Failure of a Mission ?
Speaking Frankly. By James F. Byrnes. (Heinemann 21s.)
MR. BYRNES, during a great part of his life of distinguished public service, was what the Elizabethans called an "undertaker." His role in politics was to organise consent and agreement. As Demo- cratic whip in the Senate, he was one of the chief agents of President Roosevelt, a role for which he had special qualifications as he was one of the few eminent politicians who was also a close personal friend of the President. And, if Washington rumour was correa, Mr. Bymes's period of service on the Supreme Court did not cut all wires to the White House. After Pearl Harbour, Mr. Byrnes resigned from the Court to become a kind of viceroy for the President
in domestic affairs. It mattered nothing that he was not formally a member of the Cabinet ; he was on the inside and in a position of great power and responsibility. It was widely expected that he would succeed Mr. Hull as Secretary of State, but although the honour fell to Mr. Stettinius, Mr. Byrnes accompanied President Roosevelt to Yalta and not only sat in on the conferences, but kept a stenographic record. (One of Mr. Byrnes's accomplishments is mastery of a rare form of shorthand.) It was, then, no innocent amateur in negotiation who became Secretary of State on the nomination of his old Senate colleague and admirer, President Truman. It was one of the shrewdest bargainers in American public life, a bargainer too experienced and battle-worn to expect a too per cent. success and too impressed by the terrible necessities of the times to dream of sacrificing real gains for world peace to triumphs of prestige. What this admirably qualified " under- taker " here chronicles, in a frank but good-tempered book, is the discovery that shrewdness, bargaining talents, an extremely strong bargaining position and a genuine desire to do the State and the world some service, were not enough. It would be unjust to tax Mr. Byrnes with failure, but failure it was all the same, failure of the hopes and plans that followed the complete Allied triumph in Europe and Asia.
Mr. Byrnes was obviously puzzled at the time, and is puzzled now, by the apparently reckless way in which the Russians threw away some of their best cards. He does not underestimate the abilities either of Generalissimo Stalin or of Mr. Molotov. But he did notice what seemed and seems to him a needless sacrifice. " If one can recall the days immediately following the German surrender, he will agree that, as a result of our sufferings and sacrifices in a common cause, the Soviet Union then had in the United States a deposit of good will as great if not greater than that of any other country. It is little short of a tragedy that Russia should have withdrawn that deposit with the recklessness and lack of apprecia- tion shown during the last two and a half years." That this with- di4wal of her goodwill assets was, from the Russian point. of view, a mistake, one can well believe. Those assets were far greater in Britain than in the United States, and they are almost overdrawn here. Why was the withdrawal made? It is the mystery of the book, and one on which Mr. Byrnes casts comparatively little light.
That does not detract from the general merits of the book, which makes a much better impression as a connected narrative than it did in the excerpts printed in the Press. But Mr. Byrnes, like Mr. Chamberlain, was faced with men who believed in their doctrines, however foolish those doctrines may seem under western eyes. People could not believe that Hitler believed in his own doctrines, especially the more foolish of them ; people could not believe that the ideological bias of Messrs. Stalin and Molotov so blinded them to realities as to lead them to throw away the advantages of the almost unlimited gullibility of the west. Perhaps we should be glad that Hitler had to disillusion all but the most foolish of his defenders here ; perhaps we should be glad that Stalin has disillusioned all but the most foolish of his disciples here. But the necessity of dis- illusionment is not surprising, even if it naturally surprised a former United States senator used to empty professions of political faith as mere top-dressing on a bargain. Mr. Byrnes was as astonished as the gentlemen who played with the Heathen Chinee but these new oriental euchre players were not " child-like and bland " ; anyway, they were not bland. Mr. Byrnes discovered, the hard way, that words could be made to mean anything and that bargaining was almost impossible. That is the lesson.
In the course of telling the story of his education, Mr. Byrnes throws a good deal of light on topics not directly connected with his main theme. His account of the Russian attitude to France can be commended to those passionate patriots, the French Communists. Stalin seems to have been genuinely indignant with the Vichy leaders for emulating, in r94o, Mr. Molotov's line in 1939. Mr. Byrnes thinks that it was only Mr. Molotov's excessive greed and misjudgement of the situation that led Hitler to invade Russia, that the Tilsit of 1939 might have endured. That is surely very doubtful. An invasion of Russia was a necessity of the Fiihrer's passions and programme. It had to come. Hitler's mistake lay in not " babying along " the Russians until he had made some kind of settlement in the West, aided by such allies as the American Communist party. For it is worth remembering that the charge of war-mongering was being slung about even in 1941. Roosevelt was a war-monger ; so was Mr. Wallace ; so, above all, were those who hinted that there was any danger of the imperialist war moving east to the
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