cover image Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship

Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship

Robert A. Nisbet. Regnery Publishing, $14.95 (120pp) ISBN 978-0-89526-558-6

Early in WW II, President Franklin Roosevelt shared this dangerously naive conviction with Prime Minister Churchill: ``If I give Stalin everything I possibly can, and ask nothing in return, noblesse oblige , he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of peace and democracy.'' Ignoring the advice of ambassadors William Bullitt and Averell Harriman and Soviet experts such as George Kennan, the president acceded to nearly every demand made by the Soviet dictator at the 1943 Teheran summit, remaining firm in his belief that British imperialism posed a greater danger to democracy than the Soviet Union. Nisbet's well-argued thesis is that in his uncritical infatuation with Stalin, FDR acted out essentially the same role played by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 at the ``appeasement conference'' in Munich. Further, Nisbet ( The Idea of Progress ) argues that it was at Teheran rather than at Yalta that Stalin won authorization to subjugate the Baltics, the Balkans and large parts of Poland and Eastern Europe. (Jan.)