"WE MUST BE TOUGHER"

A glimpse of the might-have-been at Yalta was given by a letter to General George Marshall from Major General John R. Deane, head of the U.S. military mission to Moscow from 1943 to 1945. A month before the Yalta Conference, Secretary of War Henry Stimson forwarded the Deane letter to President Roosevelt. If, as Stimson probably hoped, Deane's conclusions had guided U.S. representatives at Yalta, the conference results might have been far different.

Excerpts from Deane's letter:

"Everyone will agree on the importance of collaboration with Russia--now and in the future. It won't be worth a hoot, however, unless it is based on mutual respect and made to work both ways. I have sat at innumerable Russian banquets and become gradually nauseated by Russian food, vodka and protestations of friendship. Each person high in public life proposes a toast a little sweeter than the preceding one on Soviet-British-American friendship. It is amazing how those toasts go down past the tongues in the cheeks. After the banquets we send the Soviets another thousand airplanes, and they approve a visa that has been hanging fire for months. We then scratch our heads to see what other gifts we can send, and they scratch theirs to see what else they can ask for . . .

"They simply cannot understand giving without taking, and as a result even our giving is viewed with suspicion. Gratitude cannot be banked in the Soviet Union. Each transaction is complete in itself without regard to past favors. The party of the second part is either a shrewd trader to be admired or a sucker to be despised . . .

"In closing, I believe we should revise our present attitude along the following lines:

"1) Continue to assist the Soviet Union, provided that they request such assistance and we are satisfied that it contributes to winning the war.

"2) Insist that they justify their needs for assistance in all cases where the need is not apparent to us. If they fail to do so, we should in such cases refuse assistance.

"3) In all cases where our assistance does not contribute to the winning of the war, we should insist on a quid pro quo.

"4) We should present proposals . . . that would be mutually beneficial, and then leave the next move to them.

"5) When our proposals for collaboration are unanswered after a reasonable time, we should act as we think best and inform them of our action.

"6) We should stop pushing ourselves on them and make the Soviet authorities come to us. We should be friendly and cooperative when they do so.

". . . We must be tougher if we are to gain their respect and be able to work with them in the future."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.