Juliana Geran Pilon. Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), has published extensively on issues concerning national security. In “No Mere Mistake,” Dr. Pilon reviews for RealClear Books a gripping account by Christopher Farrell of the life of George H. Earle III, at one time a confidant and personal agent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Farrell’s biography indicts Roosevelt and his advisors who parroted the Soviet line not only for dismissing Earle’s overwhelming evidence of Soviet atrocities, but ignoring an overture from German elites, including Hitler’s very own chief of military intelligence, who were conspiring to overthrow der Führer. Roosevelt turned a deaf ear to Earle when he provided him with firm intelligence because, Pilon writes, “[t]hey asked one thing in return” should they succeed: “the containment of Russia.”
Earle recognized the extent to which the Roosevelt administration was populated by Soviet sympathizers not to mention active Soviet agents. “Only later,” she observes, “would de-classified archives confirm the full extent of that infiltration.” When, for example, Earle went to Roosevelt with unmistakable evidence of the Katyn Massacre, the slaughter of more than 22,000
Poles, he wrote it off as German propaganda. FDR thought “Uncle Joe” Stalin was his friend. Earle fell from grace. His persistence in supplying intelligence FDR did not want to read got him banished to Samoa, only to be recalled four months later by Roosevelt’s presidential successor, Harry S. Truman. “At this time of self-critical historical revisionism,” Dr. Pilon adds, “it may be worth revisiting the nation’s sins in ways less ideologically skewed.”
RealClear Books is part of the RealClear Media Group. The online website “provides a daily reference point to help readers take in the world of books, the changing nature of publishing and the latest industry issues and controversies that attach themselves to the written word.”
Leave A Comment