General Eisenhower would do well to include George N. Crocker’s Roosevelt’s Road to Russia (Regnery, $5.00) in his knapsack as he reconnoitres the Communist Empire’s southern frontiers from New Delhi to Rome. Assuredly, the President should deeply consider why World War II turned so disastrously upon us, before he (like Roosevelt) visits Russia. The statesmen of the Atlantic powers, Roosevelt in the van, closely attended by an infatuated Harry Hopkins and the coldly enigmatic Gen. George C. Marshall, saved Stalin’s tottering regime from his subjects as well as from Hitler, as an outcome of history’s most comprehensive war, a war fought ironically in the name of the Four Freedoms. In the aftermath commissars have replaced gauleiters in eastern Europe; the Hammer and Sickle flies in Asia where the Rising Sun of Nippon once flew; and, as for freedom, all’s to do again.
It is this harrowing, infinitely melancholy testament to man’s villainy and folly that Mr. Crocker again recites. A San Francisco lawyer, a former law school dean, Mr. Crocker expertly marshals the familiar sources, driving in a passionately terse prose to his conclusion. He holds as a necessary premise that the raising of a new and malignant enemy of the fluid, organic West was not the work of impersonal, historic forces. Stalin was fighting two wars, one of defense, the second a war for world dominion. As for Roosevelt, he was, as Crocker recapitulates the President’s acts and policies, equally intent that Stalin should win both. Unambiguously, Crocker states his conclusion:
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