Book Review of Warren F. Kimball's Swords or ploughshares?

I was surprised that Kimball’s book did not receive any reviews on Amazon.  The preface begins with a valid comment: The Morganthau Plan was not the product of impulse.  It was thoroughly debated.  He then goes off the rails.  “Morgenthau and those who supported his plan for the pastoralization of Germany could not have predicted the political and economic ramifications of what they proposed.”  A briefing book sent to FDR stated. “the statement that a healthy European economy is dependent upon German industry was never true, nor will it be true in the future.”  Opponents in the State Department protested that the plan would be a disaster.  Ironically the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, argued against the economic geniuses in the Treasury that Europe was dependent on the German economy.

Kimball also claims Morgenthau “was a very sensitive and humane man.”  Although the plan was condemned as a design to starve the German people, that was not his intention.”  It certainly was his intent.  Churchill compared the plan to being chained to a dead German.  I suppose there are those who would claim Joseph Goebbels was a humanitarian.   

The slave labor provisions in the Morgenthau Plan and the Yalta Agreement are hard to reconcile with humanitarianism.

Kimball can be excused for his conclusion that Harry Dexter White did not formulate the plan on orders from Moscow. (“Flimsy and uncorroborated statements made by a few witnesses . . . inspired speculation that White formulated the MP on orders from Moscow.)  He wrote this before the Venona revelations.  However, Morgenthau himself came to the conclusion White was working for the Russian after he checked with the FBI in the 1950s.

Kimball reports that Admiral William Leahy, the president’s military advisor . . . “was not present at the important discussion regarding Germany.”  He is relying on Leahy’s book, I was There.  Leahy writes that he was not there.  All other sources say he was.  

Kimball claims the Morgenthau Plan died with the death of FDR.  He claims “it died so premature a death.”  He also claims, “Unless the Morgenthau Plan existed as a whole, it did not exist at all.”  We could also say unless the Marshall Plan existed as a whole, it did not exist at all.  I have not heard that argument.  The last document he quotes is entitled “The End of the Morgenthau Plan, March, 1946.  Industrial plants were still being dismantled in the 1950s.

New revelations about this crusade to save civilization come to light and the effort does not seem so noble.  The problem is that revisionists are immediately labeled as Nazis.