And other great men besides.
[Last month I posted an article by Diana
West on Harry Hopkins, FDR’s top advisor, stating that he was a Soviet Agent
who tied Roosevelt and Churchill around his little finger to aid Stalin in his
conquest of Eastern Europe. As much as I've read about WWII I’m not that up to
snuff on intelligence and counter-intelligence, I’m more a tactics and weapons
buff. But there are those who are deeply involved in these fields, Ron Radosh,
Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and many others who went after Ms. West hammer
and tongs. (see http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-earl-haynes-and-harvey-klehr/was-harry-hopkins-a-soviet-spy/
) After reading the ensuing articles, which can be found at Front Page Mag and
Brietbart, I feel I must post the other side of the story. As Daniel Patrick
Moynihan once said, “You are entitled to your opinions, not to your own facts.”
JimG33]
Conrad Black
Rather than dwelling on the falsehoods of the West
or (Oliver) Stone accounts, I hope it is useful
to recount the salient facts, so obscured have they become in cant and
emotionalism. The much-maligned Roosevelt was the only leader of a major power
in the Thirties not to be ashamed of: neither a totalitarian dictator (Hitler,
Stalin), nor a strutting mountebank of a dictator (Mussolini), nor an appeaser
of dictators (Baldwin, Chamberlain, Daladier, et al.). He warned the French not
to allow German remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, and was skeptical
about Munich: He instructed his ambassador in London, the unfortunately
selected Joseph Kennedy, that he could not congratulate Chamberlain on Munich,
other than personally and verbally only. He warned Stalin in August 1939 not to
make a non-aggression pact with Germany. He told Stalin in 1941 (a couple of
months before Pearl Harbor) that the Japanese were moving their forces south to
secure their oil supply in the face of the American oil embargo, which enabled
Stalin to move 20 divisions from the Far East for the final and successful
defense of Moscow and Leningrad.
Roosevelt was concerned that if the Western Allies
did not seriously open a second front in Europe, Stalin would negotiate a
separate peace with Hitler. Because Churchill and his senior generals feared
becoming mired again in northeast France as in the hecatomb of World War I,
Roosevelt had to enlist Stalin at the Tehran Conference to support
cross-channel landings. Churchill and his staff believed that
Stalin agreed to this only because he thought that such landings
would distract Hitler but enable further Soviet penetration into Western
Europe. This was probably true, but Roosevelt had more faith than Churchill or
Stalin in the possibilities of a successful 1944 Allied landing in France, and,
once again, he was right. This Ms. West decries as ignoring General Mark
Clark’s advice, prompted by Churchill, to surge up the Adriatic and through the
Ljubljana Gap and take Vienna. Eisenhower and Marshall advised that there was
no such gap and it was a choice between Vienna and Paris. Because Churchill had
generously had Austria designated a German-conquered state at
Tehran, and therefore entitled to Four Power occupation like the rest of
Germany but under gentler rules, we ended up without Soviet occupation of
either of those capitals.
In 1940, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan had all
been in the hands of dictators hostile to the Anglo-Americans; in 1945, all
were entirely, or in the case of Germany, largely, occupied by the Western
armies and were brought into or back into the West as flourishing democracies
and allies of the Anglo-Americans, and the Russians had taken over 90 percent
of the casualties in subduing the Germans. At Yalta, Stalin pledged that
there would be free elections and that the Soviets would depart from the
Eastern European countries. Roosevelt was advised by his military chiefs that
the carnage on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where the U.S. took 70,000 casualties on
small islands [islands from which there was no
possibility of retreat or resupply for the Japanese forces, they were to fight
and die causing as many American casualties as possible], indicated that
conquering the home islands of Japan would cost a million casualties — and that
he should therefore try to secure Soviet cooperation in invading Japan until
they were sure atomic weapons would be effective (they were tested
successfully only at Los Alamos in July, three months after Roosevelt
died).
Roosevelt had said to Churchill, Anthony Eden, Henry
Stimson, Archbishop Spellman, Lord Keynes, and Admiral Leahy, among others,
that Stalin could be a real post-war problem. He planned to offer
demilitarization of Germany (the power Stalin feared, for obvious reasons), a
$6.5 billion reconstruction program, and an unspecific brandishing of
atomic weapons (if they worked) as incentives to Stalin to honor his Yalta
commitments on Eastern Europe. The strategic team he assembled — Truman,
Marshall, Eisenhower, Acheson, Kennan, Bohlen, and others — devised the
containment strategy and applied it, and their successors applied it, nine
administrations of both parties, until the Soviet Union disintegrated and
international Communism imploded, without a shot being exchanged between the
United States and the USSR. It was the greatest and most bloodless strategic
victory in the history of the world; Roosevelt’s aid to the democracies in the
first two years of World War II and his strategic conduct during that war were
a historic masterpiece, entirely consistent with the military direction
provided by Roosevelt’s personal selections of Marshall as army chief of staff
and of Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Nimitz as theater commanders.
Henry Wallace was a flake, a mad choice for vice
president; FDR made such choices occasionally, as with Kennedy for London
and Joseph Davies for the embassy in Moscow. Wallace opposed the Marshall Plan
and opposed NATO, and opposed atomic development. If he had succeeded to the
presidency, he would have done a 180-degree turn or been impeached for
incompetence on such a scale that it would be deemed a high crime, and for
once, the impeachers would have been correct (which they were not with Andrew
Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, who never should have been threatened
with impeachment as they were). The seven terms of Roosevelt, Truman, and
Eisenhower were a golden age of the American presidency. All three had their
faults, but FDR took over a completely economically and psychologically
depressed country in 1933 and — as Mr. Churchill said in his parliamentary
eulogy of him, FDR “raised the strength, might, and glory of the great Republic
to a height never attained by any nation in history”; and his successors, both
of whom he elevated from comparative obscurity, raised it higher.
These conspiratorialists are idiots: pernicious,
destructive, fatuous idiots. West and Stone and Kuznick are entitled to freedom
of expression, though they abuse it with their unutterable myth-making and
jejune dementedness, as they hurl the vitriol of the silly and the deranged at
people who should be on Mount Rushmore. The Yalta myth, inflated by Ms. West
with the unfounded new flourish that Harry Hopkins was a Commie spy, like the
unspeakable fraud that Truman, not Stalin, started the Cold War, is a revenance
of the psycho-Roosevelt-mentia virus, like the pestilence of collaboration
described by Camus in The Plague. “Only the mute effigies of great
men . . . conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been.” That is the
problem.
— Conrad Black is the author of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard
M. Nixon: A Life in Full, A
Matter of Principle, and the recently published Flight
of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial
Dependence to World Leadership. He can be reached
at cbletters@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment