The book is marred by careless errors. Misspellings abound, including the names of William Dudley Pelley, Allan Nevins, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Eugene Roseboom, and Henry Morgenthau. Senator J. Bennett Clark is really Bennett Champ Clark. (Worst of all, the first name of this reviewer is misspelled on five separate occasions.)
At times language is sloppy and polemical. Pollster Elmo Roper is a “Henry Luce minion.” Dies committee investigator J. B. Matthews, admittedly a volatile figure in the world of ideological combat, is three times referred to as a drunk.
More significant, there is hardly an interventionist group that Mahl does not label a “British interventionist front,” basing his claim on a boast of British operations officer Sidney (Bill) Morrell. Similarly, prominent interventionists who cooperated with British operatives are portrayed as their instrument, and Mahl writes without inhibition that the New York Herald Tribune was “a tool of British intelligence” (p. 157). Certainly innuendo is clear in a sentence that reads: “[John J.] Pershing’s eloquent speech was written for him by Walter Lippmann, who was working with British intelligence and had pressed so hard for [Wendell] Willkie.” The British underground officer Richard Ellis might have been influential in the OSS, but one doubts whether he at any time actually ran the agency.
Some public opinion polls were manipulated, if in no other way than the framing of the questions, and Mahl shows that some polling agencies had ardently pro-British staffers. It was, however, certainly unlikely that “all” the major published polls were “under the influence of British intelligence, its friends, employees, and agents” (p. 69).
Some contrary facts are not taken into account. If female British agents seduced Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg in hopes of converting him to interventionism, they were not entirely successful, for all during 1941 he continued to speak and vote against FDR’s proposals. One could agree with Mahl that Americans were deprived of a genuine choice in the 1940 presidential election, for Republican candidate Willkie was as interventionist as Roosevelt. The GOP standard-bearer, however, was not above pandering to anti-interventionist sentiment, as witnessed by his claim that a Democratic victory would lead to full-scale American belligerency within six months. The Cull study, mentioned earlier, shows that British propaganda efforts were severely weakened by bureaucratic rivalries, thus many efforts were highly ineffective.
Mahl does not does shy away from presenting a conspiratorial view. In fact, he asks,
How does the historian avoid the charge he is indulging in conspiracy theory when he explores the activities of a thousand people, occupying two floors of Rockefeller Center, in their efforts to involve the United States in a major war? What should we properly call the rigging of a public opinion poll, the planting of a lover, or a fraudulent letter by an intelligence agency in order to gain information or influence policy? (p. xi)
Certainly the British were involved in secret efforts, some of which were worse than shady. Anyone who worries about the health of a democracy cannot but be disturbed when any foreign power surreptitiously plays such a significant role in molding opinion and manipulating policy.
At the same time, Mahl is wrong in his implicit assumption that the British played the crucial role in energizing American intervention, that most prominent FDR backers he discusses were little more than British puppets, and that Roosevelt’s policies usually lacked the support of his countrymen. Some line of distinction must be drawn between interventionist moves plotted by the British and those fostered by Americans on their own. By his overstatements Mahl mars what could have been a superb study.
