This is not about current events. I'm pretty sure that when someone mentions the former president here, most would think it a metaphor for something relating to the current unemployment situation.
Not this time.
The Hoover institution at Stanford University is coming out with a huge tome former President Hoover finished half a century ago and never before published because it seems that he hated FDR so much he was a Nazi sympathizer....
more below the fold.
At the National Book Fair in New York city a month or so ago, I saw the publishing wing of Stanford University's archconservative think tank, the Hoover Institution, was going to publish a book by it's namesake, the former President of the United States:
Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath (HOOVER INST PRESS PUBLICATION) [Hardcover]
George H. Nash (Editor)
Herbert Hoover’s “magnum opus”—at last published nearly fifty years after its completion—offers a revisionist reexamination of World War II and its cold war aftermath and a sweeping indictment of the “lost statesmanship” of Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover offers his frank evaluation of Roosevelt’s foreign policies before Pearl Harbor and policies during the war, as well as an examination of the war’s consequences, including the expansion of the Soviet empire at war’s end and the eruption of the cold war against the Communists.
The culmination of an extraordinary literary project that Herbert Hoover launched during World War II, his “magnum opus”—at last published nearly fifty years after its completion—offers a revisionist reexamination of the war and its cold war aftermath and a sweeping indictment of the “lost statesmanship” of Franklin Roosevelt. Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath originated as a volume of Hoover’s memoirs, a book initially focused on his battle against President Roosevelt’s foreign policies before Pearl Harbor. As time went on, however, Hoover widened his scope to include Roosevelt’s foreign policies during the war, as well as the war’s consequences: the expansion of the Soviet empire at war’s end and the eruption of the cold war against the Communists.
On issue after issue, Hoover raises crucial questions that continue to be debated to this day. Did Franklin Roosevelt deceitfully maneuver the United States into an undeclared and unconstitutional naval war with Germany in 1941? Did he unnecessarily appease Joseph Stalin at the pivotal Tehran conference in 1943? Did communist agents and sympathizers in the White House, Department of State, and Department of the Treasury play a malign role in some of America’s wartime decisions? Hoover raises numerous arguments that challenge us to think again about our past. Whether or not one ultimately accepts his arguments, the exercise of confronting them will be worthwhile to all.
From the blurb above, one can see why the book was never published before. He had taken decades to rehabilitate his reputation somewhat, from the prolonger of the great depression and arch-conservative nag, to genuine traitor. I've only read the blurb, but that's enough. Hoover, the bitter old man, was not the hero humanitarian of World War I he was a McCarthyite, who would believe any lie just as long as it conformed with his prejudices.
According to the blurb, Nazi Germany wasn't as bad as Soviet Russia, and therefore we should left well enough alone. That Hoover's archenemy Franklin Roosevelt was the aggressor, and if it wasn't for him, a Jew-free Nazi Europe would have been a fat and happy friend to all.
This sort of pernicious thinking raises it's disgusting head every now and again. Take a look at Pat Buchanan, who wrote in a letter to the NY Times Book review just last week:
In his May 29 essay, The Battle for History, Adam Kirsch misrepresents the message of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War.” My book is no “isolationist lesson” but a case against compulsive interventionism. For example:
In March 1939, six months after the Munich agreement, Slovakia sought to secede from Prague. Hitler accepted its request for a protectorate, then bullied President Emil Hacha of Czechoslovakia into making his rump state a German protectorate. No vital British interest was at risk, yet on March 31 Neville Chamberlain issued a sudden, unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels who had joined in dismembering Czechoslovakia.
Enraged at Poland’s refusal to discuss a return of Danzig, a town taken from Germany at Versailles, Hitler attacked. Honoring its commitment, Britain declared war on Germany, bringing in the empire and eventually the United States, and turning a 30-day war in Eastern Europe into a six-year world war. Out of that world war came tens of millions of deaths, the Holocaust, Stalinization of half of Europe, collapse of the empire and the bankruptcy of Britain. And was Poland saved? No, but ’twas a famous victory.
It wasn't Hitler who caused the Second World War, it was those pesky Western Liberals, who realized that the 1938 Munich pact was a gross mistake. (although Hoover and Buchanan didn't think it was)! History is sometimes written by the losers. Hoover had never gotten over being rejected by the American people (he's like Jimmy Carter in that way) and that pretty much colors his thinking. Pat is just a fascist sympathizer.
The book is coming out in a couple of weeks, and I really look forward to the reviews.