The Big-Three Follies

By Curtis Prendergast

MEETING AT POTSDAM by CHARLES L. MEE JR. 370 pages. Evans. $10.95.

Germany was in ruins, the only trace of Hitler was an oil spot on the ground outside his Berlin bunker, Japan was desperately seeking escape from impending disaster, and the atomic bomb was being rushed to completion in the U.S. Harry Truman packed tuxedo, top hat and tails, as he wrote his mother back in Independence, Mo., and set off jauntily for Potsdam in July 1945 for a victors' summit with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill.

Historical attention--partisan and otherwise--has mostly centered onYalta and the deals made there by the dying Franklin Roosevelt. But it was actually at Potsdam that the wartime Anglo-American-Russian collaboration fell apart. The division of Germany was sealed there as postwar spheres of influence were confirmed. In the West, a shocked public blamed the intransigence of Stalin. But in this close and lively look at the three Potsdam participants Charles Mee, the former editor of Horizon now turned popular historian, gives nobody credit for good intentions.

Churchill appears underbriefed, garrulous, exhausted. One day he offered the Soviets access to the Mediterranean; on another he almost gave away the German fleet (then in British hands). Stalin comes carrying plans for a neo-czarist empire stretching across half of Europe. Dapper Harry Truman arrives with such members of his old Missouri gang as his "personal rascal," General Harry Vaughan.

Truman's approach to world diplomacy remained pure Kansas City. He found Stalin the Soviet dictator "as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I know." (Pendergast was the boss of Democratic politics in Missouri for almost 30 years.) Truman's intentions, according to Mee, were to thwart the Russians in Europe by stalling off a German peace treaty and keeping the Soviet Union out of the Japanese war till the bomb could clinch it for the U.S. He largely accomplished both aims, but neither was much in keeping with the visions of postwar harmony that much of the Western world, at least, then entertained.

Author Mee's postrevisionist thesis is that not merely Stalin but all "three men rescued discord from the threatened outbreak of peace." He is not entirely convincing. Unless the U.S. was prepared to accede to Soviet ambitions for a Communist Europe, the cold war was virtually unavoidable. But by concentrating on personalities and anecdotes, Mee has produced a highly readable and provocative book.

. Curtis Prendergast

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