International: The Tangled Web

The Big Three had practiced to deceive their Allies and the world. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had made a secret bargain on voting in the postwar World Assembly—and kept it secret. Six weeks after the sorry deal was struck at Yalta, the New York Herald Tribune sniffed out part of the story, and forced the White House to explain:

"Soviet representatives at the Yalta conference indicated their desire to raise at the San Francisco conference of the United Nations the question of [additional] representation for the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and the White Russian Soviet Republic in the assembly of the proposed United Nations organization. The American and British representatives . . . agreed . . . but the American representative stated that if the United Nations organization agreed to let the Soviet Republic have three votes the United States would ask for three votes also. . . . The ultimate decision will be made [at San Francisco]."

"Secret Dealing." The bargain was bad enough, but the deceit was worse. In the proposals drafted last fall at Dumbarton Oaks, and in all the whooping since then, the Assembly had been touted as the forum where all nations, big and small, would have an equal voice. True, a voice was about all the Assembly would have—the power was concentrated in the eleven-member Security Council, dominated by the big fellows. For that very reason, the Assembly's "sovereign equality" was precious to the little fellows.

But in a world manifestly run by the Big Powers, the loss of this tattered privilege might have been just another dose of "reality" if it had been judiciously administered. Cried Arkansas' James W. Fulbright, who had just made an eloquent plea for world cooperation in the U.S. Senate: "Why in the world couldn't they have announced it at the same time as they announced the other results of Yalta? I don't like this kind of secret dealing." .

Nor did anybody else. Washington's colony of little-nation diplomats fell into the nether pits of gloom. Parisians heard that Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, selected last week to head France's delegation to San Francisco, first learned of the deal from his morning newspaper. Australia's Herbert V. Evatt, in the U.S. on his way to London for a preliminary Empire conference, was astounded and enraged. All the dominions knew that Russia had asked for three votes, but not that the U.S. had consented or decided to demand three for itself. British officialdom seemed to be in a similar quandary.

Salvation in Limbo? A week before the secret leaked out, the President imparted it to the three Congressional members of the U.S. delegation to San Francisco: Senate's Foreign Affairs Chairman Tom Connally, Michigan's potent Republican Arthur H. Vandenberg, New Jersey's Republican Representative Charles A. Eaton. Letting them in on the truth, the President swore them to secrecy.