Herbert Hoover: Revisionista

Nota: Um magnum opus de Hoover que foi publicado apenas no ano passado como que vem reforçar os argumentos dos então "isolacionistas" americanos e dos agora libertarians não-intervencionistas.

Do artigo da American Spectator:  Revisionist History That Matters, By TOM BETHELL on 11.18.11 @ 6:08AM, Herbert Hoover's long buried assessment of Franklin Roosevelt and "The Good War."

 Freedom Betrayed, written by President Herbert Hoover in his retirement, is a wide-ranging attack on the decisions made by his White House successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hoover worked on it for 20 years and regarded it as his magnum opus. (...)

As his book stood in 1953, for example -- when it was titled "Lost Statesmanship" -- Hoover listed 19 "gigantic blunders" by U.S. and British policymakers. These began in 1933 with FDR's diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union and continued with the British and French guarantee to Poland in 1939. George Nash told me in an email that Hoover considered the Polish guarantee to have been "the greatest blunder in the history of British statesmanship."

Even Churchill saw (later) that it had been a mistake. But he supported it at the time. But in The Gathering Storm (1948), Churchill demonstrated the futility of Chamberlain's declaration of war. (Chamberlain was stung by the charges of appeasement after Munich and with Hitler's Poland invasion he tried to recover.)

Hoover was quite critical of Churchill. He had a "surpassing power of oratory and word pictures," Hoover wrote, but "intellectual integrity was not his strong point."

Another "major blunder," Hoover thought, was FDR's decision in 1941 to throw the U.S. into an "undeclared war with Germany and Japan, in total violation of promises upon which he had been elected a few weeks before." Roosevelt's "total economic sanctions" against Japan in the summer of 1941, and his "contemptuous refusal" of the Japanese prime minister's peace proposals in September, Hoover saw as the crucial precursors to Pearl Harbor. The day after the attack, Hoover told a friend that FDR's "continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten."

(...)Much of what Hoover said in opposition to FDR's (and Churchill's) war policies can be summarized this way: Stalin was every bit as bad as Hitler. So let them fight it out. FDR certainly didn't see things that way. 

Hoover said: "The greatest loss of statesmanship in all American history was the tacit American alliance and support of Communist Russia when Hitler made his attack in June 1941.… American aid to Russia meant victory for Stalin and the spread of Communism to the world."