Freedom Betrayed

Herbert Hoover apparently kept score. He was a bitter man, enraged for years by perceived slights at the hand of Franklin Roosevelt.

His recently published "Freedom Betrayed", edited by the Hoover Institute, is an strange echo of the birther madness that affects conservatives today.

What? How on earth did Hoover know that President Obama was a secret Muslim plant, snuck into Hawaii as an embryo, after being conceived by martians in Kenya?

Hoover's diatribe is rife with the same kind of delusional thinking.

When your political position is weak, sometimes you make stuff up.

The editor, a Hoover Institute conservative, claims that Hoover is speaking the truth, has special inside knowledge, knows more than 99% of historians.

And what does he know, what special insight does he have that we had to wait fifty years to find out? These "betrayals" are reminiscent of the 1950s red scare, one almost can see I Love Lucy from our house.

1. Joe McCarthy was actually right. His reign of terror, claiming "fellow travelers" or covert communists were rife in the federal government was right. Hoover knows, he knows who there were.

I wonder why he didn't tell back then.

To believe Hoover, we must disregard historical fact, that McCarthy could find not ONE communist for all the hearings he held. The dozens of Americans who had their career reputations ruined, Hollywood producers and actors who were blacklisted, were really commies according to Hoover. The historical record is somehow wrong. If we believe Hoover, then he somehow had an insight that nobody else could prove in 1951.

2. Roosevelt set up World War II. Germany should have fought Russia without our involvement and both would have been destroyed, we should have stayed out of it. Germany was not near as bad as Russia, Stalin cleverly sent dozens of agents to America, to sway Roosevelt into taking sides in the war. Roosevelt waged a secret war in the North Atlantic against poor old Germany, deliberately causing the war.

3. The Japanese were forced into WWII. Roosevelt, (notice a trend here...it is ALL Roosevelt's fault- sounds like today's attacks against President Obama), tricked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. The Japanese did not want war, they were manipulated into it.

4. Toward the end of WWII Roosevelt sold out Europe, he gave Eastern Europe to Stalin, subjugating millions to slavery or worse. After the war, communists in the federal government actually conspired against the interests of the United States; that is why we needed McCarthy's hearings.

5. In short, Roosevelt was a dictator, a traitor, a communist, and was rude to the butler as well.

Nonsense, all nonsense!

First McCarthy was wrong. He never found one communist agent.

For all the work, he got one conviction for perjury, none for espionage. Not one. You would think, after years of "Un-American Activity Hearings" he would have got lucky and found one communist spy. He didn't find any!

His efforts were the birther movement of the time, so whacked out that finally an exasperated Dwight Eisenhower had the political courage to stop him (after enjoying the roasting the Democrats took for almost two years).

Moderate Republicans approached McCarthy like they do the birthers of today, slyly not agreeing with them, but not attacking them either. A shrug of the shoulders, a wink and a nod, only encourages the madness; as long as only Democrats took the hit.

As today, Republicans stood silently by as a maniac used lies, scare tactics and power to destroy innocent people, which was acceptable, as long as it discredited Democrats. When McCarthy turned on Republicans, things changed fast and his reign of terror ended.

The birther movement had its antecedents in McCarthyism. The birther movement is much like McCarthyism in its cynical political application.

Roosevelt set up World War II? This ignores some huge facts: one, Britain was on the ropes, our old ally was about done. France had already been defeated. Western Europe was gone. Russia was about finished as well, leaving nothing in the way between Germany's superior war machine and the United States.

Thanks to Hoover and other "America Firsters", the United States was so isolationist that the draft passed by ONE vote in Congress in 1940. Thanks to isolationists, our military was horribly under prepared. This was with Germany literally knocking on the door.

Hoover, who once famously said that "prosperity was right around the corner" in 1932, was working hard at the time to keep America out of the war in 1940.

By doing so, he was setting us up for defeat.

At the time, because of the horrors of WWI, it made some sense, until December 7, 1941 that is.

The Japanese were forced into the war, is he serious?

Hoover, as usual, conveniently forgets that the Japanese had invaded China in the early 1930s, and had just about conquered it. And, another part of the Pearl Harbor attack strategy, was a coordinated attack on Southeast Asia and of course the Philippines.

Strange, how the poor Japanese, who were "cornered" into striking back at the American monolith, had a coordinated and well planned invasion plan for most of the Pacific, including Australia, that they put into immediate and devastating effect after Pearl Harbor.

In short, Japan had a preemptive attack strategy to conquer most of the Pacific; not exactly a defensive posture.

Japan also engaged in "peace" negotiations for months, while secretly sneaking up and attacking without a declaration of war; it doesn't sound like they were acting reluctantly in self defense.

The Japanese were the aggressors, they attacked the United States. How on earth can Hoover claim they were manipulated into attack? If they were, then why did they set into effect an elaborate plan of conquest?

If Hoover were right, the Japanese would have attacked, and immediately sued for peace. Tell the Bataan Death Marchers that! The Japanese had a plan, and it was way more ambitious than Hoover could ever imagine.

These historical facts show Hoover for the spiteful, vengeful and pathetic historical figure he became.

There is good reason for this spite. Republicans were nearly destroyed by the depression and World War II. The reason was they took positions contrary to the best interests of the American people.

Hoover was wrong on the depression. So were most Americans, including many Democrats. The modern economy had changed so much because of WWI, that the old paradigms did not work (the gold standard for one).

Hoover was, rightly or wrongly, blamed for the depression. That would be hard for anyone to take.

It took the experimentation of the New Deal, and the huge economic effects of WWII to change the economic approach to bring back prosperity and growth. Hoover did not have a clue what to do.

And sure enough, after WWII, clueless Republicans once again wanted to go back to small government, the unregulated economic approach of the 1920s; attacking Democrats for being communists and Roosevelt as a fool.

And, once again, in 2007, it blew up in their faces. Looking backward when trying to manage a global economy does not work! They still are clueless!

We are having the same argument we had in 1933, with predictable results. President Obama refers to it as trying the same thing over and over, expecting a different result... it simply does not work!

Conservatism does not work to manage a modern global economy. It is out of date, short sighted, weighted toward the rich, and leads to widespread poverty. It is Hooverville all over again!

And then there is that pesky reality that Roosevelt and the Democrats were spot on about the need for the war. When the American Army uncovered the horrors of the Holocaust, any question of the need for the war evaporated.

Hoover's clinging to the assumption that the war was unnecessary, that it was part of Roosevelt being duped by Stalin, does not compare well with what we found in the concentration camps.

Germany, and Japan to a lesser degree, planned and enacted genocide on a huge scale. The historical record proves that both had elaborate plans for conquering the United States, and Hitler made no bones about what he would do to Jews and Blacks once he took over.

Hoover is a tragic figure in history. He was trained engineer, with a first class mind. He was also an humanitarian, who helped feed Europe after WWI.

But he was a partisan hater of the man who displaced him after one disastrous term in the White House. His party never could get over the fact that the world changed so fast, and the conservative approach that had served so well simply no longer worked.

Roosevelt did not help, when he famously said, "The difference between the conservative and the liberal is that one looks backwards in time for answers, the other looks into the future, the answers always lie in the future."

Hoover lived in the past, Roosevelt looked forward; and that made all the difference.

Thank God we went with the future, and not with the past