If this is what Ronald Radosh really thinks Diana West was saying in American Betrayal, he is either a very stupid man or is incapable of reading a text for meaning. This is from his letter to The New Criterion:

She asserts, time and time again, that decisions—particularly those made by fdr—which affected the Soviet–U.S. military alliance were made because the United States was an occupied power, its government controlled by Kremlin agents who had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration and subverted it.

Not in any way did any such thought enter my head as I read the book. Nothing could be farther from my mind than such an assertion. France was an occupied power. American was not an occupied power, only one whose foreign policy direction was heavily influenced by Soviet interests because there were Soviet agents right at the centre of the decision-making process. Radish is so blatantly wrong as a reading of what West wrote that stupidity or some kind of malicious intent are both possible reasons for what he wrote. So let us turn to a sentence Radosh does agree with, which is a sentence he took from Andrew McCarthy:

There was an ambitious Communist effort to steer American policy in directions that aligned with Soviet interests.

Exactly so. All one needs to add is that this effort was entirely successful and you arrive at Diana West’s central point. So would Radosh accept this altered sentence of McCarthy’s, with my added words in parentheses?

There was an ambitious [and extremely successful] Communist effort to steer American policy in directions that aligned with Soviet interests.

Because that is exactly what the book is about. Would Radosh agree, and if not why not? And if he does agree, what’s his problem with American Betrayal? So let me turn to this, another passage from Radosh’s letter, which is a statement so off centre that it is irritating to even see the words in print:

On this point, McCarthy writes that my interpretation of her “‘occupation’ metaphor” is “overwrought,” and that I was intimating that West asserts American policy “was fully controlled, rather than significantly influenced, by the Kremlin.” McCarthy is wrong about this. Throughout her book, Diana West makes it quite clear that she believes the United States was in fact an occupied power. Ironically, in answering me, West herself wrote that she never used the phrase “occupied power,” and that what she wrote is that “the strategic placement of hundreds of agents of Stalin’s influence inside the U.S. government and other institutions amounted to a ‘de facto’ occupation,” and later in her book, that “the deep extent of Communist penetration, heretofore denied, had in fact reached a tipping point to become a de facto Communist occupation of the American center of power.”

Is he so stupid that he doesn’t see that de facto does not mean actual. She is saying that for all practical purposes, the American war effort was designed to the maximum extent to assist the Soviets not just with their own war effort but with their post-war effort as well. Does Radosh deny this? Does he deny that this is what she meant? But more importantly, does he deny that this is entirely possible based on the facts found in the book. If this is what he thinks then he should stop playing with words and tell us why in his view this conclusion is wrong. Because that is what the argument is about. There were other war aims as well that Washington pursued separate from the Soviet interests, but West never denied that there were or suggested that everything done by the US was designed to help Stalin.

And then this. Radosh writes the following about Lend-Lease which could only seem reasonable to someone who has never read West’s book:

As others and I have pointed out elsewhere, it was in our interest to provide that aid. Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union saved thousands—probably hundreds of thousands—of American lives, enabling the Russians to carry the brunt of the battle in the worst period of the war. In short, the aid given to Russia was not a gift, but was necessary and served the interests of the West in general and the United States in particular. In no way did that aid give the Soviets “far beyond what is necessary.”

It’s not lend-lease that West objected to as assistance in the war effort. Who in their right mind would do that? It is the extent of what was passed to the Soviets. Are the details of the actual materiel sent to the Soviets as described by West in dispute or not, because if they are not, then West has more than proven her case. Since Radosh doesn’t even take this issue up, not with so much as a single contrary piece of evidence, or gives any reason to doubt her sources, he is depending on people who read his review not to have read the book or seen the evidence that West puts into print.

And then with this empty and non-responsive non-response, off he goes to discuss Joe McCarthy which the book was not in the least about. In fact, it is Radosh who is raising the McCarthy scare, to try to frighten people to get them to back off from either reading or defending West’s book. Because if that’s all he has to say – just a few invectives here or there and a fully distorted description of what the book is about – then he has not even begun what would constitute even the most minimal refutation of what West has written. In fact, by not providing an actual answer to the specific issues she raised, and mis-representing what she has actually written, Radosh has demonstrated that no answer is available because if one actually existed that had even an ounce of weight, he would undoubtedly have taken the trouble to tell us what such evidence was.

Radosh ends his letter with this peroration:

There is good history and there is bad history. Unfortunately, some conservatives like Diana West have written very bad history. As one who has for years waged a battle against the Left’s distortions of history to serve its political agenda—primarily fighting against the false Leftist fables of Howard Zinn, Oliver Stone, and Peter Kuznick—I argue that when a self-proclaimed conservative writes an equally contentious, false, and misleading narrative and calls it history, he or she should receive the same kind of critical appraisal as that given to Leftist distorters of our past. Politicized history is just as bad when written from the Right as from the Left.

We know why the left tries to disguise the facts. They don’t want to be seen as complicit in Stalin’s crimes and they prefer to hide their own traitorous activities from public view. But what would West’s motives be? Why would she want to distort the history of the cold war? What political agenda would she be trying to serve? What difference at this stage would it make, other than to a handful of us, who Harry Hopkins was and what he did? What would such politicisation be in aid of? How would the past be distorted by what she wrote, other than to prove what no one said, that the US was an “occupied” power, supposedly in some kind of analogous way to what actually happened in France? To me, both the content and structure of what Radosh has written looks no different from the attempts by the left to defend the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss by smearing their enemies and scaring people into shutting up. This is the kind of argument that might have been used against Whittaker Chambers in the 1950s.

The more of Radosh’s writings I read, the more I mistrust him. The reaction on the right frightens me even more than Diana West’s original book.