To the Editors:
It is painful to take issue with someone for whom my respect and liking are as great as they are for Andy McCarthy, but as he has mentioned me in his review of Diana West’s book America Betrayal, which I have commented on elsewhere, I would like to try to make a few points. Fortunately, as an Anglo-Canadian Roosevelt biographer, I do not figure in the long and tortuous history that has personally embittered much of the fierce exchange generated by Ms. West’s book. I share her and Mr. McCarthy’s concern about the sluggish reluctance of many American policymakers and opinion-leaders to identify large sections of Islam as the enemy to Western Civilization which they professedly and demonstrably are. Where I took issue with the book, and do with the review also, is in the allegation that the American capacity for self-defense was eroded by Communist infiltration of the U.S. government starting in the 1930s and continuing into the Cold War, and that assistance to Stalin against Hitler merely replaced one horrible and dangerous foreign evil with a greater one.
There is not the slightest parallel between assisting the Mujahideen against the USSRin Afghanistan and assisting Stalin against Hitler, as Andy claimed. In the 1930s, the Western democracies, with the enfeebled and irresolute British and French on the front lines, faced two monstrous dangers: Hitler and Stalin. The United States was threatened and it was Roosevelt’s task to make the American public aware of
