Side Door to War?

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND THE COMING OF THE WAR 1941 (614 pp.)--Charles A. Beard--Yale University ($5).

Was World War II forced on the U.S. or did we ask for it? To Historian Charles A. Beard, the answer already seems plain: President Roosevelt worked for it and got it, all the time pretending that his objectives were peace and defense. Sounding more like a prosecuting attorney than the historian he is, Dr. Beard makes President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War a study in dissimulation.

Historian Beard carefully avoids the implications of an Axis victory had the U.S. stayed "neutral." Instead, he confines himself to evidence that Roosevelt deliberately goaded Hitler with Lend-Lease, illegal convoying and attacks on his submarines that amounted to undeclared war. When Hitler refused to be provoked into war by this abuse, Beard argues, President Roosevelt began, through diplomacy, to squeeze Japan into a position where she would be sure to fight. Not only that, says Beard, but Roosevelt and Hull rejected a Japanese "truce" which might have averted a Pacific war entirely. This line of argument indicates a willingness to let Japan get away with the conquests she had already made in China. It also shows surprising willingness to regard Axis offers and promises as sincere.

Historians will probably find it no great job to riddle the argument of Dr. Beard's book. It will not be so easy to ignore his emphatic conclusion: "At this point in its history the American Republic has arrived under the theory that the President of the United States possesses limitless authority publicly to misrepresent and secretly to control foreign policy, foreign affairs and the war power."

Beard is indignant about Roosevelt's promise to the nation that he had made no commitments during his Atlantic meeting with Churchill when, in fact, he had. Such binding agreements, he feels, as well as those entered into at Yalta, are inconsistent with the constitutional provision for Senate participation in foreign affairs, sidestep the duty and power of Congress (and so of the people) to determine when or whether the nation shall go to war.

Warns Beard: "If these precedents are to stand unimpeached, and to provide sanctions for the continued conduct of American foreign affairs, the Constitution may be nullified by the President, officials, and officers who have taken the oath, and are under moral obligation to uphold it. For limited government under supreme law they may substitute personal and arbitrary government--the first principle of the totalitarian system against which, it has been alleged, World War II was waged--while giving lip service to the principle of constitutional government."

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