The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2005

one step [if not leap] back.” Finally, to conclude that Washington’s missteps in the war on drugs make Bolivia the perfect MCA country, is to accept the kind of tortured logic that only a Bolivian político is capable of follow- ing. All that said, and despite the country’s seemingly endless econom- ic crises, periodic social upheavals and pervasive corruption — so per- vasive, in fact, that during the mid- 1990s our embassy in La Paz publicly announced that the U.S. visa of a for- mer Bolivian president had been revoked because of his involvement in drug trafficking while in office — Bolivia could yet prove to be an eligi- ble MCA recipient. Why? Because in the institution of the Contraloría General de la República (Bolivia’s GAO), the U.S. can look to one of the more highly developed oversight agencies in Latin America to help ensure the integrity and effective- ness of MCA assistance. Fred Kalhammer USAID FSO & Supervisory Auditor, retired Stateline, Nev. A Younger Career Minister I read with great interest the well- deserved complimentary obituary of Martin Joseph Hillenbrand in the April Foreign Service Journal. How- ever, I do take issue with one state- ment — that he was “the youngest Foreign Service officer ever to attain” the rank of career minister. Ambassa- dor Hillenbrand was made a career minister in July 1962 — the same time that my husband William M. Rountree was also made a career minister. I believe Amb. Hillenbrand was born in 1915: Amb. Rountree was born in 1917. The dates speak for themselves. Suzanne M. Rountree Atlantic Beach, Fla. The Yalta Myth The month of May brought not only flowers, but the rebirth of an historical fallacy concerning the Yalta Conference that I had tried to com- bat while posted in West Germany some 45 years ago. I refer to the belief that the country’s division had been a deliberate “stab in the back.” During his May visit to Latvia, President Bush resurrected this his- toric myth, first promoted by his post- war Republican forebears, that the Yalta Conference was responsible for the division of Europe. Even more irresponsibly, he linked it to the appeasement of Hitler at Munich. This was quickly followed by similar sentiments in the Washington Post from both the president of Georgia and columnist Anne Applebaum, whose airy dismissal of the facts on the ground at the time of the Yalta Conference was particularly egre- gious. I hope the FSJ will now permit me to enter the fray one more time. It is worth noting that this revi- sionist thesis was forthrightly dis- missed years ago by none other than the conservatives’ own icon, Ronald Reagan, who recognized clearly that Hitler and Stalin, not Yalta, were responsible for the postwar division of Europe. The war and postwar trauma of Eastern Europe began with the divi- sion of Poland in 1939 and ended with the sweep of Soviet armies through Eastern Europe to Vienna and Berlin in a war that Hitler began. Stalin’s subversion of the Yalta agree- ments on Poland and the Balkans simply crowned what Hitler’s aggres- sion had wrought. When Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta in February 1945, Soviet forces were within 50 miles of Berlin. Allied forces, just recovering from the trauma of the last German counteroffensive, had not yet breach- ed the Rhine. In Poland and the Balkans, communist-dominated gov- ernments already were establishing themselves in the wake of the Red Army and of successful communist resistance movements. The Yalta agreements sought to moderate this trend through provisions for tripartite action in all liberated areas with the aim of securing “internal peace,” eco- nomic relief and forming “governmen- tal authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements and … [the] earliest possible free elections.” In Poland, where the Soviet-creat- ed Lublin regime was already in power, a new provisional government was to be organized to include “demo- cratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad in exile.” Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, U.S. Amb- assador to Moscow Averell Harriman and British Ambassador to Moscow Archibald Clark-Kerr were to meet in Moscow “in the first instance” to establish this government of national unity. Thereafter, “free and unfet- tered elections … on the basis of uni- versal suffrage and secret ballot” were to be held “as soon as possible.” This was, of course, never to be. In the wake of Hitler’s retreat, Stalin and his Eastern European hench- men consolidated their power under the umbrella of a Red Army pres- ence, whose forced rollback by the Western allies was both militarily and politically unthinkable in the midst of wartime requirements and hopes for postwar cooperation. We must look to the follies of European history, not to the Yalta Conference, for the causes of Eastern Europe’s postwar miseries and the 45 years it took to give concrete expres- sion to the paths laid out at Yalta. Gunther K. Rosinus Senior Foreign Service Officer, retired Potomac, Md.  L E T T E R S u J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 9