Each week, The Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is "Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath." Published posthumously in 2011, and edited by historian George H. Nash, the work encapsulates the former president's critique of U.S. foreign policy from the 1930s through the early years of the Cold War.

Often referred to as Hoover’s magnum opus, the book offers extensive historical, ideological and personal reflections. The book is informed by a distinct antipathy toward foreign interventionism and what today would be called “globalism.”

Hoover began what eventually became "Freedom Betrayed" immediately after World War II. Then in his 70s and living in semi-retirement, the former president began work on the project motivated by feelings of anger and disillusionment over how the United States had entered World War II, and how it had handled the postwar settlement. Hoover worked on the book intermittently from 1944 until his death. He dictated, wrote and rewrote hundreds of thousands of words. He was fastidious, sometimes pedantic, revising chapters over and over.

The manuscript remained unpublished during Hoover’s lifetime, probably because the 31st president was wary of challenging the prevailing Cold War consensus, not to mention the accepted interpretation of World War II as the unimpeachable exemplar of the “Good War.” Hoover died in 1964, yet the book did not see the light of day for nearly 50 years.

Hoover's work carefully examines U.S. foreign policy decisions, starting with the pre-war period and extending through to the Korean War. Throughout, Hoover is critical of contemporaries such Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill. He contrasts his own vision of America as a beacon of freedom and neutrality with the imperial overreach, global ambition and moral compromise of his successors.

Hoover argues that U.S. involvement in World War II was avoidable and counterproductive. According to him, the U.S. should have focused on strengthening its own defenses and avoiding entanglements in European power struggles. He is scathing about FDR’s pre-World War II diplomacy, which, he argues, unnecessarily antagonized Germany and Japan, thereby making war with those powers inevitable. This was of course FDR’s intent, though in public he insisted that he would keep the U.S. out of war. Hoover portrays FDR as deceitful, flagrantly lying to the American people in order to win the 1940 presidential election.

Hoover believed that Hitler’s aggression, though criminal, did not threaten the Western Hemisphere. Britain and France, he argued, could have contained Germany through their own diplomacy and power if they had acted prudently. FDR’s interventionism made the U.S. complicit in a war that affected European, not American, vital interests. FDR’s intervention, as Hoover saw it, was a tragic repetition of Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in 1917.

Anti-interventionist Hoover was of course also profoundly hostile to the USSR. In this book, he is harshly critical of the wartime conferences among the Allied powers. Hoover accused Churchill and FDR of capitulating to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and allowing Soviet dominance over Eastern Europe.

Hoover claims that Roosevelt’s decision to ally with Stalin was the greatest blunder in modern history. He believed that Hitler’s regime, though evil, would eventually have collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, whereas Communism, once empowered, would expand indefinitely. The U.S. and Britain, he argues, saved Stalin’s regime by providing aid that allowed the USSR to survive and then conquer Eastern Europe.

Thus, World War II, in Hoover's view, did not liberate the world: it merely exchanged one tyranny (Nazism) for another (Communism). For Hoover, the moral disaster of the 20th century was that the democracies chose the wrong evil and created a worse geopolitical order than the one that had prevailed before 1939. Had the U.S. remained neutral, Hitler and Stalin would have destroyed each other, leaving a weakened Europe that would eventually have returned to some form of stability.

The postwar interventionism of Truman continued this pattern of moral confusion and strategic folly. Hoover saw the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO as dangerous overextensions that militarized U.S. policy and entangled America in perpetual conflict abroad.

According to Hoover, the United States was founded on liberty, neutrality and national sovereignty; interventionism abroad corrupts these ideals. The “freedom betrayed,” to which the book’s title refers, is a betrayal that was not merely strategic, but spiritual: the abandonment of the American tradition of peace and cooperation for a politics of coercion, deception and empire.

Hoover lamented that the U.S. had become the very thing it once opposed, namely, a meddling world power. In seeking to “save democracy,” it had helped enslave hundreds of millions. Thus, “freedom betrayed” is both a title and a judgment: the freedom of nations, and the moral freedom of the United States itself, had been sacrificed.

"Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath" is a monumental work of revisionist history--a work of scholarship and a fierce polemic. Whatever one might think of Hoover’s counterfactuals, there is no doubting his moral seriousness and his passionate longing for the return of an America that has now sadly gone.