Thomas Powers, 'The Conquerors': Deciding Germany's Fate nytimes.com
[Switching over to the war after the war to end all wars, we have this review of THE CONQUERORS Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945, By Michael Beschloss. This might technically be considered a Godwin's law demonstration, but I will overlook it this time. ]
Ordinary Americans thought of Roosevelt as a rock, serene and confident, but he was a cipher to the men who worked with him. None ever knew his deepest plans, or what he told anybody else or when the presidential back would turn and they would be asked to step down. Beschloss is the author of half a dozen works of history with a special focus on how American presidents run the government and make decisions, and along the way he has learned to write with ease, confidence and a lively sense of character and scene. ''The Conquerors'' is built almost entirely around the conversations of high American officials trying to decide what to do with Germany. Two broad general ideas were on the table -- a plan by Roosevelt's old friend and secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to break Germany up into several small, pastoral states of yeoman farmers; and a more conventional proposal to get Germany quickly back onto its feet as a bulwark against the territorial appetite of a victorious Soviet Union.
The son of a rich businessman, Morgenthau fled the world of commerce for life as a gentleman farmer in upstate New York, where one of his neighbors was the future president. They became friends, Morgenthau worked hard in Roosevelt's political campaigns, and in 1933 Roosevelt surprised the world by naming him to run the Treasury Department. Morgenthau was the only Jew in Roosevelt's cabinet, or among the president's friends, and his tenure was unremarkable until the man who had celebrated his marriage, Rabbi Stephen Wise, brought him vivid reports, freshly arrived from Switzerland in the summer of 1942, of the Nazi campaign that would come to be known as the Holocaust.
The killing of Jews was no secret to governments or international organizations, but despite widespread knowledge of the basic facts few officials or religious leaders or even private citizens grasped that a radical new form of evil had entered the world. Morgenthau had little success in pressing the government to do something about it. Even a proposal to bomb the rail lines carrying trainloads of Jews to Auschwitz was rejected as a distraction from the war effort. Failing to halt or even slow the horror, he determined to ensure it would never happen again, and that, in his view, meant ending Germany's power to make war once and for all. To aides he described a Germany stripped of its industry as something like the used-up areas of Nevada deserts where only ghost towns, rusting machinery and abandoned mines remain.
Morgenthau's plan was vigorously opposed by the patrician secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, and his wartime aide John J. McCloy, who both thought a principal cause of the war was the vindictive Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. Roosevelt's weary and petulant secretary of state, Cordell Hull, and his successor in the last year of the war, Edward Stettinius, seemed to waver, equally ready to rebuild Germany or to cripple it, so long as the president would admit them to the inner circle. The wild card in this mix was Roosevelt himself, but what he wanted seemed to change by the day.
He wasn't about to let Germany off the hook. All would be safe, he declared, if Germany were stripped of aircraft and forbidden to wear uniforms or to march. But then he would think better of these vindictive measures. To Morgenthau he cited an intelligence report that warned that Europe might starve if it could no longer buy German-made farm machinery. Morgenthau's response: ''In the words of your son Johnny, 'So what?' '' . . .
But the bulwark proved to be a new Germany, rebuilt as a democracy with the help of American money and determination. As Beschloss tells this story, which he calls an American success, Roosevelt comes into focus as a man of great gifts -- not for hammering out policy, but for knowing what was really bedrock and for artful delay while others came around. In this case the big thing he knew was the importance of reconstructing Germany from the ground up rather than striking some sort of deal to end the war a few months sooner. Beschloss suggests no lesson that President Bush might apply to Iraq, but one is there for anyone who chooses to see it -- fighting may be the painful part of war, but sticking around to build the peace also takes courage and resolution, and is just as important. |
