Horse Racing Greatness: Man-o-War versus Sir Barton!

 Glad you enjoyed the letter, and kudos to your reference to Sir Barton, won the Triple Crown the year before Man-o-War. In fact the under-card race to this year's Belmont was the Sir Barton Stakes. Sir Barton, (Star-Shoot-Lady Sterling, by Hanover) went to the Derby post a maiden, with his stable mate Billy Kelly running second, the first such result in Derby history. He was never out of the money in his 13 starts in 1919 of which he won 8. The term “Triple Crown” was not in use in America in those days. It had originated in England with the 1-mile Two Thousand Guineas, 1 ½ mile Derby and 1 3/4 St.Leger Stakes. With Man-o-War, (Fair Play-Muhubah, by Rock Sand) and regarding his loss in the Sanford Stakes up at Saratoga, the big chestnut had beaten Upset before the Sanford and had beaten him five times afterward. In their match race for $80,000 at Kenilworth Park in Canada, Man-o-War crushed Sir Barton, and though it was claimed that such a crushing defeat indicated that Sir Barton was off form, he had just come off four impressive victories. After that disaster Sir Barton never won again though he raced credibly in all the Maryland fall handicap races. Man-o-War didn't just break records he shattered them! He won the Lawrence Realization by 100 lengths and lowered the previous world record by 6 4/5 seconds. In the Keniworth Cup he lowered the track record by 6 2/5 seconds, and in the Belmont Stakes his time was 3 1/5 seconds faster than the former world record. Race-trackers have four classic criteria to evaluate a horse: how fast could he run, how far could he go, how much did he carry, and who did he beat? The  “Big Red” could run fast and far is obvious. In all his starts he either carried or shared the highest weight on the scale, except his 2^nd race where the assignments were equal but one of his opponent's jockey was1 1/2 overweight. And of course he beat all 48 horses that faced him in his 21 races.

 rjg

Horse Racing History and the Triple Crown

Excellent analysis. Dr. Fager was an exceptional thoroughbred, who raced in an excellent period. Some of his fellow competitors were Arts and Letters, Buckpasser, Majestic Prince and Damascus, who were also winners of the Horse of the Year. Dr. Fager never won a Triple Crown Race, but was a strong veteran horse. I believe that his owner named him after a Doctor that saved the owner's life. But Kelso was an excellent veteran horse that won Horse of the Year honors for 5 straight years 1960-4, which has never been replicated. In fact only Forego won it three years in a row from 1974-6. Kelso retired as the top money winner, but another gelding John Henry, who raced on and on, shattered his records.

The top horses of all time have to be judged by Triple Crown wins, times, domination of an era and percentage of wins. Man-O-War, who won 19 of 20 races with great record times and certainly would have won the Kentucky Derby, but the Preakness, was in conflict with the Derby in that year as it was in other years. Man-O-War won the Preakness and Belmont and his only loss was in the Sanford Stakes at Saratoga, where he came in second to Upset, when his jockey, who was probably part of a fix, held him back.

Citation and Secretariat were fabulous horses. Secretariat set records in each of his Triple Crown winning efforts. His records still stand in the Derby and the Belmont. His 35-length victory in the Belmont was awe-inspiring. He was only beaten carrying a significant weight disadvantage in a handicap race. He was great! Citation also was a record setting dominant horse. My last great horse would be Native Dancer who won a very high percentage of his races, including the Preakness and the Belmont. He did not win the Derby in 1953 that was won by Dark Star. But he was Horse of the Year in 1952 and 1954. He lost the title to in 1953 to another outstanding older horse, Tom Fool that never won a Triple Crown race. Tom Fool, as an older horse had never had beaten the Dancer. Native Dancer’s only loss was in the Derby and he finished his career winning 21 out of 22. These horses were retired to stud early and therefore did not have racing careers past age 4. Native Dancer sired the parents and grandparents of all of the 16 entrees in this year's Derby and though he did not win the Derby, he was the sire to 8 of the last nine winners. He sired Northern Dance who won the Derby and the Preakness.

Therefore my list would be: Man-O-War, Secretariat, Citation, Native Dancer, Kelso, and Nassua, who was upset by Swaps in the Derby, but won the Preakness and the Belmont and I believe beat Swaps in a Match race, and was Horse of the Year in 1955.

Meanwhile I loved Empire Maker and picked him over Funny Cide. Funny Cide was a bit of a fluke. Empire Maker was not prepared for the Derby and was a bit injured for the Preakness. It was smart to rest him and we all saw the results. To win the Triple Crown is quite an effort!

So that's it for now!  rjg

FDR and the Jews 2003

My name is Richard J. Garfunkel and I lecture on the subject of FDR. I have a collection of approximately 5000 pieces of FDR memorabilia, which includes 100's of books, thousands of stamps, campaign buttons, pictures and countless pieces of ephemera. My subject is “Collecting FDR, and FDR the Collector” and I have been interested in FDR for about 45 years. I have had the pleasure of meeting, talking and writing to Mr. William vanden Heuval, of the Roosevelt Institute for a number of years, and after reading Michael Beschloss's ridiculous book, I spoke to Mr. vanden Heuval, who told me that he received an apology from Mr. Beschloss. Mr. vanden Heuval subsequently wrote this comment on the Beschloss book “The Conquerers”. Recently, in conjunction with the March of Dimes, The FDR Library and the Roosevelt Institiute, I instituted the revival of the Roosevelt Birthday Balls that were a vehicle to raise funds for the research into finding the cure for infantile paralysis from 1934 until FDR's death in 1945. This “Dinner-Ball” was held this past year at the Culinary Institute and Hyde Park on January 30th, 2003.

I read your 1997 e-mail exchanges with many historians regarding FDR and the Holocaust. I have these comments:

a) FDR was not an anti-Semite and there is no evidence to suggest that.

b) I cannot speak for the veracity of the Casablanca conversations with Giraud etc, but a lifetime's actions, in spite of social norms of class, and home environment belie that claim.

c) FDR's public and private letters, though one could claim there could have been editing of some, do not reflect any anti-Semitism. But there were plenty of anti-Semitic inferences and remarks by Eleanor in her early years. FDR went out of his way to integrate American Jews into Washington public service. Felix Frankfurter, sent his little “hot dogs” from the Harvard Law School and recruited others from the University of Chicago and elsewhere to populate the cadres of the New Deal; (Read “The Making of the New Deal”, the Insiders Speak, by Katie Louchheim, Harvard Press 1983) Herbert Wechsler, David Riesman, Robert Stern, Paul Freund, Milton Katz, Milton Freeman, Charles Kaufman, Arthur Goldschmidt, Paul Herzog, among numerous others.

d. FDR had a strong relationship with Jews throughout his political life; Morgenthau, Baruch, David Niles, Sam Rosenman, Anna Rosenberg, Frankfurter, Ben Cohen, Lehman, and numerous others. From a social perspective FDR had few friends if any. His only true friends after Livingston Davis were Marguerite “Missy” Lehand, Louis M. Howe, Lucy Mercer Rutherford, Laura Delano and Margaret Suckley. He was basically a lonely man, who was extremely discreet and favored his own council and his intimate circle of advisors, cousins, and intimates. He was friendly with many of Eleanor's vast circle of friends, and spent much of his pre-war time with them at Val-Kill to relax.

e. FDR understood the vicious level of anti-Semitism in the United States and chose to deal with it in a subtle style. He understood the criticisms of Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, the Silver Shirts, Charles Lindbergh and the American First Movement, the German American Bund, and numerous other bigots in the State Department, in the Congress and out in the public.

f) In regards to immigration, when Henry M. Morgenthau exposed the activities of Breckenridge Long, Long's was position was adjusted. The filling of the quotas were in most cases meaningless because the German quota was only about 26,000. Almost 75% Germany's 500,000 Jews left Germany before the war. When calls from Cong. Sabbath of Ill, and Celler of NY were made to double the quota, threats from southern Congressman were made to close the quote completely. Jews from other nations did not feel specifically the need to emigrate from Europe to the US and the difficulty in immigrating to depression era United States was never easy. But, in fact, half the people who immigrated to the US between 1933-8 were Jews. When there was talk of opening the quotas or increasing them, almost all of the Eastern European countries demanded an “equal” opportunity to deport their “Jews” to the United States. In a sense it spread the virus of “Judenrein” which the Nazis had originally authored. 

g) The Wagner Refugee Bill- was dead in the water and FDR realizing the need to shift public opinion away from isolationism, was smart not to confront that issue. The last Gallup Poll before Pearl Harbor showed 90+% of the American public opposed to intervention in the European war, even to save Britain! But in the Jan. 6, 1941 Four Freedom's State of the Union address, FDR stated, I paraphrase, “when the Nazis are defeated…” That was 10 months before Pearl Harbor and a year or so into the Undeclared Atlantic Naval War we were fighting against the U-Boat menace and for “freedom of the seas.”

h) I believe that FDR wanted a neutral public face regarding immigration because he feared public backlash against potential intervention in the War and public pressure on Congress to oppose aggressive re-armament.

i) FDR looked with a blind eye towards illegal immigration of Jews and therefore many, many thousands of German Jews got into the United States one way or another. My parents and grandparents knew scores of them. In other words as long as people got into the United States it was not public policy to expose their presence or hunt them down.

j) In regards to the bombing of Auschwitz, Sir Martin Gilbert has detailed extensively the futility of the bombing, the fact that Auschwitz was never known as the terminal place for Jews up until the Hungarian deportation, and that by the time it was really known, the death camp was virtually overrun by Russians.

Please read the piece by William vanden Heuval reprinted below:

March 2003 Newsletter

COMMENTS ON MICHAEL BESCHLOSS' THE CONQUERERS

by William J. vanden Heuvel

(Roosevelt Institute)

In his book, The Conquerors, and in numerous media/marketing appearances, Michael Beschloss has arrogantly “flunked” President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his handling of Hitler's attempted extermination of Europe's Jews. FDR, according to Beschloss, bears particular responsibility for remaining silent during the first two years of the Holocaust, for being unsympathetic to the Jewish cause, and for not ordering the bombing of Auschwitz.

In making these assertions, Mr. Beschloss has joined a discredited group who would have our children believe that America was “indifferent” to the suffering of the Jews in World War II, that America was the passive accomplice in what Winston Churchill called “the greatest and most terrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.” For all of us, the shadow of doubt that enough was not done for the Jews during the war will always remain, although it is objectively clear that little more could have been done. But neither America nor American Jewry were passive observers of these events. Despite issues that bitterly divided them, primarily relating to Palestine, the Jewish community in America spoke the same words in pleading to do whatever was possible to reach out to Europe's Jews. Numerous plans were produced to rescue the Jews of Europe. Jewish leaders lobbied the Congress. Mass rallies were held across the country with overflow crowds throughout those years, praying, pleading for action to stop the genocide.

As the famed military historian John Keegan has written: “The removal and transportation of Europe's Jews was a fact known to every inhabitant of the continent between 1942 and 1945.” (1) Yet Mr. Beschloss would have us believe that Roosevelt made no attempt to draw the world's attention to these crimes in 1942 and 1943. He also makes repeated allegations that because he resented Jewish and other ethnic group pressures, President Roosevelt did not identify the Jews specifically in the repeated Allied warnings that the Nazis collectively and individually would be held accountable for their barbaric crimes. There was a time earlier in the war when it was thought best not to identify the Jews specifically in the reporting of the Nazi crimes. Beschloss would have us believe that this was done for the petty, ugly reason of resenting ethnic pressures. I thought of this on a recent visit to London's Holocaust Museum. There is a specific exhibit referring to a speech by Winston Churchill on August 24, 1941, where he reports that “a crime without a name” was being committed against “Russian patriots who defended their native soil.” These words were written after the Prime Minister had been briefed regarding information provided by the Enigma code breakthrough on the slaughter of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen after the Nazi invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941. We now know that this is when the Holocaust began. The British exhibit then states: “Western leaders feared that drawing attention to the Jews would be seen as special pleading and would fuel Nazi propaganda.” (America was not yet in the war). Winston Churchill may have been wrong in this conclusion, but it was the considered judgment of a great leader with vast sympathy for the Jewish cause, not Churchill's resentment against pressure from ethnic groups that influenced his words on this occasion.

It is hard to believe that anyone would make the allegation that FDR chose to ignore the plight of the Jews in World War II. Time and again, beginning with his pledge to Rabbi Wise and other Jewish leaders in November 1942, President Roosevelt made clear through governmental statements and messages to the mass rallies organized in those years that the Nazis would be held collectively and individually accountable for their crimes against the Jews. In his book, Beschloss denies this, asserting that in spite of a growing body of evidence in the summer and fall of 1942 pointing towards the mass execution of the Jews, FDR chose to hide the extent of what he knew and remain “silent” on the issue in 1942 and 1943. In making this allegation, Mr. Beschloss quotes from the December 17, 1942 Allied Declaration on war crimes as evidence to support his argument that FDR preferred not to mention the Jews when speaking of Nazi atrocities, noting only the “mass executions” of “many hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children.” But Beschloss is wrong. As James Cheeks has noted in an HNN review, the December 17th Declaration was written precisely to highlight the Nazis crimes against the Jews, as its title “German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race” make clear. Beschloss chooses to ignore this. He not only fails to mention the title of the document, but also its stark references to the horrors of the Nazi's brutal treatment of the Jews and the “solemn resolution” of the Allies “to ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution.”

With the Nazi coup against Admiral Horthy in March 1944, a limited opportunity came to save the Jews of Hungary. President Roosevelt was deeply and personally involved in the effort to save them. This is the President's statement to the people of the United States and of Europe on March 24, 1944:

In one of the blackest crimes of all history — begun by the Nazis in the days of peace and multiplied by them a hundred times in time of war — the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour. As a result of the events of the last few days hundreds of thousands of Jews who, while living under persecution, have at least found a haven from death in Hungary and the Balkans, are now threatened with annihilation as Hitler's forces descend more heavily upon these lands. That these innocent people, who have already survived a decade of Hitler's fury, should perish on the very eve of triumph over the barbarism, which their persecution symbolized, would be a major tragedy. It is therefore fitting that we should again proclaim our determination that none who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished. The United Nations have made it clear that they will pursue the guilty and deliver them up in order that justice be done. That warning applies not only to the leaders but also to their functionaries and subordinates in Germany and in the satellite countries. All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland or Norwegians and French to their death in Germany are equally guilty with the executioner. All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.

The principal marketing thrust for Beschloss's book centers on the issue of whether or not the Allies should have bombed Auschwitz and on “new information” that the man who made the ultimate decision not to bomb Auschwitz “may not have been John McCloy but Franklin Roosevelt himself.” This is important because apparently for Mr. Beschloss and some others whether Auschwitz should have been bombed is the defining question of World War II, a point of view frankly that is difficult to comprehend regarding a universal conflict in which 67 million people were killed, where nations were decimated, where democracy's survival was in the balance, where 16 million Americans were joined together in a military force that has never been equaled, and where our nation led the world into the nuclear age. Beschloss identifies this “new information” as a taped private conversation in 1986 between John McCloy and Henry Morgenthau III who was researching a family memoir. In his PBS interview, he says: “I came upon an interview, unpublished, that John McCloy did just before he died… where he actually conceded that he had taken this to Roosevelt and said 'do you want to bomb Auschwitz or not?' And he said that what Roosevelt said was, 'absolutely not…?'”

I have read the transcript of the McCloy-Morgenthau interview. Nowhere does the above-cited conversation take place. In fact, the interview transcript could well be read to an opposite conclusion, that the President had nothing to do with the bombing decision that it was never presented to him for decision. The interview between John McCloy and Henry Morgenthau III took place on October 8, 1986. On Page 11 of the transcript of that interview, Mr. McCloy was asked to characterize Secretary Morgenthau's style as an official.

Henry Morgenthau III: How would you characterize his style as an official?

John McCloy: I had no difficulty with him at all. The general view was that he was a……….., (2) but he was always in favor of the Jewish even irate at the treatment of the Jews and he was going to do everything in his power, he was vindictive in regard to that. Subtle, persistent and anywhere there was an antagonism to the … or the advance of Hitler.

Henry Morgenthau III: But he didn't get involved in the bombing of Auschwitz that was all post facto.

John McCloy: They came to me and wanted me to order the bombing of Auschwitz. He wasn't involved in that nor was the President. (italics added) …

Auschwitz was raised peripherally as the conversation with Mr. McCloy was about to end. McCloy was 88 years old — never in all of the extensive interviews he gave in his life, nor in his papers, is there any indication of his ever discussing the bombing questions with the President. Henry Morgenthau III never cited the interview in the family memoir nor in his frequent public appearances where he participated in discussions related to the Holocaust. In reality, the transcript presents a painfully disjointed, obviously strained, totally ambiguous recollection that is hardly the source of important historical judgments. Perhaps Mr. McCloy discussed the bombing question to the President at some uncertain date to ascertain his opinions. There is no record of such a meeting in the voluminous records of the Roosevelt era in the Presidential Library at Hyde Park. But if an informal conversation took place, it is important to note that the opinion attributed to FDR reflects the viewpoint expressed by David Ben-Gurion (then Chairman of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, later first Prime Minister of Israel) in June 1944 when he responded to a proposal that the Allies be asked to bomb the extermination camps. At that meeting, presided over by Ben-Gurion, the Jewish Agency voted eleven to one against the bombing proposal. (3)

The Holocaust is an enormously complicated tragedy. Today we have the photographs, the films, the diabolically precise records of the genocide but when I read David Ben Gurion in June 1944 saying: “We do not know the truth concerning the entire situation in Poland, and it seems that we will be unable to propose anything concerning this.” — I appreciate how helpless everyone must have felt as the news slowly leaked through the Nazi wall of secrecy as to the enormity of the crime. It is certainly appropriate — and even necessary — for contemporary generations to look at the horrendous dimensions of the Nazi slaughter and ask: Could we have prevented it? What more could have been done?

Because these questions must be asked, historians must carefully seek the truth; they must present the context of the events. Today it is taken for granted that Hitler would be defeated but historians know that victory in World War II was far from assured. The Nazi war machine was the most powerful in world history. It took the combined might of the United States, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and countless other brave allies to destroy it. The bombing of Auschwitz was never mentioned before the summer of 1944. At that point, American forces were fully engaged with Japanese aggression across the total expanse of the Pacific Ocean. In Europe, the invasion of Normandy began on June 6th. Despite the fact that two-thirds of the Nazi armies were on the Russian front, D-Day and an Allied success were by no means assured. The German armies were holding our forces at bay in Italy, causing heavy casualties, making us fight for every road and hill. We were planning the invasion of southern France for August 15th. America and our allies were stretched dangerously across western and southern Europe. The Allied bombing strategy was totally directed toward destroying Nazi fuel supplies, their synthetic oil industries, the oil fields of Romania, and their communication and transport lines wherever possible.

By making the bombing of Auschwitz such a central issue, Mr. Beschloss and others like him trivialize the meaning and the horror of the Holocaust. The unremitting, remorseless massacre of the Jews — carefully concealed by the top secret security of the Nazi murderers — continued because no one, no nation, no alliance of nations could do anything meaningful to close down the Death Camps — except, as President Roosevelt said over and over again, by winning the war and destroying the Nazis with unconditional determination as soon as possible.

Mr. Beschloss insists that “the sound of bombs exploding at Auschwitz would have constituted a moral statement for all time…” Were the countless Jewish leaders immoral who considered the possibility of bombing Auschwitz and rejected it? Were David Ben-Gurion and his ten colleagues of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem immoral because they voted against asking the Allies to bomb the Death Camps? Mainstream Jewish opinion was against the whole idea of bombing Auschwitz. The very thought of the Allied forces deliberately killing Jews — to open the gates of Auschwitz so the survivors could run where? — was abhorrent then as it should be now. Although only President Roosevelt or General Eisenhower could have ordered the bombing of Auschwitz, there is no record of any kind that indicates that either one was ever asked to issue such an order — even though Jewish leaders of all persuasions had clear access to them both. United States Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, a key intelligence officer for the Air Force in Europe in World War II in an oral history interview in 1985 was incredulous that anyone would even suggest that Allied forces bomb Auschwitz. “I am perfectly confident,” he said, “that General Spaatz [the USAF Commander in Europe] would have resisted any proposal that we kill the Jewish inmates in order to put Auschwitz out of operation. It is not easy to think that a rational person would have made such a recommendation.”

When I first spoke on the subject of America and the Holocaust in Chicago in 1996, an 80-year-old man, an Auschwitz survivor, came up to me, eyes filled with tears, to thank me for having told “the truth.” He had been a slave laborer at the Farben factory in Buna, near Auschwitz. He said that when the sirens announced the bombing raids, the Nazis forced the Jews to the rooftop while the Nazis took refuge in the cellars. “Bomb Auschwitz,” he said, “I never would have survived — if the bombs did not kill us, the Nazis would have shot us down like dogs if we tried to escape.” Is that an immoral position? The bombing raids on the IG Farben plants/Monowitz where this Auschwitz survivor was forced into slave labor succeeded in hitting 2.2% of damageable buildings. (4) These targets were far more vulnerable than the Auschwitz gas chambers and crematoria. And what if Allied bombing had destroyed the killing machinery at Auschwitz? What would the Nazis have done? They would have used machine guns and firing squads and grave-trenches as they did before. Or, as Rondall Rice has written, the SS might have begun the death marches back to the Reich a few months earlier — “destroying Hitler's grip on Europe was a guaranteed means for saving the remaining Jews.”

President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, General Eisenhower, General Marshall, the intelligence services of the Allied nations, every Jewish leader, the Jewish communities in America, in Britain, in Palestine, and yes, anyone who had a radio or newspaper in 1942 knew that Jews in colossal numbers were being murdered. They may have received the news with disbelief. There was no precedent for it in human history. The general information of the genocide was broadly available to anyone who would read or listen. But Auschwitz, like every extermination camp, was treated as a top-secret project by the Nazis. We publicized what we knew but the Nazis tried to keep as much information as possible away from everybody. As Martin Gilbert points out, the details and even the name of Auschwitz were not confirmed until the escape of two prisoners in April, 1944 — two years after its murderous processes had begun.

We should remember, as Professor Novick has reminded us in a book that deserves a significant audience, that it was only years after the war that the word “holocaust” came into general use to describe the Nazi genocide. (6) It is also important to note that no one — no one, foresaw the events that became the Holocaust. In discussing those events, it is helpful to read the words of Louis de Jong, an eminent Dutch historian and Holocaust survivor who in a lecture at Harvard University in 1989 said:

[There is] an aspect of the Holocaust which is of cardinal importance and which can never be sufficiently underlined: that the Holocaust, when it took place, was beyond the belief and the comprehension of almost all people living at the time, Jews included. Everyone knew that human history had been scarred by endless cruelties. But that thousands, nay millions, of human beings — men, women and children, the old and the young, the healthy and the infirm — would be killed, finished off, mechanically, industrially so to speak, would be exterminated like vermin — that was a notion so alien to the human mind, an event so gruesome, so new, that the instinctive, indeed the natural, reaction of most people was: it can't be true…(7)

Mr. Beschloss would have his audiences believe that President Roosevelt was besieged by Jewish leaders, led by Secretary Morgenthau, urging him to order the bombing of Auschwitz. Of course, that is not true. No mainstream Jewish leader or organization made such a request. In fact, there was considerable Jewish opposition to the suggestion of bombing Auschwitz both in the United States and Palestine. The first suggestion to John McCloy (the Assistant Secretary of War) regarding the bombing of Auschwitz, came on August 9, 1944, in a letter from Leon Kubowitzki, head of the Rescue Committee of the World Jewish Congress, in which he forwarded, without endorsement, a request to consider such bombing from Mr. Ernest Frischer of the Czechoslovak State Council (in exile in London). What is rarely cited, but what one is charged with knowing if one chooses to make historical judgments of those horribly painful years, is that in a letter dated July 1, 1944, from the same Leon Kubowitzki to the Executive Director of the War Refugees Board (John Pehle), Mr. Kubowitzki argued against bombing Auschwitz because “the first victims would be the Jews” and the Allied air assault would serve as “a welcome pretext for the Germans to assert that their Jewish victims have been massacred not by their killers, but by Allied bombing.” The same argument is made in a Report of the Meeting … of the War Refugee Board of August 16, 1944, which cites the opinion of the Jewish community against bombing. (8)

Someday I hope to hear Mr. Beschloss and others broadcast that it is the killers who bear the responsibility for their deeds. We must remember, and our children must learn, that it was Hitler and his henchmen who imagined the Holocaust and the Nazis who carried it out. America was not an accomplice. America was not “passive.” America destroyed Hitler and Nazism, the greatest threat ever to modern civilization — and it was President Roosevelt who made America the arsenal of democracy, who was our Commander-in-Chief leading the greatest military force in history, who crafted the victorious alliance that won the war, and who inspired and guided the blueprint for the world in which we live.

Professor William L. O'Neill, in his review of The Conquerors in The New Leader (November/December 2002), writes:

Another puzzling feature is that Beschloss appears to detest Roosevelt. He represents him as a doddering old conniver much of the time, then concludes by writing that today's 'democratic, decentralized Germany is largely the country that Roosevelt imagined and worked for.' This statement goes against practically everything else Beschloss has to say about FDR. It is also true, making Beschloss' denigration of Roosevelt even harder to understand… Foremost scholars, while not excusing FDR's failings, put them in context. What one almost never sees is a book like this one, where FDR's personal shortcomings dominate the narrative and are followed by extravagant praise. Beschloss claims to have begun The Conquerors in 1992. The undigested state of his frequently excellent material suggests that he probably should have started sooner.

Mr. Beschloss, is, of course, entitled to “detest” Franklin Delano Roosevelt — many names come to mind of those who detested FDR during his lifetime.

For me, Winston Churchill's judgment of President Roosevelt is preferable. Winston Churchill once said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the greatest man he had ever known. President Roosevelt's life, he said, “must be regarded as one of the commanding events of human destiny.”

Notes:

1. The Second World War, John Keegan, New York, 1989, p. 282.

2. These blank spaces are exactly as they appear in the transcript of the interview.

3. Meeting of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, Jerusalem, June 11, 1944.

4. Bombers Over Auschwitz, by Irving Uttal, Lieutenant Colonel USAF (Ret.), 2002 (available from Colonel Uttal upon request).

5. The Bombing of Auschwitz, Edited by Michael Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, St. Martin's Press, 2000, p. 179.

6. The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick, Houghton Mifflin, 1999, p. 127 et seq.

7. The Netherlands and Nazi Germany, by Louis de Jong, Harvard University Press, 1990.

8. The Bombing of Auschwitz, op. cit., p. 274.

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A View from the Eye of the Storm

 

[Talk delivered by Haim Harari at a meeting of the International Advisory Board of a large multi-national corporation, April, 2004. Haim Harari, a theoretical physicist, is the Chair, Davidson Institute of Science Education, and Former President, from 1988 to 2001, of the Weizmann Institute of Science. During his years as President of the Institute, the Institute entered numerous new scientific fields and projects, built 47 new buildings, raised one Billion Dollars in philanthropic money, hired more than half of its current tenured Professors and became one of the highest royalty-earning academic organizations in the world.

 

Throughout all his adult life, Harari has made major contributions to three different fields: Particle Physics Research on the international scene,

Science Education in the Israeli school system and Science Administration and Policy Making.] As you know, I usually provide the scientific and technological“entertainment” in our meetings, but, on this occasion, our Chairman suggested that I present my own personal view on events in the part of the world from which I come. I have never been and I will never be a Government official and I have no privileged information. My perspective is entirely based on what I see, on what I read and on the fact that my family has lived in this region for almost 200 years. You may regard my views as those of the proverbial taxi driver, which you are supposed to question, when you visit a country. I could have shared with you some fascinating facts and some personal thoughts about the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, I will touch upon it onlyin passing. I prefer to devote most of my remarks to the broader picture ofthe region and its place in world events. I refer to the entire area between

Pakistan and Morocco, which is predominantly Arab, predominantly Moslem, but includes many non-Arab and also significant non-Moslem minorities. Why do I put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood? Because Israel and any problems related to it, in spite of what you might read or hear in the world media, is not the central issue, and has never been the central issue in the upheaval in the region. Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is. The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel. The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel. The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel. Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel. Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60's because of Israel. Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands ofhis own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel.

The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel. The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on. 

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel would have joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine would have existed for 100 years. The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total population of 300 millions, larger than the US and almost as large as the EU before its expansion. They have a land area larger than either the US or all of Europe. These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone. Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers.

The social status of women is far below what it was in the Western World 150 years ago. Human rights are below any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque fact that Libya was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights commission. According to a report prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the auspices of the U.N., the number of books translated by the entire Arab world is much smaller than what little Greece alone translates. The total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis. Birth rates in the region are very high, increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline. And all of this is happening in a region, which only 30 years ago, was believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and in a Moslem area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most advanced cultures in the world.

 

It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, suicide murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything, except themselves.

Do I say all of this with the satisfaction of someone discussing the failings of his enemies? On the contrary, I firmly believe that the world would have been a much better place and my own neighborhood would have been much more pleasant and peaceful, if things were different. I should also say a word about the millions of decent, honest, good people who are either devout Moslems or are not very religious but grew up in Moslem families. They are double victims of an outside world, which now develops Islamophobia and of their own environment, which breaks their heart by being totally dysfunctional. The problem is that the vast silent majority of these Moslems are not part of the terror and of the incitement but they also do not stand up against it. They become accomplices, by omission, and this applies to political leaders, intellectuals, business people and many others. Many of them can certainly tell right from wrong, but are afraid to express their views.

The events of the last few years have amplified four issues, which have always existed, but have never been as rampant as in the present upheaval in the region. These are the four main pillars of the current World Conflict, or perhaps we should already refer to it as “the undeclared World War III”. I have no better name for the presen situation. A few more years may pass before everybody acknowledges that it is a World War, but we are already well into it.

The first element is the suicide murder. Suicide murders are not a new invention but they have been made popular, if I may use this expression, only lately. Even after September 11, it seems that most of the Western World does not yet understand this weapon. It is a very potent psychological weapon. Its real direct impact is relatively minor. The total number of casualties from hundreds of suicide murders within Israel in the last three years is much smaller than those due to car accidents. September 11 was quantitatively much less lethal than many earthquakes. More people die from AIDS in one day in Africa than all the Russians who died in the hands of Chechnya-based Moslem suicide murderers since that conflict started. Saddam killed every month more people than all those who died from suicide murders since the Coalition occupation of Iraq.

So what is all the fuss about suicide killings? It creates headlines. It is spectacular. It is frightening. It is a very cruel death with bodies dismembered and horrible severe lifelong injuries to many of the wounded. It is always shown on television in great detail. One such murder, with the help of hysterical media coverage, can destroy the tourism industry of a country for quite a while, as it did in Bali and in Turkey.

But the real fear comes from the undisputed fact that no defense and no preventive measures can succeed against a determined suicide murderer. This has not yet penetrated the thinking of the Western World. The U.S. and Europe are constantly improving their defense against the last murder, not the next one. We may arrange for the best airport security in the world..But if you want to murder by suicide, you do not have to board a plane in order to explode yourself and kill many people. Who could stop a suicide murder in the midst of the crowded line waiting to be checked by the airport metal detector? How about the lines to the check-in counters in a busy travel period? Put a metal detector in front of every train station in Spain and the terrorists will get the buses. Protect the buses and they will explode in movie theaters, concert halls supermarkets, shopping malls, schools and hospitals. Put guards in front of every concert hall and there will always be a line of people to be checked by the guards and this line will be the target, not to speak of killing the guards themselves. You can somewhat reduce your vulnerability by preventive and defensive measures and by strict border controls but not eliminate it and definitely not win the war in a defensive way. And it is a war!

What is behind the suicide murders? Money, power and cold-blooded murderous incitement, nothing else. It has nothing to do with true fanatic religious beliefs. No Moslem preacher has ever blown himself up. No son of an Arab politician or religious leader has ever blown himself. No relative of anyoneinfluential has done it. Wouldn't you expect some of the religious leaders to do it themselves, or to talk their sons into doing it, if this is truly asupreme act of religious fervor? Aren't they interested in the benefits of going to Heaven? Instead, they send outcast women, naïve children, retarded people and young incited hotheads. They promise them the delights, mostly sexual, of the next world, and pay their families handsomely after the supreme act is performed and enough innocent people are dead.Suicide murders also have nothing to do with poverty and despair. The poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa. It never happens there.

There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different cultures, countries and continents. Desperation does not provide anyone with explosives, reconnaissance and transportation. There was certainly more despair in Saddam's Iraq than in Paul Bremmer's Iraq, and no one exploded himself. A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon of cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to human life, including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with very high regard to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power. The only way to fight this new “popular” weapon is identical to the only wa in which you fight organized crime or pirates on the high seas: the offensive way. Like in the case of organized crime, it is crucial that the forces on the offensive be united and it is crucial to reach the top of the crime pyramid.

You cannot eliminate organized crime by arresting the little drug dealer in the street corner. You must go after the head of the “Family”. If part of the public supports it, others tolerate it, many are afraid of it and some try to explain it away by poverty or by a miserable childhood, organized crime will thrive and so will terrorism. The United States understands this now, after September 11. Russia is beginning to understand it. Turkey understands it well. I am very much afraid that most of Europe still does not understand it. Unfortunately, it seems that Europe will understand it only after suicide murders will arrive in Europe in a big way.

In my humble opinion, this will definitely happen. The Spanish trains and the Istanbul bombings are only the beginning. The unity of the Civilized World in fighting this horror is absolutely indispensable. Until Europe wakes up, this unity will not be achieved. The second ingredient is words, more precisely lies. Words can be lethal. They kill people. It is often said that politicians, diplomats and perhaps also lawyers and business people must sometimes lie, as part of their professional life. But the norms of politics and diplomacy are childish, in comparison with the level of incitement and total absolute deliberate fabrications, which have reached new heights in the region we are talking about.

An incredible number of people in the Arab world believe that September 11 never happened, or was an American provocation or, even better, a Jewish plot. You all remember the Iraqi Minister of Information, Mr. Mouhamad Saidal-Sahaf and his press conferences when the US forces were already inside Baghdad. Disinformation at time of war is an accepted tactic. But to stand, day after day, and to make such preposterous statements, known to everybody to be lies, without even being ridiculed in your own milieu, can only happen in this region. Mr. Sahaf eventually became a popular icon as a court jester, but this did not stop some allegedly respectable newspapers from giving him equal time. It also does not prevent the Western press from giving credence, every day, even now, to similar liars. After all, if you want to be an antisemite, there are subtle ways of doing it. You do not have to claim that the holocaust never happened and that the Jewish temple in Jerusalem never existed. But millions of Moslems are told by their leaders that this is the case. When these same leaders make other statements, the Western media report them as if they could be true. It is a daily occurrence that the same people, who finance, arm and dispatch suicide murderers, condemn the act in English in front of western TV cameras, talking to a world audience, which even partly believes them.

It is a daily routine to hear the same leader making opposite statements in Arabic to his people and in English to the rest of the world. Incitement by Arab TV, accompanied by horror pictures of mutilated bodies, has become a powerful weapon of those who lie, distort and want to destroy everything. Little children are raised on deep hatred and on admiration of so-called martyrs, and the Western World does not notice it because its own TV sets are mostly tuned to soap operas and game shows. I recommend to you, even though most of you do not understand Arabic, to watch Al Jazeera, from time to time. You will not believe your own eyes.

But words also work in other ways, more subtle. A demonstration in Berlin, carrying banners supporting Saddam's regime and featuring three-year old babies dressed as suicide murderers, is defined by the press and by political leaders as a “peace demonstration”. You may support or oppose the Iraq war, but to refer to fans of Saddam, Arafat or Bin Laden as peaceactivists is a bit too much. A woman walks into an Israeli restaurant in mid-day, eats, observes families with old people and children eating their lunch in the adjacent tables and pays the bill. She then blows herself up, killing 20 people, including many children, with heads and arms rolling around in the restaurant. She is called “martyr” by several Arab leaders an “activist” by the European press. Dignitaries condemn the act but visit her bereaved family and the money flows.

There is a new game in town: The actual murderer is called “the military wing”, the one who pays him, equips him and sends him is now called “the political wing” and the head of the operation is called the “spiritual leader”. There are numerous other examples of such Orwellian nomenclature, used every day not only by terror chiefs but also by Western media. These words are much more dangerous than many people realize. They provide an emotional infrastructure for atrocities. It was Joseph Goebels who said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. He is now being outperformed by his successors.

The third aspect is money. Huge amounts of money, which could have solved many social problems in this dysfunctional part of the world, are channeled into three concentric spheres supporting death and murder. In the inner circle are the terrorists themselves. The money funds their travel, explosives, hideouts and permanent search for soft vulnerable targets. They are surrounded by a second wider circle of direct supporters, planners, commanders, preachers, all of whom make a living, usually a very comfortable living, by serving as terror infrastructure. Finally, we find the third circle of so-called religious, educational and welfare organizations, which actually do some good, feed the hungry and provide some schooling, but brainwash a new generation with hatred, lies and ignorance. This circle operates mostly through mosques, madrasas and other religious establishments but also through inciting electronic and printed media.

It is this circle that makes sure that women remain inferior, that democracy is unthinkable and that exposure to the outside world is minimal. It is also that circle that leads the way in blaming everybody outside the Moslem world, for the miseries of the region. Figuratively speaking, this outer circle is the guardian, which makes sure that the people look and listen inwards to the inner circle of terror and incitement, rather than to the world outside. Some parts of this same outer circle actually operate as a result of fear from, or blackmail by, the inner circles. The horrifying added factor is the high birth rate. Half of the population of the Arab world is under the age of 20, the most receptive age to incitement, guaranteeing two more generations of blind hatred. Of the three circles described above, the inner circles are primarily financed by terrorist states like Iran and Syria, until recently also by Iraq and Libya and earlier also by some of the Communist regimes. These states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are the safe havens of the wholesale murder vendors. The outer circle is largely financed by Saudi Arabia, but also by donations from certain Moslem communities in the United States and Europe and, to a smaller extent, by donations of European Governments to various NGO's and by certain United Nations organizations, whose goals may be noble, but they are infested and exploited by agents of the outer circle.

The Saudi regime, of course, will be the next victim of major terror, when the inner circle will explode into the outer circle. The Saudis are beginning to understand it, but they fight the inner circles, while still financing the infrastructure at the outer circle? Some of the leaders of these various circles live very comfortably on their loot. You meet their children in the best private schools in Europe, not in the training camps of suicide murderers. The Jihad “soldiers” join packaged death tours to Iraq and other hotspots, while some of their leaders ski in Switzerland. Mrs. Arafat, who lives in Paris with her daughter, receives tens of thousands Dollars per month from the allegedly bankrupt Palestinian Authority while a typical local ringleader of the Al-Aksa brigade, reporting to Arafat, receives only a cash payment of a couple of hundred dollars, for performing murders at the retail level.?

The fourth element of the current world conflict is the total breaking of all laws. The civilized world believes in democracy, the rule of law, including international law, human rights, free speech and free press, among other liberties. There are naïve old-fashioned habits such as respecting religious sites and symbols, not using ambulances and hospitals for acts of war, avoiding the mutilation of dead bodies and not using children as human shields or human bombs. Never in history, not even in the Nazi period, was there such total disregard of all of the above as we observe now. Every student of political science debates how you prevent an anti-democratic force from winning a democratic election and abolishing democracy. Other aspects of a civilized society must also have limitations. Can a policeman open fire on someone trying to kill him? Can a government listen to phone conversations of terrorists and drug dealers? Does free speech protects you when you shout “fire” in a crowded theater? Should there be death penalty, for deliberate multiple murders? These are the old-fashioned dilemmas. But now we have an entire new set. Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage? Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital? Do you storm a church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages? Do you search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use ambulances to reach their targets? Do you strip every woman because one pretended to be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly? Do you shoot back at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately behind a group of children? Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden in a mental hospital? Do you shoot an arch-murderer who deliberately moves from one location to another, always surrounded by children? All of these happen daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas. What do you do? Well, you do not want to face the dilemma. But it cannot be avoided.

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay in a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in France, killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting responsibility for the crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do more of the same, while the Government of Iran issues public condemnations of his acts but continues to host him, invite him to official functions and treat him as a great dignitary. I leave it to you as homework to figure out what Spain or France would have done, in such a situation. The problem is that the civilized world is still having illusions about the rule of law in a totally lawless environment. It is trying to play ice hockey by sending a ballerina ice-skater into the rink or to knock out a heavyweight boxer by a chess player. In the same way that no country has a law against cannibals eating its prime minister, because such an act is unthinkable, international law does not address killers shooting from hospitals, mosques and ambulances, while being protected by their Government or society. International law does not know how to handle someone who sends children to throw stones, stands behind them and shoots with immunity and cannot be arrested because he is sheltered by a Government. International law does not know how to deal with a leader of murderers who is royally and comfortably hosted by a country, which pretends to condemn his acts or just claims to be too weak to arrest him. The amazing thing is that all of these crooks demand protection under international law and define all those who attack them as war criminals, with some Western media repeating the allegations. The good news is that all of this is temporary, because the evolution of international law has always adapted itself to reality. The punishment for suicide murder should be death or arrest before the murder, not during and not after. After every world war, the rules of international law have changed and the same will happen after the present one. But during the twilight zone, a lot of harm can be done. The picture I described here is not pretty. What can we do about it? In the short run, only fight and win. In the long run ? only educate the next generation and open it to the world.

The inner circles can and must be destroyed by force. The outer circle cannot be eliminated by force. Here we need financial starvation of the organizing elite, more power to women, more education, counter propaganda, boycott whenever feasible and access to Western media, internet and the international scene. Above all, we need a total absolute unity and determination of the civilized world against all three circles of evil  Allow me, for a moment, to depart from my alleged role as a taxi driver and return to science. When you have a malignant tumor, you may remove the tumor itself surgically. You may also starve it by preventing new blood from reaching it from other parts of the body, thereby preventing new “supplies” from expanding the tumor. If you want to be sure, it is best to do both.

But before you fight and win, by force or otherwise, you have to realize that you are in a war, and this may take Europe a few more years. In order to win, it is necessary to first eliminate the terrorist regimes, so that no Government in the world will serve as a safe haven for these people. I do not want to comment here on whether the American-led attack on Iraq was justified from the point of view of weapons of mass destruction or any other pre-war argument, but I can look at the post-war map of Western Asia. Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter being a Syrian colony. Perhaps Sudan should be added to the list. As a result of the conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded by territories unfriendly to them. Iran is encircled by Afghanistan, by theGulf States, Iraq and the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union. Syria is surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. This is a significant strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist countries.

It is not surprising that Iran is so active in trying to incite a Shiiteuprising in Iraq. I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting situation.???

In my humble opinion, the number one danger to the world today is Iran and its regime. It definitely has ambitions to rule vast areas and to expand in all directions. It has an ideology, which claims supremacy over Western culture. It is ruthless. It has proven that it can execute elaborate terrorist acts without leaving too many traces, using Iranian Embassies.. It is clearly trying to develop Nuclear Weapons. Its so-called moderates and conservatives play their own virtuoso version of the “good-cop versus bad-cop” game. Iran sponsors Syrian terrorism, it is certainly behind much of the action in Iraq, it is fully funding the Hizbulla and, through it, the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it performed acts of terror at least in Europe and in South America and probably also in Uzbekhistan and Saudi Arabia and it truly leads a multi-national terror consortium, which includes, as minor players, Syria, Lebanon and certain Shiite elements in Iraq. Nevertheless, most European countries still trade with Iran, try to appease it and refuse to read the clear signals.

In order to win the war it is also necessary to dry the financial resources of the terror conglomerate. It is pointless to try to understand the subtle differences between the Sunni terror of Al Qaida and Hamas and the Shiite terror of Hizbulla, Sadr and other Iranian inspired enterprises. When it serves their business needs, all of them collaborate beautifully. It is crucial to stop Saudi and other financial support of the outer circle, which is the fertile breeding ground of terror. It is important to monitor all donations from the Western World to Islamic organizations, to monitor the finances of international relief organizations and to react with forceful economic measures to any small sign of financial aid to any of the three circles of terrorism. It is also important to act decisively against the campaign of lies and fabrications and to monitor those Western media who collaborate with it out of naivety, financial interests or ignorance. Above all, never surrender to terror. No one will ever know whether the recent elections in Spain would have yielded a different result, if not for the train bombings a few days earlier. But it really does not matter. What matters is that the terrorists believe that they caused the result and that they won by driving Spain out of Iraq. The Spanish story will surely end up being extremely costly to other European countries, including France, who is now expelling inciting preachers and forbidding veils and including others who sent troops to Iraq. In the long run, Spain itself will pay even more.

Is the solution a democratic Arab world? If by democracy we mean free elections but also free press, free speech, a functioning judicial system, civil liberties, equality to women, free international travel, exposure to international media and ideas, laws against racial incitement and against defamation, and avoidance of lawless behavior regarding hospitals, places of worship and children, then yes, democracy is the solution. If democracy is just free elections, it is likely that the most fanatic regime will be elected, the one whose incitement and fabrications are the most inflammatory. We have seen it already in Algeria and, to a certain extent, in Turkey. It will happen again, if the ground is not prepared very carefully. On the other hand, a certain transition democracy, as in Jordan, may be a better temporary solution, paving the way for the real thing, perhaps in the same way that an immediate sudden democracy did not work inRussia and would not have worked in China.

I have no doubt that the civilized world will prevail. But the longer it takes us to understand the new landscape of this war, the more costly and painful the victory will be. Europe, more than any other region, is the key. Its understandable recoil from wars, following the horrors of World War II, may cost thousands of additional innocent lives, before the tide will turn. 

 Gary B. Rovin, esq.

JD, AAMINZ

P.O. Box 1424

Queenstown, New Zealand

 

Tel:   643 – 441-2922

Fax:   643 – 441-2921

Mob:  642 – 176-6046

 

Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 22:42:38 -0500

To: “Michael A. Schlanger” <mschlanger@sonnenschein.com>

From: Richard and Linda Garfunkel

Subject: Re: Columbia's Wrestling Centennial

Dear Michael-

Thanks for the kind words. I assume that you were able to read a lot about me in those various e-mails, especially “Three Mount Vernon Stories” Oh do I remember Bobby Danetz, my neighbor that lived 3 house down from us on Prospect Avenue, and the rest of the guys you mentioned. My sister, Kaaren Garfunkel Hale, of Belgravia London, UK, was quite friendly with that little cutie-pie Rhona Gissen, and I was distantly fond of her also. I met her many years later in my home in Prospect Park, White Plains with her husband. She had become a Rabbi! I can't remember how we matched up, but that was the first and last time I saw her since the late 1950's. Dick Sabot, Al Begun, a guy named Friendlander, and many others that crossed my path at Traphagen, were pretty decent guys. Most of them were certainly saner than I. But I only have the fondest memories of the lost Jewish world of our private upper middle class schtetl that disappeared in an eye blink. Speaking of wrestling, one of Henry's greatest products was a marvelous champion named Mitchell Gurdus. (I had seen and known them all from 1961 until Jimmy Lee coached in the late 1970's.) Mitch Gurdus was great with that double arm bar, which he would walk around and pin most of his opponents. In his senior year, at 24-0, and a Section I Champ, he went to the state championships and lost in an overtime referee's decision to the inevetible state champion, and like his great mentor he left the mat like a gentleman without a word of complaint. I never saw or spoke to Mitch Gurdus again, until 35 years later when I found his name in the internet and told him Henry was ill. Please call him I asked, and I later learned that he did. Oh! how Henry was so appreciative when those old wrestlers called. And what else did I learn, Mitch's two son's were Florida State wrestling champs!

I saw Bobby Danetz when I attended a funeral in Fleetwood about ten years ago. He looked exactly the same. We joked about those old days when wrestling was young in Mount Vernon. One day we were walking home from Davis one icy night, after a match, in which Bobby had been pinned. Outside of his home he slipped and I jumped on him and held him down laughing that he was about to be pinned twice in one day.

In 1962, after the Section I Championships at White Plains HS, the MVHS team (Henry merged Davis and Edison together before anyone else.) which had finished the season 8-7, came in 6th with 20 points to the eventual winner White Plains with 32, Henry walked out the big gym doors with his massive arm around my shoulder. Here I was almost 17 and Henry at 28 was my friend. He said to me “you know Richard I made a big mistake this week.” I said “what do you mean Coach?” He then went on to tell me an interesting story. On our team we had two natural but sort of light 180lbers, Bobby Danetz, the senior, and one ferocious Howie Wilson, the junior from Edison (A real man, as the poet said.) Henry proceeded to tell me that he allowed his heart to make a coaching decision, not his head!

He allowed Danetz the much weaker wrestler to compete at 180 because he was a senior and let Wilson to wrestle in the then unlimited heavyweight class that had people as big as a house. Brian Lucas at 350 from Scarsdale won the title. There was no 215 or 235 or 250 lb class, just an open class. So lo and behold Danetz was pinned in the first round, and Wilson was defeated by some 280 lb behemoth 2-1, or 3-2 on riding time. Henry said to me, “Richard, Howie would have easily won that class and we would have picked up 10 points for the 1st place and a few pin points along the way” In fact what he was saying, as we strolled out into that chilled cool dark March night, that this would never happen again, because his decision may have prevented our victory.

The next season MVHS went 12-1, only losing to the great Freeport team, coached by the legendary Vince Zuaro that stymied us with a chicken wing half nelsons. Howie Wilson finished 18-3 against stiff heavies and 180 lbers and breezed through the Section I's with ease and domination. MVHS scored a record 92 points, never lost a single dual match or tournament in Section I while Henry coached. So it actually could have been 6 in a row. That's what I remember so vividly about those wondrous days with the great Henry Littlefield. He was a mountain of a man in spirit, intellect, soul, heart and everything else.

(Howie Wilson went on to the service, a few tours in Viet-Nam, a great wrestling career in the service and retirement living in Madrid, Maine.)

I look forward to seeing you one of these fine days! We'll exchange old vignettes from that bygone era.

RJG

Dear Richard,

I remember you well and fondly, all the way back to Traphagen

playground basketball games on the weekends.  I was two years older than

you, but your courage and determination in playing hard against some of my

tough hombre Clipper teammates made you stand out among your peers.  I have

kept in very close touch with Mount Vernon and the Mount Vernonites of my

childhood. My parents bought their house at  19 Pamer Avenue in 1945; my

father died there in 1987, my mother in 2000. My closest friends then

remain among my closest friends now, including Mal Gissen, Bobby Danetz,

Dick Sabot and Alvin Begun. I was President of Omega Delta Fraternity my

senior year, and thus was a mentor of sorts to classmates of yours,

including Michael Rosenblum.

I will give you a call and take you to lunch sometime. It would be

very rewarding to talk about Mr. Littlefield. He inspired me to attend

Columbia, to wrestle freshman and then varsity (123, sometimes 130), to

major in American History, and even to try to join the Marine Corps in

January 1966. (I was turned down because I couldn't read even the first

line on the eye chart.) When my oldest son, Teddy, took up wrestling in the

8th grade, and thought he had to learn 100 moves, I jumped in and spent two

years teaching him the Henry Littlefield method – – fundamentals and

conditioning. He won the Woodberry Forest Invitational the next year (the

three-state prep junior varsity tournament) by mastering 20 moves or less

and wearing down his more talented foes with superior conditioning. (He

retired last year at the behest of his varsity baseball coach, to pursue

his goal of playing baseball for Columbia..)  My middle son Nicholas is

tall enough for basketball, but my youngest son, Ben, is in his second year

of wrestling as a 6th grader, and loves the conditioning and the pure

physics of the sport; he will stick with it.

I suppose because wrestling truly taught me to shed all fear, doubt

and hesitation, I became a trial lawyer; I still go before juries from

Maine to Mexico and in places where angels fear to tread – – El Paso,

Texas, Edwardsville, Illinois, Marquette, Michigan, Palm Beach County

Circuit Court.

 In 2001, I attended my A.B. Davis 40th reunion; in 2002, I attended

the 40th reunion of the Class of 1962. I wrote a letter of appreciation to

the organizer of that latter reunion. I will pass it along to you by a

separate e-mail. If your class is having a 40th reunion, and you all

wouldn't mind an older interloper, I would love to attend.

                                                   Sincerely,

                                                  Michael Schlanger

Wind Turbines an Alternative to

Fossil Fuels

Message

To

Town of Greenburgh Parks and Recreation Advisory Board

May 5, 2004

Richard J. Garfunkel

Today we face an ongoing problem regarding the usage of fossil fuels. Obviously, from a market perspective the price of oil seems to be on an upward path, not destined to be ameliorated or tempered by positive market factors, short of a recession, for the foreseeable future. Also the dependency of overseas suppliers adds to our trade deficit and exacerbates our ongoing political problems. Places like Nigeria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the like are in the near term and long term, potentially unstable. Today Iraq and Venezuela are prime examples of nations with huge reserves that are currently under jeopardy for totally different reasons.

Therefore from a geopolitical perspective the search for alternate and renewable resources should be paramount on the minds of both the government and the public it serves. Wind power is an increasingly significant renewable energy resource, producing no environmental CO2 emissions. The wind turbine collects kinetic energy from the wind and converts it to electricity. There are three bladed types that are operated “upwind” and two-bladed types that operate “downwind.” Wind turbines are manufactured by many companies around the world and this country, and come in all sizes with different though similar configurations. They are engineered to fit into the power grid, and they can be easily adapted to our current electrical system. From an environmental perspective their noise levels are equivalent to quiet bedroom at night. In a sense they would be 30% quieter than listening to a car travel by at 40 mph from a distance of 100 meters. Wind turbines can be extremely cost affective depending on the height of the tower and the constant speed of the wind. As per example a small wind turbine typically lowers one’s electricity bill between 50 and 90%. A typical wind turbine starts produce power at 6 mph. Of course, depending on the size and its efficiency, the payment may take a varied amount of time. Generally it takes 8-9 mph average speeds to make one’s site quite viable.

Presently the Town of Greenburgh, which includes villages and unincorporated areas, also has a long stretch of land that parallels the Hudson River. This may be the appropriate time to look carefully at some of the parkland, neighborhoods with wooded buffer zones and the Hudson River frontage as places where wind turbines could be placed. 

As per example; in Searsburg, Vermont, 11 wind turbines, which cost $11 million to build, with $4 million from the DOE, produces 6 megawatts- that provides the energy for 2000 homes. Of course these are large “wind turbines” and they serve different, but similar ends.

My suggestion is that we form a small working committee to establish a “task force” on alternative sources of energy. This “task force” should not be limited to wind turbines, but explore solar energy, hybrid cars, and conservation.

What is the Greatest Sport Achievement?

By

Richard J. Garfunkel

July 2004

There is a difference between a skill event, or a one-time effort, or a cumulative, game, season or career accomplishment. To me the greatest skill event, among the sports is to pitch a perfect game. Over the tens of thousands of games, encompassing the whole history or baseball, there have only been 11 I believe. Every pitcher starts with the opportunity. They all have an equal chance. But an unassisted triple play has to have the right circumstances, and it is not a matter of skill, but luck.

 In the same way, hitting for the cycle is more luck than skill. In today's smaller ballparks, triples have become a rare and lucky commodity. To me the hardest thing to do in sports is to hit off a Nolan Ryan or Sandy Koufax, or a Bob Feller or a Roger Clemons. But people did get home runs off these greats. In other words, on a one-time basis, almost everything can be done. Winning the batting or pitching Triple Crown is rare, but lucky. You cannot control your fellow players who could out perform you in one category or another. But that seasonal feat is rare and hard to accomplish. Hitting .400 has only been done twice since 1930, Bill Terry, 1930 in the NL and Ted Williams, 1941 in the AL. Many players have approached that mark but have failed. But the difference between hitting .391 and .400 over 550 at bats is 5 hits or one per one hundred at bats.

Certainly there are seasonal marks that will always be difficult, or impossible to break. Johnny vander Meer pitched two consecutive no-hitters. Could someone pitch three? Cy Young's 511 victories! A player today would have to win 25 games each season for 20 years! Impossible! The Triple Crown of Racing is rare but each race is mutually independent. Yes, a racer has to beat a different, but sometimes similar, field of horses, but the real effort is the strain on the winning horse in running three tough races in 6 weeks time. Once a horse has one the first two, the odds on winning the third are not high. Just divide the previous Triple Crown winners into the number of horses that have one the first two races.

Therefore one effort, versus, a seasonal or career effort is much different. Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, against the Dodgers, was the greatest game feat in sport's history. He pitched it under tremendous pressure, in front of 70,000+ fans, in the World Series, against a great and famous hitting team filled with all-stars and future Hall-of-Famers. They included; Snider, Robinson, Campanella, Reese, members of the Hall and Hodges, Furillo and Gilliam proven stars.

No one field goal, or soccer score, or home run, or catch, or touchdown run or, clutch game-winning basket could replicate that feat. Maybe Wilt's 100 points in a game, or Michael Jackson's 68 points against Bird, or Joe Adcock's four homers and a double, or Jim Brown's 43 points in a football game against Colgate, or Jesse Owens' world records in the Big Ten championships, or Red Grange's 6 touchdowns, or Gayle Sayers 6 touchdowns, along with a number of others could be mentioned. But to pitch a perfect game in the World Series venue against a great dynasty like the 1950's Brooklyn Dodgers is probably unequaled.

The Yankees winning 5 straight World Series from 1949-53 will probably never be broken. Even the great Yankee teams of the late 1990's could not approach that mark. It is possible, but surely improbable that any team could accomplish or usurp that feat. In the same way the Celtics streak in pro basketball and the UCLA basketball string of NCAA championships will probably never be approached!

November 16, 2002

Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel

Franklin  & Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation

711 5th Avenue/ Suite 900

New York City, NY 10022

Dear Mr. Ambassador,

I wanted to thank you again for your gracious remarks about my letter to the editor and my comments on the Michael Beschloss book. But on another note, I have included an article from the American Heritage, October 2000 about Eleanor Roosevelt and Hunter College.

I may have mentioned this before, but Terri Rosen Deutsch, who is cousin of my wife Linda, is involved in the Hunter College program to rehabilitate the old Roosevelt residence. I have sent a copy of this to her attention, and hopefully I will be able to see the old homes with her in the near future.

Meanwhile I keep collecting money for the FDR/Birthday Ball project and according to my last talk with JoAnn Benson, things are moving along quite well. Our next meeting is on Tuesday, November 26^th and I will report to you what new news comes out of that meeting.

Regards,

Richard J. Garfunkel

March 2003 Newsletter

COMMENTS ON MICHAEL BESCHLOSS' THE CONQUERERS

by William J. vanden Heuvel

(Roosevelt Institute)

In his book, The Conquerors, and in numerous media/marketing appearances, Michael Beschloss has arrogantly “flunked” President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his handling of Hitler's attempted extermination of Europe's Jews. FDR, according to Beschloss, bears particular responsibility for remaining silent during the first two years of the Holocaust, for being unsympathetic to the Jewish cause, and for not ordering the bombing of Auschwitz.

In making these assertions, Mr. Beschloss has joined a discredited group who would have our children believe that America was “indifferent” to the suffering of the Jews in World War II, that America was the passive accomplice in what Winston Churchill called “the greatest and most terrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.” For all of us, the shadow of doubt that enough was not done for the Jews during the war will always remain, although it is objectively clear that little more could have been done. But neither America nor American Jewry were passive observers of these events. Despite issues that bitterly divided them, primarily relating to Palestine, the Jewish community in America spoke the same words in pleading to do whatever was possible to reach out to Europe's Jews. Numerous plans were produced to rescue the Jews of Europe. Jewish leaders lobbied the Congress. Mass rallies were held across the country with overflow crowds throughout those years, praying, pleading for action to stop the genocide.

As the famed military historian John Keegan has written: “The removal and transportation of Europe's Jews was a fact known to every inhabitant of the continent between 1942 and 1945.” (1) Yet Mr. Beschloss would have us believe that Roosevelt made no attempt to draw the world's attention to these crimes in 1942 and 1943. He also makes repeated allegations that because he resented Jewish and other ethnic group pressures, President Roosevelt did not identify the Jews specifically in the repeated Allied warnings that the Nazis collectively and individually would be held accountable for their barbaric crimes. There was a time earlier in the war when it was thought best not to identify the Jews specifically in the reporting of the Nazi crimes. Beschloss would have us believe that this was done for the petty, ugly reason of resenting ethnic pressures. I thought of this on a recent visit to London's Holocaust Museum. There is a specific exhibit referring to a speech by Winston Churchill on August 24, 1941, where he reports that “a crime without a name” was being committed against “Russian patriots who defended their native soil.” These words were written after the Prime Minister had been briefed regarding information provided by the Enigma code breakthrough on the slaughter of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen after the Nazi invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941. We now know that this is when the Holocaust began. The British exhibit then states: “Western leaders feared that drawing attention to the Jews would be seen as special pleading and would fuel Nazi propaganda.” (America was not yet in the war). Winston Churchill may have been wrong in this conclusion, but it was the considered judgment of a great leader with vast sympathy for the Jewish cause, not Churchill's resentment against pressure from ethnic groups that influenced his words on this occasion.

It is hard to believe that anyone would make the allegation that FDR chose to ignore the plight of the Jews in World War II. Time and again, beginning with his pledge to Rabbi Wise and other Jewish leaders in November 1942, President Roosevelt made clear through governmental statements and messages to the mass rallies organized in those years that the Nazis would be held collectively and individually accountable for their crimes against the Jews. In his book, Beschloss denies this, asserting that in spite of a growing body of evidence in the summer and fall of 1942 pointing towards the mass execution of the Jews, FDR chose to hide the extent of what he knew and remain “silent” on the issue in 1942 and 1943. In making this allegation, Mr. Beschloss quotes from the December 17, 1942 Allied Declaration on war crimes as evidence to support his argument that FDR preferred not to mention the Jews when speaking of Nazi atrocities, noting only the “mass executions” of “many hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children.” But Beschloss is wrong. As James Cheeks has noted in an HNN review, the December 17th Declaration was written precisely to highlight the Nazis crimes against the Jews, as its title “German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race” make clear. Beschloss chooses to ignore this. He not only fails to mention the title of the document, but also its stark references to the horrors of the Nazi's brutal treatment of the Jews and the “solemn resolution” of the Allies “to ensure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution.”

With the Nazi coup against Admiral Horthy in March, 1944, a limited opportunity came to save the Jews of Hungary. President Roosevelt was deeply and personally involved in the effort to save them. This is the President's statement to the people of the United States and of Europe on March 24, 1944:

In one of the blackest crimes of all history — begun by the Nazis in the days of peace and multiplied by them a hundred times in time of war — the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour. As a result of the events of the last few days hundreds of thousands of Jews who, while living under persecution, have at least found a haven from death in Hungary and the Balkans, are now threatened with annihilation as Hitler's forces descend more heavily upon these lands. That these innocent people, who have already survived a decade of Hitler's fury, should perish on the very eve of triumph over the barbarism which their persecution symbolized, would be a major tragedy. It is therefore fitting that we should again proclaim our determination that none who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished. The United Nations have made it clear that they will pursue the guilty and deliver them up in order that justice be done. That warning applies not only to the leaders but also to their functionaries and subordinates in Germany and in the satellite countries. All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland or Norwegians and French to their death in Germany are equally guilty with the executioner. All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.

The principal marketing thrust for Beschloss's book centers on the issue of whether or not the Allies should have bombed Auschwitz and on “new information” that the man who made the ultimate decision not to bomb Auschwitz “may not have been John McCloy but Franklin Roosevelt himself.” This is important because apparently for Mr. Beschloss and some others whether Auschwitz should have been bombed is the defining question of World War II, a point of view frankly that is difficult to comprehend regarding a universal conflict in which 67 million people were killed, where nations were decimated, where democracy's survival was in the balance, where 16 million Americans were joined together in a military force that has never been equaled, and where our nation led the world into the nuclear age. Beschloss identifies this “new information” as a taped private conversation in 1986 between John McCloy and Henry Morgenthau III who was researching a family memoir. In his PBS interview, he says: “I came upon an interview, unpublished, that John McCloy did just before he died… where he actually conceded that he had taken this to Roosevelt and said 'do you want to bomb Auschwitz or not?' And he said that what Roosevelt said was, 'absolutely not…?'”

I have read the transcript of the McCloy-Morgenthau interview. Nowhere does the above-cited conversation take place. In fact, the interview transcript could well be read to an opposite conclusion, that the President had nothing to do with the bombing decision, that it was never presented to him for decision. The interview between John McCloy and Henry Morgenthau III took place on October 8, 1986. On Page 11 of the transcript of that interview, Mr. McCloy was asked to characterize Secretary Morgenthau's style as an official.

Henry Morgenthau III: How would you characterize his style as an official?

John McCloy: I had no difficulty with him at all. The general view was that he was an……….., (2) but he was always in favor of the Jewish even irate at the treatment of the Jews and he was going to do everything in his power, he was vindictive in regard to that. Subtle, persistent and anywhere there was an antagonism to the …….. or the advance of Hitler.

Henry Morgenthau III: But he didn't get involved in the bombing of Auschwitz that was all post facto.

John McCloy: They came to me and wanted me to order the bombing of Auschwitz. He wasn't involved in that nor was the President. (italics added) …

Auschwitz was raised peripherally as the conversation with Mr. McCloy was about to end. McCloy was 88 years old — never in all of the extensive interviews he gave in his life, nor in his papers, is there any indication of his ever discussing the bombing questions with the President. Henry Morgenthau III never cited the interview in the family memoir nor in his frequent public appearances where he participated in discussions related to the Holocaust. In reality, the transcript presents a painfully disjointed, obviously strained, totally ambiguous recollection that is hardly the source of important historical judgments. Perhaps Mr. McCloy discussed the bombing question to the President at some uncertain date to ascertain his opinions. There is no record of such a meeting in the voluminous records of the Roosevelt era in the Presidential Library at Hyde Park. But if an informal conversation took place, it is important to note that the opinion attributed to FDR reflects the viewpoint expressed by David Ben-Gurion (then Chairman of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, later first Prime Minister of Israel) in June 1944 when he responded to a proposal that the Allies be asked to bomb the extermination camps. At that meeting, presided over by Ben-Gurion, the Jewish Agency voted eleven to one against the bombing proposal.(3)

The Holocaust is an enormously complicated tragedy. Today we have the photographs, the films, the diabolically precise records of the genocide but when I read David Ben Gurion in June 1944 saying: “We do not know the truth concerning the entire situation in Poland, and it seems that we will be unable to propose anything concerning this.” — I appreciate how helpless everyone must have felt as the news slowly leaked through the Nazi wall of secrecy as to the enormity of the crime. It is certainly appropriate — and even necessary — for contemporary generations to look at the horrendous dimensions of the Nazi slaughter and ask: Could we have prevented it? What more could have been done?

Because these questions must be asked, historians must carefully seek the truth; they must present the context of the events. Today it is taken for granted that Hitler would be defeated but historians know that victory in World War II was far from assured. The Nazi war machine was the most powerful in world history. It took the combined might of the United States, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and countless other brave allies to destroy it. The bombing of Auschwitz was never mentioned before the summer of 1944. At that point, American forces were fully engaged with Japanese aggression across the total expanse of the Pacific Ocean. In Europe, the invasion of Normandy began on June 6th. Despite the fact that two-thirds of the Nazi armies were on the Russian front, D-Day and an Allied success were by no means assured. The German armies were holding our forces at bay in Italy, causing heavy casualties, making us fight for every road and hill. We were planning the invasion of southern France for August 15th. America and our allies were stretched dangerously across western and southern Europe. The Allied bombing strategy was totally directed toward destroying Nazi fuel supplies, their synthetic oil industries, the oil fields of Romania, and their communication and transport lines wherever possible.

By making the bombing of Auschwitz such a central issue, Mr. Beschloss and others like him trivialize the meaning and the horror of the Holocaust. The unremitting, remorseless massacre of the Jews — carefully concealed by the top secret security of the Nazi murderers — continued because no one, no nation, no alliance of nations could do anything meaningful to close down the Death Camps — except, as President Roosevelt said over and over again, by winning the war and destroying the Nazis with unconditional determination as soon as possible.

Mr. Beschloss insists that “the sound of bombs exploding at Auschwitz would have constituted a moral statement for all time…” Were the countless Jewish leaders immoral who considered the possibility of bombing Auschwitz and rejected it? Were David Ben-Gurion and his ten colleagues of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem immoral because they voted against asking the Allies to bomb the Death Camps? Mainstream Jewish opinion was against the whole idea of bombing Auschwitz. The very thought of the Allied forces deliberately killing Jews — to open the gates of Auschwitz so the survivors could run where? — was abhorrent then as it should be now. Although only President Roosevelt or General Eisenhower could have ordered the bombing of Auschwitz, there is no record of any kind that indicates that either one was ever asked to issue such an order — even though Jewish leaders of all persuasions had clear access to them both. United States Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, a key intelligence officer for the Air Force in Europe in World War II in an oral history interview in 1985 was incredulous that anyone would even suggest that Allied forces bomb Auschwitz. “I am perfectly confident,” he said, “that General Spaatz [the USAF Commander in Europe] would have resisted any proposal that we kill the Jewish inmates in order to put Auschwitz out of operation. It is not easy to think that a rational person would have made such a recommendation.”

When I first spoke on the subject of America and the Holocaust in Chicago in 1996, an 80-year-old man, an Auschwitz survivor, came up to me, eyes filled with tears, to thank me for having told “the truth.” He had been a slave laborer at the Farben factory in Buna, near Auschwitz. He said that when the sirens announced the bombing raids, the Nazis forced the Jews to the rooftop while the Nazis took refuge in the cellars. “Bomb Auschwitz,” he said, “I never would have survived — if the bombs did not kill us, the Nazis would have shot us down like dogs if we tried to escape.” Is that an immoral position? The bombing raids on the IG Farben plants/Monowitz where this Auschwitz survivor was forced into slave labor succeeded in hitting 2.2% of damageable buildings.(4) These targets were far more vulnerable than the Auschwitz gas chambers and crematoria. And what if Allied bombing had destroyed the killing machinery at Auschwitz? What would the Nazis have done? They would have used machine guns and firing squads and grave-trenches as they did before. Or, as Rondall Rice has written, the SS might have begun the death marches back to the Reich a few months earlier — “destroying Hitler's grip on Europe was a guaranteed means for saving the remaining Jews.”

President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, General Eisenhower, General Marshall, the intelligence services of the Allied nations, every Jewish leader, the Jewish communities in America, in Britain, in Palestine, and yes, anyone who had a radio or newspaper in 1942 knew that Jews in colossal numbers were being murdered. They may have received the news with disbelief. There was no precedent for it in human history. The general information of the genocide was broadly available to anyone who would read or listen. But Auschwitz, like every extermination camp, was treated as a top-secret project by the Nazis. We publicized what we knew but the Nazis tried to keep as much information as possible away from everybody. As Martin Gilbert points out, the details and even the name of Auschwitz were not confirmed until the escape of two prisoners in April, 1944 — two years after its murderous processes had begun.

We should remember, as Professor Novick has reminded us in a book that deserves a significant audience, that it was only years after the war that the word “holocaust” came into general use to describe the Nazi genocide.(6) It is also important to note that no one — no one, foresaw the events that became the Holocaust. In discussing those events, it is helpful to read the words of Louis de Jong, an eminent Dutch historian and Holocaust survivor who in a lecture at Harvard University in 1989 said:

[There is] an aspect of the Holocaust which is of cardinal importance and which can never be sufficiently underlined: that the Holocaust, when it took place, was beyond the belief and the comprehension of almost all people living at the time, Jews included. Everyone knew that human history had been scarred by endless cruelties. But that thousands, nay millions, of human beings — men, women and children, the old and the young, the healthy and the infirm — would be killed, finished off, mechanically, industrially so to speak, would be exterminated like vermin — that was a notion so alien to the human mind, an event so gruesome, so new, that the instinctive, indeed the natural, reaction of most people was: it can't be true…(7)

Mr. Beschloss would have his audiences believe that President Roosevelt was besieged by Jewish leaders, led by Secretary Morgenthau, urging him to order the bombing of Auschwitz. Of course, that is not true. No mainstream Jewish leader or organization made such a request. In fact, there was considerable Jewish opposition to the suggestion of bombing Auschwitz both in the United States and Palestine. The first suggestion to John McCloy (the Assistant Secretary of War) regarding the bombing of Auschwitz, came on August 9, 1944, in a letter from Leon Kubowitzki, head of the Rescue Committee of the World Jewish Congress, in which he forwarded, without endorsement, a request to consider such bombing from Mr. Ernest Frischer of the Czechoslovak State Council (in exile in London). What is rarely cited, but what one is charged with knowing if one chooses to make historical judgments of those horribly painful years, is that in a letter dated July 1, 1944, from the same Leon Kubowitzki to the Executive Director of the War Refugees Board (John Pehle), Mr. Kubowitzki argued against bombing Auschwitz because “the first victims would be the Jews” and the Allied air assault would serve as “a welcome pretext for the Germans to assert that their Jewish victims have been massacred not by their killers, but by Allied bombing.” The same argument is made in a Report of the Meeting … of the War Refugee Board of August 16, 1944, which cites the opinion of the Jewish community against bombing.(8)

Someday I hope to hear Mr. Beschloss and others broadcast that it is the killers who bear the responsibility for their deeds. We must remember, and our children must learn, that it was Hitler and his henchmen who imagined the Holocaust and the Nazis who carried it out. America was not an accomplice. America was not “passive.” America destroyed Hitler and Nazism, the greatest threat ever to modern civilization — and it was President Roosevelt who made America the arsenal of democracy, who was our Commander-in-Chief leading the greatest military force in history, who crafted the victorious alliance that won the war, and who inspired and guided the blueprint for the world in which we live.

Professor William L. O'Neill, in his review of The Conquerors in The New Leader (November/December 2002), writes:

Another puzzling feature is that Beschloss appears to detest Roosevelt. He represents him as a doddering old conniver much of the time, then concludes by writing that today's 'democratic, decentralized Germany is largely the country that Roosevelt imagined and worked for.' This statement goes against practically everything else Beschloss has to say about FDR. It is also true, making Beschloss' denigration of Roosevelt even harder to understand… Foremost scholars, while not excusing FDR's failings, put them in context. What one almost never sees is a book like this one, where FDR's personal shortcomings dominate the narrative and are followed by extravagant praise. Beschloss claims to have begun The Conquerors in 1992. The undigested state of his frequently excellent material suggests that he probably should have started sooner.

Mr. Beschloss, is, of course, entitled to “detest” Franklin Delano Roosevelt — many names come to mind of those who detested FDR during his lifetime.

For me, Winston Churchill's judgment of President Roosevelt is preferable. Winston Churchill once said that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the greatest man he had ever known. President Roosevelt's life, he said, “must be regarded as one of the commanding events of human destiny.”

Notes:

1. The Second World War, John Keegan, New York, 1989, p. 282.

2. These blank spaces are exactly as they appear in the transcript of the interview.

3. Meeting of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, Jerusalem, June 11, 1944.

4. Bombers Over Auschwitz, by Irving Uttal, Lieutenant Colonel USAF (Ret.), 2002 (available from Colonel Uttal upon request).

5. The Bombing of Auschwitz, Edited by Michael Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, St. Martin's Press, 2000, p. 179.

6. The Holocaust in American Life, by Peter Novick, Houghton Mifflin, 1999, p. 127 et seq.

7. The Netherlands and Nazi Germany, by Louis de Jong, Harvard University Press, 1990.

8. The Bombing of Auschwitz, op. cit., p. 274.

About William Donovan-

Recently as you may know, we held the first FDR/March of Dimes Birthday Ball celebration, at the Culinary Institute of America in Poughkeepsie, NY and at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, since 1945. It was great fun and and an aesthetic and financial success. My original idea on this effort was presented to Mr. William vanden Heuval, the former Ambassador to the UN and the current President of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

Recently I met with him, at his offices on 5^th Avenue in New York, and I suggested a future meeting with two of my colleagues, regarding the expansion of our Birthday Ball effort. In the course of my conversation I learned that the Ambassador was quite well connected with General William Donovan, the legendary head of the OSS, during the 2^nd World War and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions at the Argonne Forest. He was awarded the Medal of Honor while serving as an officer with the 165^th Infantry, formerly known as the Fighting 69^th, which of course was part of the famous Rainbow Division. It was nicknamed the “Rainbow Division”, because it was the first division composed of men from all over the United States. This division was home to the famous fighting Tennessean, Sgt. Alvin C. York, who captured and knocked out 20+ German machine gun nests, single-handedly and captured over 130 of the enemy himself.

Of course the, the Fighting 69^th of New York, was a famous regiment made up of many Irish-Americans from New York City, including Father Francis Duffy, for whom Duffy Square in NYC, is named, and the heroic Sergeant Joyce Kilmer, author/poet of “Trees”, who was killed in action in the same campaign, along with 644 others.

Richard

Rouge Bouquet

Joyce Kilmer in France

In a wood they call Rouge Bouquet

There is a new made grave today,

Built by never a spade or pick

Yet covered with earth ten metres thick.

There lie many fighting men,

Dead in their youthful prime,

Never to laugh or love again

Nor taste the Summertime,

For Death came flying through the air

And stopped his flight at the dugout stair,

Touched his prey and left them there,

Clay to clay….

Let your rifles rest on the muddy floor,

You will not need them any more,

Danger’s past,

Now at last,

Go to sleep!