Harry Hopkins by O'Sullivan Christopher D

Author:O'Sullivan, Christopher D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2014-10-22T14:18:29+00:00

An exhausted looking Hopkins looks on as President Roosevelt is about to cut into birthday cake while returning from the Casablanca Conference. At his right is his chief military adviser, Admiral William D. Leahy. Captain Howard Cone, the captain of the plane, is at Hopkins’s left. Credit: Office of War Information.

Hopkins told de Gaulle: “I would like to talk about what seems to me the fundamental reason for the ‘malaise’ (this was the word he used), that has existed for so long between our two countries.’ And he went on: ‘The truth is that in June ’40, the defeat of the French army, the institution of the Vichy government under German control, was for America and for President Roosevelt in particular, a painful surprise. And we have never gotten over it. It is at that time that we decided to deal with Vichy, and many things followed from this.”59

General de Gaulle replied by challenging Hopkins: “If you really mean that you believe that relations between the United States and France are not all that they should be, why don’t you do something about it?”60 De Gaulle then added: “There is also something else. You have a choice to make. Either you believe that France still has a great role to play in the world, or you consider that after what my country went through, France is on the decline and can no longer be one of the leaders. If it is the second case, you are right. I believe, however, that France will come back stronger, and that France has an important role to play. And if that is the case, your behavior is regrettable and ill-inspired.”61

Hopkins was in no way discouraged by de Gaulle’s comments. Rather, he accepted the logic of the general’s argument, not only openly at Yalta but also, more remarkably, in his private thoughts and musings. At Yalta, Hopkins often defended the interests of France, seeking to secure it a place in the UN Security Council as well as a zone in the Allied Control Commission for Germany. The president mostly followed Hopkins’s suggestions, often only on the basis of a note handed to him.62 After the conference Hopkins again struck a blow for Free France when he successfully persuaded Roosevelt to tone down an angry draft cable to de Gaulle.

Hopkins believed a democratic Europe absolutely essential to postwar stability and a democratic France central to that objective. France would have to be included in a matrix of international institutions, and he believed there was no reason for Washington and Paris not to share close relations and become strong postwar allies. As a harbinger of the Marshall Plan, Hopkins thought the United States was the only nation in the world that could provide France with sufficient economic support and that Washington had every interest in doing so. Although General Marshall later became renowned for the eponymous Marshall Plan, or European Recovery Program, in 1948, Hopkins had been thinking along these lines as early as 1943, contemplating the human consequences of what would likely be a series of brutal postwar winters in Europe.

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