The Davieses arrived in Russia unblemished by any knowledge of its language or history. It seemed that Marjorie was worried they might starve there, and so brought with her several boxcars of Post foods, inexhaustible filets and fowls, and four hundred quarts of frozen cream in a dozen freezers, which immediately blew out Spaso House’s primitive electrical system, and promptly melted. Needless to say, Moscow failed to offer Marjorie Post Davies much in the way of her preferred entertainment: shopping. And there are only so many evenings a person can go out to the theater and the ballet. Of course, there were other forms of theater to attend, if one counts Stalin’s show trials, which Joseph Davies seems to have sat through with the same illiterate appreciation he brought to bear on the operas he watched from his royal box at the Bolshoi.
Ten weeks into their stay the couple was already bored. They sailed their yacht back to America for an extended vacation. At home Davies gave the president and media his diplomatic report: The forced confessions, according to his lifelong experience as a trial lawyer, were “legally credible.” The executions of Bolsheviks? “Uprooted conspiracies.” Forced collectivization? “A wonderful and stimulating experiment.” Stalin? “A fine, upstanding fellow.” Nothing was mentioned about the harassments and intimidations suffered by Davies’s own diplomatic staff at the hands of the NKVD, and certainly nothing about the hundreds of Americans who were disappearing without a trace. Not long into his tenure, Davies’s entire staff threatened to resign in protest of his abysmal stupidity, but lost nerve at the last minute. Afraid of falling on the wrong side of the Russian secret police, they stalled on granting passports to the American nationals whom the Soviets had started claiming as their own.
Was Davies really deaf to all the American citizens banging fruitlessly on his embassy’s doors? I refuse to believe that. So—would it have been so hard to intervene on behalf of these marooned souls? The problem was that intervening would have required Davies to perform some actual diplomacy. But how hard could that have been? America still exerted no small degree of leverage over the Soviets at this time: Russia still owed the United States hundreds of millions of dollars for all that industrial machinery it had been buying for years on credit. However, Joseph Davies had not been appointed for his moral courage. That mistake Roosevelt had made once already. The former ambassador, William Bullitt, had been replaced as soon as he stopped affirming the president’s own convictions about the benevolence of their Soviet friends. No, the fault was not Davies’s ignorance, or his cowardice. He had, after all, been sent to Russia to make nice at the cost of everything else. And he carried out his function marvelously. During the 190 days a year they actually spent inside of Russia, the ambassador and his wife were busy throwing costume parties (“Come as your Secret Desire”) with gowns and props loaned by the Bolshoi Museum, hosting private screenings of American films for the same NKVD thugs who were bullying his staff, and sailing their four-hundred-foot yacht, Sea Cloud, around the Black Sea. Most notably, they spent their free time cruising the Soviet commission stores for prerevolutionary antiques being sold off by a starving populace at bargain-basement prices. Mr. and Mrs. Davies might not have cared to know much about the Soviet Union, but they did make an exhaustive study of Russia’s imperial era. By the end of their tenure, they had carted off the biggest collection of paintings, tapestries, Fabergé eggs, silver tea services, religious icons, enameled boxes, royal jewels, porcelain, and liturgical objects ever to be amassed outside of Russia. All of these expropriated treasures are now sheltered in exquisitely lighted display cases inside Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Hillwood Estate in Washington, D.C., not far from my office. I once paid a visit there and discovered that, along with a marvelous painting of Catherine the Great, there hangs on one of the walls a portrait of the middle-aged Marjorie Post Davies herself, costumed as Marie Antoinette.
It would be too convenient to conclude that Joseph Davies and his wife were merely two more dupes of Stalin’s regime. That would be giving them too little credit. In my experience, those who amass great wealth or power, however fatuous or dim-witted they might appear to the public, possess some mysterious instinct with regard to where their bread is buttered. Joseph Davies, for all his simplemindedness, had a genius for keeping powerful people happy: he pampered his wife, fawned on FDR, and as for Stalin and Litvinov, it seems he adopted the lawyer’s posture that they were his clients! Entitled to the best defense that money could buy, regardless of what crimes they had committed.
In turn, it would be giving Roosevelt too little credit to imagine that he chose Ambassador Davies simply on the basis of nepotism and reciprocity. Davies possessed one virtue that every other Russia expert in Washington at the time lacked: he was ready to affirm Roosevelt’s own political faith that the Soviet Union shared with the United States a fundamental aim to improve, if by its own peculiar methods, the lot of Everyman. At a time when Europe was drifting toward war, there was a great deal of expediency in this alliance with Russia. But my reading of history suggests that even with America’s closest allies there has never been a more uncritical friendship than the one that existed between Roosevelt and Stalin in those years. So let me put forward a different proposition, a heresy for all the FDR idolators who are ready to paint our thirty-second president into The Last Supper: somewhere in his heart Roosevelt admired that lupine monster! Admired the iron will, the unapologetic social engineering, the politico-economic experiments that were such a potent model for his own expansion of government from a small racket to a big one. Admired, most of all, the conviction that the evolution of great nations was irreversible. Just as the United States was moving from unfettered capitalism to big-government socialism, so, too, Roosevelt might have thought, the U.S.S.R. would evolve from totalitarianism to social democracy. On what basis would he have believed this? On the basis of the same hallucinatory utopism that was so catching in those days among intellectuals. Was FDR a closet communist? Heavens, no. The dispenser of government millions to the biggest corporations in the country was nothing of the sort. He was just a run-of-the-mill utopist. Scratch a utopist and you find a Machiavellian—one who, to achieve his shining vision, must inevitably subscribe to the principle that the ends justify the means.
In short, the trapped Americans, my parents included, were not abandoned. They were not even forgotten. They were sacrificed on the common altar of two superpowers.
My only consolation is that history has not been kind to Joseph Davies. He will be remembered as the craven and obsequious ignoramus he was. Meanwhile, Roosevelt, that old patrician, will retreat exonerated into the pantheon of great leaders whose myths only swell with time. For this act of misdirection even I must admit some reluctant admiration. One has to appreciate FDR’s deftness in allowing his accommodating old friend Davies to take the fall for his unholy alliances—an act of political cunning in every way worthy of The Prince.