Diana West (born November 8, 1961) is an American author and former nationally syndicated conservative columnist. She wrote a weekly column until 2014 that often dealt with controversial subjects, including Islam, which was syndicated in about 120 newspapers and news sites.
West is a graduate of Yale University. As a former CNN contributor, she frequently appeared on Lou Dobbs' shows. Her books include American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character. She has been co-vice president of the International Free Press Society, and described as part of the counter-jihad movement. West has also been a contributor to Breitbart News.
American Betrayal
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 administrations. 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 World War II.
Reviews and responses
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." 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.
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 Joseph Stalin.
A Kirkus review finds that she has a number of valid points but her additional doubtful speculations go too far. It 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."
Former Canadian newspaper publisher and Franklin D. Roosevelt 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, 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. Black believes the alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II, 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.
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.