Hopkins, Harry Lloyd (1890-1946)

Harry Lloyd Hopkins

A federal administrator and presidential advisor who is known in 20th-century American history for his unwavering loyalty to President Franklin Roosevelt, his hard-driving enthusiasm for the New Deal and his “piercing understanding” of World War II problems.

Harry Lloyd Hopkins was born on August 17, 1890 in Sioux City, Iowa, the fourth child of David Aldona Hopkins and Anna Pickett. His father ran a harness shop and eventually made his long-time passion, bowling, into his career. His mother was deeply religious and an active Methodist. Thhe family soon moved to Nebraska, then to Chicago, and finally to Grinnell, Iowa, where Hopkins graduated from high school and studied American politics and the British parliamentary system at Grinnell College. He graduated cum laude in 1912.

Hopkins’s first job after graduation was with Christodora House, a settlement house on New York City’s Lower East Side which was one of the working-class relief efforts in the Progressive Era. His next move was to the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, where he served as a “friendly visitor” and superintendent of the employment bureau. In 1915, he was appointed executive secretary of the New York Bureau of Child Welfare, which administered pensions to mothers with dependent children. Hopkins’s early experience played a significant role in shaping his ideal of government responsibility for impoverished Americans. 1

After America entered World War I, Hopkins wanted to enlist in the Army but was rejected for health reasons. Instead, he moved to New Orleans to serve as Director of Civilian Relief for the Gulf Division of the American Red Cross – and eventually moved up to head the Red Cross divisions in the American Southwest. In 1922, Hopkins returned to New York City to become Chief of the Division on Health Conditions for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor; in 1924, he became the General Director of the New York Tuberculosis Association. He also took part in drafting a charter for the American Association of Social Workers and became its president in 1923.

In 1928, Hopkins supported Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt for governor of New York. In 1931, Roosevelt chose Hopkins to run America’s first state relief organization – the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA). Modeled on the Red Cross relief program, it worked to combat the effects of the Great Depression in New York State and helped hundreds of thousands of people to survive through the most difficult times. Hopkins’s work in creating and running TERA paved the way for his leading role in President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration.

In 1932, Hopkins supported Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency and his promise of a ‘New Deal’ for Americans. In early 1933, Hopkins moved to Washington, D.C. to become director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which would provide immediate relief for the country’s millions of homeless and hungry residents. While remaining head of FERA, Hopkins was simultaneously appointed Civil Works Administrator (CWA) in November 1933, to put about four million people to work during the harsh winter of 1933-1934. In 1935, he was appointed head of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), to put another three-and-a-half million people to work. Hopkins also served in other New Deal emergency relief agencies – such as the President’s Draught Committee, the Industrial Emergency Committee and the National Emergency Council – and on the boards of many other New Deal agencies like the National Resources Planning Board. Roosevelt’s speechwriter, Robert E. Sherwood, wrote later that “Hopkins came to be regarded as the Chief Apostle of the New Deal and the most cordially hated by its enemies.” 2

In 1937, Hopkins was operated on for stomach cancer – a disease he would continue to battle for years to come. In December 1938, he became Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce, but resigned in November 1940 due to health problems. From 1940 to 1945, Hopkins continued as Roosevelt’s confidant, adviser and personal representative. Reflecting on Hopkins’s role, Roosevelt said in 1941: “. . . as President . . . you’ll learn what a lonely job this is, and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins who asks nothing except to serve you.” 3 Hopkins served as Roosevelt’s personal manager at the 1940 Democratic National Convention. During his visit to the White House in May 1940, he spent the night in a suite which at one time had been President Abraham Lincoln’s study. Hopkins would continue living in that suite, which was just down the hall from Roosevelt’s room, until December 1943.

On New Year’s Eve in 1941, Roosevelt sent Hopkins to London as his personal representative –to gain firsthand knowledge of Britain’s needs during the crucial early phase of World War II which became known as the Battle of Britain – the largest and most sustained aerial bombing campaign up to that date. Hopkins’s almost daily conversations with Churchill during the six weeks of his stay in London were the beginning of a long friendship. Hopkins was among the few people who had the privilege of addressing Churchill by his first name.

Hopkins’s reports to Roosevelt played a key role in the debate over the president’s ‘Lend-Lease’ bill to aid Britain by providing it (and eventually several other Allied nations) with weapons and supplies without requiring payment upfront. Hopkins spearheaded the rapid passage of the Lend-Lease Bill, first by the House of Representatives, on February 8, 1941, and then by the Senate a month later. Roosevelt appointed Hopkins to administer the Lend-Lease Program, with the vague authority to “advise and assist me in carrying out the responsibilities placed upon me” by the passage of the bill. 4 Although lacking the official title, Hopkins thus came to be regarded by many journalists as “deputy president.” He became famous for his unbureaucratic style and for getting things done by bypassing bureaucratic red tape. Hopkins played a pivotal role in preparing the U.S. Armed Forces and private business for war production. He was also a member of the War Production Board (WPB) and the Pacific War Council, an intergovernmental agency established in 1942 to coordinate the Allied war effort in the Pacific and Asian World War II campaigns.

Hopkins was a pioneer in establishing the practice of private diplomacy. On his missions as President Roosevelt’s personal representative, he managed to facilitate agreement on issues that would have had little chance of being resolved had the negotiations been carried out by an official diplomatic representative. Hopkins thus played a key role in facilitating accord between the leaders of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union during the war effort. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, both Roosevelt and Churchill, the British Prime Minister, saw aiding the Soviet Union as crucial to defeating Germany – provided the Soviet Union could survive the Nazi onslaught. Hopkins volunteered to fly to Moscow to find out for himself if the Soviet Union would be able to hold off the Germans.

In late July 1941, Hopkins took a 24-hour flight to Moscow, seated in the machine-gunner’s metal chair in the rear of the plane, to meet Stalin and other Soviet leaders in person. It took Hopkins just two days to dramatically increase Western understanding of the Soviet situation. “I had no conversations in Moscow,” he reported, “just six hours of conversation. After that there was no more to be said. It was all cleaned up at two sittings.” Hopkins came away convinced that the Soviet Union would be able to blunt the German advance. He also convinced Stalin of the need to call a conference of representatives of the three governments to study the strategic needs of each front in the war. The conference took place in Moscow in October 1941, and Hopkins’s efforts eventually helped Roosevelt to extend Lend-Lease legislation to aid the Soviet Union.

Hopkins and Stalin, July 1941

Many American diplomats pointed to Stalin’s special affinity for Roosevelt’s assistant. Charles Bohlen, who accompanied Hopkins to his later meetings with Stalin, as a translator, recalled that Stalin once said in his presence that Hopkins was “the first American to whom he had spoken “po dushe” – from the soul.” 5 According to Averell Harriman, Stalin displayed more open and warm cordiality to Hopkins than to any other foreigner. Throughout World War II, Hopkins continued to play a crucial personal role in Great Powers diplomacy, accompanying Roosevelt as his personal aide to the Allied conferences in Casablanca (January 4-24, 1943), Quebec (August 1943), Cairo (November 22-26, 1943), Tehran (November 28-December 1, 1943) and Yalta (February 4-11, 1945). At Yalta, Hopkins was suffering from intense pain but nevertheless participated fully in making plans for Germany’s ultimate defeat and establishing the accords for the post-war world.

At the conclusion of the conference, Hopkins was too sick to continue the trip back home with Roosevelt on board the USS Quincy cruiser and had to take a few days rest in Marrakech, Morocco before returning to the United States. Roosevelt, who had expected Hopkins to help him write a speech on the results of the conference on the way home, was disappointed. It turned out that he and Hopkins would not see each other again. On his return to the United States, Hopkins went straight to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He was still there when Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12. Although too sick to give President Harry S. Truman the same kind of service he had given to Roosevelt, Hopkins undertook his last mission to Stalin in late May of 1945 – at the height of the United Nations Charter Conference at San Francisco – to iron out differences between the Allies and plan for a July meeting between Churchill, Stalin and Truman in Potsdam, Germany.

On July 2, 1945, Hopkins retired from government service. He settled in New York, but his plans to begin writing about the war and Roosevelt were frustrated by his crumbling health. In September 1945, he made what turned out to be his last trip to Washington, D.C., to receive the Distinguished Service Medal from President Truman. Two months later, Hopkins checked into New York’s Memorial Hospital, where he died on January 29, 1946.

Asked to name two Americans (besides President Roosevelt) who had made the greatest contributions to the defeat of Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill named General George Marshall among military leaders and Harry Hopkins among civilians.

Hopkins in 1941

Hopkins is remembered in Russia as a highly trusted representative of President Roosevelt who negotiated with the Soviet leadership and contributed greatly to strengthening the Russian-American partnership that had defeated the Nazis. In the memory of older generations of Russians, his name is gratefully associated with “Lend Lease” – the great American program of wartime assistance which connoted not just tanks, guns and aircraft for victory, but also canned meat, powdered milk and warm clothes at a time of dire need. After decades of silence about the American contribution to the Russian victory, we now know that every seventh Red Army aircraft, every third ton of aviation petrol and every second truck were U.S.-made. During the Yalta Conference, Stalin acknowledged that “Lend-Lease had greatly contributed to the victory,” and that without American assistance “the victory would have been different”— meaning the cost of victory in human lives.

Hopkins is remembered in modern-day Ukraine as well, to judge from a 2009 article entitled “Ukraine Needs Harry Hopkins.” Considering the personal qualities that enabled Hopkins to go down in history “as an example of a highly efficient and honest administrator” “who was able to earn the trust of such different leaders as Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt,” the writer emphasized Hopkins’s understanding of the plight of the common American, his unselfishness, his personal modesty and his ability to distance himself from politics: “Harry Hopkins had clean hands – and, most importantly, he had never strived for power.” 6

The Smearing of Harry Hopkins as a Soviet Agent

In 1990, a book written by Christopher Andrew, a British historian, and Oleg Gordievsky, a former high-level KGB officer who had defected to the West in 1985, suddenly claimed that Hopkins was “the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States.” Entitled KGB: The Inside Story of its Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, and based on Gordievsky’s recollections of a lecture he heard when he was a KGB intelligence trainee, the book described how Iskhak Akhmerov, the former Soviet “illegalresident in the United States during World War II, had intimated to young KGB trainees that he had had secret meetings with Hopkins. These meetings allegedly began before Hopkins made his first trip to Moscow in July 1941 and continued throughout the war years. 7 Although Andrew and Gordievsky were immediately taken to task by some British and American authors, 8 this fantastic story, amazingly, remains unchallenged to this date. Moreover, since 1990 it has often been “serialized” in books, newspaper and magazine articles, on-line encyclopedias and postings. Recently, Gordievsky’s fable found its way into a Russian World War II espionage novel.

Following the release in 1995-1996 of Venona documents – partially decrypted Soviet intelligence communiqués from the World War II period – the late U.S. Air Force Department historian Dr. Edward Mark undertook to identify Hopkins behind the cover name “19” in a single, partially decrypted cable from May 29, 1943. The cable was signed by “Mer,” which was then Akhmerov’s cover name. 9 In this cable, Akhmerov reported information he had heard from “19” on discussions of the chances of opening a second front in Europe in 1943. These discussions took place at the conference between Roosevelt and Churchill and the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C. from May 15 to May 25, 1943, commonly known by its code name, TRIDENT. At the time of the cable’s release in 1996, “19” was not identified by Venona translators, who erroneously made an assumption (and, in fact, a handwritten notation) that Hopkins was behind another cover name, “Zamestitel’,” which is Russian for “Deputy.” Dr. Mark went a step further: having consulted the TRIDENT attendance records, he concluded that “Zamestitel’” was Vice-President Henry Wallace and “Source No. 19” “was most likely” Harry Hopkins. 10

As we now know, “19” or “19th” was the cover name used for U.S. State Department official Laurence Duggan in NKVD foreign intelligence communiqués from 1936 to 1944. 11 Wallace appears as “Lotsman” [“Navigation pilot”] elsewhere in decrypted Venona cables.

Nevertheless, in his 1999 book The Sword and the Shield (this time written with another KGB defector, former KGB archivist Vassili Mitrokhin), Christopher Andrew cited Mark’s “detailed, meticulous and pervasive study” as “plausible but controversial evidence” that “Hopkins sometimes used Akhmerov as a back channel to Moscow.” In Andrew’s account, “Hopkins’s confidential information so impressed the Center that, years later, some KGB officers boasted that he had been a Soviet agent.” Andrew was careful to qualify that “these boasts were far from the truth. Hopkins was an American patriot with little sympathy for the Soviet system. But he was deeply impressed by the Soviet war effort.” 12 Andrew’s qualification notwithstanding, some authors thought that “the biggest news” in his 1999 book was the “new evidence that proves that Harry Hopkins, the closest and most influential adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, was a Soviet agent.” 13

Except for Gordievsky’s tale about Akhmerov’s lecture, however, not a single story about Hopkins as a “Soviet agent” has emanated from the ranks of former KGB officers to this day. Moreover, when interviewed on the subject, these former officers vehemently deny Gordievsky’s assertion. Former KGB operative Colonel Oleg Tsarev, for example, is known for his collaboration with two Western authors on books about the history of KGB intelligence. 14 During his time as a KGB intelligence trainee, Tsarev used to attend Akhmerov’s lectures, which he remembered vividly. Tsarev told me in an interview (which turned out to be his last one) that Akhmerov “had never named any names” in his lectures. 15

KGB Lieutenant-General Vitaly Pavlov, who supervised Akhmerov’s preparations for his second U.S. mission in 1941, as well as his early operations in the States in the first months of 1942, said much the same thing. On his return to Moscow in early 1946, Akhmerov told Pavlov “in great detail about his meetings with various political figures in the United States.” Pavlov asserted that “Akhmerov had never met with Hopkins and Hopkins had nothing to do with Soviet intelligence.” 16

Click here to read more excerpts from interviews with Lt.-Gen. Pavlov.

Moreover, the story Gordievsky told does not withstand simple documentary crosschecking. According to Gordievsky, Akhmerov’s secret meetings with Hopkins began before Hopkins made his first trip to Moscow in July 1941. But that July Akhmerov was still in Moscow – his U.S. posting was approved that month – preparing for his forthcoming trip. He did not leave Moscow until September – and reached the United States in December, after a long and roundabout trip. 17 Russian published sources unanimously place Akhmerov’s second term in the United States from 1942 to 1945 – eliminating any basis for Gordievsky’s story. 18

The improbability of Gordievsky’s story does not end with Akhmerov’s absence from the United States in 1941 – the time of his alleged initial approach to Hopkins. Explaining “the nonsense of Gordievsky’s allegation,” General Pavlov told me that due to Akhmerov’s “low social standing in the United States (small businessman) there was no chance of his ever meeting Hopkins.”

Pavlov’s oral evidence has recently been confirmed with the release of the notes on KGB intelligence files taken from 1994 to 1995 by the former KGB officer and journalist Alexander Vassiliev, in the course of his work on a Russian-American collaborative book project. Vassiliev made detailed notes on a summary report on his tenure in the United States written by Vassili Zarubin, the “legal” resident in the United States from 1942 to 1944. Zarubin wrote the report in September 1944, upon his return to Moscow. In his profile of Akhmerov’s work during that period, Zarubin wrote: “He has a very isolated lifestyle abroad, and as a rule he has no neutral connections apart from his cover. Because of this factor, ‘Mer’ [Akhmerov] meets only with our people, which creates needless risk if he is being tailed.” 19 In all of Vassiliev’s voluminous notes, there is not the slightest hint about confidential contacts between Hopkins and Akhmerov or any other Soviet intelligence operatives.

Click here to see where Hopkins appears in Alexander Vassiliev’s notes.

Nor does the possibility of a confidential relationship between Hopkins and Soviet intelligence operatives appear anywhere in Russian diplomatic files.

Click here for some of the references to Hopkins in Russian files from the World War II period.

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  1. Historian R. Bruce Craig noted that early experience as workers or administrators in settlement houses played a significant role in shaping “the minds and ideals” of many of the future New Dealers: “From the late 1800s through the 1920s it was not unusual for young, practical idealists interested in solving the problems of urban, industrial America to spend a year or two living and working in working-class neighborhoods. Like the Peace Corps and Vista volunteers of more recent times, settlement workers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the vanguard of reform in the progressive era.” Treasonable Doubt. The Harry Dexter White Spy Case, by R. Bruce Craig, University Press of Kansas, 2004, p. 20.
  2. Cit., The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers. “Harry Lloyd Hopkins.” Teaching Eleanor Roosevelt, ed. by Allida Black, June Hopkins, et al. (Hyde Park, New York: Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, 2003). http://www.nps.gov/archive/elro/glossary/hopkins-harry.htm (Accessed December 28, 2009
  3. Franklin D. Roosevelt to Wendell Willkie, 1941, Ibidem.
  4. Cit., Ibidem.
  5. Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929-1969, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973, p. 244. The precise Russian equivalent of the English phrase “from the soul” is “po dusham.” – S. Ch.
  6. “Ukraine Needs Harry Hopkins and not Vladimir Litvin,” by Vladimir Bushev, February 20, 2009, http://www.politikan.com.ua/2/1/0/3182.htm
  7. KGB: The Inside Story of its Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990; New York: HarperCollins, 1990, pp. 287, 334, 349-350.
  8. In his review of Andrew and Gordievsky’s book in Spectator, November 3, 1990, British espionage journalist Phillip Knightley wrote that “a smear” of Harry Hopkins “can only be described as shameful.” In his review in The Atlantic, March 1991, American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. concluded that the story was weakly sourced, full of contradictions and probably related to the authors’ reputed six-figure advances. http://intellit.org/alpha_folder/A_folder/andrewplus.html
  9. Venona New York to Moscow #812, May 29, 1943.
  10. Edward Mark, “Venona’s Source 19 and the Trident Conference of May 1943: Diplomacy or Espionage?” Intelligence and National Security 13, no. 2 (April 1998), pp. 1-31.
  11. See Alexander Vassiliev’s notes on the Laurence Duggan file in his Yellow Notebook #2, pp. 1-39, posted at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s website: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.documents&group_id=511603
  12. The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, by Christopher Andrew and Vassili Mitrokhin, New York: Basic Books, 1999, p. 111.
  13. “The Treachery of Harry Hopkins,” by Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid, Media Monitor, October 8, 1999, http://www.aim.org/media-monitor/the-treachery-of-harry-hopkins/
  14. Deadly Illusions, by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, London: Century, 1993; The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Files, by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, HarperCollins, 1998.
  15. Svetlana Chervonnaya’s interview with Oleg Tsarev, November 21, 2008, conducted for the Russian 5th (St. Petersburg) TV channel.
  16. Svetlana Chervonnaya’s interview with Lt.-Gen.Vitaly Pavlov, April 23, 2002.
  17. The dating of Akhmerov’s posting was ascertained in the course of interviews with Lt.-Gen.Vitaly Pavlov in April and May, 2002. For an additional confirmation of the December 1941 dating of Akhmerov’s arrival in the United States, see Alexander Vassiliev’s notes on a KGB 1984 instruction manual about Akhmerov’s operational experience, entitled “Station Chief Gold” (from Akhmerov’s early cover name) in Vassiliev’s Black Notebook, p. 140.
  18. Akhmerov’s bio in Russian Wikipedia, http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D1%85%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2; http://rusrazvedka.narod.ru/base/htm/ahmer.html; http://www.pobeda.ru/content/view/2093.
  19. Zarubin to Merkulov, Memorandum (on the station’s work in the country), September 1944, Alexander Vassiliev’s White Notebook # 1, p. 14. Emphasis added. – S.Ch.