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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (49901)	10/7/2002 8:07:20 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

Did Roosevelt stop the bombing of Auschwitz? Beschloss says he did in this new book. He is an interesting Historian. He has came out of nowhere to really dominate TV discussions on Presidential History. Here is an excerpt from his book in Newsweek. >>>>Much of the modern indignation at the American failure to bomb Auschwitz has been centered on John McCloy. At best McCloy has been excoriated for his bullheaded concentration on traditional military targets; at worst he has been attacked for callous indifference to the murder of the Jews. Didn't McCloy discuss such an important matter with the president? For decades after World War II, when interviewed about the subject, McCloy insisted that he did not. He told Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz in 1983 that he "never talked" with FDR about bombing Auschwitz. In a 2000 book, "The Bombing of Auschwitz," scholar Richard Levy concluded: "If McCloy is to be faulted, his fault must lie in having failed to go to the President himself." But new information suggests that the man who made the ultimate decision not to bomb Auschwitz may not have been John McCloy but Franklin Roosevelt himself. In 1986, three years before his death, McCloy had a taped private conversation, unpublished before now, with Morgenthau's son Henry III, who was researching a family memoir. Frail but articulate and alert throughout the conversation, the 91-year-old McCloy told Morgenthau that of course he had personally raised with FDR the possibility of bombing Auschwitz. McCloy said, "I remember talking one time with Mr. Roosevelt about it, and he was irate. He said, "Why, the idea!... They'll only move it down the road a little way." (This referred to the prospect that the Nazis would have built other death mills to continue the killing.) McCloy recalled that the president "made it very clear" to him that bombing Auschwitz "wouldn't have done any good." According to McCloy, Roosevelt told him that bombing Auschwitz would be "provocative" to the Nazis and he wouldn't "have anything to do" with the idea. McCloy said that FDR warned him that Americans would be accused of "bombing these innocent people" at Auschwitz, adding, "We'll be accused of participating in this horrible business!" In his 1986 conversation with Morgenthau's son, McCloy went on to say, "I didn't want to bomb Auschwitz... It seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn't bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler. Whereas the president had the idea that that would be more provocative and ineffective. And he took a very strong stand." If we presume that the old man's memory was sound and that he was telling the truth, McCloy had concealed FDR's personal refusal to bomb Auschwitz for forty-two years. (McCloy's private papers offer no account of his remembered conversation with FDR; nor do they document every exchange he had on sensitive wartime issues.) Perhaps McCloy had been motivated by his old-fashioned notion of public service, which demanded protecting the secrecy of presidential conversations and deflecting criticism from the boss. Why did McCloy change his story in 1986? Smarting from public criticism over Auschwitz, he may have grown tired of bearing the sole burden of what had become the most hotly debated decision of the Roosevelt presidency, especially among American Jews who had once hailed FDR as their hero. But there might also have been another reason. It could not be wholly coincidental that the outsider to whom McCloy insisted that Franklin Roosevelt, not he, was cardinally responsible for the failure to bomb Auschwitz was the son of the Jewish Treasury secretary who had once accused McCloy of being an "oppressor of the Jews." John McCloy was a man so respected that he was once called the "chairman" of the American Establishment. His firsthand testimony is the first serious evidence we have that it was Franklin Roosevelt who made one of history's most crucial decisions, and of the president's rationale in making it. Based on McCloy's account, FDR made his decision on Auschwitz after little or no consultation with his key advisers. Historians will probably argue until the end of time whether or not Auschwitz should have been bombed. But as the United States contemplates war against Iraq, the story of FDR's choice not to bomb shows us how a wartime president may issue a swift and quiet ruling which, though it may not seem pivotal at the time, could prove to be one of the decisions for which history most remembers him. From "The Conquerors" by Michael Beschloss. © 2002 by Michael Beschloss. To be published by Simon & Schuster. © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. msnbc.com