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But all wars, however total, must end, and by February 1945, when the Yaltamen convened, the military situation was so far advanced toward victory that the future could no longer be brushed aside. From the preconference cables, extending over seven months, Franklin Roosevelt seems to have had the greatest sense of urgency about the meeting, although he never expressed a clear idea of what the agenda was to be. In preparation for the conference, the pharaonic hosts of specialists who toiled in the American bureaucracy sent up to the top of the pyramid briefing papers giving facts and recommendations on various points of policy.
The briefing was little used at Yalta.
What kind of a postwar world did Roosevelt want to make in a week? The record shows a shocking poverty of proposals. Some Roosevelt attitudes and aims, disclosed at Yalta:
¶ A United Nations organization to keep the peace must be established. In the Yalta argument about U.N. Charter details, Roosevelt and Stalin put the emphasis on the big power approach, leaving it for Churchill, the "imperialist," to defend, sometimes warmly, sometimes cynically, the rights of small nations before the law. Russian objections to U.S. voting-procedure sections of the draft charter foreshadowed the lawless future course of Communist policy; but all arguments over the charter came back to the familiar door, the necessity of total Big Three cooperation and agreement.
¶ A settlement of the Polish question must be found—not because the principles on which the Western powers entered the war would be violated by a Communist slave state in Poland, but because the question embarrassed Roosevelt in domestic politics. He did not make the case for justice to Poland. He never used in the Polish bargaining the enormous leverage given him by Russia's economic need or by prospective U.S.-British control of West Germany. He simply begged Stalin, as one politician to another, not to embarrass him with the Polish voters of the U.S.
¶ The future of Germany was central to every proposal affecting any part of postwar Europe, yet Roosevelt was not prepared for serious discussion of a German peace. At the Quebec Conference of September 1944 he had fallen for the Morgenthau plan for a "pastoralized" Germany. At Yalta he abandoned pastoralization in favor of dismembering Germany into "five or seven parts." But he had told Secretary of State Cordell Hull a few months before that no plans for Germany should be made until "we get into Germany—and we are not there yet."