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Farrell: Earle Delivered Unwelcome News, and Paid the Price
Christopher J. Farrell, Exiled Emissary: George H. Earle III, Soldier, Sailor, Diplomat, Governor, Spy (Washington: Academia Press, 2021), 210 pages, $29.95, Kindle $23.96. This review was originally published in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs (Vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 315-318, ) and is reprinted here by permission.
Books on history should always be reviewed with an eye toward the cutting edge. I tried to evaluate this book with that in mind. To be sure, Exiled Emissary could have been an interesting and informative study of one of those minor figures who pop up regularly in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s foreign policy orbit. It is not.
In his own charming way, FDR routinely told ambassadors and others whom he sent overseas that they were his personal agents. When they sent him out-of-date information or advice on his foreign policy, he rarely told them to stop bothering him. Avoiding confrontation like the plague, Roosevelt just ignored them. Rarely, when FDR felt his “personal representatives” had crossed the line, he found ways to “exile” them. Thus Christopher Farrell describes George Earle, whom FDR dispatched to American Samoa in late March 1945.
Farrell hurries superficially through preliminaries: Earle’s youth, his governorship of Pennsylvania, and self-proclaimed candidacy for president. Earle then became FDR’s ambassador to Austria and Bulgaria, and assistant naval attaché in Istanbul. This scarcely constitutes even a brief biography. That is because Farrell is obsessed with depicting Earle as a brave hero, unafraid to tell FDR what the President didn’t wish to hear.
Earle’s message was that the Soviet Union would turn out to be an unfaithful wartime and postwar ally. Farrell makes this claim as if Earle were alone in prevailing upon the President to change his approach to Russia. Many others transmitted a similar message to Roosevelt. Farrell only demonstrates, clearly if unintentionally, that Earle was a very minor figure.
Farrell on FDR and Churchill
Mr. Farrell is director of investigations and research at Judicial Watch, and a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute. He has a long record as a military intelligence officer. Nevertheless this is a substandard work that cannot be characterized as real scholarship, despite its flurry of endnotes. His book is narrow, tired, and tendentious—an emotional and frustrating resuscitation of accusations and assumptions dismissed long ago by the majority of serious scholars whose own works, however authoritative, are described by Farrell as “homogenized ‘Court histories.’” Furthermore, nowhere in Exiled Emissary does the author display even the most rudimentary understanding of what was in the minds of Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. Indeed, Farrell subjects Britain’s leader himself to “exile”—mentioning Churchill only twice.
The overarching thesis, presented at the beginning of the opening chapter, is revealed in a statement by George Earle himself: “I believe one man had the chance to shorten the [Second World War] by more than 18 months—and he brushed it off. His name? President Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Amid a constant cascade of critical asides and cherry-picked quotations, Farrell presents two examples to substantiate that sweeping accusation.
FDR’s perfidy?
First, Farrell insists that Roosevelt ignored reports from Earle, in January 1943 and later, that German intelligence and military leaders would turn over Hitler “dead or alive,” if the Allies promised to attack the Soviet Union. FDR’s “disinterest,” we are told, came from the advice and influence of Soviet agents within the President’s own administration.
The second example he cites is the Katyn massacre in 1940. There, thousands of Polish military officers in Soviet captivity were murdered by Stalin’s dreaded NKVD. In spring 1943, the Germans loudly exposed their discovery of a mass grave near Smolensk. Earle, then Roosevelt’s “personal emissary to the Balkans,” stationed in Istanbul, sent reports that FDR dismissed as sermons, gossip, or rumors.
The story behind each of those two major pieces of “evidence” is straightforward. Earle’s reports of proposals by German generals to eliminate Hitler and attack the Red Army were far too vague and improbable for Roosevelt and Churchill to entertain. The SS, Gestapo, and other Nazi instruments of control would remain intact, and the murderous treatment of Jews would continue. The biggest “If” was whether the Western Allies would attack Soviet forces rolling toward Germany. That, of course, was a patently absurd idea.
Earle’s contacts in the Reich were mostly old has-beens, often bearing a Prussian “von” before their family names. Leaving Germany in charge of the officer class that had gone to war in 1914 and later bought into Hitler’s depravity was ridiculous. Were Stalin (who worried about just such a turn of events) to find out, Churchill and Roosevelt feared he would cut a deal with Hitler. After all, he had done just that in 1939. There were other such offers, including one made by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. They came much too late in the war to make sense—unless defeating Nazi Germany was no longer the end goal.
Katyn
Earle, and now Farrell, claim that the Katyn slaughters proved the Russians could not be trusted under any circumstances. Earle thought that the story of the killing of the Polish officers should be made public. Churchill had already passed to FDR detailed reports of what the Germans, Poles, and Red Cross knew about the executions. Roosevelt, however, fobbed off Earle’s reports as unreliable. “The Germans could have rigged things up,” he told Earle.
Of course, the disappointed Earle had told the President nothing that he did not already know. The exchanges between Churchill and Roosevelt clearly indicate that both knew the Katyn report was in Churchill’s words “a grim, well-written story,” though Churchill was cautious enough to add: “…perhaps a little too well-written…. we are not circulating it officially in any way.” Nevertheless, they concurred that the murders might certainly have been committed by the Russians.[1]
But taking sides in a bitter argument with Moscow would not hasten the defeat of Nazi Germany. For Earle, the massacre signaled a time to change policies toward the USSR. For FDR, long-term plans for the postwar world took precedence, even in the face of convincing evidence that the Soviets were capable of horrific atrocities. Starting what would very likely turn into a military confrontation with the Russians was not in FDR’s plans. None of this, however, is considered or discussed by Farrell.
Jumping to conclusions
To Farrell, Roosevelt’s failure to heed Earle’s entreaties “proves” that the president was pro-Soviet. He suggests that FDR paid no attention because his mind had been poisoned by close advisers. Farrell accepts without question the claims of recent writers, such as M. Stanton Evans and Diana West, who accuse everyone from Harry Hopkins to Henry Morgenthau to Henry Wallace of Communist proclivities. None of them was plausibly guilty of collaboration with Soviet agents. After the war, in fact, Earle drew the same conclusions.
Perhaps one can criticize FDR, Churchill, and their respective governments for trusting Stalin and the Soviets. But as they made clear, they would not jeopardize full victory against Nazi Germany or risk getting entangled in a war with the Soviet Union by confronting Russian influence in Eastern Europe while the struggle against Hitler was still being waged.
We cannot understand wartime diplomacy without examining the goals and thought processes of the leaders involved. Was the goal in Europe to defeat Nazi Germany or to prevent Russia from subjugating Poland and half the continent? Amid the chaos and commitments of world war, Roosevelt and Churchill opted for peace and hope, not another war.
Endnote
1. Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton, 1984), II, 390ff.
The author
Warren F. Kimball, author of Forged in War, The Juggler, and books on the Morgenthau Plan and the origins of Lend-Lease, edited the three-volume collection of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence (with commentaries). Robert Treat Professor (emeritus) at Rutgers University, he was Pitt Professor at the University of Cambridge, 1987-88; and Mark Clark Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at The Citadel, 2002-04. He was also the Jones Distinguished Professor at Wofford College (Spartanburg, S.C.) in 2019.
Thanks! good post.