The culmination of an extraordinary literary project that Herbert Hoover launched during World War II, his magnum opus - at last published nearly fifty years after its completion - offers a revisionist reexamination of the war and its cold war aftermath and a sweeping indictment of the 'lost statesmanship' of Franklin Roosevelt.
Nearly seventy years ago, during World War II, Hoover began to scribble the first words of what was later to be called his "magnum opus." He did so in the shadow of three great disappointments: his inability to win the Republican nomination in 1940; his failed crusade to keep the United States out of World War II; and his frustrated bid to become the Great Humanitarian in Europe for a second time. But after a career extraordinarily rich in achievement and honors, only one accomplishment eluded him at the end: the publication of this book, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath. After Hoover's death, his heirs decided not to publish his magnum opus. Since then, for nearly half a century, it has remained in storage, unavailable for examination--until now.
In this book, perhaps the most ambitious and systematic work of World War II revisionism ever attempted, Hoover offers his frank evaluation of Roosevelt's foreign policies before Pearl Harbor and policies during the war, as well as an examination of the war's consequences, including the expansion of the Soviet empire at war's end and the eruption of the cold war against the Communists. Throughout the work, Hoover raises critical questions, many of which are still under scrutiny today: Did Franklin Roosevelt deceitfully maneuver the United States into an undeclared and unconstitutional naval war with Germany in 1941? Did he unnecessarily appease Joseph Stalin at the pivotal Tehran conference in 1943? Was Roosevelt's wartime policy of "unconditional surrender" a blunder? Did communist agents and sympathizers in the White House, Department of State, and Department of the Treasury play a malign role in some of America's wartime decisions?
On these and other controversies Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath takes it stand. Hoover's work reflects the foreign policy thinking not just of himself but of many American opinion makers during his lifetime and beyond. As such, it is a document with which we should be acquainted today. The intrinsic interest of Hoover's book remains strong, in part because it insistently raises issues--in some cases moral issues--with whose consequences we live even now.
