Freedom Betrayed--An Introduction 2

Nearly seventy years ago, during World War II, Hervert Hoover began to scribble the first words of waht was later to be called his "magnum opus." He did so in the shadow of three great disappointments: his inability to win the Republican presidential 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. For twenty more years Hoover labored over this manuscript, even as his career continued to be extraordinarily rich in achievement and honors. At the end only one final accomplishment eluded him:publication of his magunum opus, Freedom Betrayed . Following Hoover's death in 1964, his heirs decided to plance his manuscript in storage where for nearlyhalf a century it has remained unread--until now.

In this book, perhapsthe most ambitious and systematic work of World War II revisionism ever attempted, Hoover offers his frank evaluation of President Roosevelt's foreign policies before Parl Harbor and during the war, as well as an examination of the war's conseauences, includingthe expansion of the Soviet empire at war's end and the eruption fo the Cold War against the Communists. Throughout the work, HOover raises critical questions, many of which are still under scrutiniy today: Did Franklin Roosevelt decietfully maneuver the United States into an undeclared and unconstitutional naval war with Germany in 1941? Did he unnecessarily appease Joseph Stalin at the pivotal Teheran 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 its stand.

Hoover's work reflets 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--about decisions with whose consequences we still live.

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