Thursday, July 07, 2011
Ambassador Dodd
One of the things I really liked about this book is how Larson portrayed his subjects, the Dodds, as human beings with flaws and weaknesses — individuals who were caught up in an historic moment and reacted to it like human beings, frequently with self-interest and denial, sometimes with courage and honor. It was interesting to see how they navigated that world that they so strangely found themselves enmeshed in. Dodd's progression from naive and aloof and doubting to outspoken and belatedly involved was particularly compelling to me. Do you think he was a good ambassador in the scheme of things?
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3 comments:
I liked Dodd, even though I could see how he might be annoying to work with. I felt a little sorry for him, since he was clearly in over his head and so many seemed to be rooting against him. I could relate to him, too, with his reluctance to play the diplomatic games, disdain for pomp and love of history.
I think probably he was a good ambassador for that time. Obviously you didn't want someone like his successor, behaving as though the Nazis were worthy of respect and courtesy. But I wonder how a more blatantly anti-Nazi approach would have worked. How would Hitler have handled that? In the end I guess Dodd's efforts as a moderating influence on the Nazis didn't do much good, but I don't know if any diplomatic approach would have had much effect.
I liked Dodd, too. He appeared to be a man of principle at bottom. It seemed like if he had supporters rather than detractors in the State Department that the course of history might have changed in significant ways. If he felt emboldened to be more explicitly anti-Nazi, that might have emboldened ambassadors from other nations as well, or even the German people themselves.
I kept thinking, too, that if Roosevelt himself had been more aggressively anti-Nazi that Hitler might have been stopped much earlier. The Nazis seemed to get extremely stressed out by any bad PR in the U.S. Even the smallest rally or opposition got them all worked up. What if they were forced to deal with a HUGE amount of bad PR from not just private citizens but the U.S. government itself? Surely that would have weakened their standing in Europe, and if it didn't forestall WWII altogether, it might have at least forced an earlier, less costly conflict.
It seems like a tragic situation where everyone was waiting for someone else to do something.
Exactly, yes. Roosevelt came off as sort of passive in this book, which I think is not usually how we think of him. Good point about how American opinion seemed to matter a lot to the Nazis; that was surprising to me. Perhaps early intervention by the U.S. would have made a big difference.
The whole isolationist thing is sort of hard to understand, now that the U.S. is so quick to jump into international conflicts.
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