Herbert not J. Edgar

Herbert Hoover (1874 - 1964) & J. Edgar Hoover (1895 - 1972) were not related although both men have long been maligned by liberals as though they were blood kin born into a family tainted with lunacy. J. Edgar was hated because he was wise to communism and did something about it. The Left’s hatred of Herbert was broader in scope with one important feature added; denigrating Herbert justified FDR’s policies.

J. Edgar must rely upon others to defend him. Not so with Herbert:

Following Hoover's death in 1964, his heirs decided to place his manuscript in storage, where for nearly half a century it has remained unread -- until now.

Two items in the enclosed article caught my attention. The first shows that Hoover and Truman had something in common:

Just 60 years ago, in November 1951, Herbert Hoover told an acquaintance, John W. 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."

Then-Senator Harry Truman in 1941:

"If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word."

Based on Truman’s astute recommendation he was surely the last good Democrat. No Democrat seriously advocated killing Communists since Truman screwed the Soviet Union at the United Nations and stopped communism in Korea. Indeed, Democrats went out of their way to save Communists and communism in Vietnam, through most of the Cold War and beyond.

I found this next item most fascinating:

As his book stood in 1953, for example -- when it was titled "Lost Statesmanship" -- Hoover listed 19 "gigantic blunders" by U.S. and British policymakers.

I cannot prove this, but I believe that as Hoover’s thinking evolved he changed the title to Freedom Betrayed because he was beginning to see that betrayal was rapidly becoming a political calculation among Democrats and some Republicans as well; i.e., what can we get away with? They got away with a lot.

Herbert Hoover died in 1964. In the 47 years since his death Democrat treason has become so obvious it is an accepted fact of political life in Washington and the media. That makes Hoover’s use of the word betrayal all the more prophetic.

Finally, Herbert Hoover speaking for himself is a must read for everyone, more so for those who are sick of the FDR myth. There should be enough in the following article in two parts to whet every appetite for new insights into the FDR era, WWII, communism, and a lot more.

Revisionist History That Matters
By Tom Bethell on 11.18.11 @ 6:08AM
Herbert Hoover's long buried assessment of Franklin Roosevelt and "The Good War."
Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath
Edited by George H. Nash
(Hoover Institution Press, 920 pages, $49.95)

Within the past two weeks, an astonishing new book has been published. Freedom Betrayed, written by President Herbert Hoover in his retirement, is a wide-ranging attack on the decisions made by his White House successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hoover worked on it for 20 years and regarded it as his magnum opus. The manuscript was edited by Hoover's principal biographer, George H. Nash, who also wrote a lengthy introduction. I can do no better than to quote from the book's dust jacket:

Following Hoover's death in 1964, his heirs decided to place his manuscript in storage, where for nearly half a century it has remained unread -- until now.

In this book, perhaps the most ambitious and systematic work of World War II revisionism ever attempted, Hoover offers his frank evaluation of President Roosevelt's foreign policies before Pearl Harbor and 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.

John Earl Haynes, the author of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, writes that even readers who are "comfortable with the established account will find themselves thinking that on some points the accepted history should be reconsidered and perhaps revised."

Just 60 years ago, in November 1951, Herbert Hoover told an acquaintance, John W. 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 replied: "That would be a great book. Why don't you write it, Mr. Hoover?"

Hoover said he didn't have the time. In fact, he had been working on such a book since 1944.

Now it has been published, by the Hoover Institution Press.

As new books about World War II and its aftermath appeared in print, including those by Winston Churchill, Hoover would revise what he had written, sometimes softening his earlier opinions. One of the merits of the published book is that George Nash includes as appendices memoranda from Hoover showing his thinking at earlier stages.

As his book stood in 1953, for example -- when it was titled "Lost Statesmanship" -- Hoover listed 19 "gigantic blunders" by U.S. and British policymakers. These began in 1933 with FDR's diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union and continued with the British and French guarantee to Poland in 1939. George Nash told me in an email that Hoover considered the Polish guarantee to have been "the greatest blunder in the history of British statesmanship."

Even Churchill saw (later) that it had been a mistake. But he supported it at the time. But in The Gathering Storm (1948 ), Churchill demonstrated the futility of Chamberlain's declaration of war. (Chamberlain was stung by the charges of appeasement after Munich and with Hitler's Poland invasion he tried to recover.)

Hoover was quite critical of Churchill. He had a "surpassing power of oratory and word pictures," Hoover wrote, but "intellectual integrity was not his strong point." The Gathering Storm was "a mass of bitter attacks upon [Stanley] Baldwin and [Neville] Chamberlain who had kept him out of office for years."

Another "major blunder," Hoover thought, was FDR's decision in 1941 to throw the U.S. into an "undeclared war with Germany and Japan, in total violation of promises upon which he had been elected a few weeks before." Roosevelt's "total economic sanctions" against Japan in the summer of 1941, and his "contemptuous refusal" of the Japanese prime minister's peace proposals in September, Hoover saw as the crucial precursors to Pearl Harbor. The day after the attack, Hoover told a friend that FDR's "continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten."

In the weeks before Lend-Lease (enacted in March 1941 and allowing the president to place war equipment at the disposal of foreign powers), Hoover charged that Roosevelt "knew definitely of Hitler's determination to attack Russia," and did so by early 1941. Hoover repeatedly said that if Hitler couldn't get the German army across the 22-mile wide British channel, he had no chance whatever with the Atlantic Ocean. Germany didn't threaten the United States.

Hoover's criticism of Lend-Lease has a very modern ring. Congress had become a "rubber stamp," he said, surrendering to the President "the power to make war." We have heard identical complaints about our more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress, now even more than 70 years ago, is willing to do almost anything, as long as it doesn't have to exercise to its constitutionally mandated war-making power.

Much of what Hoover said in opposition to FDR's (and Churchill's) war policies can be summarized this way: Stalin was every bit as bad as Hitler. So let them fight it out. FDR certainly didn't see things that way. Domestic politics provides a partial explanation. Communist (or at least Marxist) sympathy in this country and in Europe was strong at the time, whereas Nazi sympathizers could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Socialism has long been (and continues to be) a far greater temptation in the Western world than Nazism (National Socialism) ever was.

Hoover said: "The greatest loss of statesmanship in all American history was the tacit American alliance and support of Communist Russia when Hitler made his attack in June 1941.… American aid to Russia meant victory for Stalin and the spread of Communism to the world."

Hoover was also highly critical of George Marshall, who became Harry Truman's Secretary of State. Hoover got on well with Truman (in contrast to Roosevelt). Still, Truman had sacrificed "all China" to the Communists, "by insistence of his left-wing advisors and his appointment of General Marshall to execute their will."

 

PART TWO:

As for Hoover's own stance, he was unrepentant. "I was opposed to the war and every step in it," he wrote in 1953. "I have no apologies and no regrets."

A Yale University economics instructor named Arthur Kemp became a Hoover confidante after the war. If Hoover had published his "Lost Statesmanship" more or less in its 1953 form, Kemp wrote, its "emotional impact" would have been "tremendous." It would have appeared during the Korean War and the ascendancy of Senator Joseph McCarthy. George Nash continues:

Amid the clamorous debates over Roosevelt's conduct at Yalta and the question of "who lost China," such a book might indeed have electrified the nation. Surprisingly -- considering the intensity of his convictions -- Hoover continued to hold back. He had already indicated privately in 1950 and 1951 that his Magnum Opus would not be published "for some years."… Instead of racing to publish his sizzling manuscript while the political iron was hot [he turned it over to an aide] for still more editing and feedback.

Ten years later, after further revisions, interest among publishers remained high by 1963. The Chicago Tribune was eager to serialize the book, the Reader's Digest was enthusiastic and apparently ready to do a condensed version; and Henry Regnery – the father of Al Regnery, The American Spectator's publisher today -- "asked to publish Hoover's study."

INEVITABLY, WE RUN INTO the problem of counterfactual history. We don't know what would have happened if different choices had been made; especially if Britain had not declared war in 1939 or if FDR had accepted Japan's peace offer in 1941. But we do know this. Those who are "comfortable with the established account," to quote John Earl Haynes, have already fought their own counterfactual battles and won, to their own satisfaction. World War II was "the good war."

Measured by its mortality rate, World War II (with 9.4 million deaths per year) was by far the deadliest in history; with over three times the mortality rate of the second deadliest. That was the First World War (with 3 million deaths per year). More than 400,000 American died in World War II. Communism and its accompanying poverty and oppression came to Eastern Europe and stayed for 45 years after Hitler and Nazism were dead and buried. China was overwhelmed by fanaticism, horror, and famine for 30 years. North Korea remains in that condition to this day.

Then again, we know with hindsight (as Hoover did not) that Communism could not be made to work, no matter how numerous its Western sympathizers. In Russia and China, it was the Communist leaders themselves, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Deng Xiao Ping, who brought the system to an end. It may have been better for the world that it ended that way.

A generation after his death, the state of the world looked much better than it did to Hoover in 1964. The sixty million people who died in the war can be excused if they dissent from the grave. In the end, however, counterfactual history involves calculations that are forever uncertain. Still, in its sharp dissent from the conventional understanding of the mid-twentieth century, Herbert Hoover's book succeeds in bringing that history back to life and in forcing us to think about it in ways that will surely be unfamiliar to many.

About the Author

Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and most recently Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009).

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/11/18/revisionist-history-that-matte

 

M. Stanton Evans wrote the enclosed article defending J. Edgar Hoover.

Evens created quite a stir in 2007 when his book —— Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy —— came out. Since that book showed McCarthy in a true light, I’ve noticed that it is much less fashionable for Hollywood libs to show their peers how well-informed they are; especially those libs who acted like they were personally wounded by McCarthy even though they were not born until after he passed away. Evens documented everything he said about McCarthy; so liberals never could discredit him. In a small way the article about Hoover will set the record straight as did the widely-read book about Joe McCarthy. (Prior to the Internet there was not a snowball’s chance in hell Hoover would get a fair shake.)

I want to comment on a few things. The first:

Thereafter, in the unfolding of the film, the domestic Communist problem seems to vanish, scarcely being referred to in treatment of the next five decades. At one point, Hoover himself is heard to comment that the Communist issue had subsided by the 1930s.

All of this, however, is absurdly false, disguising the true story of what happened in the long-running struggle for the world that we call the Cold War.

American Communists bringing defeat to their own country in Vietnam was a major victory for Communism. Far from being over as the film says, the struggle is on-going. Flushed by their victory in Vietnam, the American Left was stunned, and frightened, when the Soviet Union imploded less than two decades later; so they turned all of their efforts to saving and revitalizing worldwide Communism. Bill Clinton and Hussein have been leading the fight in those efforts. International success was followed by a major domestic victory —— ramming the Affordable Care Act down the public’s throat.

This last excerpt should remind everyone of Al Gore and his father:

A footnote to the above: The cinematic part of Hoover pal Clyde Tolson is played by Armand (Armie) Hammer, the great grandson of the Hammer family patriarch of the same name. The elder Hammer, described in current bios as “an oil tycoon” and “philanthropist,” was in fact a big-time Soviet agent, a front man for Moscow, recruited personally by Lenin, who carried water for the Kremlin up through the 1980’s. Young Hammer, of course, is not responsible for the misdeeds of his namesake, but the pro-Soviet doings of the senior Hammer are themselves an ironic refutation of this shamefully dishonest movie.

In Gore’s case the apple did not fall far from the tree. Al Gore’s father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., was in Armand Hammer’s back pocket. Armand Hammer (1898 - 1990) was Occidental Petroleum. Here’s the first excerpt from an article about Hammer for those too young to know the name:

Armand Hammer was one of the odder, more odious characters of American business and politics, "famous" chiefly because he was rich enough to promote his mammoth ego. He has met his match in investigative writer Edward Jay Epstein, who performs the ultimate unmasking of a man who deceived, even betrayed, his country, his family and the hired toadies who posed as his friends.

This final excerpt is more telling:

Hammer never deceived the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, who in 1919 began creating a massive file, "61-280 --- Armand Hammer, Internal Security --- Russia," scrawling across the front, "a rotten bunch." Hoover knew that Hammer financed Comintern agents but did not move, knowing that "it is often more profitable not to arrest a detected courier" when there is no assurance that the replacement will be detected.

Hammer recognized the utility of buying politicians, and here Mr. Epstein understates one of his juicier stories: how the impecunious Senator Albert Gore Sr. got the wealth to enable him to live in splendor in Washington's Fairfax Hotel and to send son, Al Jr., now the vice president, to the pricey St. Albans school.

Hammer did not die until 1990; so it is safe to assume that Al Gore Jr. learned at the feet of the master. Instead of listening to Gore’s fairy tale about global warming, everyone should be asking what he stands to gain?

DOSSIER: THE SECRET HISTORY OF ARMAND HAMMER
by Edward Jay Epstein

http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/armand_hammer.htm

The Human Events piece about Hoover is in part two. Hopefully it will be read far and wide.

 

PART TWO:

How J. Edgar Hoover Saved the Nation
by M. Stanton Evans
Posted 11/29/2011 ET
Updated 11/29/2011 ET

Hollywood efforts to revise the history of the Cold War in favor of radical left-wing interests seem to be unceasing, and in recent years have gotten worse than ever.

The latest installment in this genre is the Clint Eastwood-directed film, J. Edgar, a supposed biopic about J. Edgar Hoover, long-time head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and bête noir of American Liberals. As portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio (and scripted by Dustin Lance Black, who also gave us Milk), Hoover was a neurotic, driven egomaniac, interested in effective law enforcement but publicity mad and power hungry, obsessed with a mostly illusory communist menace, and a closet sexual deviate in the bargain.

All these are standard elements in the left-wing smear of Hoover that has been out there for decades, and the Eastwood treatment basically repeats them, adding less than nothing to our knowledge of the subject. An inordinate amount of screen time is devoted to showing that Hoover and his FBI associate Clyde Tolson were homosexuals (Hoover repressed, Tolson overt) - in essence, Brokeback Mountain at the Bureau. But all of this is insinuation and surmise, as private scenes between the two are by their nature sheer invention.

Worse than this, if possible, are aspects of the film meant to show the public, official Hoover as a would-be tyrant and political bully, abusing the power of the FBI to get the things wanted. Given the amount of documentation that has been released from Bureau archives, it’s remarkable that, when the film deals with matters checkable from the record, it routinely gets the relevant items not only wrong but backwards.

Hoover is depicted, for instance, as having conducted surveillance of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in the early New Deal era, discovering her in a compromising situation, an alleged example of his snooping on higher-ups to strengthen his position. So far as the FBI was concerned, this reference is completely bogus. The surveillance in question was conducted (in 1943, not ’33), by Army counterintelligence, which was monitoring youthful leftist Joseph Lash, a draftee much favored by Mrs. Roosevelt but not so by the Army. As the record clearly shows, the FBI had no responsibility for the surveillance, but was simply informed about it by the Army.

The movie later shows the FBI Director browbeating Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy into persecuting Martin Luther King, with a well-meaning Kennedy reluctantly agreeing. Putting aside the image of the famously ruthless Kennedy as intimidated civil libertarian, the truth of this episode is different also. In fact, both Robert Kennedy and his presidential brother were concerned about two identified Communists in King’s entourage, and worried that this would damage the civil rights movement, hence their own political prospects. The brothers accordingly conferenced with King, who promised to break off the connections but didn’t. The FBI wiretaps that revealed this were explicitly authorized by Robert Kennedy. Given his political history in general, that he did so with any great reluctance may be doubted.

In like fashion, the movie closes with scenes in which President Richard Nixon—depicted as an enemy of Hoover though they were in numerous matters allies— orders on the occasion of Hoover’s death that the Director’s official and confidential files be seized, as they allegedly contained damaging information on high officials, Nixon presumably included. However, when White House operatives get to the FBI, the file cabinets are empty—DiCaprio-Hoover having earlier ordered that their contents be destroyed. This too is total fiction, an episode that demonstrably didn’t happen.

In fact, Hoover’s official and confidential files survived long after the Director’s passing, and unless they have recently been disposed of (always a possibility in the current era of disappearing records) they should be available to researchers today under the Freedom of Information Act. I have hundreds of pages of these files in my possession, and have consulted them often in writing about America’s domestic Cold War. The accompanying FBI chart, like the information on Mrs. Roosevelt and Joe Lash, is derived from these supposedly nonexistent records.

In short, all these Eastwood-Black vignettes and others like them are falsehoods, systematically doctoring the record to discredit Hoover. And the reason for this is not far to seek, leading us to the single greatest falsehood in the movie. For the main point of smearing and misrepresenting Hoover is of course not merely to attack him as an individual, but to discredit the anti-Communist cause that he embodied. It is in this respect that the film is most mendacious and misleading.

To judge by the contents of the movie, the danger of Communism in the United States, whatever its extent may have been, was apparently over and done with circa 1919, the era of the A. Mitchell Palmer “Red scare” (under Democratic President Woodrow Wilson), in which Hoover was a junior player. Thereafter, in the unfolding of the film, the domestic Communist problem seems to vanish, scarcely being referred to in treatment of the next five decades. At one point, Hoover himself is heard to comment that the Communist issue had subsided by the 1930s.

All of this, however, is absurdly false, disguising the true story of what happened in the long-running struggle for the world that we call the Cold War. For it was precisely in the 1930s that massive Communist penetration of the U.S. government occurred, to be increased in exponential fashion in the pro-Soviet daze of World War II. At this period, literally hundreds of Soviet agents, Communist party members and fellow travelers showed up on federal payrolls and used their official positions to advance the cause of Moscow, via policy sabotage, spying and pro-Communist propaganda.

It was in tracking and countering this treasonous penetration that Hoover and the FBI rendered their most invaluable service, the more so as numerous members of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, at the White House, Treasury, State Department and other venues variously aided the penetration, covered up the facts about it, then set out to destroy those who tried to warn the nation of the danger. In the course of which cover-up, numerous perjuries, grand jury fixes and other felonious actions were committed by high-ranking U.S. officials.

Hoover and his men fought valiantly —and sometimes almost alone —against this massive Red infiltration, the cover-up and the hazards these presented. The chart above, prepared at Hoover’s direction at the time of the Alger Hiss case, indicates some of the innumerable reports the FBI submitted to U.S. agencies in the period 1945-48 about the extent and nature of the penetration. While these reports in many cases were disparaged or ignored, they did lead in time to the gradual ouster of some of more flagrant comrades from official payrolls. Hoover and Co. thus saved the nation from even greater perils than those that in fact befell it.

Here was a titanic struggle between faithful law enforcement agents and the evil designs of a hostile foreign power, thoroughly documentable from official records and well worthy of a movie. Yet not a word about it is uttered in the Eastwood treatment, where the names of such Soviet agents as Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Solomon Adler and countless others are never mentioned, and J. Edgar Hoover is depicted as the bad guy. Disinformation on Cold War issues and corruption of the historical record could hardly go much further.

A footnote to the above: The cinematic part of Hoover pal Clyde Tolson is played by Armand (Armie) Hammer, the great grandson of the Hammer family patriarch of the same name. The elder Hammer, described in current bios as “an oil tycoon” and “philanthropist,” was in fact a big-time Soviet agent, a front man for Moscow, recruited personally by Lenin, who carried water for the Kremlin up through the 1980’s. Young Hammer, of course, is not responsible for the misdeeds of his namesake, but the pro-Soviet doings of the senior Hammer are themselves an ironic refutation of this shamefully dishonest movie.

Click on the link to view an interesting chart:

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=47618