James Grover McDonald

The book "Advocate for the Doomed" contains the diary of James Grover McDonald from the years 1932 to 1935. It is over 800 pages long. There will be several additional volumes published over the next several years. If I had all the time in the world, I would love to read through it. But I don't, and that is probably why this book will not be a best seller.

McDonald was the United States' first ambassador to Israel. Before that, he was the League of Nations Commissioner for Refugees. And before that he headed the Foreign Policy Association, advocating an active foreign policy in opposition to the American isolationists.

The book was just published. It contains McDonald's notes about meetings with Hitler, Roosevelt, the future Pius XII and many others. It contains new information, because McDonald believed, from 1933 on, that Hitler and the Nazis were out to destroy the Jews. Well before there were death camps. And (surprise!), no one would believe him. This too will pass, they seemed to think.

McDonald was a diarist, but not a writer. So he went to Thomas Sugrue, a writer but not a diarist, to ghost write his memoirs. Sugrue had already worked with McDonald on a book called Mission to Israel, which dealt with the first years of the Jewish state. So he was a natural. But the book was never written (for one thing, Sugrue died young), and Sugrue's daughter found amongst her father's things, in a box in her basement, fragments of the diary. They looked important to her and, not knowing what else to do with them, she took them to the Holocaust museum. The diary fragments, I believe, dealt with meetings with Cardinal Pacelli, the future pope. The historians at the museum wanted to find other fragments of the diary. They went to Columbia U., where the McDonald papers were kept. No luck. They then located McDonald's daughter, a lecturer at George Mason University in Fairfax, who had 10,000 diary pages at her house, and who had tried unsuccessfully earlier to get publishers interested in them.

Yesterday, at the Holocaust Museum, the editor of the publications, Prof. Richard Breitman of American University, Barbara McDonald Stewart, the daughter, and a museum archivist and a museum historian, all of whom had worked on the publication, discussed the book.

McDonald was prescient. He early saw Hitler's designs. He saw that Jewish emigration from Germany was not the goal. It would only be a step in an attempt to wipe the world clean of Jews, a most corrosive influence on society. The world would be in favor of this, was the feeling of Der Fuhrer. "We'll show the world how to get rid of the Jews", Hitler told McDonald in 1933. (McDonald's mother was German, he spoke German, had German friends, had written favorably about Germany in his younger years, and was generally viewed as pro-German in 1933). McDonald was aghast.

Like Kurt Gerstein, he wanted to get the church active in stopping the anti-Semitic movement throughout much of Europe. Cardinal Pacelli would hear nothing of it. He had just negotiated a Concordat between Berlin and Rome. In return for avoiding political activity, the church would be allowed to function and hold on to its assets. This was all important to the Vatican. And McDonald knew this in 1933.

He liked Roosevelt, and especially liked Eleanor Roosevelt. His relationship with FDR apparently soured as time went to (but in subsequent volumes, not here) as he felt Roosevelt was acting too often from political expediency, rather than a sense of moral duty or responsibility.

Again like Gerstein, McDonald was a failure. His warnings were not heeded. His position as Ambassador to Israel (by now he had become, it appears, a full fledged Zionist supporter) was the high point of his life. After he retired from that position, he spent years pushing the sale of Israel bonds.

Whether the future volumes will be as interesting as this one, I don't know. Should I have shelled out the $35? The book would have been signed by the four speakers/editors. Maybe. But I didn't.