My Review of Mike Wallace's Gotham at War: A History of New York City, 1933-1945

 Big Apple History Through a Socialist Lens

 

Self-professed leftist historian and John Jay College professor, Mike Wallace has written a history of New York City through the New Deal years and World War II. In reading this long book (976 pages in the print edition), it seemed that it took the full thirteen years of his history. Needless to say, the book is way too long and covers way too much minutia.

 

Wallace discusses at length how the city’s various ethnic groups approached the coming of World War II. His view of New York’s ethnic groups is through the lens of cultural pluralism. Although that view has some merit, he ignores the fact that New York was becoming more homogenized and, on its way, to being a melting pot. He ignores two facets causing this. This first is that the public schools were inculcating Americanism into the minds of its students. Second, he ignores the roll of baseball which put sometimes antagonistic ethnic groups in rooting for their respective teams. Indeed, the Yankee-Dodger subway World Series was a classic and no matter which team they were rooting for, fans marveled at Joe Di Maggio's 56 game hitting streak.

 

With Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 New York’s Jews, the largest Jewish community in the world, stood as one against him. They had to face off against local Nazi’s in the German American Bund and plea with Roosevelt, to no avail, to open immigration for Jews fleeing Europe. Here Wallace ignores the role of the New York mob which stood foursquare behind the Jews in breaking up Nazi rallies. ( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Michael Benson's "Gangsters vs. Nazis" ) Wallace rightly notes the perfidy of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger in his downplaying of the Holocaust.

 

Wallace is all-in on the New Deal and LaGuardia’s social democratic vision for New York. What he ignores is that LaGuardia’s vision was funded by a hugely disproportionate amount of dollars flowing from Washington D.C.  Those who followed him did not have the largess of Washington behind them and that put the city on an unsustainable fiscal path. Simply put, to him business was bad and government was good.

 

True to his beliefs Wallace spends an inordinate amount of time on the three-way split between, the communists, the socialists, and the New Deal liberals. This would play out in the dumping of Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s VP in 1944. He also ignores the real gravity of the Rosenberg spy ring which went well beyond atomic spying.  

 

Wallace is particularly good at discussing the policy differences between the Fighting Liberals and the Wall Street Warriors in their focus on bringing the U.S. into the war. Both groups had decidedly different war aims. The Fighting Liberals wanted to globalize the New Deal while the Wall Street Warriors following Henry Luce's "Amercian Century,"  wanted to establish U.S. hegemony.  Incidentally, both supported free trade. Many of the architects of the Cold War who came out of Wall Street banks and law firms are here. They include Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, Paul Nitze, and John Foster Dulles, who by the way was too cozy with Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.

 

We also have a whole bunch of folks who featured in my childhood growing up in New York City in the 1950’s. The include future U.S. Congresswoman Bella Abzug, feminist Betty Friedan, governors Dewey, Harriman, and Rockefeller, expert builder Robert Moses, Congressman Adam Clayton Power, Mayor Robert Wagner Jr., Attorney General Herbert Brownell, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, and builder Bill Zeckendorf.  All-in-all, quite a cast of characters.

 

The book ends with a discussion on planning for the postwar world. There were many plans drawn up under the belief that the New Deal was still alive. It wasn’t and it pretty much died after the 1938 election. To my mind the planners failed to understand that what New Yorkers wanted were automobiles, houses, and babies. They did not want to be cooped up in apartments the planners imagined. Those desires set off the race to the suburbs of Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey and if you really think about it represented a continuation of the trend that was established in the 1920’s that was interrupted by the depression and the war.

My Review of H.W. Brands' "America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War"

 The First America First

With Donald Trump’s victory America First as foreign policy is yet again being thrust into the limelight. Thus, it is important to understand its origins making University of Texas historian H.W. Brands new history of the first America First movement is especially timely. Brands views America First through the lens of the shadow war between Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh with the latter being the most prominent proponent of America First.

There is not much new in the Roosevelt side of the equation, but Brands, at least for me plows new ground on Lindbergh by carefully researching his diaries and speeches from the late 1930’s to America’s entry into the war in December 1941. What I learned was that Lindbergh was a foreign policy realist in understanding the decadence of 1930’s Britain and the weakness of France. In his view Germany was the rising power in Europe, so much so that it would overwhelm both Britain and France. 

He believed that with adequate military preparedness the United States would be able to fend off any cross Atlantic attack from a Europe under the auspices of Nazi Germany. Roosevelt, on the other hand was far more clear-eyed in understanding what a Nazi dominated Europe would mean for the security of the United States. From 1939 his globalist vision pushed the United States for war with Germany. Indeed. within the space of a few weeks between late December 1940 and early January 1941 Roosevelt called on America to become the arsenal of democracy and then articulated his Four Freedoms.

Although losing the public relations battle Lindbergh plowed ahead in attacking Roosevelt and his interventionist policies. He reached a dead-end with his infamous Des Moines speech in September 1941 when he, echoing Nazi propaganda, called out the Roosevelt, the British and the Jews for leading America into war. There was near universal condemnation of his speech and for both Lindbergh and America First it was downhill from there.

Beneath his realpolitik there was his underlying racism against Jews and the non-white races. He viewed the war as dividing the white world, when instead it should have been focusing on the dangers coming from the non-white world, no matter that Germany was allied with Japan.

Unfortunately, there are too many similarities to the world of Trump and the world of Lindbergh. America can’t stand aside today in a very dangerous world, but as Brands noted in 1941 the U.S. was the dominant economic power in the world; this is no longer the case. This makes the case that the most important task before us is to strengthen our economy.

My Thoughts on the First Anniversary of October 7th

 There are many dates that are seared into our memory.  President Roosevelt, responding to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, called December 7^th, 1941,” a date which will live in infamy” and demanded a declaration of war against Japan. December 7^th,1941, resonates with me because that was that was the day my Dad proposed to my Mom in Central Park.  Four days later Hitler asked for and received a declaration of war from the Reichstag against the United States. Sitting in the audience cheering him on was Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Yes, the antagonism between Jews and Palestinians predates 1948 and 1967. Indeed, well before 1941.

 

On September 11^th, 2001, Al-Qaeda crashed two airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and one plane into the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people. I witnessed the attack on the towers from across the street.

 

Today, we memorialize another date, October 7^th, 2023, Israel’s, and World Jewry’s day of infamy. On that day 1200 hundred people in Israel’s Gaza envelope died and 240 were kidnapped by the Hamas terrorists. To put this event into perspective 1200 dead in Israel is equivalent to 40,000 dead in the United States.

 

Now, a year later, a war rages on in Gaza and Lebanon testing whether Israel, a light unto the nations, can remain true to its founding as a democratic home to the Jewish people. It is a war where about 725 soldiers, who in the words of Abraham Lincoln “gave the last full measure of devotion.”

 

It is my hope that “these dead have not died in vain.” (Again, from Lincoln) Just as our Civil War can be viewed as the second American revolution, so too can Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon be viewed as its second war of independence. And it is my hope the war will midwife a new generation of Israeli leadership that will have the wisdom to rise above the country’s divisive internal politics and find a path to seek peace with its neighbors.

My Review of James Graham Wilson's "America's Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan"

A Man of Action

 

Where is Paul Nitze when we need him? Paul Nitze engaged in national security policy for every president from Roosevelt to Reagan. The lesson he learned from Pearl Harbor carried through his entire career and that was in order to defend the United States, the United States had to be stronger than any potential aggressor. His policy was the essence of peace through strength.

 

James Wilson’s biography fully discusses Nitze’s professional career from being an investment banker in the 1930’s to being a tribune in the highest councils of government on national security affairs.  Nitze modeled himself on what he called “men of action.” They included his first boss Clarence Dillon, Navy Secretary James Forrestal, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and presidents Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. While working for Clarence Dillon at the Dillon Reed banking firm Nitze was involved in putting together the Cal-Tex agreement which sent middle eastern oil to Asia and the financing of the Triboro Bridge.

 

As war clouds loomed in 1940 Nitze followed his mentor at Dillon Reed, James Forestal into government. He could well afford to work in government because of his wife’s wealth and his own personal investments. During World War II he worked on the strategic bombing survey and after the war he found himself at the State Department working under George Kennan. In 1950 he succeeded Kennan as the Director of Policy Planning. There he authored the now famous NSC-68 memorandum which called for a massive defense build-up wrapped in American values. The build-up would come with the onset of the Korean War a few months later.

 

In the mid-1950’s he would switch parties and became a Democrat because of his disagreement over Eisenhour’s massive retaliation strategy and his thinking was very influential in the Kennedy campaign of 1960. Nitze was in the room when during the height of the Cuban missile crisis. Nitze thought Kennedy’s policy only worked because the U.S. had superior forces relative to the Soviet Union. That advantage would erode away in the 1960’s and turn into a severe disadvantage in the 1970’s. Though now a Democrat, Nitze participated in arms control negotiations under Nixon. He was respected by hawks across the aisle.

 

When not in government during the Nixon-Ford era he found a home at the Johns-Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, which is now named after him. His interns there included Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz who would soon become real players in the Reagan Administration and beyond. His contribution to the arms debate in the 1970’s was his leading role in the Committee on the Present Danger which anteceded the Reagan military build-up of the 1980’s.

 

Reagan hired him as an arm control negotiator and in 1982 he had his famous walk in the woods with his Soviet counterpart, Kvitsinsky. Although nothing came of it at the time, it was a percussor of all of the arms control agreements that would follow. In the 1980’s Nitze was far too suspicious of Gorbachev and overestimated Soviet strength. He didn’t realize how much the Soviets feared Reagan. ( See: Shulmaven: My Review* of Sergey Radchenko's "To Run the World: The Kremlin's Bd.........." )Nitze wasn’t perfect, but he got most of the big things dead right. Further his brittle personality kept him from being either Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State, although he served admirably in both departments. Wilson has done us a real service in writing Nitze’s biography at this time. We surely need someone like him today. 

President Biden's State of the Union: Strong on Form Weak on Substance

Very reminiscent of Harry Truman's "give'em hell" 1948 campaign, President Biden came out swinging against his nameless predecessor and the Republican House of Representatives in his state of union address. ( See: Shulmaven: New Yorker Follows Shulmaven on Biden Election Strategy. ) He was confident, strong, and relaxed and at least for the time being silenced the "bedwetters" in the Democratic Party concerned about his re-election prospects. Further I wouldn't be surprised to see a meaningful bounce in his poll numbers in the coming week.

In terms of substance there was much to be desired. He opened his speech citing Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 state of the union (see below):

" In January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. He said, “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.” Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment. 

Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world. Tonight I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. And yes, my purpose tonight is to both wake up this Congress, and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either."

President Roosevelt's speech which has become to be known as his "Four Freedoms Speech" was delivered on January 6, 1941. Only a week before Roosevelt gave fireside chat where he declared the United States to be "an arsenal of democracy." The difference today is that President Biden is nowhere near declaring America as an arsenal of democracy. Indeed his proposed defense budget will show a meager 1% increase. Given the tone of his speech and the prewar environment we are now living in, he should have called for a massive increase in defense spending. (See: Shulmaven: Shulmaven Anticipates Hal Brands Foreign Affairs Article on Pre-WW II and Today) Thus his rhetoric is way ahead of his actions.

The other troubling parts of his speech is that he revived all of the old Democratic Party tropes about taxing the rich, going after big Pharma, and spending program upon spending program. He fails to understand that middle-of-the-road voters in 2020 thought they were voting for a Bill Clinton and instead got a Lyndon Johnson. This could come back to haunt Biden as his rhetoric could very well scare away the Nikki Haley voters he will need in November.

My Amazon Review of Benn Steil's "The World that Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century"

America Missed a Bullet

 

On July 21,1944, the Democratic National Convention dumped its pro-Soviet vice president and named Senator Harry Truman as its vice-presidential nominee. With President Franklin Roosevelt operating in the background the political bosses of the Democratic Party, knowing that Roosevelt was likely to die in office, out maneuvered the labor bosses in obtaining the nomination for Truman.

 

With that the United States avoided having an administration led by a Soviet sympathizer who would have placed the communists in charge of State and Treasury, in particular Laurence Duggan at State and Harry Dexter White at Treasury. Should that have happened there would have been no intervention in Greece, no Marshall Plan, and no NATO. Further Germany would have been neutralized there would have been communist governments in France and Italy, a far cry from the Cold War history as it turned out.

 

I previously reviewed Benn Steil’s “The Marshal Plan” (See Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Benn Steil's "The Marshal Plan: Dawn of the Cold War" )and his “The Battle of Bretton Woods,” and with this book he established himself as a leading historian of the mid-1940’s. Steil covers Wallace’s life from his early beginnings as part of an Iowa farm family and later as publisher of a leading agricultural journal. He became interested in plant genetics and founded with others Pioneer Hybrid International. The $7000 invested in 1926 turned into a nearly $10 billion equity valuation by 1999 when it was sold to DuPont. If Wallace stuck to his seed business the world would have been a much better place.

 

Wallace caught the eye of Roosevelt and became his Secretary of Agriculture. In that capacity he was an architect and follower of the New Deal farm programs that worked to prop up big agriculture at the expense of tenant farmers, ploughed under crops and destroyed millions of piglets at a time of mass starvation. Farm income hardly increased in the 1930’s. Also, during the 1930’s Wallace found a “guru” in Russian artist Nicholas Roerich. It is all very bizarre and Steil spends too much time on this.

 

In 1940 with Roosevelt needing support among farmers and the isolationist Midwest, Wallace was picked as his vice-president. In that capacity he is put in charge of the Bureau of Economic Warfare. There he clashes with Jesse Jones, the powerful head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The seeds of his demise start here. He picked the wrong enemy. In 1944 Wallace goes on an extended trip to Siberia where he is completely taken in by the Potemkin Villages set up by the KGB. His trip was orchestrated by spy chief Lavrenty Beria. Where the reality was that of penal colonies, Wallace only saw happy farmers and miners. He didn’t return until June 1944, and he was therefore politically unprepared for the upcoming convention.

 

Truman gave Wallace a consolation prize by making him Commerce Secretary. His nomination was controversial, and the Senate stripped control of the RFC from him. His pro-Soviet leanings get the better of him in a speech at a pro-communist rally in September 1946 at Madison Square Garden where he attacks the Truman Administration as imperialist warmongers. Truman has no choice but to follow him. Much of the speech was written by his staff, many of whom were communists. From then on Wallace mouths every pro-Soviet trope in the book in attacking Truman.

 

After asking advice from of all people Soviet Ambassador Andrey Gromyko, Wallace decides to run as the nominee of the new Progressive Party which was largely staffed by communists including Harry Magdoff, Victor Perlo, John Abt and Lee Pressman. Steil highlights how closely the Soviets watched the campaign and highlighted its role in the 1948 election in Pravda. This was not the first time the Soviets took an interest in the activities of the American Communist Party.

 

After his loss Wallace fades away and later recants his pro-Soviet views. In my opinion too little too late. We now live in a time where the Russians are actively involved in our elections; only this time it is the Republican Party that is the object of their affection. It is also unfortunate that there are no party bosses in the Democratic Party that can fix its ticket, that as of today looks weak. Steil reminds us that we may very well be at another hinge of history and hopefully America will once again miss a bullet. (See: Shulmaven: Shulmaven Anticipates Hal Brands Foreign Affairs Article on Pre-WW II and Today )

For the full Amazon Review see: America Misses a Bullet (amazon.com) 

 

  

My Amazon Review of Patrick Weil's "The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson"

 William Bullitt: Diplomat and Amateur Psychiatrist

 

Yale law professor Patrick Weil has really written two books in one. The first deals with the joint effort of William Bullitt and Sigmund Freud to write a psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson. The second is an excellent biography of the extraordinarily well-connected diplomat, William Bullitt.  I found the biography of Bullitt far more interesting.

 

Bullitt hooks up with Sigmund Freud in 1926, first as a patient and later as a collaborator as they seek to understand why Woodrow Wilson failed so badly at the Paris Peace Conference and later in his attempt to ratify the Versailles Treaty though the U.S. Senate. Their explanation is rooted in Wilson’s “daddy issues” (my term) and his Christ Complex.  To me, even with Sigmund Freud at the helm, psychoanalysis at a distance is problematic. Further the title of the book calls Wilson a “madman” when in fact Freud used the term neurosis, not psychosis to describe Wilson’s personality. A simpler explanation would be somewhere along the way Wilson, became a stubborn old man, and systematically began to destroy what he had built.

 

Either way Weil shows the importance of personality in diplomatic affairs. Instead of buying into the older explanation the imperialist machinations of France and England combined with the isolationists in the Senate that worked to kill the treaty, Weil puts the blame directly on Wilson’s personality. Wilson didn’t like the advice he was getting from his two key advisors, Secretary of State Lansing and his longtime confidant, Colonel House, so he fired them. He was too stubborn to make a deal with the Senate Republicans that was already blessed by Britain and France that would have enabled passage through the Senate. Indeed, I learned that as part of the deal was a Treaty of Guarantee that would have established a mutual defense pact between the U.S., Britain and France, a precursor to the Atlantic alliance, if you will.

 

Now, as to Bullitt. At 25, Bullitt, as scion of Philadelphia society, was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. In the middle of the conference, he goes off to Russia to try and make a deal with Lenin, which Wilson rejects. He leaves the conference disillusioned by Wilson’s craven dealmaking. A few years later he marries Louise Bryant, John “10 Days that Shook the World” Reed’s widow. In 1933 he became Roosevelt’s ambassador to Russia and later was his ambassador to Paris where he was his eyes and ears to Nazi Europe. Along the way he helped write speeches for Roosevelt.

 

As ambassador to Russia, he hired George Kenan, Charles “Chip” Bohlen and Loy Henderson, who would become mainstays of U.S. Russia policy during the early Cold War years. In Paris he befriended Charles de Gaulle on the right and Leon Blum on the left. In 1943 he wrote a long memo outlining the threats coming from Russia, that Kenan viewed as precursor to his 1946 Long Telegram. As a result, because of Russia policy difference and Bullitt telling Roosevelt about his friend and Deputy Secretary of State Sumner Wells’ homosexual proclivities, the two break and Bullitt endorses Dewey in 1944.

 

Now on the right with respect to Russia policy, Bullitt gets along great with John Foster Dulles, Chiang-Kai-Shek, and Syngman Rhee of South Korea. Indeed, Bullitt at the request of both Rhee and Dulles mediated a position between them that helped end the Korean War. Further Bullitt came very close with Richard Nixon as congressman and later as vice-president.

 

Weil did a huge amount of work going through all of the Bullitt papers at the Yale library, and his efforts show throughout this book. His work includes uncovering the original Freud-Bullitt manuscript. For a history buff like me, this is a terrific book.

For the full Amazon URL see: William Bullitt: Diplomat and Amateur Psychiatrist (amazon.com)

Reliving the 1930's - Part 5

We started this series in March 2014 ( Shulmaven: Reliving the 1930s)  with Putin taking Crimea and using his proxies in eastern Ukraine and the last one was in April 2017 with  Trump’s and Obama’s vacillation in Syria in 2013 and 2017. ( Shulmaven: Reliving the 1930s - Part 4) With this blog I go further in that I now believe that we are no longer in the Post-Cold War Era, but rather we are now in what future historians will call a pre-war era.

 

Instead of facing the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis we now face the Russia-China-Iran North Korea Axis We see this new axis playing out in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Taiwan Straits. All the signs were there in the 1930’s with Japan invading Manchuria in 1931 and the heart of China in 1937; Italy invading Abyssinia in 1935, and Germany reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936. However, it was not until 1938 that they were taken seriously.

 

In terms of economic policy protectionism was the order of the day in the 1930’s and we now witness the Biden Administration continuing and amplifying Trump’s protectionist trade policies. Although Biden’s trade policies conflict, he remains a committed internationalist. However, the Republican Party is reverting to its 1930’s form with its America First withdrawal from the world.

 

At home America’s college campuses look like prewar Germany where in many cases it is no longer safe for Jews to walk freely to class. Although anti-Zionism has always been a cover for antisemitism, recent events have ripped off all of its pretentions of being anti-Israel while still liking Jews. Nevertheless, unlike the 1930’s, Jews in America have more to fear from the Left than from the Right when the Father Coughlin’s of the world ruled the airwaves.

 

Further unlike the 1930’s when America had real leadership under Franklin Roosevelt, today’s divided government is challenged by a Putinista faction in the Republican Party that is implicitly allied with the new axis of evil. Be warned the clock is ticking.

  

My Amazon Review of Hal Brands' Ed. "The New Makers of Modern Strategy...."

Thinking Strategically

 

Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands has updated Peter Paret’s 1986 “Makers of Modern Strategy,” which in turn updated Edward Mead Earle’s 1943 version. It is a very long book consisting of 45 separate essays by different authors that runs 1168 pages. In my opinion this is way too long for the average educated lay reader. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned and I will highlight below a few of the essays that caught my attention.

 

Walter Russell Mead’s discussion of Thucydides is on the mark because it deals with the timeless question that the fear of a rising power (Athens) engenders in an established power (Sparta). I wish he spent more time on Graham Allison’s parallel thoughts on the U.S. vis-à-vis China. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Graham Allison's "Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap" ) Matthew Kroenig’s essay on Machiavelli’s realism is spot on. Further he understands that despite Machiavelli’s bad rap, he was a republican at heart seeking to unify Italy. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Philip Bobbitt's "The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World that he Made")

 

I was disappointed in Hew Strachan’s essay on Clausewitz. To be sure he emphasizes that war is the extension of politics by other means, but he is all to brief on friction, the fog of war and the center of gravity of the enemy. He does, however, mentions Col. Harry Summers’ Clausewitzian critique of U.S. military policy in Vietnam.

 

The essay by Charles Edel on John Quincy Adams’ realism hits the mark. Understanding the U.S. was not ready for the global stage, Adams utilizes the implicit support of the British navy to establish the Monroe Doctrine and further avoids direct U.S. involvement in the Latin American and Greek revolutions. At the time the U.S. could rightly only offer moral support.

 

I didn’t realize how influential Alfred Taylor Mahan’s treatise in sea power until I read John Maurer’s essay. Mahan’s influence extended well beyond the United States to Germany and Japan with global consequences. Robert Kagan’s essay on Woodrow Wilson casts him, not Theodore Roosevelt, as the architect of American global strategy for the 20^th Century. Wilson comes off far more realistic than I expected as he protected U.S. interests at Versailles.

 

Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling’s theories of nuclear deterrence and flexible response are examined by Eric Edelman. Schelling’s theories were in contradiction to the Eisenhower Administration’s massive retaliation response to potential Soviet aggression. One of the problems, as Edelman notes, is that sometimes the message you want to send is misinterpreted by the enemy, which is what occurred during the Cuban missile crisis. The Russians thought the embargo was a far bigger deal than how the Kennedy Administration viewed it.

 

Mark Moyar’s essay on U.S. strategy in Vietnam accuses the Johnson Administration of refusing to listen to its military advisors who wanted to go all-in at the start of the war. Simply put, gradual escalation failed. However, it is not clear that Johnson would have had the political support for what his advisors advocated. Nevertheless, this debate echoes to this day with the Biden policy with respect to Ukraine. Biden has been a gradualist, but ultimately, he is doing far more than what he thought practical at the start of the war.

 

I am glad that Dmitry Adamsky has given credit to Andrew Marshall, the long-time Pentagon guru of the net assessment project. If any one person has been the architect of U.S. military strategy in a networked age, it is Marshall. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Andrew Krepinevich's and Barry Watts' "The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy")

 

The book ends with a summation essay by Yale’s John Lewis Gaddis. It is a well thought out summary, but where he errs is that he gives too much credit to Franklin Roosevelt’s recognition of the Soviet Union as a strategic decision that would play out in World War II. To me, it is an ex-post rationalization where Roosevelt’s motivation had more to do with the hope of near-term trade deals.

 

I know I have only scratched the surface of Brands’ book, but if the reader puts in the effort there is much to be learned here.

For the full Amazon URL see: Thinking Strategically (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Robert Kagan's "The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse................."

 America Comes of Age in Fits and Starts

 

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has written a sequel to his “Dangerous Nation” Japan to cover American foreign policy from 1900-1941. In 1900 fresh after defeating Spain in 1898 the U.S. had the largest economy in the world and was viewed as a non-entity as far as the great powers of Europe were concerned. Domestically there was a strong anti-imperialist lobby against the American occupation of the Philippines, but Kagan reminds us that the freeing Cuba from Spanish colonialism was highly popular across the political spectrum. Using terms of today, it was viewed as a “humanitarian intervention.” Further the takeover of the Philippines was accidental in that Admiral George Dewey was following a decade old plan to steam to Manila to engage the Spanish fleet where he won a resounding victory. Kagan argues that absent the U.S. intervention, sooner or later the Philippines would have been taken over by either Germany or Japan.

 

Kagan covers the Platt Amendment to the Monroe Doctrine which unilaterally granted the U.S. the right to intervene in Latin America which it does many times. Initially to keep the Europeans out and to maintain the peace, but later with less than benign motives. He spends less than time than he should have around the politics of building the Panama Canal and President Roosevelt’s arbitration of the Russo-Japanese War. By 1914 the U.S. has no army to speak of and has modern, but small Navy.

 

When the war in Europe broke out the U.S. position was to stay out of it, despite strong support from banking interests to weigh in on the side of the allies. There was great support for the Central Powers coming from Irish, German and Jewish Americans for their own unique reasons. Despite the sinking of the Lusitania, President Woodrow Wilson, though indirectly supporting the allies, struggles to keep the U.S. out of the war. The pressure for U.S. entry  is led by former president Theodore Roosevelt. Ultimately as Germany resorts to unrestricted submarine warfare the U.S. enters the war as an associated power with an inflated sense of morality coming from “peace without victory” and his Fourteen Points.

 

Wilson enters the Versailles negotiations as a giant. American power is supreme, yet he gets sucked into the vortex of European power politics doing whatever he can to bring forth the League of Nations. However, while in Paris, the once internationalist Republican Party, does a 180-degree shift. The party once lead by Elihu Root, Henry Stimson and Charles Evans Hughes is now lead by the anti-league Theodore Roosevelt and Senate foreign relations chair Henry Cabot Lodge. They are backed up by “the irreconcilables” led by Senator’s William Borah and Hiram Johnson. When Wilson fails to seek a compromise, the League fails and the U.S. returns to its pre-war isolation. In a footnote three young idealist, William Bullitt, John Maynard Keynes, and Walter Lippmann become disillusioned on the shoals of European reality.

 

It is here where Kagan argues that the U.S. should have stayed in the game. Without U.S. backing both France and Britain became paranoid about future German power and therefore were less willing to compromise on reparations, something that would plague the continent for a decade. In the terms of the British diplomat Harold Nicholson, the U.S. became “the ghost at the feast.” To be sure the U.S. was present financially with both the Dawes and Young Plans, it was not really in the game.

 

With the onset of the Great Depression the world order begins to collapse, first economically and the politically. Japan invades Manchuria making a mockery of the League. Further, its naval build-up threatens the American presence in the Pacific and we have the rise of Hitler.

 

What is the newly elected President Roosevelt’s response to the deteriorating international situation? More isolation. Kagan, in my opinion underplays Roosevelt’s blowing up the July 1933 World Economic Conference where it is understood in no uncertain terms the U.S. will focus on domestic recovery. This did not go unnoticed by Mussolini and Hitler. To me one failing of the book is that is lacks an economic context, particularly on the role of the gold standard and the collapse in world trade.

 

Later in the decade Roosevelt has to fight off the isolationists to deal with the growing challenges coming from Japan and Germany. He highlights the trigger for the change as the September 1938 Munich Conference and the November 1938 Kristallnacht explosion in Germany. Kagan reasons, correctly in my opinion, that the reason France and Germany caved into Hitler is that they rightfully believed that the U.S. did not have their backs. Thus had the U.S. been more involved with Europe in the 1930’s the horrors to come might just have been avoided. And if the war in Europe did not start, Japan might not have embarked on its aggression in Southeast Asia.

 

Kagan’s conclusion is that there is a straight line from America’s holiday from international affairs in the 1920’s and 1930’s to the agony of the 1940’s. It is a lesson that should be remembered by those today who see few reasons for America’s involvement on the world stage.

For the full Amazon URL see: America Comes of Age in Fits and Starts (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Brad Snyder's "Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter..........."

Talent Scout for the Administrative State

 

You can view Brad Snyder’s “Democratic Justice” as the sequel to his “The House of Truth” where the leading lights of early 20^th Century liberalism lived or visited one time or another at 1727 19^th Street in Washington D.C. from 1912-1919. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Brad Snyder's "The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism")   One of those occupants was Felix Frankfurter who was to become a confidant of Franklin Roosevelt and the leading talent scout for the New Deal.

 

Arriving in 1894 at age 12 from Austria, a mere fourteen year later Felix Frankfurter would find himself with a Harvard law degree and working as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York under the leadership of Henry Stimson. Stimson would go on to become Secretary of War under both Howard Taft and Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary of State under Hoover.  Stimson would be Frankfurter’s mentor and instill in him the importance of public service.

 

After leaving the War Department, Frankfurter returned to Harvard Law School as a professor, but would soon find himself involved with the House of Truth. He would help found The New Republic in 1914 and the ACLU in 1920. Along the way he ran Wilson’s War Labor Board, attended the Versailles Conference and under the wing of Louis D. Brandeis became an ardent Zionist. It was in the Wilson Administration where Frankfurter met Franklin Roosevelt and formed a bond that last until Roosevelt’s death in 1945.

 

Frankfurter’s judicial idols were justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Brandeis, both of The House of Truth and later Benjamin Cardozo. All three supported minority rights and importantly were reluctant to overturn economic regulations passed by the elected branches of government. In their view and Frankfurter’s as well they did not see the Supreme Court as a super-legislature. Hence Snyder’s title “Democratic Justice.” To me a major inconsistency with that view, while Frankfurter and his brethren were unwilling to give authority to unelected judges, they were more than willing to give authority to unelected regulatory agencies of the administrative state. Snyder is clearly a proponent of the administrative state.

 

Frankfurter comes into his own with the arrival of the new deal. He has near complete access to the White House, and he was able to place his former students across a vast swath of the ever-growing bureaucracy. They would include Dean Acheson (Treasury and later Secretary of State under Truman), Alger Hiss (State Department and Soviet spy), James Landis (S.E.C.) Ben Cohen and Tom Corcoran who wrote the securities laws and the Public Utility Holding Company Act.

 

Roosevelt ultimately appoints to Frankfurter to the Supreme Court.  His was the first of the modern confirmation hearings where the nominee actually testified before Congress. His clerks would go onto become prominent law professors (Anthony Amsterdam, Alexander Bickel, and Paul Freund), Washington Post owner Phil Graham, Appellate Judge Henry Friendly, FCC Chairman Newton Minow, civil rights lawyer Joseph Rauh and Attorney General Elliot Richardson.

 

When Frankfurter was appointed to the Supreme Court the betting was that he would vote as a traditional liberal. That would not be the case because his philosophy of judicial restraint which was completely in accord with upholding much of the New Deal, would now be supportive of governmental actions supportive of national defense (Japanese internment), mandating the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools and reapportionment. In case of the last he did not want the Supreme Court to get involved in the “political thicket.’’ (Baker v. Carr). To me given how political the Supreme Court has become in recent years, it would be a breath of fresh air to have the court pull back from what are essentially political controversies that should rightfully be settled by the political branches of government.

 

In the famous Brown vs. Board of Education we witness Frankfurter playing a critical roll in bringing the court to a unanimous decision which was absolutely critical to the legitimacy of the decision. He also was responsible for the words “with all deliberate speed” taken from a much earlier Holmes decision. Frankfurter and Justice Black for that matter believed that integration could not be accomplished in one fell swoop.

 

Snyder also writes of Frankfurter’s long marriage to Marion and how he cared for her as a nurse in her later years. Though childless the couple took in three children from a friend in England at the start of World War II. Parenthood was a new and loving experience for them.

 

I learned from Snyder that the famous “switch in time that saved nine” in 1938 by Justice Owen Roberts was not in response to Roosevelt’s court packing scheme. The decision was made several months before but was not read until one of the justices had recovered from an illness. I also learned that internal arguments within the Supreme Court among the justices take on some of the aspects of a middle-school cafeteria and that Frankfurter and William O. Douglas hated each other. Brad Snyder has written the definitive biography of Felix Frankfurter. However, I do warn the reader it is 992 pages long in the print edition. 

For the full Amazon URL see: Talent Scout for the Administrative State (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of David Pietrusza's "1920: The Year of Six Presidents"

 

A Rocky Road to Normalcy

 

1920 was quite a year. The 18^th Amendment (prohibition) was enforced, the 19^th Amendment was ratified (Women’s Suffrage), the Palmer raids against radicals continued, the Ku Klux Klan was revived, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for murder, and the North discovered there was a large African American population living in its major cities as a result of the wartime demand for labor. Into this hothouse comes the 1920 presidential election.

 

Author David Pietrusza highlights the role of six presidents who played key roles in that year’s election. First there is Theodore Roosevelt who in late 1918 after Republican congressional victories became the odds-on favorite for the nomination. Unfortunately, he dies in early 1919 and his chosen successor General Leonard Wood fails to win the Republican nomination. Then there is President Woodrow Wilson who was ready to run for an unprecedented third term but was incapacitated by a stroke that enabled his wife Edith to become the de facto president. We see young and charismatic Franklin Roosevelt advancing to become the Democratic nominee for Vice President. Before that he was talked about running for Vice President under Herbert Hoover on the Democratic ticket.

 

Of course, Hoover would ultimately acknowledge that he was a Republican. Hoover was extraordinarily popular in his role to feed famine struck Europe and even Keynes noted that Hoover was one of the few people who came out of the Versailles Conference with an enhanced reputation.

 

On the Republican side we see the very amiable and very flawed Warren Harding win the nomination under the aegis of his corrupt campaign manager Harry Dougherty. Harding’s affairs and illegitimate children would have made Bill Clinton blush. In a multi-ballot affair, the Republican leadership settles on Harding in the famous Room 404 of the Blackstone Hotel which forever after would be called the smoke-filled room. When a delegate from Oregon nominates Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge for Vice President a genuine stampede on the floor of the convention leads to his nomination. Coolidge is known for breaking the Boston police strike in 1919.

 

The Democratic Convention is also a multi-ballot affair that leads to the nomination of Ohio governor James Cox, a favorite of the big city bosses. Unlike the Republican Convention the Democratic bosses left no tracks. Ironically both Harding and Cox are newspaper publishers from the same state. Nevertheless, the decision of the voter in November was clear. Both Harding and the Republicans in congress won a blowout victory. One of Harding’s first acts is to pardon Socialist candidate Eugene Debs who was serving in prison, an act that Wilson refused to do.

 

Where Pietrusza is acute is his character sketches of the book’s major protagonists. Wilson is a stubborn old man, Harding is in way over his head, Hoover, though brilliant is cold and austere and Coolidge, though quiet is a dedicated public servant. This book is a great read for political junkies. I learned that the Republicans put a mild anti-lynching plank written by the NAACP and that the seeds for Roosevelt’s 1932 run were planted in 1920 where he collected the names of leading Democrats throughout the country during his vice-presidential campaign.

For the full Amazon URL see: A Rocky Road to Normalcy (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Sean McKeekin's "Stalin's War: A New History of World War II"

 

Stalin Wins

 

Bard College history professor Sean McKeekin has written an interesting revisionist history of World War II. In his view the real winner of the Second World War was Stalin’s Russia even after the horrendous losses it suffered. All of Stalin’s pre-war aims as outlined in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 were achieved and then some. In Europe Stalin ends up with redefining the Finnish, Polish and Romanian borders along with his capture of the three Baltic states. In the East he ends up controlling Manchuria and North Korea. Not bad for a leader who looked at the jaws of defeat in December 1941 with the German army at the gates of Moscow.

 

How did Stalin do it. McKeekin gives great credit to the Soviet-Japan nonaggression pact of May 1940 which avoided a two-front war. It came about, in part, because Hitler never informed Japan of his plan to invade Russia. Had he done so, McKeekin argues that Japan may have moved north into Russia instead of south into the Dutch Indies. I would respectfully disagree because after Russia bloodied Japan’s nose in Manchuria in 1939 and the collapse of Holland and France in 1940, the way was open for Japan to attack the French, British and Dutch possessions in southeast Asia.

 

That said, through the efforts of Soviet spy Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department the Japan-U.S. antagonism was intensified. White was behind the oil sanctions against Japan and the author of the Hull note which signaled which called for a pullout of Japanese forces in Indochina and parts of China. Remember it was Moscow’s goal to have Japan tied down with a war with the United States. Russia got its wish.

 

McKeekin criticizes Britain for not bombing Russia’s Baku oilfields which were supplying 40% of Germany’s oil and the failure of Britain for not coming to the aid of Finland after Russia’s invasion in early 1940. He wanted to see an all-out fight against totalitarianism. But what was Britain, standing alone to do. It could not fight both Hitler and Stalin.

 

McKeekin writes at length about the lend lease aid given to Russia after Hitler’s invasion. He is way too detailed here, but the fact remains Russia received billions of dollars in aid without conditions. To McKeekin lend lease Administrator Harry Hopkins was “objectively” (my word) a Soviet asset. And it was the lend lease aid that came just in time to save Moscow in 1941 and Stalingrad in 1942. Further by 1943, Roosevelt with Hopkins present at the Teheran Conference all but concedes Eastern Europe to Stalin.

 

At the end of the war, we see White influencing the Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize Germany. That plan gives backbone to the German Army to undertake the Battle of the Bulge. Just after that at the Yalta Conference we see Roosevelt ratifying the Soviet facts on the ground in Eastern Europe.

 

I don’t buy into all of McKeekin’s assertions, but it does make for an interesting book, save for the over-detailing of U.S. lend lease aid to Russia which should have been left for an appendix.

For the full amazon URL see: Stalin Wins (amazon.com)