History's Twists
Reconsidering FDR, Korea, and Vietnam.

It is time to revise history, or perhaps to revise the revisions. There is an uncatalogued hobgoblin that should be chased up and classified by the Smithsonian, that requires part of the U.S. conservative historical community to persist in defaming Franklin D. Roosevelt (who was, in fact, rivaled only by Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan as America's greatest and most effective conservative). FDR had barely settled in his grave, with Fala sadly silent and Eleanor back in Washington Square, when the Yalta Myth descended on him.

This held that he had been swindled by Stalin out of Eastern Europe and had approved the delivery of those countries to the hob-nailed jackboot of the USSR. He and Winston Churchill had extracted from Stalin at Yalta the unconditional promise of democracy, fair elections, and independence for all those countries. They achieved all that they sought. As Roosevelt biographer Ted Morgan has written, "If it had been a good deal for Stalin, he would not have violated every clause of it." At the first summit conference after 1945, at Geneva in 1955, President Eisenhower, despite all the false histrionics of his Republican party about Yalta, began by demanding that the collective post-Stalin leadership honor their deceased leader's Yalta promises to Eastern Europe.

Many of us who have specialized in Roosevelt studies had just finally driven a stake through the heart of the Yalta Myth when the hobgoblin lunged at our throats from another quarter. The Wall Street Journal's admirable opinion pages erupted a few years ago in the contra-historical fabrication that Roosevelt didn't end the Great Depression in the U.S.

When he came into office in 1933, Roosevelt found unemployment at 33 percent (not the mere 25 percent that this nursery school of detractors claims), with no direct federal assistance for the jobless; the banking system and stock and commodity exchanges closed; farm prices beneath subsistence levels; 45 percent of residential housing under threat of foreclosure; and machine-gun nests at the corners and on the steps of Washington's great federal buildings for the first time since the Civil War.

When he left the White House twelve years and 39 days later, to the most heart-rending dirges and lamentations the nation had uttered or heard since Lincoln departed (on the same caisson), unemployment was less than half of 1 percent; millions of mortgages and the whole banking system had been refinanced; most of rural America benefited for the first time from electricity and flood and drought control; Prohibition had long been repealed and the liquor industry repossessed from the folkloric gangsters who had been running it; the U.S. had pioneered nuclear fission and set up the United Nations, had half the world's economic production, was on the verge of the defeat of Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan, and had unlimited moral authority, military and economic power, and cultural influence.

If Franklin D. Roosevelt did not lead America out of the Depression, who did? The hobgoblin's answer is that the New Deal didn't. There was actually a series of New Deals, starting with the giant workfare projects that put 40 percent of the unemployed to work at once and endowed the country with the greatest infrastructure and conservation assets in history; followed by Social Security and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and some other (not necessarily very successful) regulatory initiatives; then by the huge defense and military buildup of 1939–41, which brought conventional unemployment below 10 percent prior to the 1940 election, and eliminated it before Pearl Harbor; and finally by the GI Bill of Rights of 1944, which financed university or technical education, and small-business or farm acquisition, for the 13 million members of the armed forces (10 percent of the population).

The hobgoblin then grumpily states that the war ended the Depression (as if Elmer Fudd had been the U.S. commander-in-chief). The able historian (and good friend) Amity Shlaes, like distinguished deceased historians Frank Freidel and Arthur Schlesinger, and the otherwise groundbreakingly effective Doris Kearns Goodwin, has bought into this myth. Germany, Britain, Japan, and France all cut their unemployment numbers after 1934 by steadily more massive rearmament and comprehensive conscription. (Soviet statistics are too unreliable to yield useful comparisons, and were complicated by the Stalinist novelty of physically liquidating about 10 percent of the work force.)

There is no discernible distinction, in market terms, between — on one hand — German army draftees and British naval shipyard workers, and — on the other — New Deal unemployed building the Triborough Bridge or the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, working on the TVA, or planting a billion trees and saving the whooping crane. Yet the millions of New Deal workfare participants are still considered unemployed, while the millions of European and Japanese draftees to the armed forces and defense production are not. This fatuous debate must end. FDR had his faults and mistakes; his economics rated a C, but his catastrophe avoidance, crisis management, and ultimate success record were straight A's. Serious historians should stop trying to breathe life into the limp sail that FDR was a continuer of Hoover and that Hitler, Chamberlain, and even the poltroon Mussolini fought the Depression more effectively than he did.

Reconsidering history these days leads eventually to Korea. It is generally agreed that President Truman was correct to relieve General MacArthur and settle on reestablishment of the 38th Parallel as the objective of the Korean War. (The same conventional wisdom generally credits President Eisenhower for settling for a truce on that line, and for providing adult supervision for Dulles, Nixon, MacArthur, and the joint chiefs in the Formosa Straits and Indochina, as well as at Suez.)

Military intelligence, in one of the greatest military blunders of U.S. history, caused MacArthur to assure Truman, at their one meeting, at Wake Island on Oct. 15, 1950, that there were no Chinese Communist forces in North Korea, when they in fact already numbered 150,000. When the blow fell, after an initial debacle, MacArthur stabilized the front and did have a serious plan for administering a decisive rebuff to China. He was correct in believing that Stalin would not lift a finger to help Mao Tse-tung, as Chou En-lai confirmed to Richard Nixon 20 years later. MacArthur was also right that "in war, there is no substitute for victory," as he famously told the Congress, and that draftee armies could not be expected to risk and lose their lives indefinitely for an objective less than victory in an operation not obviously in the national interest.

MacArthur's public differences with the president were intolerably insubordinate. Truman should have told him (as Roosevelt and Eisenhower would have done) to conform to official policy or retire back to the occupation government in Tokyo, where he had rendered immense service. If he had done this, he and MacArthur would not have sadly and acrimoniously destroyed each others' careers as they in fact did, like two scorpions in a bottle.

A more intensive campaign, of the kind MacArthur proposed, would have pushed north of Pyongyang and stabilized a front 100 or so miles from the Chinese and Soviet borders (the Yalu), so as not to alarm them, but leaving too small a buffer zone for the Kims to have plagued the world from for more than 60 years after, with no current end in sight. Truman could have delivered Eisenhower's threat to use atomic weapons on China as well and earlier than his successor did, and ended the war sooner and more satisfactorily, without necessarily having incinerated the balance of his distinguished career in a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung with MacArthur.

The Nixon opening to China could then have occurred 15 years earlier than it did. Eisenhower, when he came to the presidency in January 1953 and fulfilled his promise to "go to Korea" (something Truman inexplicably had not done), could almost certainly have got rid of the Kim regime and put the new Red China in its place at relatively acceptable further cost, after three years of bloodletting that China, after nearly 30 years of civil and Sino-Japanese and Korean war, could not sustain indefinitely outside its own borders.

In Indochina, the French committed every conceivable error and then asked for a U.S. atomic intervention, which Eisenhower wisely declined to provide. But if the U.S. were ever going to take a stand in Indochina, this was the time — when France had promised independence, there was no Communist Vietnamese regime, the U.S. had serious allies, the Chinese were exhausted, the post-Stalinist Russian leadership was in disarray, and Kennedy had not yet given away Laos to serve as the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The U.S. should have done its best to organize a Korea-like coalition and fought to salvage a non-Communist part of Indochina then, or written the territory off once and for all. At the least, the Americans should have used their airlift capability to spare the French the Dien Bien Phu fiasco, as there were only 13,000 troops involved (only 3,000 of them French).

Similarly, everything about the Suez episode was simply mad. Eisenhower and Dulles, for no good reason, canceled the financing of the Aswan Dam Egypt's President Nasser was going to build on the Nile, and he secured the financing from the Russians and, for good measure, seized the Suez Canal. Britain and France then put Israel up to invading Sinai, and then invaded themselves, claiming to be coming ashore as peacemakers. Eisenhower then undermined the British currency, and effectively forced out his old friend Anthony Eden as prime minister.

Might-have-beens are odious. No one should begrudge Dwight D. Eisenhower his status as only the fifth U.S. president to be honored with a monument in Washington, given the distinction of his service, military and civilian. But if he and Truman had paid more attention to MacArthur's strategic notions, they would not have spent their last years trying to be geriatric hawks in Indochina. If Eisenhower had not been so stingy over Nasser's Aswan project, the Russians would never have exercised the influence they did in the Middle East, until Nixon and Kissinger and Sadat flung them out 20 years and three Middle East wars later.

And if Eisenhower had shown the solicitude of an ally — but no complicity in fatuous Beau Geste colonialism — in the sands of Egypt and the jungles of Vietnam, the Middle East would not be such a horrible mess and France would never have caused the problems to the Anglo-Saxons, including the unoffending Canadians, that de Gaulle felt it his right and duty to inflict, when he resurrected his country after 1958. Ike, commander at D-Day, liberator of Western Europe, military founder of NATO, author of Open Skies, and builder of the Interstate Highway System, deserves his monument. Great men do deserve monuments, and their history deserves to be read and remembered clearly.

– Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at [email protected]

© 2024 Conrad Black