Leadership Quote by W. Averell Harriman

Revisionism thrives in the gap between a messy ending and the story we wish had followed. Harriman’s line is a blunt instrument aimed at that gap: the comfortable American fable that Eastern Europe was “given away” at Yalta by a naive or soft Roosevelt. By opening with “There’s a myth,” he frames the charge not as a debatable interpretation but as a politically useful falsehood, the kind that lets later critics outsource responsibility to a single moment and a single man.

The second sentence is the real power move. “I was with Roosevelt every day at Yalta” is credential and rebuke in one breath. Harriman isn’t arguing from documents; he’s claiming proximity, the hard currency of diplomatic history. It’s also an attempt to foreclose the armchair counterfactuals that flourish when the actual constraints are forgotten: the Red Army already sat across Eastern Europe, Britain was exhausted, the U.S. was still fighting Japan, and “free elections” language could be negotiated more easily than it could be enforced.

Subtext: Harriman is defending not just FDR but the premise of postwar realism. Yalta becomes a scapegoat because it’s narratively satisfying to imagine a conference table where borders were traded like poker chips. Harriman insists the tragedy wasn’t a “gift” but an imbalance of leverage, then and there. His testimony also protects the institutional memory of American statecraft: if it was a “myth,” then the lesson is less about betrayal and more about limits - and the uncomfortable fact that moral outcomes require power to back them up.