Condoleezza Rice and Herbert Hoover…
A good friend asked me to read “The Perils of Isolationism” which is the lead article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. The author is Condoleezza Rice, who was Secretary of State for G.W. Bush and also his national security advisor.
My friend was evidently impressed with the article. Someone at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University had emailed him an online copy. I was able to read the hard copy from the issue which had just arrived in my mailbox.
Dr. Rice is the director of the Hoover Institution. I am wondering if she has read Herbert Hoover’s magnum opus, Freedom Betrayed, the Secret History of the Second World War and its Aftermath. I wonder because Hoover was a “revisionist”, which is something Rice deplores in her Perils essay.
From the editor’s introduction to Freedom Betrayed:
“Originally conceived as the section of his memoirs that would cover his life during World War II, the “War Book” (as he called it) had morphed into something far more ambitious: an unabashed, revisionist reexamination of the entire war—and a sweeping indictment of the “lost statesmanship” of Franklin Roosevelt.”
From the back cover:
“Nearly fifty years after his death, Herbert Hoover returns as the ultimate revisionist historian, prosecuting his heavily documented indictment of U.S. foreign policy before, during and after the Second World War….”—Richard Norton Smith
I raise the issue because nowhere in Dr. Rice’s essay do I see an original thought, something which might be termed revisionist. She is every bit the conventional, establishment thinker. An enabler. Here’s my abbreviated critique of The Perils of Isolationism which I sent my friend…
….
OK, I’ve read the entire Condi essay in the current edition of Foreign Affairs. It is full of many false assumptions, unconscious arrogance and non sequiturs which I won’t e
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