My view was that the U.S. policy support for Britain and Russia, short of war, was the correct one, and once Hitler declared war on us we had no choice but to fight. But the mistake of both the isolationists and FDR was leaving America disarmed in the world as it changed dramatically from the 1920s.
And I do argue this -- and of course this is kind of a complex argument -- that not only was the 1938 Munich Pact a mistake but so were the war guarantees. And every historian I've found agrees that when Chamberlain gave war guarantees to Poland on March 31, 1939, he was in a panic after Hitler had taken the rump of the Czech Republic. He was in a panic so he gave the war guarantee, but he had no intention of honoring it, and they did not have the additional forces to do it. So he had put himself between the Russians and Hitler's Germany. And every historian I know agrees, including George Kennan, with whom I talked about that.
The Salon Interviews index -- links to all the interviews related to the Sept. 11 attacks and the events that have followed.
The core argument in the book is that the ideal thing for Britain and France to have done is that in 1936 they should have acted in the Rhineland. But they didn't. They couldn't act in Austria because it happened too quickly. And then when the Sudetanland fell they couldn't act. I argued that either you fight early or you fight late.
One of the things that bothered critics of the book is that you didn't seem to spend much time discussing the notion that the U.S. should have fought the Nazis because they were killing Gypsies, Slavs, Jews.
You're mistaken. Look, this is about the diplomatic run up to World War II. In reading and doing the analysis of the period between Munich, in late September 1938, and the war guarantees of March 1939, the only event that was of any significance morally was Kristallnacht. And I have gone through Churchill's six-volume memoirs and he doesn't even mention it. If we're arguing issues that were at stake during the run-up to war, those you mention simply were not in consideration. Poland was a deeply anti-Semitic regime; this had nothing to do with that. And the camps did not start running until 1942, after Britain had gone to war.
Hitler's destruction of the Jews by taking them to the camps happened after all my pre-World War II chapters end. And if we're talking about the considerations of the Isolationists -- FDR, Churchill, Chamberlain -- you can't even find it mentioned by any of them. Read Churchill's first volume -- "The Gathering Storm." It doesn't even come up.
Obviously you feel that your book was misrepresented in the media and by your Republican opponents. Why do you think that is?
My wife said that the whole thing can be summed up in two words: "Reform Party." If I had not been running for the Reform Party nomination, this would have been an academic argument like they hold in Britain all the time. We would not have had the accusations we received. It was politically motivated. I was astonished at the controversy over the book. Astonished. I sat down and reread it. I wondered, Is there something in the chapter I have not seen? I couldn't believe the intensity.
Let's turn back to today's battles. In an October column, you called for the establishment of a military tribunal to deal with terrorists. A few weeks later, President Bush issued the executive order to do so.
Exactly. And he used the German example, too.
Did anyone in the White House contact you? How did you find out about it?
I picked up the paper and saw it.
Do you feel vindicated at all?
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