Freedom
Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World
War and Its Aftermath
Edited by George H. Nash
(Hoover Institution Press, 920 pages, $49.95)
Within the past two weeks, an astonishing new book has been
published. Freedom Betrayed, written by President Herbert
Hoover in his retirement, is a wide-ranging attack on the decisions
made by his White House successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hoover
worked on it for 20 years and regarded it as his magnum
opus. The manuscript was edited by Hoover’s principal
biographer, George H. Nash, who also wrote a lengthy introduction.
I can do no better than to quote from the book’s dust jacket:
Following Hoover’s death in 1964, his heirs decided to place his
manuscript in storage, where for nearly half a century it has
remained unread — until now.
In this book, perhaps the most ambitious and systematic
work of World War II revisionism ever attempted, Hoover offers his
frank evaluation of President Roosevelt’s foreign policies before
Pearl Harbor and during the war, as well as an examination of the
war’s consequences, including the expansion of the Soviet empire at
war’s end and the eruption of the Cold War against the
Communists.
John Earl Haynes, the author of Spies: The Rise and
Fall of the KGB in America, writes that even readers who are
“comfortable with the established account will find themselves
thinking that on some points the accepted history should be
reconsidered and perhaps revised.”
Just 60 years ago, in November 1951, Herbert Hoover told
an acquaintance, John W. Hill: “When Roosevelt put America in to
help Russia as Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, we should have
let those two bastards annihilate themselves.”
Hill replied: “That would be a great book. Why don’t you
write it, Mr. Hoover?”
Hoover said he didn’t have the time. In fact, he had been
working on such a book since 1944.
Now it has been published, by the Hoover Institution
Press.
As new books about World War II and its aftermath appeared
in print, including those by Winston Churchill, Hoover would revise
what he had written, sometimes softening his earlier opinions. One
of the merits of the published book is that George Nash includes as
appendices memoranda from Hoover showing his thinking at earlier
stages.
As his book stood in 1953, for example — when it was
titled “Lost Statesmanship” — Hoover listed 19 “gigantic blunders”
by U.S. and British policymakers. These began in 1933 with FDR’s
diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union and continued with the
British and French guarantee to Poland in 1939. George Nash told me
in an email that Hoover considered the Polish guarantee to have
been “the greatest blunder in the history of British
statesmanship.”
Even Churchill saw (later) that it had been a mistake. But
he supported it at the time. But in The Gathering Storm
(1948), Churchill demonstrated the futility of Chamberlain’s
declaration of war. (Chamberlain was stung by the charges of
appeasement after Munich and with Hitler’s Poland invasion he tried
to recover.)
Hoover was quite critical of Churchill. He had a
“surpassing power of oratory and word pictures,” Hoover wrote, but
“intellectual integrity was not his strong point.” The
Gathering Storm was “a mass of bitter attacks upon [Stanley]
Baldwin and [Neville] Chamberlain who had kept him out of office
for years.”
Another “major blunder,” Hoover thought, was FDR’s
decision in 1941 to throw the U.S. into an “undeclared war with
Germany and Japan, in total violation of promises upon which he had
been elected a few weeks before.” Roosevelt’s “total economic
sanctions” against Japan in the summer of 1941, and his
“contemptuous refusal” of the Japanese prime minister’s peace
proposals in September, Hoover saw as the crucial precursors to
Pearl Harbor. The day after the attack, Hoover told a friend that
FDR’s “continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this
country bitten.”
In the weeks before Lend-Lease (enacted in March 1941 and
allowing the president to place war equipment at the disposal of
foreign powers), Hoover charged that Roosevelt “knew definitely of
Hitler’s determination to attack Russia,” and did so by early 1941.
Hoover repeatedly said that if Hitler couldn’t get the German army
across the 22-mile wide British channel, he had no chance whatever
with the Atlantic Ocean. Germany didn’t threaten the United
States.
Hoover’s criticism of Lend-Lease has a very modern ring.
Congress had become a “rubber stamp,” he said, surrendering to the
President “the power to make war.” We have heard identical
complaints about our more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Congress, now even more than 70 years ago, is willing to do almost
anything, as long as it doesn’t have to exercise to its
constitutionally mandated war-making power.
Much of what Hoover said in opposition to FDR’s (and
Churchill’s) war policies can be summarized this way: Stalin was
every bit as bad as Hitler. So let them fight it out. FDR certainly
didn’t see things that way. Domestic politics provides a partial
explanation. Communist (or at least Marxist) sympathy in this
country and in Europe was strong at the time, whereas Nazi
sympathizers could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Socialism
has long been (and continues to be) a far greater temptation in the
Western world than Nazism (National Socialism) ever was.
Hoover said: “The greatest loss of statesmanship in all
American history was the tacit American alliance and support of
Communist Russia when Hitler made his attack in June 1941.…
American aid to Russia meant victory for Stalin and the spread of
Communism to the world.”
Hoover was also highly critical of George Marshall, who
became Harry Truman’s Secretary of State. Hoover got on well with
Truman (in contrast to Roosevelt). Still, Truman had sacrificed
“all China” to the Communists, “by insistence of his left-wing
advisors and his appointment of General Marshall to execute their
will.”
As for Hoover’s own stance, he was unrepentant. “I was
opposed to the war and every step in it,” he wrote in 1953. “I have
no apologies and no regrets.”
A Yale University economics instructor named Arthur Kemp
became a Hoover confidante after the war. If Hoover had published
his “Lost Statesmanship” more or less in its 1953 form, Kemp wrote,
its “emotional impact” would have been “tremendous.” It would have
appeared during the Korean War and the ascendancy of Senator Joseph
McCarthy. George Nash continues:
Amid the clamorous debates over Roosevelt’s conduct at Yalta and
the question of “who lost China,” such a book might indeed have
electrified the nation. Surprisingly — considering the intensity
of his convictions — Hoover continued to hold back. He had already
indicated privately in 1950 and 1951 that his Magnum Opus would not
be published “for some years.”… Instead of racing to publish his
sizzling manuscript while the political iron was hot [he turned it
over to an aide] for still more editing and feedback.
Ten years later, after further revisions, interest among
publishers remained high by 1963. The Chicago Tribune was
eager to serialize the book, the Reader’s Digest was
enthusiastic and apparently ready to do a condensed version; and
Henry Regnery — the father of Al Regnery, The American
Spectator’s publisher today — “asked to publish Hoover’s
study.”
INEVITABLY, WE RUN INTO the problem of counterfactual
history. We don’t know what would have happened if different
choices had been made; especially if Britain had not declared war
in 1939 or if FDR had accepted Japan’s peace offer in 1941. But we
do know this. Those who are “comfortable with the established
account,” to quote John Earl Haynes, have already fought their own
counterfactual battles and won, to their own satisfaction. World
War II was “the good war.”
Measured by its mortality rate, World War II (with 9.4
million deaths per year) was by far the deadliest in history; with
over three times the mortality rate of the second deadliest. That
was the First World War (with 3 million deaths per year). More than
400,000 American died in World War II. Communism and its
accompanying poverty and oppression came to Eastern Europe and
stayed for 45 years after Hitler and Nazism were dead and buried.
China was overwhelmed by fanaticism, horror, and famine for 30
years. North Korea remains in that condition to this
day.
Then again, we know with hindsight (as Hoover did not)
that Communism could not be made to work, no matter how numerous
its Western sympathizers. In Russia and China, it was the Communist
leaders themselves, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Deng Xiao
Ping, who brought the system to an end. It may have been better for
the world that it ended that way.
A generation after his death, the state of the world
looked much better than it did to Hoover in 1964. The sixty million
people who died in the war can be excused if they dissent from the
grave. In the end, however, counterfactual history involves
calculations that are forever uncertain. Still, in its sharp
dissent from the conventional understanding of the mid-twentieth
century, Herbert Hoover’s book succeeds in bringing that history
back to life and in forcing us to think about it in ways that will
surely be unfamiliar to many.
