Leadership Quote by W. Averell Harriman

Harriman is doing more than sketching a diplomatic dispute; he is staging a morality play about misplaced trust at the hinge point of the 20th century. The line builds toward a quiet indictment: Roosevelt, in Harriman's telling, isn’t naive in general, just determined enough to believe that a personal bargain with Stalin could anchor a postwar order. That word "determined" matters. It frames FDR as a statesman wrestling a bad set of options, not a dupe sleepwalking into Yalta.

The rhetorical move is the pivot from "agreement" to "broken". Harriman compresses a sprawling tangle of wartime realities into a clean before-and-after: first, the promise of Poland as the test case for Eastern Europe; then, the betrayal that reveals the larger pattern. Poland isn’t just geography here, it’s the symbolic tripwire for the whole region, a stand-in for the principle that liberation should mean self-rule rather than Soviet management.

Context sharpens the subtext. Harriman, a key U.S. diplomat to Moscow, is also positioning himself inside the argument over who "lost" Eastern Europe: the postwar American obsession with blame. By emphasizing that Roosevelt "finally had an agreement" and then "realized" it was broken only late, Harriman implies two things at once: the U.S. tried, and the Soviets never intended to honor the deal. It’s a tidy, persuasive narrative - and politically useful - because it relocates failure from strategy to Stalin’s character.