Roosevelt the traitor? Absurd

It is a painful, but necessary, duty to address the dismaying subject of Diana West's book, "American Betrayal," about which she has written, in the last few days, "The war of words is over." Her authority for this triumphalist expression of relief is that Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and his co-commentator, Pavel Stroilov, have described Mrs. West's book as "huge and brilliant." Part of their review of her book, and much of the debate, has been a fierce firefight including a considerable, though often somewhat entertaining, volume of recriminations that asperse the rigour, motivations, ideological orientation, integrity, and sanity of the two sides.

I do not fit any of the stereotypes erected and riddled with high-explosive projectiles by both camps, and am merely a non-American biographer of Roosevelt and strategic historian, of impeccable conservative credentials. I have enjoyed the previous work of Mrs. West that I have seen. Accordingly, I will try to illuminate the battlefield without injuring anyone unnecessarily, since I am usually in some sympathy with all the combatants. Vladimir Bukovsky, after 12 years in Soviet labor camps and psychiatric hospitals, commands respect as a man, but his article with Mr. Stroilov is, to say the least, un-rigorous, and certainly does not end the war of words. It merely escalates it.

Let us consider what he wrote, in defence of Mrs. West's assertions that the United States was betrayed by its governments, opposite Soviet Communism, from the 1930s through the 1980s, and then let us return, very succinctly, to the indisputable facts.

I agree with the spirit and object of Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov's question of how could "this great civilization of ours have [been] degraded into such a hypocritical nonsense as political correctness." In this, all the warriors who have raised their faces above the parapets are on the same side. Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov begin with another good thrashing of the useful idiots of the Western intelligentsia and media who whitewashed Stalin's pre-war crimes.

Where it all starts to go horribly wrong is in the sudden metamorphosis of Walter Duranty, New York Times Pulitzer Prize Stalin apologist, into Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, Mr. Bukovsky has learned, presumably from whatever unimaginable emanations possessed him in his decades of brave resistance to Communism and in his apparently incomplete convalescence since, sought a "convergence" of Stalinist socialism with American constitutional government. This was a process that "had already begun, as the Roosevelt administration was full of Soviet agents of influence, including Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and crucially, Harry Hopkins — FDR's alter ego, his 'personal foreign secretary,' and the most powerful man in the White House" (presumably not excluding the president himself). These, we read, are "proven facts" of "the glorious FDR administration."

© 2025 Conrad Black