Free The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' From the Book-Burners by Diana West

of the story. In 1949, after Stalin exploded
an atomic bomb, former US Army Lend-Lease “expediter” Major George Racey Jordan
went public with his claim that he had shipped uranium to the Russian during
World War II, and that Harry Hopkins was personally involved. Groves had no
idea the Manhattan Project’s embargo had been broken until Jordan spoke up.
What I do in American Betrayal is
weigh Jordan’s testimony and reports, explain what aspects of his story have
been corroborated and what have not. I examine Congressional investigations,
histories, memoirs and the like. I pay close attention, for example, to the
case of the great Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko, author of I Chose Freedom , who defected from the
Soviet Lend-Lease office in Washington, DC. Jordan and Kravchenko had worked on
opposite sides of Lend-Lease during World War II, but in dramatic testimonies
before Congress after the war they would confirm relevant sections of each
other’s stories.
    Radosh channeling Holloway describes
none of this. Instead, he drones on about the state of Soviet technology at the
time, which is another giant non sequitur: “bomb-grade U-235 … 0.7 percent of
natural uranium … U-238 … isotopes … mining … refining … alloys … plutonium …
Laboratory No. 2… urgent … uranium problem …”
    He finally ties it all back to me.
The Soviets were having a “uranium problem,” he writes.
    “Had
the Hopkins flight provided the material Diana West says gave them the material
for the bomb, all this concern would have been unnecessary.”
    Surreal time again: I didn’t say
“the” (incorrect article) “Hopkins flight” gave the Soviets “the material for
the bomb.” Simultaneously minimizing my evidence while also inflating
(aggressively attacking) one detail, Radosh mixes everything up again to put
across something that is not in my book.
    My discussion is specifically
related to “three
shipments totaling nearly three-quarters of a ton” of uranium ( American Betrayal , p. 140). Whether this
was “the material” for “the bomb,” as Radosh hyperbolizes, it was highly
significant, particularly given the lengths to which Harry Hopkins’ Lend-Lease
went to get it, even breaking Gen. Leslie Groves’ embargo to do it.
    Radosh continues:
    “Technical
questions aside, in concocting her conspiracy
theory of Lend-Lease as a Soviet plot to help Russia win the war and build
an atomic bomb, West refuses to consider a range of political realities that had nothing to do with Kremlin agents .”
(Emphasis added.)
    Here we go again. First, as I have
demonstrated time and again, Radosh is not a reliable source as to what I have “refused”
or not refused to consider. Second, once again, Radosh is impugning me for
failing to following the conventional consensus on “political realities that
had nothing to do with Kremlin agents.”
    My book concocts nothing, and I
advance no conspiracy theory. In 1950, the US Congress was able to establish
the facts of a plan executed from within the Roosevelt administration
bureaucracies to thwart the top-secret Manhattan Project’s embargo on uranium
shipments to Stalin. That’s no theory, and it fits the definition of a
conspiracy.
    Naturally, this is not covered in
Holloway, Radosh’s latest liberal professor of choice. How could it be there?
Holloway doesn’t draw from the same sources I draw from. There is no Jordan
memoir of Lend-Lease in his bibliography, no House Un-American Activities
Committee Hearings Regarding Shipments of Atomic Materials to the Soviet Union
during World War II, no life of Victor Kravchenko, the famous ex-Soviet who
defected from Lend-Lease in Washington. Like Gaddis’s book before his,
Holloway’s and my stories can’t possibly match.
    For breaking out of the conventional
groove, from seeing beyond the blinkered liberal consensus − for
documenting everything − Radosh sees fit to smear me as “unhinged.”

 
    CHAPTER 4