Category Archives: History

Gun, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies–Part I

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This book by Jared Diamond published in 1997 won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. I don’t often open a review by arguing with the author about the title, but I prefer the one that had the subtitle, “A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.” It is an excellent book that deserved awards. It is easy to read, although I caught myself skimming in some sections where the author was describing, as an example, lengthy lists of food-producing plants. This part will focus on the role of guns, germs, and steel in the conquest of many native peoples.

The Prologue is titled “Yali’s Question, The regionally differing courses of history.” The author explains that New Guineans had tens of thousands of years of history and were still using stone tools when the Europeans showed up with all manner of manufactured goods, including steel axes. New Guineans called all those goods “cargo.” Yali was a New Guinean politician who inquired, “Why do white people have so much cargo, but we New Guineans have so little?” The Europeans used their superior technology to impose a centralized government and dominate the New Guineans, who they considered to be primitive. Yali’s question is mentioned often in the author’s quest to understand how Europeans and Asians were able to dominate original occupants of many lands, such as Native Americans, despite having no genetic superiority. Continue reading →

FDR’s Personality

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This is the fourth and perhaps final posting of the review of Joseph E. Persico’s excellent book, “Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage.” The author gives significant insights into FDR’s personality, especially his fascination with learning the secrets of others. One person observed, “Few leaders were better adapted temperamentally to espionage than Franklin Roosevelt.” In keeping with that observation, FDR authorized wire taps of people judged to be suspicious despite a Supreme Court ruling that banned wire taps and the advice of his Attorney General. He justified that authorization on the grounds of national security, but he took the liberty to go further.  He had J. Edgar Hoover investigate former President Herbert Hoover and opponent Wendell Wilkie. He also had Vice President Henry Wallace under surveillance. I’ve read in other accounts that he expanded far beyond political opponents and associates. It was said that he reveled in learning about skeletons in people’s closets gathered by Hoover. Perhaps he did some of this as a reflective action to an event early in his adulthood when he and a friend began consorting with two beautiful women. He was warned by a friend of his family that the two women were the “best known pair of international blackmailers in Europe,” and he and his friend were able to escape. The lesson in the value of suspicion may have stayed with him.

Roosevelt had a recording system installed inside a drawer of his desk in August 1940.  One recorded conversation was about Wendell Wilkie. FDR was recorded talking about Wilkie’s mistress, and how Wilkie’s wife had in effect, “…been hired to return to Wendell to smile and make his campaign with him.”  The recorder was removed almost immediately after FDR won reelection. 

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Roosevelt’s Secret War–FDR, Stalin, and Churchill

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The interactions of the “Big Three” have inspired several books, but once again the book by Joseph E. Persico ties what I see as the complete story together nicely. FDR had a much stronger affinity for Stalin than to Churchill.  He confided to Joseph Kennedy, his ambassador to Great Britain, that he had never liked Churchill from the beginning.  Churchill was open in his desire to maintain the British Empire, and Roosevelt was strongly opposed to imperialism. I was startled to read a quote from him in the book that he told Admiral Godfrey, the U.S. is going “…to show the Brits, Portuguese, and Dutch how to take care of those West Indies Islands. Every n—-r will have his two acres and a sugar patch.” On the other hand Roosevelt was strangely able to overlook the atrocities committed under Stalin. He knew that large numbers of people Stalin decided he couldn’t trust were summarily executed and millions of Ukrainians were intentionally starved.  Both Roosevelt and Churchill knew that Stalin had ordered the execution of thousands of Polish officers, but covered it up. FDR was somehow persuaded that he could work with Stalin and trust him.

Roosevelt early and often acted according to Stalin’s wishes. He had established diplomatic relations with the Soviets, and apparently was willing to accept the large numbers of spies that action brought into the country and his administration. He released Earl Browder, the head of the U.S. Communist party who had been convicted of passport violations. He took that action to placate Stalin, and it restored a key link in Russia’s spy chain in America. One of the strangest actions he took involved 1500 pages of Soviet cryptographic material and a codebook that had been sold to the Office of Strategic Service by Finland. FDR ordered the information to be returned to the Soviets without copying it, and there is a dispute whether it was copied or not. There is no dispute the Soviets were absolutely baffled about why the Americans had returned the information.  Secretary of State Edward Stettinius was said to have explained that FDR ordered to action because he wanted to do nothing to arouse Stalin’s suspicions.  

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History of the Global Warming Theory

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The history of how we have arrived at the current “consensus” that man-made carbon dioxide is causing or will cause catastrophic climate change is interesting. The idea isn’t new.  A Time Magazine article published in 1972 describes how, “As they review the  bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are are actually part of a global climatic upheaval.”  The conditions that caused concern included a six year drought in Africa, record rains in the U.S., Pakistan, and Japan, a poor wheat harvest in Canada, dry conditions in Britain, and bitter winters in some areas while other parts of the globe where having the mildest winters in anyone’s recollection. Those words could come from the headlines today about the certainty that we are in a period of global warming. However, read on in the article. It says that meteorologists “…find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing…the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” (emphasis added) We still have a “consensus” that there will be climate change, but the certainty of global cooling has somehow transitioned into global warming.

There was a politician credited with the transition from believing that global cooling was a certainty to the current belief that global warming is a certainty, and that politician was Margaret Thatcher. I’m certain many readers thought they were going to read Al Gore’s name, but he came late to the party. Ms Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1979, and she believed coal miner strikes were crippling the English economy.  She wanted to promote nuclear power as a replacement for coal, and began committing large amounts of government money to researchers charged with investigating climate change caused by the carbon dioxide that is emitted when coal is burned. Temperatures began to creep up, and researchers who had advocated global cooling adjusted their computer models or created new ones to arrive at the conclusion that carbon dioxide emissions were going to cause global warming.

Scientists have been debating the effect of carbon dioxide on climate since the late 1800s. Savante Arrheius, a Swedish scientist, is credited by some as being the first to theorize in 1896 that fossil fuel combustion would eventually result in global warming. The theory lay more or less dormant until the flood of government grant money began by Margaret Thatcher and then made available to researchers in the U.S. created opportunity for those who found a connection between carbon dioxide and temperatures.  Of course the research might not even involve that direct relationship.  It might involve the effect of increased carbon dioxide on the growth rate of hickory trees, and rapid increases in squirrel populations because there were more hickory nuts (as an example that I just invented).  However, studies that came to a dire prediction followed by the consistent conclusion “that more study is needed,” were more likely to be given news coverage followed by more government grant money. The Environmental Protection Agency has joined the party by finding that carbon dioxide is a toxic pollutant, but that is the subject of another posting.

Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage, Part II

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Part I of the review of this book by Joseph E. Persico was about how FDR prepared the country for war, and how he reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This posting will focus on Roosevelt’s use of intelligence and intelligence services, and some of the impacts on the events of World War II.  Vincent Astor had become a friend and confidant of FDR after his crippling attack of polio. Astor and a group of wealthy friends had formed an organization to secretly collect gossip and informal intelligence that they called “The Room.”  One member was Kermit Roosevelt, the man who would engineer the CIA overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran in the early 1950’s.  Astor had done some amateur sleuthing in the Pacific for Roosevelt after FDR had become President, but the German attack of Poland brought Astor and The Room closer to FDR.  The group of adventure-seeking dilettantes reconstituted themselves as “The Club,” and began to increase their activities through various international banks.  This group appealed to FDR’s natural attraction to “cloak and dagger” intrigue.  FDR is characterized in the latter pages of the book as wanting to be like a secret agent who was “…a burglar with morals.”  He preferred to work with human sources over signals intelligence, or “humint” over “signit” in the shorthand of the trade.

Much of the book is about the various U.S. intelligence gathering services that seemed to spend almost as much effort trying to discredit the other organizations as they did trying to steal secrets from other countries.  Much of the in-fighting involved Bill “Wild Bill” Donovan. FDR had written a note in June 1941 authorizing a military central intelligence service with Donovan as the “coordinator of information,” or COI.  The organization was renamed Office of Strategic Services, or OSS.  It was the latest of 136 “emergency agencies” that FDR created.  However, this one began almost immediately to create friction with the other military intelligence agencies and J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to Britain also wasn’t a fan of Donovan.  Continue reading →

Roosevelt’s Secret War, FDR and World War II Espionage, Part I

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I’ve read several books about FDR, and this book written by Joseph E. Persico is, in my opinion, the best one. My parents were avid supporters of FDR, and I have been skeptical about why they felt that way. This book made me reflect that there were positive aspects of the man and his leadership that I hadn’t considered previously.  There is so much information in the book that I intend to break the review into several parts.  This part will describe how FDR prepared the country for war, and how he reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Isolationists, such as Charles Lindberg, had a majority of popular support to avoid another war with the memories of the dead and maimed from World War I fresh in minds of Americans.  Roosevelt agreed with Churchill’s priority of finding a way to get the U.S. into the war before the Germans overran Britain, but he had to deal with the political reality that the country was not convinced that was necessary and the practical reality of the state of preparedness.  In 1940 the U.S. army ranked eighteenth in the world behind Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Roosevelt strived to find ways to support the British while telling the American people that his intention was to remain neutral.  The depth of Roosevelt’s deception is illustrated by the “Tyler Kent” affair.  Kent was a code clerk attached to the U.S. embassy in London who was frustrated that his intellect wasn’t being used in his mundane job of decoding messages.  He was an anti-Communist Isolationist, and was reading exchanges between FDR and Churchill that clearly proved FDR was lying about how he was working to keep America out of the war.  Unfortunately for Kent and fortunately for FDR, Kent told some people he intended to provide documents he was copying to the press.  The British intelligence agency MI5 raided his apartment in May 1940 and found 1,929 documents. The content of the documents would likely have cost Roosevelt reelection if they had been revealed to the American public.  Roosevelt and Ambassador Kennedy denied Kent the diplomatic immunity to which he was entitled, and he was tried, convicted, and jailed. Continue reading →