SOURCE: "Roosevelt and Stalin (I)," in Modern Age, Vol. 30, No. 2, Spring, 1986, pp. 103-12.

In the following essay, the first in a series of two, Nisbet examines Roosevelt's "uncritical, unconditional adulation" of Joseph Stalin from 1941 through the Yalta summit in 1945.

It is unlikely that history holds a stranger, more improbable and unequal political courtship than President Roosevelt's courtship of Marshal Stalin in World War II. The very idea is arresting: Roosevelt, patrician, born with the silver spoon, Grotonand Harvard-educated aristocrat in American politics; Stalin, low-born revolutionist and bandit from early years, successor by sheer ruthlessness to Lenin as absolute ruler of the Soviet Union, liquidator of the kulak class in the Ukraine, purger of his own party, and totalitarian to the core. That a liaison of any kind should have existed between these two men is barely credible. That the liaison was a political courtship, initiated and pursued by...