They really picked the wrong person to malign, and those who came in defense of Radosh and like ilk, in a knee jerk way due to personal reasons, are going to have egg all over their faces because of it. Thanks to Andy, once again, coming to bat for Diana, as only Andy can do.
NOTE: And to those who attack West for personal reasons, using the recent brouhaha that her book has become the center of, I wouldn’t blame Diana if her next book is titled:
Conservative Betrayal
The Open Assault on My Character by Self Important Hacks
Conrad Black’s Vitriol Masks His Own Historical Blindspot
August 16th, 2013 by Andrew Bostom |
The late military intelligence historian Eduard Mark, whose 1998 analysisidentified FDR “co-President” Harry Hopkins as “Source 19” in a cable putatively authored by Soviet spymaster Iskhak Akhmerov, lamented,
the indifference of American diplomatic historians to intelligence and of their predominantly liberal political orientation which has led them to ignore the whole question of the relationship between internal security and foreign policy as smacking of ‘McCarthyism’
Irrespective of Conrad Black’s current political orientation, his vitriolic attackon Diana West, and her book American Betrayal, epitomizes the mindset identified with rare candor by Mark—who was not a political conservative.
Black’s 2003 Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom includes this bowdlerized characterization of Alger Hiss, allegedly redressing “lurid allegations” by McCarthyite bogeymen, while trivializing Hiss’s influence at the seminal 1945 Yalta Conference (pp. 1079-80):
Because of the lurid allegations by McCarthyite Republicans in the early fifties, a word must be said about Alger Hiss, who attended the Yalta Conference as a junior State Department official specializing in international organizations. Hiss was eventually revealed as a former member of a Communist espionage ring in the United States, and was convicted of perjury on the dogged examination of Congressman Richard Nixon. Roosevelt had never met Hiss before Yalta, and never spent one minute alone with him at Yalta, according to [FDR interpreter Charles] Bohlen, who was with Roosevelt throughout as interpreter and counselor in Soviet matters, Hiss’s chief contribution at the conference was a sensibly reasoned argument against giving the Soviet Union three votes in the international organization. In this, as in all other matters, while he was competent and unexceptionable in his functions, Hiss had no influence whatever on Roosevelt or American policy at Yalta.
Black does not provide a single footnote for any of these assertions, including his final statement about Hiss’s alleged lack of influence. Fortunately, there is a well-documented corrective to Black’s sanitized court history account of the role Alger Hiss played at Yalta, written, collaboratively, by Cold War scholars par excellence, Herbert Romerstein, and M. Stanton Evans. In Stalin’s Secret Agents, which was just published this past November, 2012, they dedicate a chapter to the actual role Alger Hiss played at Yalta, dubbed eponymously, “See Alger Hiss About This,” based upon a telltale quote by former FDR Secretary of State Edward Stettinius.
Contrary to her detractors, Diana West’s thesis makes sense. Their hysterical reaction doesn’t.
Sure, the Black’s and the Radishes and Horowitzes can yell ‘fake but accurate’, but common sense and the overall knowledge we have now can be backed up with a common sense approach, and it should be discussed. If West’s opponents profess to know the ultimate historical truth they should be laughed out of office.