ROOSEVELT, ELLIOTTAS HE SAW IT
Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1946
predslov Eleanor Roosevelt
1. vydanie
história, II. svetová vojna, životopisy,
270 s., angličtina
hmotnosť: 453 g
tvrdá väzba
stav: dobrý
2,90 €
*kamag* in *060*
7
TEHERAN CONFERENCE
The seventy-seven Americans who made up the party to Teheran saw it first from the air—a surprisingly modern city, its buildings and railroad yards clustered at the foot of a range of small mountains. These mountains, taken with others to the west and south, formed a bowl which enclosed miles and miles of desert, an occasional village, one or two lonesome spurs of railroad track, and Teheran. The Big Three were met here in compromise, and I imagine none of the three chief participants was completely happy about the place of rendezvous. Stalin, because he was a working military commander, had insisted that it be some city no farther than a day’s flight from Moscow; and as a result here they were, in the capital of a friendly neutral, a country which was one of the United Nations, but of which it was difficult to make any other recommendation.
But it was never difficult to hit on a drawback. For one: until quite recently, Teheran had been general headquarters for all Axis espionage in the Middle East; and Mike Reilly of our Secret Service shared with the Soviet secret service agents the conviction that there were still, despite many precautions, among the thousands of refugees who had crowded into the city from Europe, dozens of Nazi agents and sympathizers. For another: the problems of health and sanitation are among the most difficult in the world. Teheran’s drinking water flows down to the city from the mountains in open ditches; if you live on the upper outskirts of the city, you are fortunate, for you have first crack at it; you are probably also antisocial, for you use the ditches as they flow past you as sewage system as well as water supply system; thus, if you are unfortunate enough to live in the center or lower outskirts of the city, what you get as drinking water is your neighbor’s refuse and offal. After that, you are surprised if you don’t get typhus or malaria or dysentery. Why a city with broad, well-paved streets, relatively modern hospitals, a university, museums, a serviceable power plant—even a telephone system-should not have taken the seemingly prior step of installing a proper water supply system and sewage disposal system is one of those minor mysteries.
And despite the fact that Teheran otherwise gave the appearance of a modern and prosperous city, it was swiftly evident that the Iranian economy was neither modern nor prosperous. There was the capital, and then there was the surrounding country—a grazing ground for the herds of nomadic tribes, who knew nothing but abject poverty except perhaps in the north, where there was better farmland and a better living to be won. To the south were the oil fields, then a British concession,
