More on Yalta

One of my favorite columnists is Jules Witcover.  He writes substantial pieces, is careful in his reporting and usually manages to avoid the conventional wisdom of the reporter tribe.  He occasionally slips on the latter, with a reference to Al Gore and the Internet, or something.

But I've been missing his columns, because his paper, the Baltimore Sun, put them behind registration.  And the registration feature proved to be totally dysfunctional, at least for me.  But it appears that there is a backdoor around the registration, so that you can go directly to the index of his columns and click on the links and go directly to them.

I've been missing things like this: Bush reawakens the ghost of Yalta Baltimore Sun 05/11/05.  He's discussing Bush's notorious rewriting of the history of the Second World War.  He writes:

Mr. Bush's resurrection of the Yalta conference, and his acknowledgment of American culpability in its outcome, was a muted echo of Republican Party dogma throughout the Cold War. Then, GOP orators, in appeals for the votes of Americans of Eastern European descent, repeatedly railed about how the Democrats had "lost" their homelands at Yalta out of false trust in Mr. Stalin.

Indeed, after the Yalta conference, Mr. Churchill expressed remarkable - and naive - confidence in Mr. Stalin's word.

FDR expressed greater reservation, but he did agree to European spheres of influence after the war. The United States, Britain and France subsequently occupied soon-to-be conquered West Germany and the Soviet Union most of Central and Eastern Europe.

It's especially interesting that he notes that Churchill, who the "neoconservatives" like to claim as a hero, was more trusting of Stalin's commitments than Roosevelt.

The first paragraph I quoted might be a little misleading.  Although it was a favorite theme of Republican orators, and was even written into the Republican Party platform for 1952, even Ronald Reagan was willing as president todefend the US position on the Yalta agreements.  As Joe Conason quoted him in one my previous posts on the topic:

Let me state emphatically, we reject any interpretation of the Yalta agreement that suggests American consent for the division of Europe into spheres of influence.  On the contrary, we see that agreement as a pledge by the three great powers to restore full independence, and to allow free and democratic elections in all countries liberated from the Nazis after World  War II.

But there are no doubt some for whom Bush's version of the Yalta Agreement will be more comfortable than Reagan's version:

... Communism receives help in all of its treacherous endeavors from the non-Communist world, chiefly from the government of the United States. Whatever else can be said about this aid, there is an important, fundamental point that cannot be made too often. It is that helping Communist regimes has always been -- and continues to be -- morally wrong. Treating them with dignity cannot be justified. Overlooking their treachery is wrong. ...

The documented pattern of U.S. Government aid to Communism must be broken. Begin with the critical diplomatic help given to top Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky by President Woodrow Wilson ... that enabled Trotsky to join with Lenin to complete the Communist conquest of Russia. Add the 700,000 tons of U.S. foodstuffs, given to a Soviet government that promptly used the food to consolidate power in the 1920s; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's extension of diplomatic recognition, legitimacy and credit that saved the Communist regime in 1933; and $12 billion in U.S. Lend-Lease aid that saved the Soviets from destruction in World War II and started them on the way to world power.

The post-World War II years saw our own nation disarm and return to peace-time pursuits. But those same years saw Communism conquer much of Europe and the vast nation of China. Assistance to Communism in the form of equipment and supplies was now being augmented by vital diplomatic help. No less an authority than U.S. Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane tried to tell fellow Americans that Poland didn't so much fall in 1947 ass  he was pushed into Communist hands by officials of the U.S. Government. His 1948 book, I Saw Poland Betrayed, detailed the incredible story. But his book was smothered and created hardly a ripple. Additional revelations later showed that the same pattern had been followed to push Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia into Communist hands. (my emphasis) - from Premeditated Merger by John McManus 04/25/88, John Birch Society Web site