- Crocker, George N.
Roosevelt's Road To Russia.
Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, [1959] 2010.
ISBN 978-1-163-82408-5.
-
Before Barack Obama, there was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Unless you lived through the era, imbibed its history from
parents or grandparents, or have read dissenting works which
have survived rounds of deaccessions by libraries, it is hard
to grasp just how visceral the animus was against Roosevelt
by traditional, constitutional, and free-market conservatives.
Roosevelt seized control of the economy, extended the tentacles
of the state into all kinds of relations between individuals,
subdued the judiciary and bent it to his will, manipulated a
largely supine media which, with a few exceptions, became his
cheering section, and created programs which made large sectors
of the population directly dependent upon the federal government
and thus a reliable constituency for expanding its power.
He had the audacity to stand for re-election an unprecedented
three times, and each time the American people gave him the nod.
But, as many old-timers, even those who were opponents of
Roosevelt at the time and appalled by what the centralised
super-state he set into motion has become, grudgingly say,
“He won the war.” Well, yes, by the time he died
in office on April 12, 1945, Germany was close to defeat;
Japan was encircled, cut off from the resources needed to
continue the war, and being devastated by attacks from the air;
the war was sure to be won by the Allies. But how did the
U.S. find itself in the war in the first place, how did
Roosevelt's policies during the war affect its conduct, and
what consequences did they have for the post-war world?
These are the questions explored in this book, which I suppose
contemporary readers would term a “paleoconservative”
revisionist account of the epoch, published just 14 years after
the end of the war. The work is mainly an account of Roosevelt's
personal diplomacy during meetings with Churchill or in the
Big Three conferences with Churchill and Stalin. The picture
of Roosevelt which emerges is remarkably consistent with what
Churchill expressed in deepest confidence to those closest
to him which I summarised in my review of
The Last Lion, Vol. 3 (January 2013)
as “a lightweight, ill-informed and not particularly
engaged in military affairs and blind to the geopolitical
consequences of the Red Army's occupying eastern and central
Europe at war's end.” The events chronicled here and
Roosevelt's part in them is also very much the same as
described in
Freedom Betrayed (June 2012),
which former president Herbert Hoover worked on from shortly
after Pearl Harbor until his death in 1964, but which was not
published until 2011.
While Churchill was constrained in what he could say by the
necessity of maintaining Britain's alliance with the U.S., and
Hoover adopts a more scholarly tone, the present volume voices
the outrage over Roosevelt's strutting on the international
stage, thinking “personal diplomacy”
could “bring around ‘Uncle Joe’ ”,
condemning huge numbers of military personnel and civilians on
both the Allied and Axis sides to death by blurting out
“unconditional surrender” without any consultation
with his staff or Allies, approving the genocidal
Morgenthau Plan
to de-industrialise defeated Germany, and, discarding the
high principles of his own
Atlantic Charter,
delivering millions of Europeans into communist tyranny and
condoning one of the largest episodes of ethnic cleansing in
human history.
What is remarkable is how difficult it is to come across an
account of this period which evokes the author's passion,
shared with many of his time, of how the bumblings of a
naïve, incompetent, and narcissistic chief executive
had led directly to so much avoidable tragedy on a global
scale. Apart from Hoover's book, finally published more than
half a century after this account, there are few works accessible
to the general reader which present the view that the tragic outcome
of World War II was in large part preventable, and that Roosevelt
and his advisers were responsible, in large part, for what
happened.
Perhaps there are parallels in this account of wickedness
triumphing through cluelessness for our present era.
This edition is a facsimile reprint of the original edition
published by Henry Regnery Company in 1959.
January 2014 