Freedom Betrayed: An Interview with George H. Nash about Herbert Hoover's Magnum Opus

Nearly fifty years after its completion, the Hoover Institution Press published Herbert Hoover's "magnum opus," Freedom Betrayed, last year. A revisionist examination of World War II and its Cold War aftermath, it is a mammoth volume of over 900 pages, skillfully edited by George H. Nash, a historian, lecturer, and authority on the life of Herbert Hoover. His publications include three volumes of a definitive, scholarly biography of Hoover and the monograph Herbert Hoover and Stanford University (Hoover Institution Press, 1988). Nash is also the author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006) and Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2009). A graduate of Amherst College and holder of a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, he received the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters in 2008.

Senior editor Donald Yerxa interviewed Nash about the book in July.

Donald A. Yerxa:

In broad brush strokes, what is Herbert Hoover's argument in Freedom Betrayed?

George H. Nash:

In the years just before World War II, and up to December 7, 1941, Herbert Hoover was an ardent noninterventionist and outspoken critic of President Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy. After Pearl Harbor, Hoover supported the American war effort, but he never abandoned his belief that Roosevelt had blundered or maneuvered the United States into an avoidable conflagration, with many malign consequences. Nor did Hoover approve of FDR's diplomacy vis-à-vis Joseph Stalin during the war, as well as some of President Truman's foreign policies (especially toward China and Korea) immediately thereafter.

In Freedom Betrayed Hoover distilled these convictions into a comprehensive, critical history of American diplomacy between the late 1930s and 1945. It was an unabashed, revisionist reexamination of the entire war—and a sweeping indictment of what he termed the "lost statesmanship" of Franklin Roosevelt. It is a history not so much of the war as a military event but of what Hoover saw as the deeply flawed statecraft of Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

Hoover believed, as he remarked in Freedom Betrayed, that "the fate of mankind" during the World War II era had been "determined less by military action than by the decisions of political leaders." Freedom Betrayed is a heavily documented, relentless, and often scathing account of the diplomatic and geopolitical mistakes (as Hoover judged them) made by American and British leaders.

Yerxa:

What prompted Hoover to write what he called his "War Book," and why has it taken so long for it to be published?

Nash:

In the summer of 1940, Hoover, at age 66, began in earnest to write his memoirs, which he ultimately conceived as a multivolume set. Late in 1944 he started work on the projected fifth volume, in which he planned to cover his life in World War II and his battle against Roosevelt's interventionist foreign policy prior to Pearl Harbor.

Former president Herbert Hoover arrives to attend a meeting at the Carnegie Institution, December 9, 1938. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-hec-25552].

In conversation Hoover called this installment the "War Book." But soon it morphed into something far more ambitious: a no-holds-barred, revisionist history of the war. As the manuscript grew in scope and size, he and his staff informally referred to it as the Magnum Opus. For nearly twenty years he labored over it, incorporating fresh source material, adding footnotes, and producing draft after draft. At one point in the early 1950s, the latest "edition" exceeded 1,000 pages in page proofs—and this was only one of several large books on which he had been working. What began as a memoir turned into something akin to a doctoral dissertation.

As Hoover entered his eighties, he considered the Magnum Opus to be his most important book of all. He referred to it in a letter as his "will and testament" to the American people. He wanted it to be the irrefutable indictment of the feckless diplomacy...