"Letters to the Editor"
The Wall Street Journal
Dear Sirs:
Edward Kosner’s review of Nigel Hamilton’s War and Peace shows that, for both of them, the apologetic and whitewash of what happened at the Yalta conference continues. The villain now is not the despot and mass murderer Josef Stalin, but Winston Churchill. While detailing Franklin Roosevelt’s physical decay, Kosner overlooks Roosevelt’s mental decay. There was certainly a “keen and surprisingly genial Stalin” at Yalta, when he was confident of his Soviet spies and agents, like Alger Hiss, shepherding Soviet interests through the conference, while Roosevelt’s mind wandered, Churchill was shut out, and the Russians had bugged all the rooms allotted to the British and Americans. It was crooked dice from the start.
Kosner asserts that Stain’s “creation of the Soviet bloc could not realistically be denied.” Since there was no public admission of this at the time, and the Truman Administration was still expecting honest elections in Poland, Kosner inadvertently admits that a deception and betrayal was involved. Poland, which was supposed to be saved from conquest by the very inception of the War, ended up thrown to the Russian wolves. Stalin, having already slaughtered Poles, ended up, not only with the land he took in league with Hitler in 1939, but with everything, condemning all the Poles to 45 years of tyranny and (more) murder. Kosner and Hamilton are apparently indifferent to this. They should ask some Poles, or Estonians (etc.), what they think. Edward Kosner was obviously not the person to review this book. He is part of the cover-up.
Yours truly,
Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.
Nigel Hamilton is not an academic historian but, as well as journalism, has written a great deal of history. Relocating from Britain to Boston, he has taken up the cause of Franklin Roosevent and has apparently turned against his own national hero, Windston Churchill. Edward Kosner is also a journalist rather than an academic historian. Of course, if these writers were academics, there would be even less reason to suppose that they would not be promoting Soviet propaganda.