CORRESPONDENCE
R Conrad Black Replies I thank Sir Martin Gilbert for his generally favorable comments on my book about Franklin D. Roosevelt in your June issue ("Avoidable Errors," TAS, June 2004). Sir Martin...
...But I do not believe that his regret at how "frequently Churchill's dealings with Roosevelt are presented to Churchill's disadvantage" is justified...
...I did not write a biography of Churchill and his entourage, and none of Roosevelt's other biographers has referred more often or generously to Winston Churchill (or Charles de Gaulle) than I did...
...652, 674...
...However, I could not resist the urge to flip through a few pages to find out...
...There is (p...
...I should have mentioned Roosevelt's telephone call to Churchill on October 5, 1939, and Churchill's suggestion of a haven for Jews in North Africa in 1943, and Roosevelt's financing and promotion of the rescue mission of Raoul Wallenberg...
...He and his biographers have generally ignored the British promotion of the European Advisory Commission demarcation of occupation zones in Germany in February 1944, putting Berlin in the Russian zone, against Roosevelt's desire to leave that to the end of the war because he rightly believed that the Western allies would advance much more rapidly toward Berlin than the Russians would...
...I absolutely reject Sir Martin's claim that I engaged in "knocking or diminishing the point of view" of Churchill through World War II...
...He nit-picks again when he complains that I committed "an avoidable error" when I quoted Churchill's (and Hitler's) descrip tion(s) of the unpredictability of Russian foreign policy (made by Churchill before he was prime minister), and did not add Churchill's remark that the key to the Russian mystery was its national interest...
...Churchill and his biographers have generally credited the prime minister's agitations to Truman for an American advance on Berlin, which Eisenhower recommended against because he would then be spending American, British, Canadian, and French soldiers' lives to take territory that would have to be handed over to the Russians, according to the agreement the British and Russians agreed against American wishes at the EAC...
...Sir Martin generously cites a couple of the many passages of this kind, but conveys the impression that I build up Roosevelt at the expense of Churchill...
...Roosevelt did not like Churchill when they met in 1919, which Churchill did not remember when they next met in 1941, and he considered him a bibulous and inept Tory ex-chancellor, until Churchill emerged as the leader of the anti-appeasement forces in British public life in 1938...
...I am taken to task for not mentioning Rene Leon, who conveyed a pre-war message from Churchill to Roosevelt, but Leon was a relatively obscure person who is not mentioned in any of the other biographies of Roosevelt in any capacity...
...I was sure that this was some lampoon type of publication's idea of a sick joke...
...It is emphatically mentioned (pp...
...That Sir Martin "could not find in these pages" any reference to the Churchill-Roosevelt difference of view about bombing French rail-way yards before D-Day, with the likelihood of significant resulting 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR February 2005 COkRESPONDE civilian casualties, indicates that he did not read pp...
...Sir Martin writes that Churchill's "proposed stern message from Roosevelt to the Japanese," "is not mentioned here...
...Nor is it the case that "there is no mention in these pages" of Roosevelt's rather one-sided view of Anglo-American cooperation in atomic research...
...But Sir Martin can-not seriously deny that Churchill was reluctant to attack across the Channel, despite the lip service he gave that project, until Roosevelt enlisted Stalin to help him prevail upon Churchill to commit to that operation at Teheran...
...I left a great many messages for him, even intervening with his publisher, and if, as he wrote, he was unaware that I wished to talk to him about my book (and not someone else's), and even ask him to peruse a few parts of it relevant to Churchill, he must have suffered a complete breakdown of personnel and technology...
...I did, however, and contrary to Sir Martin's claim, refer to James Roosevelt's meeting with Churchill and Churchill's support of the early New Deal as "the greatest crusade in modern times" (pp...
...Sir Martin's lamentation that "it would have been interesting to know of Roosevelt's" view of the February 1945 bombing of Dresden, is answered, I believe, on p. 931...
...I repeat my gratitude for Sir Martin Gilbert's generous overall commendation of my book...
...My description of Churchill's initiative to bomb the rail approaches to Auschwitz (p...
...I believe the description to be accurate, though it makes no pretense to exhaustive completeness...
...The Americans did not want a break-up of the alliance at this point because they did not yet know if atomic weapons would work and wanted the Russians to take some of the one million casualties that were anticipated if it proved necessary to invade the home islands of Japan...
...532-533...
...I believe the house where he stayed was between those nearby communities...
...I did not consider that an especially profound insight, and the real key, in the con-text in which I wrote, was not the Russian national interest but the fact that Germany attacked Russia, as both Churchill and Roosevelt had warned Stalin would happen (pp...
...I have tried faithfully to do justice to both men, have heavily praised both, though neither uncritically...
...I repeatedly heap praise on Churchill's courage, brilliance, eloquence and heroic qualities, and conclude that he was, with Roosevelt, the "co-savior of the West" and Roosevelt's only rival as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century, and a man of superior culture and integrity to Roosevelt (p.1132...
...I don't agree that I was remiss in not mentioning much of what Churchill thought of the early New Deal, and his commendation of one of Roosevelt's government appointees, because from 1929 to the Munich crisis in 1938, Churchill was not perceived to be a person of great importance, by the British or the Americans, and the New Deal was a vastly different policy to the one Churchill had pursued as chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929...
...I agree with Sir Martin's praise of Arthur Purvis, but think he is unjust in complaining that I should have gone farther than refer to his untimely death as "a grievous loss...
...At first glance I chuckled to myself at the sight of George Bush paired with the caption "Joy to the World...
...746...
...It is natural for Churchill's principal biographer to have a slightly different view of their respective merits, but he has no right to exact more than my abiding and concluding comment on Winston Churchill: that his services to civilization were "beyond estimation...
...528, 617, 623, 639...
...Churchill's broadcasts to the United States in 1934 and 1937 were not mentioned by me be-cause I could find no evidence that Roosevelt took any notice of them...
...But I think he is nit-picking when he complains that I referred to Churchill suffering "chest-pains" rather than "angina" while opening a window in the White House on December 26,1941, and that he recuperated in Palm Beach rather than Pompano Beach...
...DAN PERKINS Dayton, Ohio The American Alternative Foundation has recently been renamed The American Spectator Foundation...
...The greatness of neither man is at issue...
...While Churchill was respectful of Roosevelt's reputation, he complicit in the British Tory and Euro-Gaullist and U.S...
...February 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 7...
...818) was based in part on a brilliant lecture on the subject by Sir Martin Gilbert I attended in London approximately ten years ago...
...Sir Martin's own official biography of Churchill can be invoked in many places in support of that view...
...I will address these oversights in the second edition and am grateful to Sir Martin for pointing them out...
...I quickly realized that, while this was a sick joke, it was not a lampoon at all...
...Sir Martin makes a number of dissenting points which I con-cede, and a number that are unjust and reflect an incomplete reading of mybook...
...He knew Stalin too well for that, which is why he suggested that they destroy the "naughty" piece of paper on which the pro-posed spheres of influence were written...
...936-937...
...Nor is it true that "Black does not tell us the reason for Roosevelt's refusal to apply pressure on the Soviets in order to help the Poles in 1944" (pp...
...If anyone there actually thinks that Bush has anything to do with joy to the world then you are, in fact, American spectators and not participants...
...Re-publican myth-making about Teheran and Yalta Churchill tried to pretend that his signing over to Stalin in Moscow of control of Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, in October 1944, was only "immediate war-time arrangements" and temporary...
...CONRAD BLACK Toronto, Ontario A Rude Awakening Although I am not familiar with your magazine, your recent (December 2004/January 2005) cover photo and caption caught my eye...
...884, 920, 984-986, 996-997...
...I accept that I have redistributed some of the credit accorded by the conventional wisdom from Churchill to Roosevelt, but the conventional wisdom was unrigorous, and even ahistoric...
...It is unlike Sir Martin Gilbert to be so careless...
Vol. 38 • February 2005 • No. 1
