Fifty years ago today the three most powerful men in the world finished their last meeting -- at the Black Sea resort of Yalta -- to deal with ending World War II and beginning the post-war era. They issued a communique that concluded:
"Only with continuing and growing co-operation and understanding among our three countries and among all the peace-loving nations can the highest aspirations of humanity be realized -- a secure and lasting peace which will, in the words of the Atlantic Charter, 'afford assurances that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.' . . .
"Winston S. Churchill
"Franklin D. Roosevelt
"J. Stalin."
It didn't turn out quite that way. The Soviet Union was conceded at Yalta territorial influence in Eastern Europe and Asia that outraged anti-communists in the United States and elsewhere. Millions did not live out lives free of fear and want. Furthermore, the geo-political advantages the Soviets enjoyed after the end of World War II made it enough of a superpower to oppose the United States in the resulting 40-plus years of Cold War.
When all the details of the Yalta agreements were prematurely made public in the 1950s, they became grist for the Red-baiting mills of the likes of Sen. Joe McCarthy. FDR was portrayed as a terminally ill man duped by the villainous Stalin; and FDR's aides were portrayed as leftist traitors who aided and abetted the Soviet dictator, who had no intention of cooperating or allowing democratic regimes on his borders. Thus "Yalta" became an important event in the life of the nation not once but twice.
More reasonable people of the right in the 1950s and since have agreed with those of other philosophical leanings that Yalta did not "give" Stalin anything. The Red Army would have taken those prizes, no matter what the U.S. and Britain said. The English-speaking allies, on the other hand, at least got Stalin to promise to enter the war against Japan, which, five months before the first atomic bomb was tested, seemed a great diplomatic accomplishment that could save the lives of thousands of American GIs.
That the Yalta agreements were not perfect was obvious to the Western principals. "I didn't say it was good," FDR told a friend and critic back in Washington, throwing up his hands. "I said it was the best I could do." It was probably the best anyone could do. As Churchill later reminded critics: "It is easy, after the Germans are beaten, to condemn those who did their best to hearten the Russian military effort and to keep in harmonious contact with our great Ally, who had suffered so frightfully. What would have happened if we had quarreled with Russia while the Germans still had three or four hundred divisions on the fighting front? Our hopeful assumptions were soon to be falsified. Still they were the only ones possible at the time."