Rearguing the U.S. Role

...Beard was viciously attacked by pro-Roosevelt forces, and Dennis was indicted under the Smith Act for "conspiring to cause insubordination in the Armed Forces...

...All five, for their own reasons, were strongly opposed to American involvement in World War II...

...the connections between a permanent war economy, industry, government, and the state...

...The man was a McCarthyite, a progressive-turned-reactionary, a political neanderthal...

...in some cases the same remark is cited more than once, leaving the reader with an "I know I've seen that somewhere recently" squint in his eye...

...Senator Taft, who is too often portrayed by historians and journalists as a knee-jerk anti-Communist, was actually repulsed by Truman's repeated warnings about Soviet plans to conquer the world...

...He argues merely that, despite their personal and political shortcomings, Flynn, Taft, Dennis, historian Charles Beard, and journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, the Prophets on the Right, were roundly condemned in the 1930s and '40s for offering a critique of U.S...

...He was, after all, an admirer of Adolf Hitler, a fascist who flooded America with pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic propaganda...

...the menace of crusades and holy wars...

...Robert A. Taft, on the other hand, claimed the War had been engineered largely by those who hoped the government would use its expanded strength to socialize the economy and limit individual rights...

...Among the few voices raised in opposition were those of Flynn, Taft, Dennis, Beard and Villard...

...One hopes the debate on such matters will be more fruitful the second time around...

...Beard, for instance, believed the campaign for war had been managed by business interests concerned about foreign markets for a supposedly indigestible surplus of manufactured goods, and by New Deal officials who could not come to grips with pressing domestic problems...

...the need for attention to the methods used to bring a nation into war...

...Regardless of the prophetic qualities these men may or may not have possessed, they raised a series of critical issues that until recently were too often ignored: "the erosion of congressional authority to bring the nation into war...

...And the book could have benefitted from more careful editing...

...Unlike both the Truman-Humphrey liberals and the Goldwater-Buckley conservatives, he says, "they called empire by its proper name and rejected its thrust -at a time when their contemporaries scarcely admitted its existence or when they were celebrating its growth as a logical and inevitable development...

...Stories and anecdotes will flow about his capitulation to Joe McCarthy, his attempts to unleash Chiang Kai-shek and Douglas MacArthur during the Korean conflict, his unwavering support of the China Lobby...

...Indeed, Robert Taft's flip-flop during the Korean war provides a good example of how minds can change as a situation moves from the abstract to the real...

...Presidency...

...Still, all five could agree on two basic points: First, U.S...

...It must be recalled that all of these men, with the exception of Taft (who, Radosh admits, was the weakest and most inconsistent in his condemnations of Truman's policies), were far removed from the seats of power...

...Then bring up Lawrence Dennis and watch the roof blow off...

...entry into the War was due largely to the usurpation of constitutional power by a "devious" Chief Executive (and, conversely, to the impotence of the legislative branch...

...Nonetheless, Radosh's sympathetic account of these early Cold War critics is not without value...

...foreign policy that has come to be accepted by most Americans in the '70s...

...Reviewed by David Oshinsky Assistant Professor of History, Douglass College, Rutgers University Raise the name of John T. Flynn to a group of liberal academics and wait for the fireworks...

...Villard lost a similar position at the Nation...

...Flynn was fired from the staff of the New Republic during the late 1930s...

...They viewed the new anti-Soviet stance as a ploy to increase Executive authority, fatten the defense budget, crush dissent, and extend the American Empire under the guise of stopping the Russians...

...They were, in short, among a bare handful of perceptive critics who foresaw the limitations of American globalism in the post-World War II era...

...Taft's criticism of those who failed to define the limits of American power probably cost him the biggest prize of all-the U.S...

...As might be expected, their opposition to American foreign policy dating back to the period before Pearl Harbor hurt these men badly...

...In writing a collective biography of five men (two chapters on each), Radosh finds himself constantly repeating the same events...

...the dangers of concentrated power in the Executive;- the need for debate on foreign policy...

...He feels that in the shadow of recent foreign policy debacles caused by America's anti-Communist actions, their antiglobalism has been clearly vindicated...

...I myself," Taft told the Senate, "know of no particular indication of Russian intentions to undertake military aggression beyond the sphere of influence originally assigned to them...

...In Congress, a union of Republican and Democratic legislators insured speedy approval of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...

...But this analysis overlooks an important fact...

...Radosh argues that these were farsighted, courageous men who stood outside "the consensus or the mainstream...

...Although they came from different backgrounds and held diverse (and often contradictory) political beliefs they also had much in common...

...second, intervention had greatly enhanced the notion of an emerging "American Century," with its emphasis on worldwide commitments...

...After urging caution and restraint in the days of the North Korean assault, the Ohioan perceived the end of Western civilization when Chinese troops entered the fray, and wound up supporting MacArthur's plea for a total military victory...

...With the coming of the Cold War, the vast majority of citizens willingly supported the Truman Administration's stated goal of containing Communism around the globe...

...Move on to Robert A. Taft...

...Both groups, he concluded, were seeking external solutions to internal problems...

...Prophets on the Right has other, if less essential, difficulties as well...

...Dennis, Flynn, Villard and Beard did not have to wrestle with daily issues like the Greek civil war, how far to push Stalin over Berlin, what to do about the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia...

...Long quotations follow one another with numbing regularity...

...Ronald Radosh, an associate professor of history at the City University of New York and the author of an excellent monograph on foreign policy and the American labor movement, neither ignores nor condones these facts...