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  • Crusader in the Cold War: A Biography of Fr. John F. Cronin, S.S. (1908-1994)
  • Charles R. Gallagher S.J.
Crusader in the Cold War: A Biography of Fr. John F. Cronin, S.S. (1908-1994). By John T. Donovan. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.2005. Pp. xiv, 245. $67.95.)

John T. Donovan has written a wide-ranging biography of one of the foremost anti-communist Catholic clerics of the Cold War. From 1945 to 1967, Father John F. Cronin, a member of the Society of St. Sulpice, served as Assistant [End Page 456] Director of the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. During the height of the Cold War, Cronin served as a behind-the-scenes labor expert and priest-politico dedicating the resources of his department to the solution of labor problems and the eradication of domestic communism. Through his scholarly writing, "blind" speech and pamphlet writing, and advice to bishops and politicians, Cronin became the intellectual point-man on communism for the U.S. bishops throughout the early Cold War. Cronin's career exemplifies the alliance of the U.S. bishops with secular politicians dedicated to the "rollback" of communism in Europe and the swing within the Cold War U.S. hierarchy to view political anti-communism as a divinely sanctioned imperative. These trends are exhibited most succinctly through Cronin's exclusive and extensive contacts with both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the office of Vice President Richard Nixon.

Cronin's contacts and information-sharing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation reached the highest levels of the bureau, with its director J. Edgar Hoover periodically reviewing and passing judgment on Cronin's activity and usefulness. In late 1945, Hoover permitted the bureau to pass untraceable raw data from their investigative files to Cronin for use in preparation of a U.S. bishops' report entitled "The Problem of American Communism in 1945." John T. Donovan ably chronicles the import of this report, showing how Cronin's work assumed the status of a White Paper on how U.S. bishops were to understand domestic communism. Donovan traces Cronin's verbatim integration of FBI field intelligence into his report. One area left unconsidered is how the twelve pages of word-for-word FBI information on "Negro" involvement with the Communist Party USA may have shaped the thinking of the new generation of postwar U.S. bishops. FBI RACON (Racial Conditions) files were often tinged with disparaging racial analysis, and further investigation here would be interesting, since a real contribution of Donovan's work is his account of Cronin's work in the late 1950's and early 1960's as a progressive Catholic voice for civil rights. Did FBI material in Cronin's 1945 report reinforce existing prejudices and make his later push for change more difficult?

Donovan also provides an account of Cronin's personal relationship with Richard M. Nixon. With the arrival of this book, there can be no doubt that Cronin was the primary speech writer for Vice President Nixon. Donovan, however, seems more intent on solving the investigation into Cronin's ghost-authorship of Nixon's speeches than on analyzing of the content or socio-political import of the speeches themselves. More will need to be written on the fact that a Roman Catholic priest largely constructed Richard Nixon's early political persona.

The analytical lacuna encountered in the Cronin-Nixon relationship exemplifies a shortcoming of this otherwise data-driven biography. While Cronin's furtive secular political work mirrors that of other Cold War anti-communist clerics such as the Anglican Archbishop Cyril Forster Garbett, the Jesuit [End Page 457] Edmund A. Walsh, and Aloisius Cardinal Muench—all subjects of recent scholarly biographies—there is little indication that Donovan views Cronin within the emerging historiography ably mapped out by Peter Kent in his book The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII. For Kent and others, regional Catholic leadership was given an urgent green light to work for the advancement of secular political anti-communism precisely because non-extremist anti-communism was viewed as possessing inherent theological value. Donovan, on the other hand, sees Cronin's anti...

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