A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind (38 page)

21
.   Montefiore,
Stalin
, p. 272.

22
.   Montefiore,
Stalin
, p. 298.

23
.   Montefiore,
Stalin
, pp. 309–310.

24
.   Some scholars still maintain that the Welles Mission of 1940 represented a genuine effort for peace. See Christopher O’Sullivan,
Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937–1943
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), ch. 3.

Chapter 5

1
.   Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, Collection: Grace Tully Archive, Series: Marguerite (“Missy”), LeHand Papers, Box 10; Folder = Correspondence: Roosevelt, Franklin D.: Transcripts of Longhand, 1934. Sunday July 1, 1934.

2
.  
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1934, Vol. II: Europe, Near East and Africa
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934), pp. 241–43. Letter 1072 from William E. Dodd, the Ambassador in Germany, to Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, July 24, 1934.

3
.  
FRUS, Volume II
:
Europe, Near East and Africa
. Memorandum from Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, July 13, 1934, p. 238–39.

4
.   Edgar B. Nixon,
Franklin D
.
Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1969), vol. II, pp. 180–81.

5
.   Nixon,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs
, vol. II, pp. 186–87.

6
.   Nixon,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs
, September 7, 1934, pp. 207–8.

7
.   Dodd was far from the only foreign observer to be distressed by the heightened militarism suffusing German daily life at this time. One young American who was studying at Oxford travelled to Germany in 1934. While there he attended a Hitler Youth camp outing and was startled to see how much it resembled military exercises, complete with drills, calisthenics, and instruction in the dismantling and reassembling of weapons. Later, Dean Rusk would write, “This was no Explorer Scout outing or weekend in the fresh air of the countryside.” Rusk could not then recognize the direction in which Germany was headed. In a speech to the World Affairs Council of Riverside, California, he adopted a wait-and-see attitude about Hitler’s regime. He would look back on his myopia with regret. We can only speculate that this experience was a meaningful episode that shaped his worldview and influenced his decision-making while Secretary of State during the Vietnam
War. Dean Rusk,
As I Saw It
, as told to Richard Rusk, edited by Daniel S. Papp (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 79.

8
.   Nixon,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs
, November 5, 1934, Dodd to Moore, pp. 274–77.

9
.   Nixon,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs
, May 9, 1935, Dodd to FDR, pp. 499–503.

10
.   Memorandum by Mr. S. R. Fuller, Jr., of a Conversation With Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, Minister of Economics and President of the Reichsbank of Germany, Berlin, September 23, 1935,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1935. Volume II: The British Commonwealth, Europe
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), pp. 282–86.

11
.   Memorandum,
FRUS 1935
, pp. 282–86.

12
.   President’s Secretary’s File (Dodd), Part 2, Reel 11. FDR to Dodd, December 2, 1935. Roosevelt reiterated his concern over media control in Germany in a letter to Dodd on August 5, 1936, going so far as to liken the Nazi’s media control to the Republicans’ control over American media. “The election this year has, in a sense, a German parallel. If the Republicans should win or make enormous gains, it would prove that an 85% control of the Press and a very definite campaign of misinformation can be effective here just as it was in the early days of the Hitler rise to power. Democracy is verily on trial. I am inclined to say something a little later on about the great need for freedom of the press in this country, i.e., freedom to confine itself to actual facts in its news columns and freedom to express editorially any old opinion it wants to.” PSF Dodd, Part 2, Reel 11, August 5, 1936.

13
.   Ian Kershaw,
Hitler: 1936–1945, Nemesis
(London: Penguin, 2000), p. 141.

14
.   Draft Statement on Kristallnacht, November 15, 1938, President’s Secretary’s Files: Diplomatic Correspondence, Germany 1933–1938 (Box 31).

15
.   Thomas E. Ricks,
The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today
(New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 27.

16
.   The political scientist Barbara Farnham has argued that the Munich Crisis of September 1938 convinced Roosevelt that Hitler represented a genuine threat to the Western democracies, America included. Barbara Farnham,
Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis: A Study of Political Decision-Making
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). In contrast, I have suggested that FDR grasped the nature of Hitler’s regime and its dangers long before Munich. I have not focused on the Munich crisis here because it did not represent a pattern break but was instead the continuation of a pattern in Hitler’s diplomatic style.

17
.   Kershaw,
Hitler: 1936–1945
, p. 153.

18
.   The historian David Irving has argued that Hitler was unaware of the plans for Kristallnacht, and once he learned of it, he sought quickly to end it. This claim is exceedingly hard to support, given, among other issues, Hitler’s close collaboration and personal friendship with Josef Goebbels, who orchestrated the pogrom. Irving subsequently went to prison in Austria for denying the Holocaust.

19
.  
Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945
(hereafter
DGFP
), Series D, Memorandum by the Führer, “Directive for the Conversations with Mr. Sumner Welles,” February 29, 1940, doc. 637, pp. 817–19.

20
.   Montefiore,
Stalin
, p. 312.

21
.  
DGFP
, Series D, Supplement to Memorandum of the Conversation between the Foreign Minister and Sumner Welles on March 1, 1940, doc. 641, p. 829.

22
.  
Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 1, 1940
. Memorandum by Under-Secretary of State Welles, March 1, 1940.

23
.  
DGFP
, Series D, “Directive by the Führer and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht,” March 1, 1940, doc. 644, pp. 831–33.

24
.  
DGFP
, Series D, “Conversation Between the Führer and Chancellor and American Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, in the Presence of the Foreign Minister, State Secretary Meissner, and American Charge d’Affaires Kirk,” March 2, 1940, doc. 649, pp. 838–45.

25
.  
Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 1
, March 2, 1940. See also Welles’s subsequent account in Sumner Welles,
Time for Decision
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), ch. 3, “My Mission to Europe: 1940.”

26
.  
DGFP
, Series D, vol. VIII, “Conversation Between Field Marshal Göring and Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles,” March 3, 1940, doc. 653, pp. 853–62.

27
.  
FRUS
, Welles Report on conversations with Göring, March 2, 1940.

28
.   Fred L. Israel,
The War Diary of Breckinridge Long: Selections From the Years 1939–1944
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 64. One scholar of the Welles mission concludes that FDR had multiple aims in mind beyond seeking a peace initiative, including gleaning information on Hitler’s and Mussolini’s views, prolonging the Phoney War, and continuing Italy’s neutrality. See C. J. Simon Rofe,
Franklin Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy and the Welles Mission
(London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).

29
.   OSS Study of Hitler, 1943, Hitler 201 File, RID/AR, WASH X-2 PERSONALITIES #43

30
.  
DGFP
, Series D, vol. XI, doc. 326, Berlin, November 16, 1940, p. 547.

31
.  
DGFP
, Series D, vol. XI, doc. 326, Berlin, November 16, 1940, p. 542. Record of the conversation on November 12, 1940. People present: Hitler, Molotov, von Ribbentrop, Dekanozov, Hilger, and M. Pavlov.

32
.  
DGFP
, Series D, vol. XI, doc. 328, Berlin, November 15, 1940. Record of the conversation on November 13, 1940. People present: Hitler, Molotov, von Ribbentrop, Dekanozov, Hilger, and M. Pavlov, p. 554.

33
.  
DGFP
, Series D, vol. XI, doc. 328, Berlin, November 15, 1940. Record of the conversation on November 13, 1940. People present: Hitler, Molotov, von Ribbentrop, Dekanozov, Hilger, and M. Pavlov, p. 557.

34
.   Montefiore,
Stalin
, p. 350. Montefiore has offered this quote from an unpublished collection of notes by Reginald Dekanozov, son of the Soviet Ambassador to Berlin and Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Dekanozov. I have therefore not corroborated the quote from Montefiore’s book with the original that he claims is found in the son’s notes.

Chapter 6

1
.   This chapter and the subsequent one previously appeared as an article in the
Journal of Cold War Studies
. I am grateful to the journal for its permission to reprint the work here.

2
.   Lien-Hang T. Nguyen,
Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam
(The New Cold War History) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

3
.   “The Historic Talks: 35th Anniversary of the Paris Agreement, 1973–2008,” Diplomatic History Research Committee of the Foreign Ministry, ed. Vu Duong Huan [Vũ Du’o’ng Huân] (Hanoi, Vietnam: National Political Publishing House, 2009), p. 101.

4
.   This lament is made most famously by Robert McNamara,
In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam
(New York: Random House, 1996), p. 32. McNamara wrote that neither he nor the Presidents he served nor their top advisors possessed any appreciation for or understanding of Indochina, “its history, language, culture, or values.”

5
.   The
Van Kien Dang
is a collection of Politburo and Central Committee directives, speeches, and cables, emanating from Hanoi and covering most of the post–World War II era. The collection is assessed in the
Journal of Vietnamese Studies
, vol. 5, no. 2 (2010).

6
.   From among the many official DRV histories, this article has been informed in part by the histories of the Foreign Ministry, the People’s Army, the People’s Navy, the Sapper Forces, the Central Office of South Vietnam, histories of combat operations, histories of the Tonkin Gulf incident, the memoirs of prominent military officers, records of the secret negotiations with the Johnson administration, and some Vietnamese newspapers.

7
.   Pierre Asselin has highlighted the Party Secretary’s importance in state building. See his article, “Le Duan, the American War, and the Creation of an Independent Vietnamese State,”
The Journal of American—East Asian Relations
, vol. 10, nos. 1–2 (2001). A 2007 biography of Le Duan, which is essentially a hagiography by the official state-run publishing house, covers his general background and impact on Vietnamese history. See Tong Bi Thu,
Le Duan: Party General Secretary Le Duan
(Hanoi, Vietnam: VNA Hanoi Publishing House, 2007).

Liên-Hang T. Nguyen’s
Hanoi’s War
spotlights intra-Party factionalism, emphasizing the roles of Le Duan and Le Duc Tho. Still largely absent from the literature is a focus on the Party General Secretary’s ability to know his American enemy and its effect on the war.

8
.   Tuong Vu, “From Cheering to Volunteering: Vietnamese Communists and the Coming of the Cold War, 1940–1951,” in
Connecting Histories: The Cold War and Decolonization in Asia (1945–1962)
, eds. Christopher Goscha and Christian Ostermann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 172–204; and also “Dreams of Paradise: The Making of Soviet Outpost
in Vietnam,”
Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space
, no. 2 (2008), pp. 255–85.

9
.   Martin Grossheim, “‘Revisionism’ in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam: New Evidence from the East German Archives,”
Cold War History
, vol. 5, no. 4 (2005), pp. 451–77.

10
.   For an excellent analysis of just how dangerous Party rivalries could be, consider Le Duan’s maneuvers to sideline General VÕ Nguyên Giáp and force the Tê´t Offensive. See Merle L. Pribbenow, “General VÕ Nguyên Giáp and the Mysterious Evolution of the Plan for the 1968 Tê´t Offensive,”
Journal of Vietnamese Studies
, vol. 3, no. 2 (2008), pp. 1–33.

11
.   Christopher E. Goscha,
Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945–1954): An International and Interdisciplinary Approach
(Nordic Institute of Asian Studies) (Copenhagen, Denmark: NIAS Press, 2011), p. 261.