Diana West

On May 28, 2013, St. Martin's Press published West's second book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character. West argues that after the fall of the Soviet Union, historians failed to sufficiently "adjust the historical record" to account for newly available Soviet files and archives. West writes on the extent of Soviet influence during the Roosevelt and Truman Presidencies.[3] She argues that infiltration of the American government by Stalinist agents and fellow-travelers had significantly altered Allied policies in favor of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Frank J. Gaffney Jr. finds that West "painstakingly documents how America's government, media, academia, political and policy elites actively helped obscure the true nature of the Soviet Union."[4] West contends that there is a parallel with the failure to face the dangers of communism in the 1930s and the failure to face the threat of Islamic extremism today.[4][5]

Frank T. Csongos argues that West is right "up to a point." He notes that West rejects the standard narrative that Franklin Roosevelt, like George W. Bush, took drastic steps to "save capitalism." Unlike West, he believes that Roosevelt was merely naive when trusting Stalin.[6]

A Kirkus review finds that she has a number of valid points and notes that: “Not until the 1990s, with access to the Venona files and Soviet archives, have historians wholly appreciated the scope of Russian spying in this country from the time FDR formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. West matches these new revelations to previously known facts and wonders why we’ve neglected to fully adjust the historical record.” It ends with the warning: "A frustrating mixture of incontrovertible facts and dubious speculation. Proceed with caution."[3]

Former Canadian newspaper publisher and FDR biographer Conrad Black published a critique of American Betrayal in the conservative journal National Review in late 2013, to which West responded and Black then rejoined. Like Radosh et al., Black believes West grossly exaggerates Soviet influence in the Roosevelt Administration, whose policies were driven by the extreme social and economic crisis America was going through during the Depression. Moreover, like Radosh, Black believes the alliance with the Soviet Union in the Second World War, while driven by realpolitik, was a dire necessity to prevent the victory of Nazi Germany which had already conquered France and was threatening Britain, and finds West's dismissal of the D-Day invasion of Normandy as somehow the result of Soviet subterfuge to shift the strategic thrust from the campaign in Italy to be an absurd and amateurish contention that ignores the realities of logistics and terrain. All these authors also point out that for the first two years of World War 2 during the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, widely considered odious among liberals, the policy of the FDR administration was at loggerheads with that of the Soviets in aiding Britain through Lend-Lease and point out the irony that at that time communists allied with isolationists and the America First movement, whose legacy West extols.

Jonathan Chait, a liberal pundit and writer for New York magazine, says that West's "thesis that American foreign policy under presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower was secretly controlled by the Soviet Union" has found supporters at the Heritage Foundation and the American Spectator.[7]

M. Stanton Evans, author of Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Sen. Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, and co-author most recently with the late Herbert Romerstein of Stalins' Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government, also wrote in support of West. On September 13, 2013, Evans wrote an essay called "In Defense of Diana West".[8] In it, Evans strongly backs American Betrayal and specifically West's contested metaphor that Washington was, in effect, "occupied" due to the influence on policy-making and US actions by hundreds of agents working on Moscow's behalf inside the federal government and related institutions, some of whom actually reaching the inner sanctums of the White House, the State Department, the Treasury, OSS, and elsewhere. Evans writes:

"By using the 'occupied' image, Ms. West is of course not saying Soviet tanks were patrolling the streets of Washington, or that Red martial law was imposed on its cowering citizens. What she is arguing instead is that Soviet agents, Communists and fellow travelers held official posts, or served at chokepoints of intelligence data, and from these positions were able to exert pro-Soviet leverage on U.S. and other allied policy. Though ignored in many conventional histories, the evidence to support this view is overwhelming."

Andrew C. McCarthy also came to West's defense in a review-essay in The New Criterion, where he writes West relies on M. Stanton Evans book that comes to the defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy and cites the "groundbreaking scholarship of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr" to back up Evans' claims.[5]

West responded to Haynes and Klehr, writing: "Notice they do not claim American Betrayal makes serious historical errors. According to [Haynes and Klehr], American Betrayal makes serious interpretative errors. If you are wondering who sets the standard of interpretation, who deems what is in alignment or out, what is "incorrect" or correct, so am I."[9] As noted above, however, Haynes and Klehr do claim West made serious historical errors, the most egregious being that Harry Hopkins was the soviet spy "source 19" named in the Venona transcripts, who they believe the evidence shows was actually State Department official Laurence Duggan.

• The Death of the Grownup: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization / Diana West (St. Martin's Griffin, 2007) ISBN 0-312-34048-6
• Diana West; William J. Boykin (Author), Harry Edward Soyster (Author), Henry Cooper (Author), Stephen C. Coughlin (Author), Michael Del Rosso (Author), Frank J. Gaffney Jr. (Author), John Guandolo (Author), Clare M. Lopez (Author), Andrew C. McCarthy (Author), Patrick Poole (Author), Joseph E. Schmitz (Author), Tom Trento (Author), J. Michael Waller (Author), R. James Woolsey (Author), Brian Kennedy (Primary Contributor), James "Ace" Lyons (Primary Contributor), Christine Brim (Primary Contributor), David Yerushalmi (Primary Contributor), David Reaboi (Designer) (2010), Shariah: The Threat To America: An Exercise In Competitive Analysis, Washington: Center for Security Policy, ISBN 978-0982294765 {{citation}}: |author2= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character / Diana West (St. Martin's Press, 2013) ISBN 978-0-312-63078-2
• The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' from the Book-Burners /Diana West (Bravura Books, 2013) ISBN 978-1-4928-8453-8
• The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy / Diana West, (Center for Security Policy Press, 2019), ISBN 9781076939630

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Diana West

• Personal website
• Feature Bank Diana West Profile
• Biography and links to syndicated columns at Townhall.com
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • C-SPAN Q&A interview with West, January 22, 2012