—Twenty-Eighth Day,” 20 September 1944, p. 829; and Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, pp. 100–101. 63. Stettinius Diaries, pp. 129–132. See also Roosevelt to Stalin, 9 September 1944, and Stalin to Roosevelt, 14 September 1944, both in Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Truman, pp. 159– 160. 64. The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Moscow, 5 December 1944, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 58–60. The message was delivered to Stalin on 14 December. See Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Truman, p. 173. 65. Stettinius to Pasvolsky, 22 December 1944, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 62–63.

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think that [Stalin] would be willing or able to fly.”66 On 30 December, Stet- tinius and the president reviewed “the matter of whom he wished to accompany him on the trip” to Yalta.67 Even then, the State Department did not figure significantly in Roosevelt’s thinking about the makeup of the U.S. delegation to the conference. Roosevelt omitted any mention of department personnel when he wrote to Churchill on 30 December advising that “it is my intention to take with me about 35 persons, including Joint Staff, personal staff, Secret Service, servants, etc.”68 A follow-up message the next day to Ambassador Harriman provided more details about the anticipated composition of the president’s party (whose overall size had increased from 35 to 70 overnight). In addition to the Joint Staff military delegation, Roosevelt described his “personal group” as including “Vice Admirals McIntire [the president’s physician] and Brown, Major General Watson [the President’s appointments secretary], Mr. Harry Hopkins, six White House staff officers, sixteen Secret Service Officers, and eight servants.” “I may be able to bring Stettinius and Jimmy Byrnes,” Roosevelt added almost as an afterthought, but once again the president did not mention any other State Department personnel, apart from Bohlen as “interpreter.”69 When Roosevelt informed Stettinius on 22 December 1944 that he wanted him to attend the Yalta conference, the president had not yet received a response from Stalin to his message of 5 December regarding voting in the Security Council. By 30 December, when Roosevelt met with Stettinius after returning from his Christmas holiday at Hyde Park, the president had received Stalin’s negative reply. “I see no possibility of agreeing” to the U.S. proposal, Stalin wrote.70 Hiss later claimed that his “inclusion in the American delegation was a matter of chance” and came about only because, when Stettinius “presented Roosevelt with a list of the State Department personnel” that he proposed to take with him as aides, the president immediately vetoed Dunn, who had been “for some years the director in charge of European affairs in the State

66. Stettinius Diaries, p. 202. 67. Stettinius Calendar Notes, 30 December 1944, in Box 243, Stettinius Papers. 68. Roosevelt to Churchill, 30 December 1944, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 23–24. 69. Ibid, pp. 25–26. Having passed over Byrnes for the vice presidential nomination in 1944, Roo- sevelt included him in the Yalta delegation as something of a consolation prize. Byrnes, who was head of the Ofﬁce of War Mobilization and a former South Carolina congressman and senator, as well as a former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was also useful as an intermediary with Congress, where he was widely respected. See Plokhy, Yalta, pp. 9–10; and Reynolds, Summits, p. 146. 70. Stalin to Roosevelt, 26 December 1944, in Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Truman, pp. 178–179.

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Department.” Dunn, Hiss wrote, was “outstanding, in his opposition to the President’s liberalism,” and when FDR said he wouldn’t have Dunn at Yalta, Stettinius proposed me because of my participation in the State Department’s work in the projected United Nations....AsStettinius later recounted the incident to me, the President said he didn’t care who was named, provided it wasn’t Dunn.71 Leaving aside the issue of what Stettinius may have told Hiss, the contemporaneous record does not show that Hiss was named as a politically “accept- able” alternative to Dunn. Instead, independent of Roosevelt’s decision not to include Dunn in the Yalta delegation, Hiss was included because of his experience in planning for the proposed postwar international organization, both at Dumbarton Oaks and in the preparations for Yalta.72 According to Stettinius’s notes, when he met with Roosevelt on 30 De- cember, he asked the president to identify the personnel he wanted to attend the conference. “You-Hopkins-Bohlen and myself,” the president responded, adding, “but you mentioned Bowman the other day.” Stettinius confirmed that Isaiah Bowman, a prominent geographer and State Department consultant on international organization issues, “would be most useful to us” at the conference: With Stalin having turned our last suggestion down on the World Security pro- gram we might have to get into some discussions perhaps with Eden and Molo- tov on technical angles of the international organization and that while Bohlen and I were fully confident of our ability we might want someone who had been a keener student than we had been.73 Roosevelt accepted Stettinius’s request, saying, “Arrange to have Bowman as a consultant to you on these matters,” but he vetoed Pasvolsky’s inclusion in the U.S. delegation.74 Stettinius then asked about Assistant Secretary of State James C. Dunn or Director of the Office of European Affairs H. Freeman Matthews, but

71. Hiss, Recollections of a Life, p. 99. At the time the Yalta delegation was selected, Dunn had recently been appointed one of ﬁve new assistant secretaries of state as part of Stettinius’s reorganization of the department. See Johnson, “Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.,” pp. 213–214. Dunn was succeeded as director of the Ofﬁce of European Affairs by H. Freeman Matthews, who did attend the conference. 72. Accepting Hiss at his word about the explanation he was given by Stettinius about his inclusion in the Yalta delegation in place of Dunn suggests a relationship between Hiss and the secretary that would have been surprisingly close and candid given their respective positions in the department hierarchy. 73. Roosevelt to Churchill, 30 December 1944, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 25–26. 74. Stettinius Calendar Notes, 30 December 1944, in Box 243, Stettinius Papers.

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Roosevelt replied that “there was no need of having anybody else.” When Stettinius pressed the matter and “pointed out that the British would have a large representation from the Foreign Ofﬁce and we had thought of Cannon or Bohlen, Riddleberger on Germany, Vincent on the Far East, Ailing on the Near East,” the president ended the discussion by saying, “I don’t want a big party. I don’t see why you need them.”75 The conversation concluded with Stettinius telling “the President I thought it was very important to have some brieﬁng sessions next week of about a half hour as to what we were going to take up at those meetings.” Roosevelt responded, “‘That’s good. But hold it down to Harry [Hopkins], Bohlen and Bowman.’” He then suggested that Stettinius set up a meeting for Tuesday, 2 January 1945.76 On New Year’s Day 1945, Stettinius followed up by telephoning Hop- kins to discuss the White House meeting scheduled for the next day with the president to determine the makeup of the U.S. delegation at Yalta. When a summary of that conversation was included in the public release of the “Yalta papers,” some commentators speculated that Hiss’s presence at Yalta may have been at the request of the president himself, a claim that has been repeated recently.77 However, the more complete version of that conversation recorded in

75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. Stettinius in his record of his 30 December meeting with the president also found it worth noting that “later in the conversation [Roosevelt] repeated the same thought” about “holding it down” to Hopkins, Bohlen, and Bowman. Stettinius Calendar Notes, 30 December 1944, in Box 243, Stet- tinius Papers. 77. “The Behind the Scenes Struggle over the Yalta Papers,” Newsweek, Vol. 44 (1 November 1954), p. 43; Shelton, Alger Hiss, pp. 135–136; and M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012), p. 40. Shelton and Evans and Romerstein claim that, in the same conversation, Stettinius told Hopkins that Roosevelt had asked that Hiss be included in the Yalta delegation, reﬂecting pro-Soviet inﬂuences within the White House, even if Roosevelt did not then know Hiss, and that it was not Roosevelt’s personal decision. See Shelton, Alger Hiss, pp. 135–136; and Evans and Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents,p.40. These authors rely on the abbreviated version of the conversation included in the “Stettinius Record” in the published FRUS volume on Yalta, which states that “The Secretary told Mr. Harry Hopkins that the purpose of his 12:30 appointment with the President next day was to ‘bring with him people who will be involved in the forthcoming conferences.’ The President, Mr. Stettinius explained, did not want to have anyone accompany him in an advisory capacity, but he felt Messrs. Bowman and Alger Hiss ought to go. Hopkins promised to discuss the matter with the President that afternoon.” FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 439: cited in Shelton, Alger Hiss, p. 228 n. 28; and Evans and Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents, p. 258 n. 1. Although the “he” in that summary is arguably ambiguous and could conceivably refer to either Stettinius or Roosevelt, the context suggests that “he” more likely refers to Stettinius. (The secretary was apparently trying to persuade Hopkins to convince the president to authorize Bowman and Hiss to attend the conference. Stettinius would not likely have had to intercede with Hopkins to persuade the president that Bowman and Hiss should attend the conference if the president already “felt [they] ought to go.”) In any event, any potential ambiguity is resolved by the more complete entry in the unpublished telephone summary.

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Stettinius’s unpublished telephone log conﬁrms that Stettinius, not Roosevelt, brought up Hiss’s name as someone who should attend the conference. As Stettinius told Hopkins,

he is going to have an appointment with the President tomorrow at 12:30 and bring with him people who will be involved in the forthcoming conferences. Therefore, a list of the delegates will have to be decided upon before tomorrow morning. ERS tells Harry Hopkins the President’s feeling about not having anyone accompany ERS as Advisors but ERS feels that Bowman and Alger Hiss ought to come. Hopkins promises to bring up the matter with the President when he sees him this afternoon and report back to ERS.78

According to Stettinius, Pasvolsky was the one who suggested that Hiss attend the Yalta conference.79 Stettinius later wrote that he

met Alger Hiss for the first time in April 1944, on my return from a war-time missiontoEnglandasUnderSecretaryofState....Hiss,inmyabsence,had been transferred to the staff of former Ambassador Edwin Wilson, who had been put in charge of Special Political Affairs, specifically to prepare the documents and agenda for the forthcoming Dumbarton Oaks Conversations. Mr. Hiss was appointed Secretary General of the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations by Secre- tary Hull and performed efficiently and with distinction at all times.80

With Pasvolsky vetoed by Roosevelt and Bowman apparently unable to travel because of illness, Stettinius formally designated Hiss to accompany him “for Dumbarton Oaks matters,” along with Matthews, the director of the Ofﬁce of European Affairs.81 Hiss was also placed in charge of compiling the memoranda to be included in the brieﬁng book that Stettinius would deliver to Roosevelt before the president sailed to Malta en route to the Crimea.82

78. Summary of Telephone Conversation, 1 January 1945, in “Telephone Summaries and Transcripts, 1–6 January 1945 (Hyde ﬁle, Telephone Summaries etc.),” Box 236, Stettinius Papers. 79. Statement of Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Regarding Alger Hiss, 20 May 1949. The statement was provided to Hiss’s defense lawyers for possible use at Hiss’s trial for perjury. 80. Ibid. 81. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), p. 401; and Stettinius to Harriman, 15 January 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta,p.36. 82. See “Editorial Note,” in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 42; and Hiss, “Memorandum of Duties,” quoted in Weinstein, Perjury, p. 314.

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Yalta: The Soviet Republics Issue Resurfaces

The Yalta conference convened on 4 February 1945. At the fourth plenary session on 7 February, U.S. hopes were dashed that the Soviet Union would abandon its demand for separate representation of Soviet republics in the postwar international organization. At the third plenary session on 6 February 1945, the Big Three began discussion of the proposed world organization. Secretary Stettinius orally presented the U.S. proposal for the voting formula in the Security Council, addressing the issue that had not been resolved at Dumbarton Oaks or in the subsequent exchange of correspondence between Roosevelt and Stalin.83 Stettinius’s carefully prepared statement delimited the scope of a great-power veto and again rejected the Soviet position that great- power unanimity should be required for all decisions by the Security Council. According to the U.S. text presented by Stettinius, one of the great powers could veto any enforcement action by the world organization directed against it but could not block decisions involving the peaceful settlement of disputes to which it was a party.84 Seizing on what Stettinius described as a “modest drafting change” from the version that had been transmitted to, and rejected by, Stalin in December, the Soviet participant ratcheted up the tension by requesting additional time to study the new text, thereby delaying any hoped-for resolution of the dispute.85 At the next day’s plenary session, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov sud- denly announced his acceptance of the U.S. proposal for voting in the UN Security Council. Molotov’s unexplained and apparently unconditional approval of the U.S. draft broke the tension and was gratefully welcomed by the U.S. delegation, although it would turn out to be a ruse that masked a continuing disagreement over the scope of the veto—a disagreement that resurfaced at the San Francisco conference in the spring of 1945 and almost torpedoed agreement on the terms of the UN Charter.86 At Yalta, however, Molotov’s

83. Roosevelt to Stalin, received 14 December 1944, in Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Truman, pp. 173–174; and Stalin to Roosevelt, 26 December 1944, in Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Truman, pp. 178–179. 84. Bohlen Minutes, Third Plenary Session, 7 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 661–663. 85. Bohlen Minutes, Third Plenary Session, 6 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 663, 665. 86. Although Bohlen later wrote that “the agreement on the voting procedure in the Security Coun- cil was the one solid and lasting decision of the Yalta Conference” and that “Soviet acceptance of the voting formula was unconditional,” that did not prove to be the case. Bohlen, Witness to His- tory, pp. 193–194. The problem with the “Yalta formula, as it came to be called, on the extent of

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announcement was a well-played gambit that set the stage for the Soviet Union’s renewed bid for separate membership for Soviet republics in the postwar world organization. After stating Soviet acceptance of the U.S. voting formula, Molotov immediately extinguished the relief with which Roosevelt and Stettinius effu- sively greeted that (apparent) concession by reigniting the Dumbarton Oaks controversy over separate world organization membership for the Soviet republics.87 Backing away from the previous demand for sixteen seats, Molotov now staked out a claim that three of the republics (Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania), or at least two of them, be admitted as original members of the world organization.88 The clearly unanticipated proposal to pare down the Soviet membership claim from sixteen republics to three, or at least two (in addition to the USSR itself), caught FDR off guard, as his rambling response indicates. Although Stalin had signaled the particular importance he attached to membership for Ukraine and Belorussia by speciﬁcally referring to those two republics in a September 1944 communication to Roosevelt, “there had been no brieﬁng by

the veto was that in neither the American draft proposal nor the text accepted at Yalta” was there “a positive definition of what types of question might be considered ‘procedural.’” See Herbert Feis, Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 551, n. 61, emphasis in original; and Sydney D. Bailey, Voting in the Security Council (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univer- sity Press, 1969), pp. 14–15. See also Russell, HistoryoftheUnitedNationsCharter, p. 737. At the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco in April 1945, the Soviet Union seized on a lack of precision in the text of the provision (which State Department officials, including Hiss, had labored over for months prior to Yalta) to insist that the decision even to discuss an issue by the Security Council was subject to veto as substantive not procedural—an issue that U.S. officials believed had been resolved at Yalta. See Russell, HistoryoftheUnitedNationsCharter, pp. 713–714, 728–735. At that time, Stettinius acknowledged in an internal State Department telegram that this issue had not been addressed at either Yalta or Dumbarton Oaks. Stettinius to Joseph C. Grew, 3 June 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 995. The resulting impasse threatened to derail the founding of the UN, and President Harry Truman urgently requested Harry Hopkins to discuss the issue with Stalin during negotiations in Moscow on other matters. When Hopkins raised the subject, Stalin again managed to secure some measure of U.S. goodwill by purporting to be unaware of the Soviet position and then brushing it aside as “an insignificant matter” and instructing Foreign Minister Molotov to “accept the American position,” thereby effectively selling the same horse twice. See Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), pp. 911–912. In an oral history interview in 1990, Hiss, rather improbably given the magnitude of the dispute and its potential to disrupt the San Francisco conference, attributed the renewed Soviet position on the extent of the veto to an unauthorized initiative by Molotov, undertaken without Stalin’s knowledge, which “Stalin immediatelycountermanded...[and]whenHopkins...statedtheissuetoStalinheunderstoodit immediately and said ‘of course.’” See Hiss, United Nations Oral History Project, 13 February 1990, p. 13. Hiss, in his public statements, tended to be enduringly charitable (at best) on the subject of Stalin and the nature of his regime, a point discussed in Susan Jacoby, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 173–174. 87. Plokhy, Yalta, pp. 123–124, 184–185; and Bohlen Minutes, Fourth Plenary Session, 7 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 711–712. 88. Bohlen Minutes, Fourth Plenary Session, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, 7 February 1945, p. 712.

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the State Department on this particular question,” Stettinius later acknowledged.89 “This is not so good,” Roosevelt scribbled in a note to Stettinius when Molotov presented the modified Soviet proposal.90 Not only had Molotov confounded Roosevelt’s hopes that the Soviet Union would not pursue the issue at Yalta, but U.S. officials had given no consideration whatsoever to the possibility that Molotov would offer such a stripped-down version of the USSR’s previous membership demand. The plenary session on 7 February adjourned with the issue, in the modified form presented by Molotov, referred for consideration to the next day’s meeting of Foreign Ministers.

The Hiss Memorandum: Timing, Preparation, Text

The Hiss Memorandum was presumably drafted sometime between the end of the plenary session in the early evening on 7 February and the opening of the Foreign Ministers’ Conference at noon the following day. Whether Stettinius requested it, whether Hiss decided to prepare it on his own initiative, whether Stettinius relied on it at the Foreign Ministers’ meeting, or whether it was even delivered to the secretary of state or read by him at all, is unrecorded. No reference is made to the memorandum in either Stettinius’s diary or his memoir account of the process by which the United States agreed to support the Soviet proposal to admit the republics of Ukraine and Belorussia to initial membership in the world organization.91 Stettinius’s own papers relating to Yalta at the University of Virginia do not contain a copy of the memorandum. Nor did Hiss mention it when he was interviewed by Johnson, Stettinius’s collaborator on the secretary of state’s memoir account of the Yalta conference, or in his written comments on the manuscript Stettinius sent him to review before publication (the memoir was eventually published in early November 1949, a few days after Stettinius’s death, as Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference). The State Department ﬁles at the National Archives and Records Ad- ministration at College Park, Maryland, also contain no documentation

89. Stalin to Roosevelt, 9 September 1944, in Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Truman, pp. 158–159; Roosevelt to Stalin, 1 September 1944, in Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Truman, p. 158; and Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians, p. 203. 90. Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians, p. 174. 91. Ibid., pp. 186–197; Stettinius Diaries, pp. 242–256; and Stettinius Calendar Notes, in Box 278, Stettinius Papers.

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indicating how and when the Hiss Memorandum was written, to whom, if anyone, it was delivered, or whether it was read by anyone. As noted in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) Yalta volume, the memorandum was found in the “Hiss Collection,” described by FRUS editors as “the notes and documents pertaining to Yalta which were collected by Alger Hiss.”92 There is apparently no copy of the Memorandum in other State Department ﬁles at the National Archives.93 Nevertheless, Stettinius’s presentation at the Yalta Foreign Ministers’ Conference at noon on 8 February closely tracked portions of the memorandum, suggesting that he did consult it before going into the meeting. The premise for the Soviet claim that separate representation for the Soviet republics was warranted—namely, that constitutional changes had granted the republics independent control over the conduct of their foreign relations—was an obvious sham. When responding to Molotov’s overture at the 7 February plenary session, Roosevelt had clearly regarded this contention as nothing more than a ploy by which the Soviet Union would gain extra votes in the world organization. A core principle of the U.S. conception of that organization, one that was consistently adhered to from initial planning through the Dumbarton Oaks conference, was that each member-state would have one vote in the organization’s General Assembly. For Hiss to have written a memorandum arguing in favor of including the Soviet republics in the proposed international organization would thus have been highly anomalous, indeed suspicious. A subordinate State Department ofﬁcial like Hiss would have had no persuasive reason to argue against the concern expressed by the president—a concern that was consistent with the State Department’s own well-established policy on the issue. The Hiss Memorandum sets forth two substantive “arguments” against including any of the Soviet republics as initial members of the UN: that they were not signatories of the United Nations Declaration; and that they “were not sovereign states under international law.” It also raised the procedural argument that “the question should be postponed until the organization is formed.”94

92. See FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. xvii, 746–747 n. 3. 93. NARA, RG 43.4.1 contains the State Department records for the Yalta Conference. The Hiss Memorandum is contained in the folder labeled “Hiss Notes” in Box 4 (“Minutes, Notes and Confer- ence Documents”). No copy of the memorandum is found elsewhere in Box 4, in Box 3b (“Crimea Conference: Secretary of State’s File”), or in Box 5 (“Yalta General Records February–May 1945 etc.”). 94. FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 746–747.

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Despite the memorandum’s title, scholars have generally overlooked the fact that the Hiss Memorandum is not a flat-out rejection of the Soviet proposal. In line with the president’s own repeated—and rebuffed—requests at the fourth plenary session on 7 February to postpone resolution of the issue, perhaps aware of presidential adviser Byrnes’s opposition to granting the So- viet Union extra votes, and doubtless cognizant of Churchill’s immediately sympathetic response at the plenary session to the Soviet request, Hiss recommended deferring a decision on the issue because “the question is such a novel one in international relations that the other members of the Organization should have a chance to consider the question before a decision is reached.”95 Regarding the substantive points raised in opposition to the Soviet position, Bohlen’s praise that it was a “closely reasoned argument” is a simplistic as- sessment that fails to account adequately for how the actual contents of the document relate to the broader ramifications of the question of UN membership for two or three of the Soviet republics.96 In fact, the memorandum is noteworthy for an argument it does not make in opposition to admitting the Soviet republics, and the arguments it does make either undermined the overall U.S. position on the membership eligibility question or were calculated to inflame relations with an already testy Churchill.

The Hiss Memorandum: The Omitted Argument

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the Hiss Memorandum is its failure to argue that separate membership for the Soviet republics would vitiate the principle that each member-state should have only one vote in the international organization’s General Assembly. This “one nation, one vote” principle had been a fundamental element of U.S. planning for the contemplated world organization throughout the war years. The initial “Draft Constitution of the International Organization” prepared by the State Department in July 1943 had provided that “Each member of the General Conference shall have one vote,” as did the next month’s draft “Charter of the United Nations” prepared

95. Ibid., p. 747. At the 7 February plenary session, in contrast to Roosevelt’s temporizing, Churchill declared that “he had great sympathy with the Soviet request. His heart went out to mighty Russia....Hesaidhecouldunderstandtheirpointofviewastheywererepresentedbyonlyone voice in comparison with the British organization” but needed to review it with the Foreign Ofﬁce “as he had just heard the proposal” (p. 714). For Byrnes’s opposition to the Soviet proposal, see James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper, 1947), p. 40. 96. Bohlen, Witness to History, p. 194.

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by the department’s research staff.97 The “Possible Plan for a General Orga- nization” drafted in the spring of 1944 similarly provided that “each member state shall have one vote in the General Assembly.”98 More formally, the “United States Tentative Proposals for a General In- ternational Organization” prepared in July 1944 for consideration at the Dumbarton Oaks “conversations” proposed establishing a General Assembly composed of representatives of the “states members of the international organization,” in which “each member state should have one vote.”99 “The principle of one-state-one-vote in the Assembly,” U.S. ofﬁcials agreed, “was basic to the idea of the sovereign equality of all members.”100 Secretary Stettinius himself afﬁrmed, in a pamphlet issued by the State Department while he was en route to Yalta, that “the phrase ‘sovereign equality’ is enshrined in principle number one oftheDumbartonOaksProposals....Conformingtotheprin- ciple . . . [t]he Proposals provide for a General Assembly in which all member states will be represented on an equal footing.”101 The “one nation one vote” principle was perhaps the only clear point to emerge from Roosevelt’s confused response to Molotov’s request at the plenary session on 7 February for initial membership for three (or at least two) of the Soviet republics. After carefully—perhaps even worriedly—establishing that the Soviet Union was seeking representation for three (or at least two) Soviet republics only in the General Assembly (and not in the Security Coun- cil), Roosevelt reverted to the well-established U.S. view “that Mr. Molotov’s suggestion should be studied, particularly in light of the possibility that if the larger nations were given more than one vote it might prejudice the thesis of one vote for each member.”102

97. “Draft Constitution,” 14 July 1943, Article 5, Section 7, in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Prepa- ration, Appendix 13, p. 472; and “Draft Charter,” 14 August 1943, Article 3, Section 4, in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, Appendix 23, p. 526 ff. 98. “Possible Plan for a Genl Intl Organization,” 29 April 1944, in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, Appendix 35, p. 582 ff. 99. “United States Tentative Proposals for a General Intl Organization,” 18 July 1944, in Notter, Post War Foreign Policy Preparation, Appendix 38, p. 595 ff. The proposal did provide that in budget matters votes would be allocated in proportion to each member-state’s contribution of expenses. 100. Russell, History of the United Nations Charter, p. 366. See U.S. Department of State, “Questions and Answers on the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals,” 20 November 1944, in Illinois Digital Archives, http://www.idaillinois.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/isl3/id/12487/rec/6. 101. Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., “What the Dumbarton Oaks Peace Plan Means,” Department of State Conference Series No. 63, printed in U.S. Department of State Bulletin, Vol. 12, No. 292 (28 January 1945), pp. 115–119; emphasis in original. The statement was also published in Reader’s Digest,Vol. 46 (February 1945), pp. 1–7. 102. Bohlen Minutes, Fourth Plenary Session, 7 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 712– 713. When responding to Molotov’s overture at the 7 February plenary session, Roosevelt had no

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Despite the omission of the “one nation one vote” principle from the Hiss Memorandum, Secretary Stettinius clearly had that principle in mind when he addressed the issue at the Foreign Ministers’ meeting on 8 February. The secretary was at pains to assure Molotov (and Eden) “that he hoped and expected that the United States would be able to give a favorable reply [to the Soviet request] before the end of the day,” while expressing concern that in the Dumbarton Oaks proposals there was a provision to the effect that each sovereign state had one vote. He had not thus far been able to see clearly how the Dumbarton Oaks proposals could be amended to provide for multiple participation.103 In light of the president’s and the secretary’s reiterated reliance on this long-standing “core principle” of U.S. thinking about the structure of the international organization, its omission from Hiss’s own list of “arguments” is surprising.

The Hiss Memorandum: The United Nations Declaration and the Status of the “Associated Nations”

The Hiss Memorandum’s ﬁrst argument against initial UN membership for “any of the Soviet republics” stipulates that the Soviet Republics are not Signatories of the United Nations Declaration: On further thought we have become impressed with the Soviet view that the initial members of the United Nations Organization should be the signatories of the United Nations Declaration. As none of the Soviet republics are signatories of that declaration, Mr. Molotov’s proposal that two or three of these Republics be admitted to initial membership would be contrary to that principle.104

doubt that the Soviet contention about the republics’ “independence” in foreign affairs was nothing more than a bid for extra votes in the world organization. Even as Roosevelt went along with the Soviet proposal the next day, he again characterized the admission of Ukraine and Belorussia to the world organization as “giving one of the Great Powers three votes instead of one in the Assembly.” See Bohlen Minutes, Fifth Plenary Session, 8 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 775. Stalin conﬁrmed that this was what was really at issue when he subsequently consented to Roosevelt’s request that the United States obtain an equal number of additional votes, writing that “because the Soviet Union’s votes will increase to three owing to the admission of the Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Byelorussia, the number of U.S. votes should likewise be increased.” See Stalin to Roosevelt, 11 February 1945, in Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Truman, p. 192. 103. Edward Page, Jr., Minutes, Meeting of the Foreign Ministers, 8 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 735. 104. Hiss Memorandum, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 746; emphasis added.

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As Hiss well knew, making the signing of the United Nations Declaration a prerequisite for UN membership would have torpedoed membership for the “associated” countries of Latin America which had not yet signed the declaration but which the United States had consistently wanted to be eligible for membership. Throughout U.S. wartime planning for an international organization— work in which Hiss had been actively involved—the Roosevelt administration had stressed that the organization’s initial members should include the United Nations (the states that had signed the declaration of 1 January 1942), as well as the “associated nations” of Latin America (Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela), which had not signed the declaration.105 Those countries, the United States had consistently argued, in the face of Soviet opposition, were entitled to membership because they had assisted in the war effort despite not declaring war on the Axis or signing the United Nations Declaration.106 At Dumbarton Oaks, the U.S. delegates had explained to the Soviet representatives that the initial members should include

not only the initial signatories of the United Nations Declaration and those countries that have subsequently adhered to that Declaration but also a few additional countries which have broken relations with Germany and are cooperating in the war effort. It is these latter countries which are covered by the term “Associated Nations.”107

The Soviet position at Dumbarton Oaks was that only “the United Nations, i.e. Those States which have signed the declaration of January 1, 1942, or who have subsequently adhered to it” were entitled to be “the initiators and founder-members of the organization.”108

105. “[U.S.] Tentative Proposals for a General International Organization,” 18 July 1944, in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, Appendix 38, pp. 595–606; Stettinius to President Roosevelt, 15 November 1944, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 52–53; and Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks,p.94. 106. Russell, HistoryoftheUnitedNationsCharter, p. 433; “United States Tentative Proposals for a General International Organization,” 18 July 1944, Section A Paragraph 2 (“The United Nations and the nations associated with them and such other nations as the United Nations may determine, should comprise the initial membership of the organization”), in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 1, p. 653 ff.; and “Memorandum on an International Security Organization by the Soviet Union,” 12 August 1944 (“The initiators and founder-members of the organization are the United Nations”), in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 1, p. 708. 107. “Informal Minutes of Meeting No. 6 of the Joint Steering Committee,” 28 August 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 1, p. 742. 108. “Memorandum on an International Security Organization by the Soviet Union,” in FRUS, 1944, Vol. 1, p. 708.

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When Roosevelt met with his advisers in November 1944 to discuss “Questions Left Unsettled at Dumbarton Oaks,” he reviewed a State De- partment memorandum concerning the countries that should be invited to the founding conference of the postwar international organization and com- mented that “in his opinion it was entirely proper that only the signatories to the United Nations Declaration should be invited to the Conference” and that “we should take all necessary steps to induce the six so-called ‘Associ- ated Nations’ in South America [Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela] to regularize their position by declaring war and thus making themselves eligible to becoming signatories of the United Nations Decla- ration.” However, as the Yalta conference approached, the South American “associated nations” had yet to take action, and the president’s conference briefing book noted that “although we are suggesting to these six countries the desirability of their adhering to the United Nations declaration, special prob- lems in each country make such action unlikely for some months.” Accordingly, the briefing book “recommended that this Government maintain its previous position”; namely, that “both the United Nations and the nations associated with the United Nations should be invited” to the founding conference of the organization and enjoy the status of “initial” members.”109 At the plenary session on 7 February, in response to Molotov’s unexpected broaching of the issue of separate membership for at least two or three Soviet republics, Roosevelt raised the question of initial UN membership for the “associated nations.” Exactly how Roosevelt framed the question is uncertain because the various U.S. officials taking notes recorded the president’s words in different ways. According to Bohlen’s minutes, Roosevelt, in an apparent reference to the countries that might participate in the “conference to orga- nize the setting up of the World Organization,” mentioned “that there were a number of nations associated with the United Nations, such as Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Iceland, and others, which had broken relations with Germany but which were not at war.” Hiss’s notes indicate that Roosevelt began by saying, “invitations will go out to all nations that have had a place in the war” and continued by asking,

As a practical matter when we have this organizing meeting whom shall we ask? Nations in the war or those associated but not in the war. For instance, shall we invite———. The associated nations have broken rels [relations] with Ger.

109. Memorandum of Conversation, 15 November 1944, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 56; and “Na- tions to Be Invited to the United Nations Conference,” p. 91 (emphasis added).

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but have not declared war. Read list. We’ve got to decide who we’re going to invite.110 Roosevelt’s meandering statement had left Stettinius—and Hiss— without a clear lead to follow when the Foreign Ministers addressed the issue at noon on 8 February. Roosevelt’s remarks at the previous plenary session did signal a continuing interest in finding a way to invite the “associated nations” to the organizing meeting of the international organization. However, the Hiss Memorandum fully exercised whatever discretion the president’s open-ended comments had conferred, to the detriment of the “associated nations.” The preconference briefing book recommended that the United States maintain the position advanced at Dumbarton Oaks: “that the nations associated with the United Nations should be invited.”111 The Hiss Memorandum announced that “on further thought we have become impressed with the So- viet view that the initial members of the United Nations Organization should be the signatories of the United Nations Declaration,” thereby abandoning that position—but without acknowledging that it was so doing. Excluding both the Soviet republics and the associated nations would surely have been satisfactory to the Soviet Union. The demand for separate republic representation had originated at Dumbarton Oaks as a riposte to the U.S. position advocating for inclusion of the associated nations. The Hiss Memorandum provided an argument for excluding those countries, as Soviet officials had wanted all along. When the Yalta papers, including the memorandum, were released to the public in 1955, Hiss claimed that it represented, in addition to “his personal convictions,” the position of State Department experts. How- ever, the view Hiss expressed in the memorandum is in fact at odds with that of the Yalta briefing book and longstanding U.S. policy.112 Scholars have expressed doubt that Stettinius relied on the Hiss Memo- randum at the Foreign Ministers meeting on 8 February. Most notably, Plokhy asserts that “Stettinius did not use the memorandum or its recommendations.”113 However, the minutes of the meeting record that Stettinius adopted the Hiss Memorandum’s argument on the invitation issue: With respect to the question concerning who would be invited [to the founding conference], he recalled that at Dumbarton Oaks there had been considerable talk of inviting the Associated Nations as well as the United Nations. He stated

110. Hiss Notes, Fourth Plenary Session, 7 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 722. 111. Brieﬁng Book Paper, “Nations to Be Invited,” in FRUS, Malta and Yalta,p.91. 112. “Hiss Identiﬁes Yalta Notation,” p. 79. 113. Plokhy, Yalta, p. 193.

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that he had come to the conclusion that it would be most satisfactory to limit the invitations to those who had signed the United Nations Declaration and declared war on the common enemy.114 The Hiss Memorandum, and Stettinius’s acceptance of its position regarding signatories to the United Nations Declaration, opened the door to a potentially fatal blow to the long-standing U.S. objective of securing initial membership for the “associated nations” of Latin America that had not declared war on Germany. As a result, in the draft report of the Foreign Min- isters’ meeting of 8 February, prepared by the British delegation (which had hosted that day’s session), Stettinius’s position, as accepted by Molotov and Eden, was rendered as providing that the “only states invited to the Confer- ence on World Organization” would be “the United Nations as they exist at the time the [Yalta conference] convened.”115 This decision was tantamount to excluding all six “associated nations” (as itemized in an attachment to the Hiss Memorandum) from the founding conference of the UN. Of the six, only Ecuador had declared war by 4 February, the day the Yalta conference convened, and none had signed the United Na- tions Declaration.116 On 4 February an evidently anxious Stettinius had sent a cable to the State Department asking for “your estimate of the present status and time at which future action may be taken by each of the five Latin Ameri- can countries other than Ecuador?” The response on 6 February advised Stet- tinius that “it looks as though favorable action may be expected by all except Chile within a reasonably short time,” although that optimistic conclusion was somewhat at odds with the country-by-country status reports included with the response. Nor did the response advise the secretary that action could be expected by any specific date.117 When the Foreign Ministers met at noon on 8 February, none of the five other “associated nations” had declared war, and Ecuador had not yet signed the United Nations Declaration. Stettinius did have in hand a cable from Under Secretary of State Grew indicating that the department was planning a

114. Page minutes, Meeting of the Foreign Ministers, 8 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 735. 115. Draft Report by Foreign Secretaries to Plenary Meeting of Conference on World Organization Questions, in Hiss ﬁle, RG 43, NARA. Although Hiss inserted handwritten text in another section of that draft, he left the language unchanged on his copy of the draft. 116. Ecuador declared war on 4 February, and the State Department soon thereafter was informed that Ecuador planned to sign the United Nations Declaration on 14 February. See Ambassador to Ecuador to the Secretary of State, 4, 5, and 7 February 1945, in FRUS, 1945, Vol. IX, pp. 1004–1006. 117. Stettinius to Joseph C. Grew, 4 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 952; and Grew to Stettinius, 5 [6] February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 954.

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ceremony on 14 February, after the Yalta conference ended, at which Ecuador and any other associated nation that had by then declared war would sign the United Nations Declaration.118 Stettinius had thereby, apparently on his own authority but in accord with Hiss’s thinking, effectively abandoned the long-standing U.S. objective of maximizing the presence of the Latin American “associated nations” at the founding conference of the postwar international organization, a goal the United States had strongly pressed since Dumbarton Oaks, as Stettinius’s own statement to the foreign ministers acknowledged.119 Bohlen believed that Stet- tinius “sometimes was unaware of political nuances,” and even Walter John- son, Stettinius’s collaborator on his memoir of Yalta, later wrote that Stettinius “on occasion displayed a lack of conﬁdence in dealing with major policy per- plexities”120 The Foreign Ministers’ meeting appears to have been one of those “occasions.” The ﬁnal version of the Foreign Ministers’ report provided a few days’ grace for the effort to secure invitations for the Latin American “associated nations” by recommending that the “only states invited to the Conference on World Organization” would be those that had signed the United Nations Declaration by the date on which the Yalta conference ended, rather than the date on which it had convened, as the draft had provided.121 Even in this revised form, as presented to the plenary session later that afternoon, the tight deadline was potentially fatal to the U.S. aim of securing invitations for the Latin American “associated nations” to the founding conference. At the opening of the plenary session at 4:00 p.m. on 8 February, Roo- sevelt was therefore faced with a Foreign Ministers’ report that would forestall invitations to the “associated nations” that had not declared war and had not signed the United Nations Declaration within the next few days—an unlikely event. Arguing the cause of the Latin American countries which had “helped us a great deal in the war effort,” Roosevelt “said that he would have to go back a bit into history” to justify their continuing failure to go to war with Germany. According to the president, in 1942 the Latin American “associated nations” had been told by the State Department “that it was not necessary

118. Joseph C. Grew to Stettinius, 5 [6] February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 954–955. 119. The status of the “associated nations” as initial members of the United Nations did not come up in Stettinius’s private discussion with Roosevelt the evening before the Foreign Ministers’ meeting concerning membership for the Soviet republics. See Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians, pp. 186– 188. 120. Bohlen, Witness to History, p. 179; and Johnson, “Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.,” p. 221. 121. Bohlen Minutes, Fifth Plenary Session, 8 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 772– 773.

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to declare war on Germany but only to break diplomatic relations. There- fore, there were five or six South American countries who felt that they had taken the advice of the United States Government and were, therefore, in good standing . . . this advice had been a mistake.”122 Roosevelt then asserted that “he had sent letters to the presidents of these six countries urging them to declare war against the common enemy,” that “Ecuador had already done so and Peru’s declaration could be expected at any time, and he hoped the others before long.”123 Seeking to recoup the situation, Roosevelt reiterated his commitment to “a conference of United Nations and Associated Nations who had helped the war effort” and proposed that “the time limit should be the first of March” for the “associated nations” to declare war and thereby be invited to the conference. Stalin (who had earlier in the session secured U.S. and British support for UN membership for two of the Soviet republics) and Churchill agreed. The conference protocol affirmed that, in addition to the “United Nations as they existed on the 8th of February 1945,” invitations to the “United Na- tions Conference” would be issued to “such of the ‘Associated nations’ as have declared war on the common enemy by 1st March 1945.”124 By the end of February, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Uruguay had joined Ecuador in declaring war, and each had adhered to the United Nations Declaration.125 All six Latin American “associated nations” thereby secured invitations to the San Francisco Conference—but only by virtue of the time extension Roosevelt had obtained at the plenary session, an extension that Secretary Stettinius, heeding the recommendation of the Hiss Memorandum, had been ready to forgo.

Sovereignty, the Soviet Republics, and India

The second argument the Hiss Memorandum makes is that “the Soviet Re- publics are not sovereign states under international law” and that “the Soviet constitution does not permit the Soviet Republics to control their own foreign

122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. “Protocol of the Proceedings of the Crimea Conference,” 11 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 975–976. 125. Ecuador, Chile, Peru, and Paraguay signed the United Nations Declaration on 14 February 1945, as reported in The New York Times, 15 February 1945, p. 6. Venezuela signed the declaration on 20 February and Uruguay on 24 February, as tabulated in The New York Times, 21 February 1945, p. 11; and The New York Times, 25 February 1945, p. 23.

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policy or affairs.” Not only was this unlikely to be effective as an exercise in persuasion directed at the Soviet Union, but it highlighted an issue that would be highly damaging to Anglo-American cooperation at a tense moment in tre- lations between Roosevelt and Churchill at the conference.126 The memorandum’s doubts about the actual independence of the Soviet republics in matters of foreign affairs echoed a skeptical question—known, no doubt to Hiss—that his colleague Pasvolsky had posed to Ambassador Gromyko in January. In response to Gromyko’s assertion that “they have their own constitutions and deal independently with their own foreign affairs,” Pasvolsky “asked him whether he really thought that they are independent countries as we commonly understand the term.” Gromyko, predictably, responded “that, of course, they are,” leaving Pasvolsky to wrap up the unpro- ductive exchange by saying, “that was obviously a question which would have to be discussed at the meeting of the Big Three.”127 No doubt Pasvolsky’s doubts about the actual sovereignty of the Soviet republics, as restated in the Hiss Memorandum, would have been similarly in- effective with Stalin when the issue was under discussion. As Plokhy observes, “No one at Yalta believed in the independence of the Soviet republics.”128 More importantly, this was an argument likely to complicate U.S. interests vis-à-vis the United Kingdom. In challenging the sovereignty of the Soviet republics, Hiss acknowledged a potentially embarrassing weakness in that line of argument: “India is one of the United Nations. It, too, is not independent. The Soviet representatives will probably argue that if India can be a member so should their three Republics.”129

126. Hiss Memorandum, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 746–747. 127. Memorandum by the Special Assistant to the Secretary of State (Pasvolsky), 11 January 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 72. For a follow up discussion of the issue, see Memorandum from the Special Assistant to the Secretary of State (Pasvolsky), 13 January 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 75. At the time of the constitutional changes, Bohlen, who was the president’s interpreter at Yalta and was chief of the department’s newly reestablished Division of Eastern European Affairs, observed that “this change in itself does not mean a move towards greater decentralization and does not basically alter the constitutional structure of the Soviet Union. The centralized control of Moscow has never been exercised through the Governmental structure but through the Communist Party and will unquestionably continue to be exercised through Party channels. No basic structural change has been madeintheSovietconstitutionalstructuralmachinery....ItmerelymeansthattheCommissariatfor ForeignAffairs...willnowhavewhatamountstobranchofﬁcesinthesixteenconstituentrepublics.” See Bohlen memorandum, 3 February 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Vol. IV, p. 811. 128. Plokhy, Yalta, p. 187. 129. Hiss Memorandum, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 746–747. Hiss proposed the following response to such an argument: “India has for some period past been gradually developing international relations and is generally regarded as having more of the attributes of separate nationhood than the Soviet Republics.”

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The timing of any such discussion, in the terms raised in the Hiss Mem- orandum, of the relative claims of India and the Soviet republics to membership in the international organization was hardly propitious. India’s status was a long-standing sore point between Roosevelt and Churchill. When Roosevelt had raised the subject during Churchill’s ﬁrst wartime visit to Washington in December 1941, Churchill—as he himself recorded—“reacted so strongly and at such length that [Roosevelt] never raised it verbally again.”130 The subsequent attempt by a career diplomat, William Phillip, to discuss the postwar status of India with the British prime minister had unleashed Churchill’s rage during a meeting in Washington in the spring of 1943.131 The British had already signaled their sensitivity to the status of India in the context of the Soviet demand for separate world organization membership for the Soviet republics. In London, while en route to Malta and thence to Crimea, Hopkins and Bohlen had reviewed with British ofﬁcials the So- viet demand at Dumbarton Oaks that each of the sixteen Soviet republics be granted separate votes. They agreed that the demand was “preposterous,” but

the fact that each of the British dominions—including India, which was not then self-governing—was to have a separate vote, however, made the British decide that for reasons of tactics, the primary burden of opposition had to be carried by the United States.132 Injecting the status of India into the heart of the dispute over the Soviet republics was bound to stir controversy with the United Kingdom just when a firm united front between it and the United States was needed in negotiating with Stalin on crucial issues regarding the composition of the Polish government and the postwar status of Germany. This was especially true when Hiss was preparing the memorandum on the Soviet republics issue: the aftermath of the plenary session on 7 February, when tensions had openly flared between Roosevelt and Churchill for the first time at the conference. During that con- tentious session, Churchill had launched an unexpected attack on Roosevelt’s proposal to convene the organizational conference for the United Nations in March and then had balked at Roosevelt’s suggestion that membership for the Soviet republics be referred to the foreign ministers for study.133

130. Russell, HistoryoftheUnitedNationsCharter, p. 79. See also Bohlen, Witness to History, p. 140. 131. See Stettinius Diaries, pp. 52, 487 n. 9. 132. Ibid., p. 55. 133. Plokhy, Yalta, p. 189.

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For the British, securing initial membership in the UN for India, along with the self-governing dominions, was a fundamental objective in their planning for the international organization, as U.S. policymakers well knew.134 Advancing that goal provided a self-serving rationale for Churchill’s prompt embrace at the 7 February plenary session of the Soviet proposal for admitting three (or at least two) of the Soviet republics to membership.135 By so doing, the British leader clearly intended to preempt just what the memorandum proposed: the initiation of a debate over the relative independence of India and the Soviet republics. A U.S. argument that India was entitled to membership as having “more of the attributes of separate nationhood than the Soviet Republics” was unlikely to persuade the Soviet Union on the merits. Inviting open debate on the status of India vis-à-vis the Soviet republics could only impede, or even torpedo, initial membership for India.136

The Hiss Memorandum: What Did Hiss Know—and When Did He Know It?

In assessing how the Hiss Memorandum ﬁts into the debate over Hiss’s status as a Soviet spy, the question of its timing—and of what Hiss knew when he drafted it—is as important as its contents, perhaps even more so. The available evidence, sparse though it may be, suggests that Hiss may well have prepared the memorandum after learning that Roosevelt was inclined to support the Soviet proposal. Knowing that the president had already effectively decided to admit the Soviet republics meant the memorandum was a “no risk” exercise and could provide useful cover without playing any role in defeating the Soviet proposal. According to Stettinius’s memoir, he conferred with Roosevelt after dinner on 7 February, and the president informed him that he was sympathetic to

134. See Bohlen, Witness to History, p. 194. “Churchill’s reaction was no surprise, since we knew of his desire to get India into the United Nations.” 135. Bohlen Minutes, Fourth Plenary Session, 7 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 713– 714; and Plokhy, Yalta, p. 189. 136. At the San Francisco conference, Molotov argued (in an effort to win support from the United States and Great Britain for the USSR’s opposition to the seating of a delegation from Argentina) that India was not “an independent state” but that the Soviet Union had acceded to its membership as a courtesy to Great Britain. Molotov similarly argued that “the Philippines are not an independent country” and that the Soviet Union had accommodated the United States in agreeing to membership for the Philippines. See United Nations Conference on International Organization, Documents of the United Nations Conference on International Organization San Francisco 1945 (New York: United Na- tions Information Organization, 1945–1955), Vol. 1, pp. 347–348; and Russell, History of the United Nations Charter, p. 638.

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the Soviet position after having discussed the matter privately with Stalin.137 Stettinius wrote, the President told me that evening at Yalta that Stalin felt his position at Yalta was difficult and insecure. A vote for the Ukraine was essential, the Marshal had declared,forSovietunity....TheMarshalalsofeltthathewouldneedthe three votes to secure the acquiescence of his associates to Sov participation in theworldorganization....[ThePresident]toldmethatfromthestandpoint of geography and population he did not believe there was anything preposterous about the Russian proposal for two extra votes for the Ukraine and White Russia....Furthermore,thePresidentknewthattheBritish,althoughtheyhad opposed 16 votes, would not object to two extra votes for the Soviet Union. As the President analyzed the question in my presence, he said that the mostimportantthingwastomaintaintheunityoftheGreatPowers....There would be approximately fifty seats in the Assembly anyway, and after all, what practical difference would it make to the success or failure of the Assembly for the Soviet Union to have two additional seats to represent its vast population and territory?138 Stettinius recalled that at Yalta his “usual daily schedule . . . was to confer with Matthews, Bohlen and Hiss just after I got up in the morning” and that after dinner “I usually conferred again with Matthews, Bohlen, Hiss and Foote.”139 Once the dispute over the scope of the veto had (apparently) been resolved at the plenary session on 7 February, the one open issue regarding the establishment of the postwar international organization concerned the determination of its initial members, including the Soviet bid to accord that status to the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics. Given the importance of the contemplated international organization for U.S., and especially Roosevelt’s, plans for the postwar world, Stettinius likely shared Roosevelt’s thinking on the subject with his aides. Whether after dinner on 7 February or “first thing” in the morning of 8 February, Stettinius had the opportunity to brief Hiss on the president’s inclination to agree to the Soviet proposal. If so, Hiss would have known in advance that any statement he might draft in opposition to the Soviet proposal had been overtaken by events. The events leading up to Roosevelt’s announcement at the 8 February plenary session that the United States would support initial UN membership for the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics are, according to a leading

137. Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians, pp. 187–188. 138. Ibid., pp. 186–188. See Stettinius to Walter Johnson, 4 November 1948, in Box 876, Stettinius Papers. 139. Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians, pp. 82–83.

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historian of the origins of the United Nations, “completely confused in the records.”140 Indeed, the conference records do not clarify how the U.S. decision was reached between the end of the plenary session on 7 February and the plenary session the next afternoon.141 Hopkins’s most recent biographer offers what can only be characterized as speculation in explaining how the decision came about.142 Maurice Matloff, author of several volumes in the U.S. Army’s official history of World War II, observes, “No war was better recorded than World War II. . . . But all too often the historian who has struggled through mountains of paper finds the trail disappearing at the crucial point of decision-making, somewhere in the vicinity of the White House.”143 A recent study of Roosevelt’s final months describes the president’s policymaking as “so personal and intuitive, so seemingly off the cuff, that it’s seldom reflected in documents,” and this appears to have been one such occasion.144 Stettinius’s memoir of Yalta is the sole source for not only the evening discussion between Roosevelt and Stettinius on 7 February but also the private conversation between Roosevelt and Stalin that took place after the plenary session earlier in the day (and whose contents Roosevelt relayed to Stettinius that evening). None of the contemporaneous documents refers to either conversation, and in the course of preparing his Yalta memoir Stettinius had trouble recalling when that discussion with Roosevelt took place.145 Byrnes had blamed Stettinius (his predecessor) for the decision, and Stet- tinius therefore had a self-protective interest in deflecting Byrnes’s accusation by placing responsibility on Roosevelt.146 Nevertheless, Stettinius’s account has

140. Russell, HistoryoftheUnitedNationsCharter, p. 536 n. 43. 141. See Minutes of Meeting of Foreign Ministers, 8 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 734–735; and Hiss Notes, Fifth Plenary Session, 8 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 782. 142. David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 369. 143. Maurice Matloff, “Mr. Roosevelt’s Three Wars: FDR as War Leader,” Harmon Memorial Lecture 6, United States Air Force Academy, p. 6, quoted in Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin D. Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 16. 144. Joseph Lelyveld, His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), p. 30. 145. See drafts and notes on drafts in Boxes 878–879, Stettinius Papers; and Stettinius to Walter Johnson, 2 December 1948, in Box 877, Stettinius Papers. 146. See James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper, 1947), p. 40. As Plokhy (in Yalta, p. 193) notes, Stettinius composed his memoir in response to Byrnes’s charge that Stettinius was the one who took the initiative in agreeing to the admission of the Soviet republics at the foreign ministers’ meeting and who “as the [plenary] meeting opened . . . advised the President of the action which the President later announced, and the heads of government approved.” Similarly, Bohlen attributed the decision to a miscommunication between Stettinius and Roosevelt regarding the outcome of the For- eign Ministers’ meeting on 8 February 1945, a miscommunication for which Bohlen holds Stettinius

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generally been accepted by historians writing about Yalta.147 The conference records do show that when Stettinius went into the foreign ministers’ meeting at noon on 8 February he was ready to give “sympathetic consideration” to “multiple membership for the Soviet Union” at the founding conference of the international organization. In light of Stettinius’s deferential relationship with the president, it seems doubtful that he, an “organization man” par ex- cellence both in business and government, would have taken that stance on his own volition.148 “Hiss objected to a draft proposal allowing the Soviets two additional votes in the United Nations General Assembly, unaware that Roosevelt had already conceded the point,” Eric Alterman writes, apparently because he be- lieves this shows “Hiss’s lack of inﬂuence over the proceedings at Yalta.”149 But in fact if Hiss was aware, as Stettinius’s account of his daily routine during the conference suggests is likely, that was precisely the reason why Hiss took the trouble to record his, apparently unsolicited, objection.

Conclusion

Regardless of what Hiss argued in the memorandum, and whatever his actual intentions, the Yalta Conference protocol stipulated that “when the Confer- ence on World Organization is held, the delegates of the United Kingdom and United States of America will support a proposal to admit to original membership two Soviet Socialist Republics, i.e. the Ukraine and White Russia.”150 This agreement was not included in the published conference communiqué, and Roosevelt did not disclose it in his address to Congress upon returning from Yalta, acknowledging its existence only in response to leaks in the press in late March. To the end of his life, he downplayed its formal status,

accountable. See Notes of Interview of Alger Hiss by Walter Johnson re “Extra Votes,” 19 November 1948, in Box 277, Stettinius Papers. 147. See, for example, Plokhy, Yalta, p. 191; Russell, HistoryoftheUnitedNationsCharter, p. 535; Susan Butler, Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), Kindle ed., loc. 7062; Schlesinger, Act of Creation, p. 59; Forrest C. Pogue, “The Big Three and the United Nations,” in John L. Snell, ed., The Meaning of Yalta (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), p. 182; and Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 266. 148. Meeting of the Foreign Ministers, 8 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 735. 149. Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie (New York: Viking, 2004), pp. 71, 346–364 (esp. n. 264). 150. Yalta Conference Protocol, 11 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 976.

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misleadingly describing it, either willfully or negligently, as only a personal— and not an official—undertaking.151 Roosevelt speechwriter and Hopkins confidant Robert E. Sherwood judged the belated disclosure of the agreement on the Soviet republics “one of the worst all-around botches of the war,” insofar as it triggered questions about “why it had been kept secret—and how many more secrets were left over from Yalta?”152 In Sherwood’s view, “from then on the very word ‘Yalta’ came to be associated in the public’s mind with secret and somehow shameful agreements.”153 Stettinius himself privately acknowledged a few years later that “the extra votes and the Kuriles business with the Soviet Union gradually caused Yalta to become a symbol of appeasement.”154 Hiss agreed that the belated disclosure of the agreement had sparked public concern about secret agreements that may have been reached at Yalta.155 The flap over the unsuccessful effort to keep the agreement secret, and the grudging admission of its existence, were compounded by the fact that it did not preclude the emergence of a dispute (akin to that which similarly bedeviled the apparent resolution of the veto issue at Yalta) over the point at which the Soviet republics would be entitled to participate as “initial members” in the founding conference of the UN. That dispute was not resolved until the conference convened in San Francisco in April 1945.156

151. Yalta Conference Communiqué, 11 February 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 968–975; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, pp. 876–877; and “Text of Roosevelt Address to Congress on 1 March 1945,” The New York Times, 2 March 1945, p. 12. For the delayed disclosure of the agreement in late March, see “Who Can Belong to the Security Organization?” Newsweek,Vol.25(26March 1945), p. 62; Joseph C. Grew to President Roosevelt, 23 March 1945, in FRUS, 1945, Vol. 1, p. 152; U.S. State Department Bulletin, Vol. 12, No. 301 (1 April 1945), p. 530; “Minutes of the Third Meeting of the United States Delegation Held at Washington, March 30, 1945, 11 A.M.” in FRUS, 1945, Vol. 1, p. 170; Bertram D. Hulen, “United States, Russia to Seek 3 Votes in Security Assembly,” The New York Times, 30 March 1945, p. 1; and Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, pp. 522–523. For Roosevelt’s repeated mischaracterizations of the agreement as a personal undertaking only and not binding on the U.S. government, see Charles E. Bohlen, “Report of the Meeting of the San Francisco Delegation with the President March 23,” 24 March 1945, in Calendar Notes 3/12–4/19, 1945, Box 244, Stettinius Papers; Arthur H. Vandenberg, Jr., ed., The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1952), pp. 159, 160–162; Stettinius Diaries, p. 306; and “Extracts from Franklin D. Roosevelt Press and Radio Conference at the Little White House, Warm Springs, Georgia,” 5 April 1945, in FRUS, 1945, Vol. 1, p. 197. The text of the Yalta conference protocol was not made public until March 1947. See FRUS, Malta and Yalta, p. 975 n. 1. 152. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, p. 876. 153. Ibid., p. 877. 154. Stettinius to Walter Johnson, 4 November 1948, in “Comments on Roosevelt and Hopkins,” Box 876, Stettinius Papers. 155. Hiss, United Nations Oral History Project, 13 February 1990, pp. 18–19. 156. Russell, History of the UN Charter, pp. 596–599, 636–639; Memorandum by Assistant Secretary of State Dunn, 17 March 1945, in FRUS, 1945, Vol. 1, pp. 132–134; Eden to Halifax, 21 March

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The decision-making process underlying U.S. acceptance of separate UN membership remains uncertain and is not resolved by the documentary record. The version offered by Stettinius in his Yalta memoir has generally been accepted by historians. However, Stettinius’s collaborator Johnson privately concluded upon completion of the memoir manuscript, “I still am not entirely convinced that the story of how the U.S.A. agreed to the extra votes for the U.S.S.R. is completely accurate.” He elaborated: it took [Stettinius] a number of dictations and changes before he reached the final version. There was nothing on this in his diary, and I had the feeling that he was thinking out his explanation in terms of making sure 1) he wasn’t responsible for it 2) it would sound plausible. There is only a dead man [i.e., Roosevelt], however, who could correct the picture if it is inaccurate.157 Whatever services Hiss may have rendered to the Soviet Union at Yalta by allegedly tipping them to U.S. negotiating strategies and objectives, there is no evidence that he similarly served Soviet interests by exerting influence behind the scenes to secure UN membership for the two Soviet republics.158 Roosevelt’s decision to go along with that Soviet initiative can instead, and more plausibly, be attributed to the goodwill generated by Stalin’s apparent, although illusory, acceptance of the U.S. formula for voting in the UN Secu- rity Council; Molotov’s retreat from the earlier proposal that all sixteen Soviet republics be eligible for membership; British support for the Soviet position, which left the United States isolated in any potential opposition thereto; and (if Stettinius’s memoir is credited) the president’s belief that giving the So- viet Union two extra votes in the organization’s general assembly was a relatively insignificant concession. Given the U.S. delegation’s lack of briefing and preparation on the revised form in which the “extra votes” request was raised at Yalta, Hiss would seem to have had nothing of value to convey to Soviet intelligence about how U.S. policymakers might respond to that proposal. At the time of the Yalta conference, Hiss held a subordinate, non- policymaking position in the State Department hierarchy and lacked the standing to authorize U.S. support for—or opposition to—UN membership

1945, in FRUS, 1945, Vol. 1, pp. 142–144; Joseph C. Grew to John G. Winant, 23 March 1945, in FRUS, 1945, Vol. 1, pp.150–151; and Hiss to Stettinius, 19 March 1945, in FRUS, Malta and Yalta, pp. 990–992. 157. Johnson, “Random Thoughts on Project Stettinius,” 24 March 1949. 158. As noted in Plokhy, Yalta, p. 357. Plokhy cautions that “suggestions that Soviet intelligence had daily brieﬁngs with Hiss during his stay at Yalta . . . have not been corroborated by documentary evidence and are based on recollections of retired Soviet intelligence ofﬁcers, or members of their families. . . . If that was indeed the case . . . his Soviet handlers were most probably interested in military rather than political matters.”

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for the Soviet republics. Unlike Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Depart- ment, who assumed control over significant areas of responsibility at the be- hest of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Hiss lacked the standing to shape policy to the advantage of the Soviet Union.159 Given Stettinius’s high regard for Hiss’s ability and integrity, an opinion that survived Hiss’s indictment for perjury in 1949, Hiss might eventually have reached a position from which he could have shaped policy, but any such opportunity was rendered moot when President Harry Truman abruptly removed Stettinius as secretary of state in June 1945. Hiss’s own forced separation from the State Department followed in 1946. Regardless of whether Hiss can be properly termed an “agent of influence” at the time of the Yalta conference, the Hiss Memorandum’s marshaling of arguments against UN membership in ways that helped to undermine the long-settled U.S. position in favor of initial UN membership for the “associated nations” of Latin America does need to be accounted for, especially in light of its departure from the position set forth in the Yalta briefing book.160 As embodied in the report presented by the Foreign Ministers at the plenary session on 8 February, that position would have barred Latin American countries from participation in the San Francisco conference had President Roosevelt not secured an extension of time for them to declare war on the Axis and adhere to the United Nations Declaration. The preparation of the memorandum may have afforded Hiss the opportunity—even if the initiative was not at the direction of his Soviet contacts—to “mess up policy” (as Chambers once described Hiss’s activities in an interview with a government security officer), at least in its details.161 The evidence, as well as the nature of the role played by Hiss at Yalta or of his relationship with Roosevelt, does not support Isaac Don Levine’s 1945 allegation, made in the first published accusation against Hiss, that the decision at Yalta to support initial UN membership for the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Republics resulted from Hiss’s behind-the-scenes interven- tion with Roosevelt. But neither does the Hiss Memorandum in any way call into question the notion that Hiss remained a Soviet agent at the time of the Yalta Conference. Because of the apparent timing of Hiss’s preparation of the memorandum and the fact that it made no mention of the oft-stated

159. Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 273–274, 326–329; and Haynes and Klehr, Venona, pp. 138–145. 160. “Hiss Identiﬁes Yalta Notation,” p. 79. 161. Raymond Murphy, “Memorandum of Conversation with Whittaker Chambers,” 28 August 1946, cited in Weinstein, Perjury, p. 327.

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U.S. criteria for initial UN membership and contravened a longstanding U.S. goal to secure that status for the “associated” Latin American countries, the document no longer should be depicted as a “puzzling anomaly.” In key re- spects, it was not anomalous at all.

Acknowledgments

I thank Jon von Briesen for stimulating my initial interest in the “Hiss case” and Jesse A. Hecht for incisive editorial assistance.

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