FDR - Jean Edward Smith [365]
As work on the atomic bomb progressed, American officials charged with the bomb’s development grew reluctant to share secrets with the British. Churchill raised the matter with FDR at the TRIDENT conference in May 1943, and Roosevelt once more agreed that the enterprise was a joint one “to which both countries would contribute their best endeavors.”39 The president instructed Vannevar Bush to be fully forthcoming with the British, but evidently there was sand in the gearbox. British scientists continued to believe the Americans were holding back. To resolve the problem, Churchill asked FDR for a written commitment, to which the president quickly agreed. The final version, typed out on stationery from the Quebec Citadel, where both were staying, promised to share the results of the Manhattan Project, keep it secret, and not use the weapon against each other, or against anyone else without mutual consent.40
On the day before they signed the atomic accord, Roosevelt and Churchill cabled Stalin a joint invitation for a personal meeting sometime later in Alaska, where they could “survey the whole scene in common” at this “crucial point in the war.”41 Roosevelt had not met Stalin and was eager to negotiate postwar matters, preferably one on one, but with Churchill if necessary. Stalin sidestepped the invitation—he neither accepted nor rejected it—and suggested that the foreign ministers of the three nations meet to discuss matters. FDR and Churchill embraced the idea, and on September 4, 1943—the day after Italy surrendered—the president again wrote Stalin to suggest they get together, perhaps in Cairo. Four days later, with U.S. and British troops pouring ashore in Italy, Stalin agreed. The Soviet leader said that because of his command responsibilities he could not travel as far as North Africa, but he recommended Teheran sometime in November or December. As a preliminary, Stalin suggested the foreign ministers meet in Moscow in October. FDR agreed. “I really feel that the three of us are making real headway,” he told Stalin. Churchill was equally pleased. “On this meeting may depend not only the best and shortest method for finishing the war, but also those good arrangements for the future of the world which will enable the British and American and Russian nations to render a lasting service to humanity.”42
It was during the Quebec conference that the feud between Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles at the State Department reached a climax. Hull had chafed for years that FDR often dealt directly with Welles; that he bypassed Hull and excluded him from major foreign policy decisions. It was Welles, not Hull, who attended wartime conferences with Churchill, who carried the mail for the president on special missions abroad, and with whom foreign ambassadors preferred to deal after paying routine courtesy calls on the secretary. Yet Hull knew Welles was vulnerable. His homosexual advances to Pullman car porters at the time of Speaker William Bankhead’s Alabama funeral in 1940 were a matter of record.
Roosevelt chose to ignore the incident, believing it was a momentary lapse triggered by alcohol and fatigue, and felt confident the episode would soon be forgotten.43 Hull was less forgiving and over the years amassed evidence pertaining to the encounter. When J. Edgar Hoover and the Department of Justice declined to provide Hull access to Welles’s file, he sought out FDR’s former confidant William Bullitt, who had been the original source of the information. With Bullitt’s aid Hull leaked the story to Maine’s Republican junior senator, Owen Brewster (who later made headlines pursuing Howard Hughes).* When Brewster threatened a Senate probe, Hull had what he wanted. Lunching with FDR