Twelve presidents have visited Alaska while serving in office, going back to Warren G. Harding in 1923, who made the journey to drive the golden spike for the Alaska Railroad, the first major federal public works project in the territory.
While President Barack Obama's plans to visit Alaska next week are founded on the science, geography and politics of climate change, past presidential visits have been mere pit stops, with the exception of the 1971 meeting of President Richard M. Nixon and Emperor Hirohito of Japan in Anchorage and the 1984 meeting of President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in Fairbanks.
But there once was a plan for a rendezvous of world leaders in Alaska that went far beyond a rest stop or a half-hour meeting. While it never came to pass, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made plans for a wartime conference in Fairbanks in 1943.
If the political wrestling in Alaska today highlights conflicting views of what is important -- with Obama choosing an Alaska backdrop for an international climate change message and a grave threat to the planet, while Alaska politicians say we really need more oil and money for the economic climate -- imagine the haggling among uneasy wartime allies who found it hard to agree where to meet, even as they struggled with the survival of their nations.
On May 6, 1943, FDR had offered numerous options for a summit site in a letter to Stalin and concluded, "I suggest that we could meet either on your side or my side of Bering Straits." He said he wanted to meet Stalin one-on-one, with only one staff member and an interpreter, meaning without Churchill. FDR took pride in his powers of persuasion and thought he would do better with Stalin alone.
When Churchill learned of this, he was angry with FDR, who denied that he ever planned to meet with Stalin alone. Churchill said a meeting among the three leaders was important and should take place as soon as it could be arranged. "If this is lost, much is lost," he wrote to FDR in late June.
In any event, Stalin responded through FDR emissary Joseph Davies that he would like to meet in mid-July in Fairbanks.
As the transfer point for thousands of aircraft delivered to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program during World War II, there was a regular contingent of a few hundred Russian military personnel in Fairbanks at Ladd Field. It had become the major stopping point for flights for diplomats traveling between the Soviet Union and the U.S.
The Roosevelt administration reviewed Fairbanks as a potential site for a summer summit and concluded that the quarters at Ladd Field for officers and noncommissioned officers would work. "The personnel now occupying these buildings could be moved under canvas for the period of the visit," said the analysis, which is in the archives of the FDR Presidential Library and Museum.
"Security in this case offers no problem," the military planners said. As Fairbanks was 2,000 miles from the nearest enemy air base, "that practically eliminates the possibility of air attack. If deemed advisable, anti-aircraft can be moved in from Anchorage," the report said.
The administration said facilities at Fort Richardson in Anchorage could be used as an alternative, but that travel on the railroad was not advised because the tracks were in such poor condition that the trip "might be considered a hazardous one." The same analysis looked at a meeting in Iceland as an option, but ruled that out because of worries about security.
The trip would have taken four days for Roosevelt, traveling by train to Ottawa and flying to Edmonton, Fort Nelson and Fairbanks.
But Stalin demurred and suggested other sites in the Soviet Union. Roosevelt and Churchill, who privately referred to Stalin as "Uncle Joe" or "U.J." kept pushing him to meet in Fairbanks.
"After pondering this morning I feel pretty sure that we ought to make a renewed final offer to U.J. to go to meet him at Fairbanks or at the farther point you had in mind," Churchill wrote to FDR in a private note on Aug. 15 while traveling to Quebec to meet the president.
Four days later they said it was a "crucial point in the war" and they were prepared to go with their respective staffs to see Stalin in Fairbanks to "survey the whole scene in common with you." Roosevelt had asked for meetings with Stalin many times before and at one point he considered traveling the brand-new Alaska Highway to set a rendezvous with the dictator, historian Susan Butler wrote in "Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership."
On Aug. 22, the Soviet dictator said he agreed it was important for the three of them to get together, but "At a moment like this I cannot, in the opinion of all my colleagues, leave the front without injury to our military operations to go to so distant a point as Fairbanks, even though, had the situation been different, Fairbanks would be very convenient as a place for our meeting, as I said before."
A month later, Stalin said he would meet with Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran, which was close to the Soviet Union and on the route Westerners used to reach Moscow. Churchill suggested the code name for the conference "Eureka," meaning "I have found it."
Even so, as late as Oct. 26, Stalin said it might be a good idea to delay the meeting until the following spring, "at which time Fairbanks might be an appropriate place," according to a secret cable to FDR from Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
Historian Paul Mayle said the four-day Tehran conference was a "useful exercise in summit diplomacy." The heads of state discussed the preparations for the invasion of France that would take place the next year.
During a Nov. 28 dinner during the Tehran summit, Roosevelt and Stalin talked in general terms about a lot of things, including the future of France, control of postwar Germany and where the three men might gather for their next meeting. "Fairbanks seemed to be considered by both the most suitable spot," according to the secret conference minutes kept by Charles Bohlen.
In a telegram from Churchill to FDR on July 16, 1944, the prime minister said he would "brave the reporters at Washington or the mosquitos of Alaska" for another meeting and begin negotiating with "U.J." on the specifics. As it happened, Roosevelt was on his way to Hawaii and Alaska at that time, a trip that included stops in Juneau, Kodiak and the Aleutians.
By this time, it should have been clear that Fairbanks was not on Stalin's bucket list. When he met with Roosevelt and Churchill for the last time in early 1945 it was not in Fairbanks, but in Yalta, where the three leaders made key decisions that for better or worse shaped the postwar world.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints.