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(More customer reviews)... First, Fleming not only does NOT join the conspiracy buffs (which, by the way, include the prestigious John Toland) who say that FDR planned Pearl Harbor, Fleming actually DEBUNKS those theories somewhat.
Fleming interviews the captain of an obsolete warship who was sent out on what the captain describes as a "suicide mission" by Presidential order to try to provoke an incident with the Japanese. He was saved by the Pearl Harbor raid because he was called back to port. If FDR knew the Pearl Harbor raid was coming, there would have no point to doing this. Fleming shows that the racist attitudes toward the Japanese-- don't forget, our Liberal ICON FDR is the ONLY American president in this century to round people up solely because of their race imprison them-- meant that no one in the American chain of command believed that the Japanese were capable of such a raid. (Don't forget, Billy Mitchell was court martialed for saying it would happen.)
On the subject of FDR's health, even the FDR worshippers will tell you that the Democrat party bosses insisted on Truman because they knew FDR was dying, and were afraid of being stuck with Henry Wallace as their 1948 nominee. The pro-FDR crowd make this deception of the American electorate proof of FDR's brillance. Fleming merely says that the people had a right to know, and that perhaps FDR was starting to believe his own press clippings when he thought that the country would not survive without his election.
Fleming also exposes the fact that McCarthy was not the first to say that people who opposed them politically were sympathetic to America's enemies. FDR tried to jail some of his opponents, and was slaughered in the 1942 election when his hubris led him to say that Republicans and those who were not pro-war before Pearl Harbor were fascists.
Fleming is the first in a long time to discuss how the leaking of the Rainbow Five war plans in December of 1941 affected Hitler to declare war on the US. These plans were considered a huge factor at the time, but the incident was forgotten in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack. However, German documents reveal that the fact that Amercian newspapers reported that the US was planning a ten million man army to invade Europe led Hitler to declare war on the US while it was still reeling from Pearl Harbor rather than wait for a build up.
Here is where Fleming engages in some speculation. No one KNOWS who leaked Rainbow Five. But in interviewing General Wedemeyer who WROTE it, Fleming does the Sherlock Holmes routine of eliminating all the other suspects leaving only FDR as a logical choice. Fleming plays fair here by showing his method and letting us draw our own conclusion.
This book will undoubtedly give Doris Kearns Goodwin a heart attack. Though even in her worshipful book "No Ordinary Time" she admits much of the facts that Fleming lays out, her spin is that all of this deception was "leadership" and it showed FDR's brilliance. Fleming thinks that 50 years after the fact, it might be time to cut through the war time propaganda and take a clear eyed look at FDR. It was certainly controversial at the time-- so much so that FDR barely hung on to power within his own party and lost it in the Congress for the last term of his presidency. But as Fleming points out, when Roosevelt died, and especially after a brilliant bureaucrat added his name to the day's casualty list, talking about all this became thought of as bad form.
It is forgotten in the haze of wartime propaganda, Norman Rockwell paintings, and Hollywood movies, that this country was as politically divided during WWII as it is today, and that there were legitimate arguments against the say FDR conducted his policies-- both domestic AND foreign. A 1944 poll showed that if the war ended before the election, FDR would get only 30% of the vote!
The biggest of these, and the one that really justifies the title of the book, is the policy of Unconditional Surrender. While it was well sold to the American public (and to school textbook writers) this policy undoubtedly lengthened the war, and caused hundred of thousands of extra Allied casualties. The driving force behind the policy was the vision of the New Dealers for a worldwide order, which could live with a Soviet empire, but NOT a British Empire, or a democratic industrialized Germany. The New Dealers' plan was to divide Germany into seven little demilitarized agrarian states, in a Carthigian sort of eternal subjugation. That, of course, was just fine with Stalin.
Luckily, Truman became president before this kind of insanity could take place, or Stalin would have been the next dictator to roll his tanks down the Champs Elyses. But lots of people died for this policy before Truman nixed it-- including, Fleming shows, a bevy of German Resistance leaders who, as Churchill later admitted, were betrayed by the Allies, and who rank as some of the 20th Century's greatest heroes.
If this book is "revisionist" than it is revisionist in the finest tradition-- challenging the consensus opinion. It is NOT, however, revistionist in the postmodern, truth is what you make of it, sense that defiles the study of history, rather than enlightening it.
"The New Dealers' War" is a great book by one of our very finest historians-- who, by the way, did not try to "rehabilitate the villanous Aaron Burr," but showed the WHOLE person of Burr, not just the cartoon, and who illuminated Jefferson and Hamilton's slanderous role in pushing Burr in the unfortunate roar he chose. Instead of ad hominem, this book should-- and will-- provoke legitimate discussion. Good!
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The New Dealers' War: FDR And The War Within World War II
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