Washington, D.C., is a city of many mansions. If you walk northwest from the teeming heart of imperial rule, away from the extravagant neoclassicism and mean low-rise office buildings, the streets grow greener and the buildings older. The depressing detritus of the professional bureaucrat begins to give way to signs of civilization. Blocks of townhouses begin to alternate with standalone structures, some the embassies of foreign nations, some private homes. The farther you walk, the more frequently these manses come, and the larger their grounds, which themselves seem to merge with shady parks and cemeteries, themselves becoming larger and closer together until you reach the urban forest of Rock Creek Park. This is Georgetown. In these houses, the great and the good have lived for what passes as an age in this young country.
Among these mansions, abutting Rock Creek Park itself, is the estate among estates, an emerald set among lesser jewels: Dumbarton Oaks. It is old by American standards—ancient even. It was first granted to a colonial colonel, the memorably named Ninian Beall, by Queen Anne following his service in the New World theater of the English Civil Wars; the oldest part of the house went up in the early days of the Republic. John Calhoun’s mother-in-law bought the property from a hapless merchant lawyer, and the fire-eater often stayed there as secretary of war and as vice president; other grandees followed.
In 1920, Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Barnes Bliss purchased the estate. They were an unusual couple, the sort of academically inclined eccentrics who once made up the diplomatic class of this country. Robert had represented the United States in Argentina and would later do so in Sweden, and in their travels they had picked up a taste for Byzantine and Pre-Columbian studies. The Blisses were also very wealthy; Mildred was the heiress of a castor oil fortune, and they put her wealth to good use. In a space of years, they expanded the house and contracted one of the foremost landscape architects of their time to develop the grounds: Beatrix Farrand.
The Dumbarton Oaks property, which at its largest encompassed nearly sixty acres, is a gardener’s challenge. It was named after the Scottish Dumbarton Rock for a reason: The house stands on a steep hill that falls precipitously away into the ravines and watery defiles of Rock Creek Park, which makes for a multitude of microclimates, a patchwork of sections of different wetness, different orientation to the sun, different wind exposures. And that is just the matter of viability, of what will grow where; matters of taste and design are restrained by these, as well as by the inherent challenge of working with the extremes of the third dimension.
Farrand was a match to the task. Over twenty years, she worked with Mildred on a vast plan of cultivated terraces and wild sections descending harmoniously toward the woods. It is a vast holding of many disparate parts, in which many European garden styles are syncretized into a harmonious whole: a model world, a miracle of American civilization. And it is permanent, as these things go. Georgetown’s great estates have grown less great through the years by subdivision; many of these huge piles have but a thin fringe of grass and bushes around the footprint of the foundation. No such fate for Dumbarton Oaks. In November 1940, the Blisses handed it over to Harvard University to be a museum and research institution for their three unlikely passions: Byzantinism, Pre-Columbian studies, and landscape architecture and gardening. So long as Harvard’s treasure lasts, Dumbarton Oaks will remain as it is.
But outside its high iron fence, the chaos begins: the dark, untamed mid-Atlantic forest of Rock Creek Park, carpeted thick with fallen leaves, a primeval moldering in the heart of orderly Georgetown. It creeps up to Dumbarton Oaks’s fence, but no further. Were it not for the estate’s assiduous gardeners, in time the forest would overtake its grounds entirely.
During the waning years of World War II, a young State Department apparatchik named Alger Hiss lived in the neighborhood of the Blisses, first on P Street and then on Thirtieth Street. Hiss, the son of an old Baltimore family that had fallen on hard times, had nevertheless gotten a blue-chip education at Hopkins and Harvard Law; in the Roosevelt era, he was the sort of omnicompetent operator familiar in Washington, bouncing from department to department plugging lawyer-shaped holes wherever they were found. At present, he was working for Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Assistant Secretary Edward Stettinius on a great plan. The war on Hitler and Hirohito continued to rage, but the Allied leaders were already looking to the peace. Hull, Stettinius, and Hiss were coming up with nothing less than a new order for the world. For months, Hull had been wrangling with the White House, American politicians, and his own department to formulate the plan for a post-war world congress to replace the discredited and despised League of Nations.
President Roosevelt, ever the canny patrician, was happy for Hull and company to convene committees and think thoughts, but he bridled at the idea of oversight from a supranational body with real coercive power (much as he bridled at the idea that his own State Department would execute American foreign policy rather than his own person). He rejected outright early theories of the new world body having its own army or its own armed forces or even its own strategic bomber fleet; he had no interest in handing away American military supremacy. Nor did he think that the deliberations of many small, weak nations were of particular use or interest in the realm of real power. He believed that problems would ultimately be arbitrated by the private diplomacy of the Big Four in a framework he called the Four Policemen: America, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China. He didn’t need a world congress to get Churchill or Chiang Kai-Shek on the line.
But he wasn’t blind to politics, either, and was innately willing to work with popular currents irrespective of his own feelings. The American political class felt the need to bind the peace in law and government. Roosevelt’s own vice president, Henry Wallace, delivered an eccentric declamation in New York City in June 1942, in which he declared that “the heir of the religious concepts of Palestine and the culture of Rome and England, is building in the full sun of a new day for a peace which is not based on imperialistic intervention” and that “the American peace, the peace of the common man, must be translated into freedom everywhere.”
Others were not perhaps so visionary, but they still held that America must sit at the head of the table of nations in the post-war settlement if the horrors of war were not to be repeated. The press magnate Henry Luce of the Time-Life empire, hardly a New Deal progressive, had declared the arrival of “the American century.” America had, for the second time in forty years, reached across the oceans to put a hand in the affairs of the world. It was time to recognize this sort of move as the rule, not the exception.
The British also desperately wanted a new body. Churchill saw that the future of British and European security lay in keeping the Americans invested in affairs across the ocean. As the European war shambled into its final bloody months, Britain’s statesmen devoted themselves to their classic, centuries-old problem: preventing the rise of a hostile hegemon on the continent while protecting their vast overseas holdings. Churchill and his government saw the Americans as part of the solution to the chestnut, an even larger offshore balancing power to support their own by that time threadbare balancing capacities.
In the grim, rationed months of 1943 and 1944, both countries’ diplomatic establishments set themselves on drafting outlines for a post-war organization to replace the League of Nations. As these matured, the two Western allies began to consider a joint summit with the Soviets and, at Roosevelt’s insistence, the Chinese, to be held sometime in late summer 1944. They hoped that this meeting of the Allied Great Powers would produce nothing short of a working draft for the post-war organization.
The location had to be somewhere far from the active fronts with modern amenities and lines of communication to the involved governments; and it had to be somewhere cool. It was natural that Hiss, ever the resourceful solutions man, would hit upon the mansion at Dumbarton Oaks, whose commanding height permitted breezes to alleviate the stifling climate of the rest of the capital city. For his efforts, he was made the general secretary of the conference, which was now to be known by that estate’s name. The other participants quickly agreed to the Americans’ proposal—with a snag from the Soviets. Because of their technical neutrality in the war with Japan, they refused to hold a summit with the Chinese. The British and the Americans suspected this claim was specious and had more to do with Soviet unwillingness to countenance the recognition of a second great power in Asia, but they unhappily agreed to hold the conference in two phases: first with the Soviets and then with the Chinese. The date was set for the second half of August.
At the insistence of Anthony Eden, the British foreign minister, the Dumbarton Oaks Conference was conducted at a “technical” level: subject-matter experts and lower-level diplomats working out detailed proposals for presentation to the political leaders who would be meeting at Yalta later in the autumn. Roosevelt and his men had reservations; they foresaw, correctly as it turned out, that many of the innocuous “technical” issues could not be settled without the consultation of political leadership. Yet they went along with Eden’s proposal, perhaps not least because their own political leadership was only a ten-minute drive from Georgetown. Stettinius was designated the chairman of the American delegation.
The British delegation arrived first. It was headed by Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office. At nearly sixty, Cadogan was by far the oldest delegation chairman at Dumbarton Oaks, and the one most attuned to the tragedy of international relations. He had led the League of Nations section in the Foreign Office for twenty years, and was painfully aware of the difficulties inherent in the task at hand. His long, gray face could have been drawn as a direct counterpoint to the forty-four-year-old Stettinius’s matinee-idol features: living portraits of empires decaying and rising. The American and British delegations quickly became friendly and started preliminary discussions of their respective draft proposals.
The Soviet delegation was the last to arrive. It was headed by Andrei Gromyko, a thirty-five-year-old Belarusian who had risen swiftly in the Soviet diplomatic service following the Great Purge. Gromyko was a true believer and a tough customer; born to a poor family between the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War, in both of which his father fought, he had become an atheist as a teenager and joined the Komsomol in 1923. He became an expert on the American economy, so it is little wonder that in 1939 Stalin sent him as a second to the Soviet ambassadors in Washington, first the disliked Konstantin Umansky and then the high-flying Maxim Litvinov. He was a cipher; his dark, deep-set eyes and tightly drawn lips gave him the look of a man who was not saying everything he was thinking. Because of his reserved demeanor, the American and British participants at the conference suspected that he was dim. The conclusion of the conference perhaps put the lie to that; if it did not, his later career surely did.
There were several sets of binary contradictions at the heart of the conference’s agenda. How can a world security organization be both strong enough to suppress conflict and weak enough not to become a threat to national sovereignty itself? How can the Great Powers secure the peace without turning it to their own devices? How can an organization act with speed and decisiveness while also respecting democratic procedure?
But the first pressing contradiction had nothing to do with the nature of the post-war organization itself: How could a conference be both secret and designed to drum up enthusiasm? Having made the preambulatory trumpetings to the press about the grand project, the State Department was surprised and a little dismayed to find the newshounds rise to the bait with vigor, so the secret conference began with an explosion of press fanfare. Stettinius, a P.R. man by nature and habit, invited photographers, film crews, and reporters to goggle at the delegations and listen to prepared comments from the delegations’ chairmen. The circus was meant to end there, but the press had other ideas. The New York Times published a detailed article on the draft proposals shared between the delegations at the conference. The paper’s competitors cried foul, and Stettinius was browbeaten into holding something like a proper press conference. This made matters worse, as he mostly deflected rather than answered substantive questions; worse still, he addressed reporters by their first names. It was a pricklier, less gullible press corps in those days. Meanwhile, the Times kept publishing secret information; the State Department launched a witch hunt to find the leakers, ultimately without much success. Bureaucrats, at least, haven’t changed much.
Nor was that the end of the public relations failures. Gerald L. K. Smith, a colorful and not altogether pleasant character, was at loose ends after failing to win the presidency on the America First Party ticket—he got fewer than two thousand votes nationwide. Christening himself the “nationalist” champion of the American people, he showed up at the gates of Dumbarton Oaks on August 25, the Friday of the first week of negotiations, demanding admission to the conference. Stettinius sent a lieutenant to get rid of Smith, but he was gone, and the damage was done: The newsmen were delighted to have a bit of color for what was otherwise promising to be a tough contest with the Times’s leaks.
The game that diplomacy most resembles is not chess, that most symbolic of Western games, or even go, the beloved obsession of China-watchers; it is the antiquated, slightly ridiculous card game of contract bridge, in which teams declare the number of tricks they believe they can take with a certain suit as trumps. These bids are not mere good-faith declarations of what players think they can do; they are also secret or quasi-secret languages for team members to describe their cards, and efforts to confuse the other team’s communications and to get them either to overextend their resources in an extravagant contract they cannot fulfill, or to let them go underused in a contract well short of the value they could manage, or to forgo a contract entirely. Diplomacy, likewise, is a game of guessing at resources and intentions, of pressing and falling back, winks at allies and not-quite-lies to adversaries. The bridge player does not play the cards, but the people around the table. This, too, is true of diplomacy.
Robert Hilderbrand’s able history of the conference, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security, disentangles the negotiations by examining them point by point rather than purely chronologically; this makes the proceedings easier to understand, but inherently dispels their bewildering tangle of provisions that were in large part being negotiated concurrently, the bids and counterbids cutting across each other.
The delegations were univocal in their stated desire: a world organization with the real capacity to keep the peace. But each power had a set of fears. With the remarkable consistency that characterizes Russian foreign policy irrespective of regime, the Soviets’ priority was the preservation of their own power within their sphere of influence. Similarly, the British Foreign Office was not without reservations about the post-war project. In a series of internal memoranda preparing for the conference, His Majesty’s diplomats had expressed concerns about the Americans’ anticolonial bent; they feared that the new organization would invite meddling in the colonial possessions, most of all India; there had been troubling references from the Americans to “trusteeship” of colonies in the new world order. The Americans’ prime fears were along the same lines, with an extra dose of domestic politics: first, that there would be interference from the new body in the Western Hemisphere, and second, that the Senate would jealously defend its war powers and leave the new body as toothless as the League of Nations.
It was a delicate push-pull game, and one in which the basic affinities of each delegation quickly became clear. The Soviets objected to including welfare and education provisions in the brief for what was supposed to be foremost a security organization; the British and especially the Americans, who after all worked for the free-trade zealot Hull, were insistent that security must cover some amount of the root causes of conflict. The Soviets proposed that the new body be called the International Security Organization, to reflect what they saw as its fundamental concern; the Anglo-Americans objected, insisting that the term “United Nations” be held over from the Allies’ existing formal organization. The Soviets proposed a permanent air force under the direct control of the new body; the Anglo-Americans, despite the fact that they considered such a provision themselves in their own planning, rejected this idea out of concerns for national sovereignty and logistical complications.
The mood was, at first, optimistic. All three parties seemed willing to concede much in the spirit of cooperation. Stettinius, on the theory that everything would go smoothly in an atmosphere of camaraderie, was determined to show the delegations a good time. The same Friday that Smith showed up at the gates to disturb the repose of the conference, the delegations flew to New York for a weekend. Gromyko declined to come along; his first impression of New York had confirmed him in his beliefs about the innate brutality of capitalism, and he was not eager to return. The other Soviets appeared to see the charms of the Waldorf Astoria and of the fleshy displays at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe Club. The combined crew saw the usual sights: the Stock Exchange, the Empire State Building, Nelson Rockefeller. A good time seems to have been had by all. Indeed, Stettinius seems to have felt that they had overdone it a bit; he told the press that they had not seen any floor shows in New York, although their large party of foreigners traveling by police motorcade had been difficult to miss.
The Soviets must have felt they were competing in something short of a fair contest. Their proposal was much sparer than those of their counterparts, who had already been working on their frameworks for roughly a year; as a result, many issues required consultation with Moscow, which hampered their ability to play the game in real time. And the Americans and the British had each slyly stolen a march on them in the very premises of the discussion, the former by addition of China to the list of Great Powers with permanent seats on the security council and the latter by the addition of France. This deck-stacking was fait accompli by the time of the conference. Nor was the composition of the general assembly likely to be friendlier to Soviet interests.
It was when the Americans started discussing expanding the assembly to “associated powers,” nations not directly fighting in the war, that Gromyko played his card. The day after the delegation returned from the revels in New York, he observed in an almost offhand way that a recent constitutional change allowed the constituent republics of the Soviet Union a certain latitude to conduct their own foreign policy—surely each of the sixteen republics would have a separate voting delegation at the world organization. This proposal staggered the Americans, from Stettinius up to Roosevelt; not only were they trying to expand the general assembly but they were launching a clumsy trial balloon for adding Brazil to the security council. Expansion was put off, and the Brazil scheme was hastily dropped. Gromyko let the matter lie. The Soviets had won a trick.
Around the same time, the essential matter rose to the surface: the security council and the Great Power veto. Great Power unanimity had been one of the original cornerstone principles for the post-war order during the planning phases. “Procedure is rather a secondary matter,” Cadogan had written in an early memo. “Everything depends on the unity of purpose of those Powers who are able to impose their will.” Each power had its reasons for wanting a veto over actions taken against it: The British had the Empire, the Americans the Western Hemisphere and their new Pacific acquisitions, the Soviets Eastern Europe. Yet at the same time the planning assumed the principle that the new organization would not be a tool for Great Power domination and that each nation would be susceptible to enforcement.
The British became the first to reconsider the veto in this light; they doubted that middle powers such as the British Dominions, which would form the backbone of their voting bloc in the new organization, would accede to an organization without some guardrails on Great Power action. In their Dumbarton Oaks proposal, they argued that Great Powers should not be able to vote on disputes in which they were a party. The Soviets insisted on the original principle of unanimity—that Great Powers must agree on all settlements. The Americans vacillated; their original proposal had aligned with the Soviets’, but the British perspective had gotten purchase in the State Department. By the time of the conference, they no longer had a resolved position and said, with mild embarrassment, that they needed more time to study the question.
As the conference dragged on through the hot days of late August and early September, the Americans began to harden behind the British position. The world outside Dumbarton Oaks’s iron fence was slipping its tendrils through the bars. Stalin had stopped his army in the suburbs of Warsaw to file its nails and wait for supply lines to be consolidated while the free Poles were massacred by the Germans. The Soviets gave no explanation, but the Western powers suspected that Stalin was allowing the Nazis to do the work of suppressing independence-minded Poles before he moved in to take the spoils. Those with memories that could stretch back to the days of the Nazi–Soviet Pact remembered the Katyn massacre of 1940.
The Americans tried to thread this impossible needle. Various compromises were proposed; the Soviets consulted with Moscow and rejected them. Next to the garish mosaics of the estate’s swimming pool, one of the conference’s preferred theaters for side conversations, Gromyko told Stettinius he was disappointed that the Americans had reversed their position and said it was impossible for the Soviet Union to accept a compromise on the point of the veto on enforcement actions. Stettinius, in turn, said that he was willing to offer compromises on what constituted a voting majority on the council but added that there was little room for movement on the veto question. The prospect of failing to produce a charter was coming into view.
As this core dispute was growing in intensity, Stettinius attempted to keep up the performance of a good host. The Chinese delegation—already in town, and doubtless feeling somewhat second-rate as they waited for the Big Three to conclude their phase of the conference—were on September 10 treated to a day of touring in Virginia, where they saw the great houses of the Virginia presidents and were treated to a dinner at Stettinius’s own mansion, replete with entertainment by a black gospel quartet. The saturnine Cadogan found the affair faintly ridiculous. The same day, the Americans held a smaller tour in Virginia for the Soviets, who still refused even to socialize with the Chinese delegation. This must have been an even more depressing performance; Gromyko again stayed in Washington, apparently feeling little need to see the sacred sites of the American bourgeoisie.
For all the formal jollity, gloom settled on the delegations. They had reached an impasse. In an effort to short-circuit the process, Roosevelt sent a message directly to Stalin—in which he referred, perhaps unwisely, to American interests in “the smaller nations,” which is to say in Eastern Europe. This message confirmed Stalin’s suspicions about Western intentions to interfere in what he regarded as a core Soviet interest. His reply was uncompromising. The conference had failed on its own terms. The delegations haplessly drafted a communiqué outlining the charter that left unresolved the central question.
The end of September saw the end of the Soviet phase of the conference. Far from proving to be a dullard, Gromyko had performed ably. He had prevented the drafting of a document that would constrain Soviet action in Eastern Europe while maintaining a Soviet share in the formal post-war planning.
What had occurred as tragedy with the Soviets now came as farce with the Chinese. The Americans and the British were tired and dispirited after six weeks of ultimately fruitless wrangling; the Chinese phase was anyway an appendix to the Big Three’s negotiations, as there was no time to haggle with the Soviets on substantive changes to the joint communiqué before the publication deadline in early November—the conference needed to have its proposals out before the meeting of the Great Powers’ leaders at Yalta in February 1945 and the subsequent meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco. The generalissimo’s main man in Georgetown was Wellington Koo, an old hand in Chinese diplomacy who had briefly served as the troubled republic’s president and prime minister in the 1920s. Koo seemed to understand his subordinate position, and he put on a good show; after being briefed on the agonies of the prior six weeks, he produced a relatively brief list of suggestions for publication in a supplement to the communiqué. The Americans and the British vetoed about half of these, and he put up little resistance. The Anglo-American group was relieved, and the proceedings concluded in October with a dying fall.
At the conclusion of the conference, a Canadian film company produced a brief documentary titled, pompously, Now—The Peace. Interspersed with hair-raising footage of war and famine, a reassuring mid-Atlantic bass announces in lofty platitudes the era of peace and international goodwill ushered in at Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks. No reference is made to the Great Power veto; nor could you tell by watching it that the impasse in Georgetown is what is conventionally held to be the beginning of the Cold War.
Eventually, at Yalta, Stalin agreed to a compromise formula on security council voting that left the Great Power veto on enforcement essentially intact. Nor were the other leaders necessarily entirely unhappy with this outcome; Churchill himself, the last imperialist, had reversed his position and joined the Soviets in wanting a strong veto to protect British control over its vast holdings. The fledgling United Nations was doomed to be little stronger than the League of Nations, and the diplomats knew it. “We are badly enmeshed in our own unsound slogans,” George Kennan commented in January 1945.
The proof has been in the pudding. One can fairly ask after eighty years, What has been the point of the U.N.? The Cold War was kept from going hot not by the machinations of the international peacekeeping body but by the awesome strength of the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals. The postcolonial wars in Africa have raged with merry brutality and near-total disregard for the suits in New York. Contests of arms between Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, the never-ending broil of the Middle East, death in the sunflower fields of Ukraine: The U.N.’s failures to suppress or punish aggression are far easier to list than its triumphs, and not only because war captures the imagination in a way that peace does not. Just this July, war broke out between Thailand and Cambodia over a patch of land that had already twice been subject to rulings by the U.N.’s associated International Court of Justice. The Great Powers remain jealous of their own interests and uninvested in the squabbling of others.
Nor has American involvement in keeping the peace made our nation appreciably more peaceful. Far from making the return to isolationism feared by the planners, America became an enthusiastic foreign adventurist. The British got what they wanted, good and hard: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq. The hand of American power is far-reaching, if fumbling.
The future careers and legacies of the conference’s participants were not altogether happier for its legacy, either. Hiss, the general secretary, the rising star, the indispensable factotum, became the focus of a national firestorm when he was accused of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. He was disgraced and drummed out of public life. Until his death, he insisted on his innocence; the preponderance of evidence suggests otherwise.
Stettinius was the first American ambassador to the United Nations. He died of a heart attack at the age of forty-nine.
Cadogan went on to Yalta, where the final details of the U.N. were hammered out. He was disgusted with the post-war settlement; he felt that Yalta had been a capitulation to an increasingly malign Soviet power. Like Stettinius, he served as the United Kingdom’s first U.N. delegation head, where his suspicions of the futility of diplomacy with the Soviets were amply confirmed.
Gromyko went on to become the Soviet Union’s permanent representative to the U.N., where he earned the moniker “Mr. Nyet” for his persistent use of the security council veto he fought so hard to defend. Afterwards, he became the Soviet foreign minister, a post he held for twenty-eight years. An old grandee by the time Mikhail Gorbachev began to introduce his reforms to the Soviet Union—reforms that, contrary to public perception at the time, he supported, if his memoirs are to be believed—he became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1988, the formal head of state. After three years, he retired and wrote his memoirs. With immaculate timing, he died within a year. Within four years of his death, the state to which he had dedicated his entire life was no more.
The ancient Persians were great builders of parks and gardens. Their characteristic form was a garden divided into quadrants by waterways, in which not only lines of sight but the very movements of air were harmonized. The paradise, a Persian word bundled into the Western languages by Xenophon, came through long centuries to be a symbol of the Garden of Eden, Islamic Jannah: The world as it is meant to be.
The garden has been, since antiquity, not only a symbol of the world as it ought to be; it has been the antithesis of power politics. This is not only because gardens are, generally, private, and places specifically to retire from the hurly-burly of public life. The very concept of the garden is antipolitical. Here, the conflict of plant against plant, of root and branch, is not decided by the strength of the agonists but by the prudence of the gardener, wielding shears and tearing out the unruly residents that threaten the harmony of the whole. The planners of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference had sought to do something similar; under the trappings of parliamentary procedure, the five great gardeners sat in judgement, saying, Thou shalt go so far, and no further. But the world is not a garden but a wild, and its trees and shrubs and creeping things do as they will.
No, the true model world in the end was not Beatrix Farrand’s exquisite design. It was the forest beyond the fence, the untamable anarchy of leaf and shadow, where, though a few foresters may beat back branch and bramble from uneven paths, the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must.
