The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners (4 page)

Who knows what led Churchill to this
judgment? I don’t. Radosh seems to be now consulting historian Laurence Rees,
in whose popular book,
World War II
Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazi and the West
, the “gravity of the
war” anecdote appears (p. 127). Radosh will rely heavily on Rees throughout his
“take-down” of
American Betrayal
.
Rees is a British historian and BBC documentary-maker, and reliably mainstream
(read: liberal). (Full disclosure: Rees is cited about a half-dozen times in
American Betrayal
.)

If Radosh had just turned the page,
he would have seen,
pace
Rees (p.
128), that the US disagreed with Churchill’s moral and/or military position
here, as did the British War Cabinet. Thus, Churchill’s “military reality on
the ground” concession to Stalin at this time was rejected. This rather cancels
Radosh’s point about the “military reality on the ground” dictating Soviet
appeasement, at least this time around. And that rather cancels his point
against me.

One might
quote Radosh to Radosh himself to note that his “judgment” (see “Radosh’s
Introduction”) here was “not only bizarre on its face, but also unwarranted by
the evidence and refuted by the very authorities [he] draws on.”

Then
again, even if Churchill were making judgments to appease Stalin based on “the
military reality on the ground,” that “reality” certainly shifted for Churchill
to a point where Churchill would come up against Stalin throughout the
following year, 1943, in pushing the Italy/Balkan strategy.

But as
noted above, Radosh completely missed the Italy/Balkan part of my book.

MILITARY ANALYST HANSON BALDWIN ON THE
“SEPARATE PEACE” FEAR FACTOR

For an
opposing view on the “separate peace” fear factor, I will now quote military
analyst Hanson Baldwin.

In
Great Mistakes the War
, pp. 10-11,
Baldwin writes:

“In the same manner, a
careful study of strategical facts and available military information should
have indicated clearly the impossibility,
from
the Russian point of view
, of a separate peace with Germany. Such a peace
could only have been bought in the opening years of the war by major
territorial concessions on Russia’s part, concessions which might well have
imperiled the Stalin regime, and which, in any case, would have left the
Russo-German conflict in the category of `unfinished business.’ In the closing
years of the war, when Russia had everything to gain and nothing to lose by
continuing the struggle to complete victory, a separate peace would have been
politically ludicrous.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Nonetheless,
Radosh raps me once more for failing to take the conventional consensus view.

Radosh:

“Instead of weighing these
fears [separate-peace fear-factor], West turns to another anecdote…”

THE MISSING ANECDOTES

I now
re-enter the surreal dimension of this rebuttal to note that the anecdote he
now describes is
not in my book.

This, too, is part of the Radosh
“take-down” pattern: Imagining or fabricating events (I don’t know which),
statements that are not in my book. The following is a particularly bizarre
example.

The
anecdote, he writes, is “telling how George Elsey found confidential files in
the Map Room that showed FDR naively thinking he could trust Stalin, and
instructed Hopkins to tell Soviet Minister Molotov that FDR was in favor of a
Second Front in 1942.”

When I
posted at dianawest.net the fact that this anecdote wasn’t in my book, Radosh
replied at Frontpage Magazine (“Diana West’s Attempt to Respond”
^[7]
). Incredibly, he fought me about the
contents of my book.

Radosh:

“
Maybe
she couldn’t find the anecdote. But it is there in three different places where
she writes how FDR told Hopkins to go into Molotov’s bedroom while he was
staying in the White House so that he could meet with the President, and at
that meeting, Hopkins told Molotov that FDR was in favor of a Second Front.”

Please
note how Anecdote 1 (George Elsey, confidential files, Map Room) has changed
form – now it’s in Molotov’s bedroom. But in Radosh’s telling, it is
still somehow the same anecdote and, yes, it still remains in my book –
now in three places. Again, there is a surreal quality to what I am about to
write: The anecdote
is not in my book – not once, not three times.

Radosh
even cites page numbers where these anecdotes are, in fact, not to be found:

“They can be found on p. 129, p. 268 and p. 296.
She missed them
because
of
a trivial error I
did make
which was to associate the anecdote
she took from her
source,
Laurence Rees’
WW II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the
Nazis and the West
, with the anecdote about Elsey’s find, which is in
another part of Rees’ book.”

Are you following this? If not, the
key point to remember now is Radosh’s claim that my source for this anecdote
(that isn’t in my book) is historian Laurence Rees.

He writes:

“West may not have mentioned Elsey’s role in her own text,
but it is the anecdote itself about the Second Front that is the crux of this
matter and
she does refer to it on three occasions.”

Caught, Radosh blithely excuses his
sloppy error and continues.

But
Radosh
is wrong again.
Molotov’s name appears on p. 129 of
American
Betrayal,
but not in a “second front” anecdote. The source, by the way, for
the p. 129 Molotov reference is Robert Sherwood, not Rees.

There
are ”second front” anecdotes on p. 268 and p. 296 (congratulations), but
neither of them is about “
how FDR told Hopkins to go into
Molotov’s bedroom while he was staying in the White House so that he could meet
with the President, and at that meeting, Hopkins told Molotov that FDR was in
favor of a Second Front,” as Radosh maintains.

In
my
book – not Rees’s, which Radosh is clearly confusing with
mine (and not for the final time) − it is Hopkins, not FDR, who is acting
with volition, and there is nothing in my account about Molotov’s bedroom. On
p. 268 I write: “Was it merely paradoxical back in May 1942, when, according to
Soviet
records, Harry Hopkins privately coached Foreign Minister Molotov
on what to say to FDR to overcome U.S. military arguments against a `second
front’ in France in May 1942?”

A different import entirely. Not
surprisingly, my source for this isn’t Rees, as Radosh asserts. It’s Eduard
Mark.

David Horowitz needs to reassess who
is “incompetent” here.

BACK TO THE “SEPARATE PEACE” FEAR FACTOR

There’s more.

Book-report-style, Radosh trots out
John Lewis Gaddis’s
The Cold War: A New
History
to comment on the main Radosh “claim” that is
not in my book
–
Claim No. 5, northern France – as a segue back to another dressing-down
for my not having embraced the conventional consensus on the “separate peace”
fear factor as the catch-all explanation for Soviet appeasement during the war.

Before I go on, I would like to
point something out about Gaddis’s book. Yale professor Gaddis, whom Radosh
calls the “pre-eminent historian of this conflict,” wrote this history of the
Cold War one decade after the US release
of
2,900 KGB cables known as the Venona archive. These World War II-era cables
quite dramatically confirm the Soviet espionage activities of many members of
the US federal government (some extremely influential) during what we think of
as the dawn of the Cold War.

Gaddis,
however, in his “new” Cold War history, doesn’t mention Venona (or other KGB
archives). He mentions Soviet agent/State Department official Alger Hiss once
in passing. Hiss, of course, did many things while working on behalf of the
“Soviet motherland” (as Radosh calls it), including presiding over the creation
of the United Nations, a Cold War battleground, which Gaddis does mention.
Gaddis doesn’t mention Treasury official/Soviet agent Harry Dexter White at
all, although White presided over the creation of the global economy (IMF and
World Bank). Nor does he mention Whittaker Chambers, the ex-Communist
agent-turned-witness who exposed Hiss as a Soviet agent in momentous
Congressional hearings in 1948. Indeed, it was not until preparing for a
conference honoring Chambers’ monumental anti-Communist manifesto
Witness
last year that Gaddis, as he
“confessed” to the audience, read
Witness
for the first time.

I
reference and discuss all of the above in
American
Betrayal
. Radosh, in his “take-down” of
American
Betrayal,
relies heavily upon the Yale professor’s book as a shining
example of the consensus I should have conformed to but didn’t.

For
not conforming – in Radosh’s mind, for
failing
to conform − Radosh proceeds not to debate my book,
but to impugn it as “yellow journalism conspiracy theories,” and to smear me
personally as “unhinged” and a “crackpot.”

Radosh writes:

“I quote Gaddis at length to indicate that the decisions
reached by FDR and Churchill were not the results of being run by NKVD
conspirators who had infiltrated Western governments, but because they needed
to win the war against Hitler, which they realized would be impossible without
Soviet military strength.”

Just to underscore, Gaddis doesn’t
discuss “NKVD conspirators,” as Radosh calls them, or agents of Soviet
influence, as I call them, in the first place. Radosh is making a specious
argument for the inevitability of the “military reality on the ground” as
having been the only possible and totally objective factor weighing on the
decision-making of FDR and Churchill.
American
Betrayal
considers the impact of identified Soviet spies and agents on
their policy-making chain. In Radosh-world, this is clearly verboten.

So Radosh re-states the blinkered,
conventional-consensus wisdom. But this doesn’t make it so – and
particularly not when Radosh again grossly mischaracterizes the relationship
between the “NKVD conspirators” and the Western governments. “Influence” was
the name of the game – and the subject of
American Betrayal
 
not
“control,” as I have noted with some frequency above. FDR and Churchill were
not being “run” by “NKVD conspirators,” nor does my book make such a claim.
American Betrayal
examines the impact of
Soviet
influence operations
on US
policy-making. Radosh, through his repeated distortions and omissions, seems to
want to change the subject. By extension, he has in his review prevented reader
from learning that Soviet “influence” is the subject under consideration in my
book.

Why does Radosh continually misstate
the concept so clearly outlined in my book?

ABOUT CHURCHILL

Out of thin air − or maybe out
of another book − Radosh writes that I depict Winston Churchill in
American Betrayal
as a “Soviet dupe.”
This, too, is
not in my book.

Without offering any supporting
quotations or anecdotes, Radosh states:

“Even the most minimally informed reader will recognize the
most obvious chink in West’s conspiracy theories: the failure to explain how
the anti-Bolshevik Churchill, whose hatred for the Soviet regime went back to
1917 when he sought to crush it in its cradle, became a Soviet dupe.”

This unsupported claim has been
seized upon to bash my book, from the sundry attack-pieces that popped up
quickly, like toadstools, to a string of one-star comments the book accrued on
Amazon, post-Radosh.

Even cursory observation of
Churchill’s actions
vis a vis
Stalin
during the wartime alliance reveals the British prime minister did not follow a
policy that could accurately be described as resolutely “anti-Bolshevik.” That
aside: I have re-examined every reference to Churchill in
American Betrayal
, and my characterization of Churchill in no way
resembles “dupe.” On the contrary, the portrait that emerges is of an
increasingly powerless junior partner doomed to make a very bad deal. In
focusing on Soviet influence on the Roosevelt White House, my spotlight reveals
the advancing marginalization of Churchill by war’s end, particularly once he
has lost the “second front” debate. In fact, some of the most perplexing and/or
suspicious actions of Harry Hopkins − the controversial top aide to FDR
whom, I argue, appears to have been an agent of Stalin’s influence inside the
White House − catalogued in
American
Betrayal
concern Hopkins’ documented efforts to contain Churchill. This
includes Hopkins’ efforts to, in effect, “protect” FDR from Churchill’s
influence, whether about sending troops into North Africa after the fall of
Tobruk, expanding into the Mediterranean (more of the south-central Europe
strategy), supporting anti-Communist Polish resistance, and so on. According to
Charles E. Bohlen’s account, Hopkins all but ordered the prime minister of
Britain privately to stop bringing up even an ancillary Balkan effort to FDR at
the Tehran conference.