In November 1951, a public-relations executive named John W. Hill met Herbert Hoover at a dinner in New York City. It was an unhappy time in the United States, especially for conservative Republicans. Abroad, the Korean War had turned into a bloody stalemate that Pres. Harry Truman’s administration seemed unable to end. Earlier in the year, the president had abruptly dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a conservative hero, from America’s Far Eastern military command, to the consternation of Hoover and millions of others. At home, Truman’s liberal Democratic administration was under furious assault from conservative critics of its policies toward Communist regimes overseas and Communist subversion within our borders.
How quickly the world had changed since the close of the Second World War a few years earlier. Then the future had seemed bright with promise. Nazi Germany and imperial Japan had been crushed; fascism as an ideology had been discredited; the birth of the United Nations had appeared to presage an era of global peace. Now, a mere six years later, in Asia and along the Iron Curtain in Europe, a third world war — this time against Communist Russia and China — seemed a distinct possibility.
Advertisement
“Mr. Hoover,” said Hill that November evening, “the world is in one hell of a mess, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is,” Hoover replied.
“It has always occurred to me,” Hill continued, “that we are in this mess because of the mistakes of statesmen. Somebody ought to write a book [on the subject] like [E. S. Creasy’s] ‘Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World’; I think it would be a classic.”
“You are absolutely right,” Hoover responded. “That should be done, and I am going to tell you what should be the first chapter.”
“What is that?” asked 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 was delighted. “That would be a great book. Why don’t you write it, Mr. Hoover?”
“I haven’t the time,” Hoover countered. “Why don’t you write it?”
What Hill did not know — and what Hoover, that evening, did not tell him — was that for several years Hoover had been at work on a book with a similar theme: a comprehensive, critical history of American diplomacy between the late 1930s and 1945, with emphasis on the misguided policies of President Roosevelt. It was a volume in which the Roosevelt administration’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union would be subject to withering scrutiny.
Twenty years later, in 1971, in a conversation with an interviewer, Hill lamented that no one had ever written the book he had once proposed to Hoover on “The Fifteen Decisive Blunders of Statesmen.” “I have always wished somebody would do it,” he added. “It would be controversial because every one of the decisions the author stated would cause trouble, would cause somebody to come up and defend it, and the book would sell like hotcakes.”
What Hill did not realize was that nearly eight years earlier Hoover had completed his own book of diplomatic blunders. Unlike the scattershot collection of essays that Hill had envisaged, Hoover’s tome was tightly focused. Originally conceived as the section of his memoirs that would cover his life during World War II, the “War Book” (as he called it) had morphed into something far more ambitious: an unabashed, revisionist reexamination of the entire war — and a sweeping indictment of the “lost statesmanship” of Franklin Roosevelt.
Truman was not obligated to Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender” folly. It had been denounced by our own military leaders in Europe
Here we have a typical example of "war being a matter too important for military men". Churchil states it clearly in his book: he didn't want to repeat the blunder of 1918: because Germany had not been militarily crushed, because the Allied armies had not even set foot in ots soils then both the General staff and some Austrian demagogue had been able to pretend that Germany had not been defeated buty betrayed (by revolutionaries and by the Jews) and advocate for a war of revenge. So Churchill wanted that this time it had to be made well clear to every German that Germany had been defeated and that it would do well not to start still another war. He thought that even if it meant taking additional casualties in WWII it would spare countless lives from a third war. It can be argued that nuclear weapons would anyway prevent a major hot war in Europe but the American generals who advocated for letting Germany out of the hook didn't know about the Bomb, so with the data they had at hand they were simply wrong. Also what would have happened if even after the Allies had agreed on a separate peace the German Army had been defeated by the Soviets? Given how the Red Army simply rolled over the Weharmacht in 1945 crushing every nest of resistance with Stalin's organ fire it is far from sure that the Wehrmacht would have been able to stop the Russians. So with all of Germany under Soviet rule and the Red Army, one whose average soldier would have had some right to feel betrayed, on the French border who would have won the Cold War?
"Given how the Red Army simply rolled over the Weharmacht in 1945 "
For the sake of argument...I think the point Wilson was making was that if the US hadn't helped the Soviet Union, or diverted Grerman attention by opening different fronts, they wouldn't have been able to to simply roll over the Wehrmacht. The idea being that left alone to slug it out, neither country would be able to claim absolute victory as the exhaustion of men and materiel would have been too great.
I agree. There was no reason for us to supply Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union, at tremendous costs to ourselves. Those supplies would have served us far better in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. The Eastern Front might have ended in a bloody stalemate, and the Iron Curtain would have been a lot farther to the east when the dust settled.
You're forgetting how close the Germans came to defeating the Soviet Union between 1941 and mid-1943.
During the period between December 1941 and mid-1943, American aid to the Soviets was considered vital by the U.S./British Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), which wanted desperately to make sure that the USSR could stay in the fight against Germany.
Even after Stalingrad fell (February 1943), the Germans remained on the strategic offensive against the Russians. It was only after the German defeat at Kursk (July 1943) that the Soviets finally gained the decisive upper hand against Hitler.
Before mid-1943, American aid to the Russians was strategically vital, as the CCS well understood realized at the time. It may very well have provided the margin of victory in the theater that engaged the bulk of the Wehrmacht from June 1941 through May 1945.
In WWII we provided lend lease tanks, trucks and aircraft to USSR. they provided millions of bodies to operate them. USSR lost over 1 million second lieutenants as they destroyed the German Army. Who gets to be a 2nd lieutenant? The best young men with the greatest potential.
I agree, they were right to withhold this sad temper tantrum from a rejected Progressive.
By, apparently, being unaware of what Hitler would have accomplished had he time to develop more super weapons including nuclear weapons and jet bombers, it is evident that Hoover is incorrect. While it's true that one world threat was replaced with another, Hitler and the German military-industrial complex could not be allowed victory of any kind. It took many more years for the USSR to topple under its own weight but helping them defeat Hitler, as unpalatable as it was, turned out to be the best line of defence.
Should the reference to 1941 in the fifth blunder (United States' Undeclared War) be a reference to 1940? Roosevelt was not elected "a few weeks before" the winter of 1941-42, and by the winter of 1941, America had formally declared war on Germany and Japan.
Bulldog, at first (and second) blush, this seemed odd to me, too. But, the winter of 1941 started on December 21, 1940, and the day of infamy, of course, was the following fall, on December 7, 1941. FDR properly requested and received a Congressional Declaration of War on December 8, 1941.
On the French-British Guarantee to Poland and Romania: Was Hoover arguing that the Hitler-Stalin pact of Aug 1939 wouldn't have been signed if Britain and France had not given their guarantee?
I think that's a stretch. Hitler was weak in 1939 and their was no assurance Russia wouldn't intervene if Germany attacked Poland, so the pact was a necessity from Hitler's standpoint.
It's hard to see how the Allied guarantee to Poland kept Germany and Russia from going to war with each other--Ribbentrop and Molotov did that through diplomacy.
I'm not impressed with the claim that Britain was out of danger once Germany invaded Russia. This ignores the fact that the submarine war in the Atlantic did not reach its peak until May 1943. Britain could well have been starved out without the kind of U.S. aid Hoover seemed to feel went beyond proper neutral limits.
I'm also not impressed with the claims the A-bombs were unnecessary. No, they weren't. The alternatives were to accept a peace offer from Japan whose terms were remarkably similar to those of the derided Versailles Treaty, or to destroy Japan's rail system with conventional bombing (already in the planning stages) at the cost of starving 8 million Japanese from the resulting disruption of rice distribution. The use of the bombs was the least awful of the awful alternatives facing the U.S. in mid-1945.
Hoover seemed to have forgotten that "best is enemy to good" -- a saying particularly and painfully true in time of war. Sometimes all the alternatives have some poor consequences.
While reading the preliminary setup, I was outraged (slightly) that Hoover's heirs had supressed publication of what sounded like such an important document.
But after reading the excerpts posted afterward here, anyone can clearly see they were merely trying to protect what remained of Hoover's reputation.
This "Magnum Opus" is hardly even interesting as an examination into the opinions of a former president. The only value I can see from the these ahistorical, preposterous, and biliously partisan ravings is a sad picture of the senility of a not-too-well informed man.
While the concessions at Yalta & Tehran were disgraceful, they were really no more than codifying the real situation. Stalin had boots on the ground, a massive army built with free dollars, and the United States didn't have the will to continue another war.
And the bizarre notion that Japan was secretly begging to surrender a year before Hiroshima & Nagasaki excepting only that the Emperor be not dethroned is as laughable as the idea that Britain's last minute mutual-defense treaty with Poland forced Germany to invade it. If actually true, this would be among the greatest political cover-ups, but sadly it is entirely unsupported, and undocumented except by Dewey-era right-wing conspiracy theorists equivalent to modern day Truthers.
Since any of us can point to the inevitable ascendancy of Hitler in Europe (and Japan in the Pacific) to expose the folly of Hoover's non-interventionism it is tempting to let him off the hook in this regard, except that his opinions formed as knee-jerk political reactionaryism before the US joined the war were somehow untempered by reality even 20 years afterward.
The abandonment of Chiang Kaih-Shek and the Chinese nationalists might be the only accurately portrayed blunder of them all, but Mao's attack from Mongolia with Russian reinforcement would have been inevitable, unless of course we'd have allowed Hitler & Tojo to overrun Russia and China and consolidate their gains before beginning the battles of Britain and Pearl Harbor -- which in reality was bombed but not defeated.
I agree that Hoover made a very simplistic and laughable proposition when he said Japan was "begging for surrender."
Regardless, I feel Hoover's basic premise remains true - there was NO reason for the USA to support the Soviet Union, either before the war, or to make any agreements to Soviet domination of the Baltics and Eastern Europe - even if it was a military fact at the time.
I sense more than a whiff of Jimmy Carter-like bitterness in Hoover's memoirs. History has judged both men rather harshly as "failed" Presidents. The truth is, Hoover was a Progressive who put in place a number of mildly socialist measures at the onset of the Great Depression - he just didn't push them with the fervor of his replacement, FDR. Who knows? If Hoover had been reelected, perhaps the Depression would have ended a lot sooner, just as defeating Mr. Obama just might, possibly, end the Great Recession sooner - depending on who replaces him.
"Despite these physical losses and these moral, political disasters, and these international follies, Americans can have faith that we will grow strong again; that the march of progress will sometime be renewed. Despite the drift to collectivism, despite degeneration in government, despite the demagogic intellectuals, despite the corruption in our government and the moral corruptions of our people, we still hold to Christianity, we still have the old ingenuity in our scientific and industrial progress. We have 35 million children marching through our schools and 2,500,000 in our institutions of higher learning."
