Page 20 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • June 11, 2014 A pre-emptive strike The first ship to get hit off the coast of North Africa in 1942 was the “Paul Hamilton.” The “U.S.S. Lansdale” came to help and was hit by the next torpedo. The stricken ship circled, broke in half, and dumped a young officer in the ocean. “I made a little deal with the Almighty that if I got out of this I would do something useful with the rest of my life,” the officer said. His name was Robert Morgenthau. He was rescued, sent home on leave, and later saw combat in the Pacific. He served as U.S. Attorney General and as district attorney for Manhattan, where his office helped reduce the homicide rate from 252 murders per year to 58 per year. He was a genuine war hero, and a worthy and important citizen. A portion of the documentary “Morgen- thau” reflects those facts admirably. The historical parts of the film and the sepia-tone stills venture into the realm of “disinformation,” partly by what the filmmaker put in and partly by what he left out. Morgenthau was the son of Henry Morgenthau Jr. and the grandson of Henry Morgenthau Sr. His cousin was the historian Barbara Tuchman. Tom Brokaw said of the family and their generation, “They knew in their hearts that they had saved the world.” Brokaw then mumbled briefly about “that Red Scare business,” stirred up by people who thought the world could have stood some saving from Stalin. Viewers are told that the “Red Scare” consisted in part of an attempt to frame Edward G. Robinson as a communist. We are not shown the hearings in the later 1940s before Senator Joseph McCarthy started his engine, at which time a number of Soviet agents were trotted before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and refused to tes- tify as to whether they had ever been communists. Rus- sian records released after the fall of the iron curtain, and decoded Soviet intelligence messages under the VENONA program, indicated that just about all of them had been communists, and many had been spies. This was not men- tioned in “Morgenthau.” Morgenthau Sr. was a brilliant lawyer and a self-made multi-millionaire. He retired at 55 and hoped for a cabi- net post, but the best Woodrow Wilson could do -- partly because of anti-Semitism -- was an appointment as ambas- sador to Turkey. When the British and French landed at Gal- lipoli in 1915, fanatic Turkish nationalists used the invasion and some isolated Armenian revolts to engage in the mass deportation of Christian Armenians, which swiftly turned into the mass murder of deported Armenians. Morgenthau Sr. denounced the deportation, and urged Germany and the United States to do something. He claimed German Ambassador Hans von Wangenheim refused to cooperate. Morgenthau was born in Germany. He covered his Teu- tonic tracks and tried to truckle to Wilson by blaming the entire outrage on the Germans. The documentary cited “...the German penchant for Holocaust...it was in the German DNA and in the German culture way before.” This could be called the Blood Libel standing on its head -- superstitious medieval people blam- ing Jews for kidnapping and murdering children for ritual magic -- superstitious urbanites expect the Amish and the Mennonites, both genetically German, to whip out machine guns, harness up their horse-drawn tanks, and march on New York City. Dr. Donald Bloxham, a Holocaust expert at the Univer- sity of Edinburgh, has read virtually every English, Arme- nian, or German account of what happened in Turkey. Bloxham scoffs at “the wartime notions of the Entente and of the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau... Germany would have to wait for Hitler to develop the blue- print.” Wangenheim protested, and then died in office in 1915. His successor, Baron Paul Wolff Metternich von Gracht, protested so hard that the Turks lifted his diplomatic cre- dentials and kicked him out of Turkey. The German mili- tary commander, Otto Liman von Sanders warned the Turks not to touch any Armenian within his jurisdiction, and was seconded by another field commander, Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, a Bavarian nobleman. German missionaries saved and fed thousands of Armenian women and children. A favorite Armenian hero was Armin Wegner, a German medic, holder of the Iron Cross, and honored today for his rescue efforts and his opposition to Hitler. Why invent a Blood Libel that blamed German genetics rather than Turk- ish fanatics for one of history’s worst massacres? We shall see one reason. Morgenthau Sr. raised millions of dollars for Armenian relief, but the documentary says he wrecked his own career. He retired. Morgenthau Jr. was a neighbor and a close friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A shy dyslexic kid who could never finish college and was a demonstrably poor speaker, Henry Jr. loved life on his farm and Roosevelt appointed his buddy U.S. Agriculture Secretary. Morgenthau Jr. was appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary. Morgenthau, to his credit, attempted to aid the flight of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany but bumped up against Cordell Hull, who did not. The documentary assures view- ers that the U.S. State Department was riddled with WASP anti-Semites, but the truth is more disappointing. Hull’s wife had a Jewish father, and since Cordell Hull wanted to be president, he hated to have this mentioned because it was then a political liability. Despite his racism, Hull tried to prevent a war with Japan because he did not want Ameri- cans to die in a war with Japan, or more particularly in a second war with Germany. Just two days after Pearl Harbor, Morgenthau Jr. showed up at the office of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. He had a plan. Why not round up all the Japanese, at least those on the West Coast, and confiscate their property? Because it is illegal, Hoover told him, Attorney General Nicholas Biddle would never go for it, and the potential spies and traitors were already under surveillance or in custody. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102 and 110,000 Japanese-Americans were headed for involuntary incar- ceration based on race alone. Morgenthau Jr. lobbied for the deportation of the Japanese-Americans as a pretext, in many cases, for stealing their real estate. None of this appeared in the documentary. Morgenthau Jr. was finally able to get the United States to establish a War Refugee Board. The board was credited with saving about 200,000 people after the Nazis had mur- dered five and a half million others. In October of 1944, Morgenthau accompanied Roos- evelt to Quebec to present a plan Roosevelt liked better. The Morgenthau Plan proposed the final solution of the German Problem by dividing Germany into five states, stripping industry, flooding the coal mines, and letting the women and children fend for themselves. Roosevelt loved it. Churchill hated it, but accepted a bribe of $6 billion to rebuild Britain. When the word leaked out, the majority of Germans dropped the tacit tactic of letting the Americans and British advance while the Germans fought hard against the Russians. The officers decided they might as well fight to the death. The result was the Battle of the Bulge -- 19,246 American dead, 62,489 impacted by wounds or frostbite, and 26,612 captured or missing. The Morgenthau Plan was dismantled, but about a million German prisoners and another million civilians are said to have died from malnu- trition. The documentary never mentioned the Morgenthau Plan. Roosevelt died of a stroke in April 1945. In May 1945, the documentary says Harry S. Truman “brutally” fired Morgenthau as treasury secretary. Truman was a known anti-Semite, but he had another reason for dumping Mor- genthau. On March 20, 1945, State Department security officer Raymond Murphy had his second meeting with Whittaker Chambers, a defected Soviet agent who had been picking up government secrets for transmission to Moscow. Cham- bers -- for the second time -- identified Harry Dexter White as a Soviet agent of influence. White was the assistant sec- retary of the treasury and served a key economic adviser to Morgenthau Jr. White was also known as JURIST to his Soviet handlers and JURIST was linked with Morgenthau in a way that virtually proved that Morgenthau was flying top cover over White -- the man a KGB officer named Vitalii Pavlov was later to credit for the “tough stance” that triggered the attack on Pearl Harbor after Hull calmed things down. Instead of the original Hull Plan -- restored limited oil to Japan in return for a gradual evacuation of China and French Indo-China -- White drew up a list of demands including “immediate” evacuation of China and Manchuria and the virtual end of Japanese autonomy. He also drafted a note for Morgenthau to sign in which he appealed to Roosevelt with terms of the basest flattery to prevent “a new Munich” in the Pacific, not to sell China for “30 blood-stained pieces of gold,” and avoid the ridicule of the world. Roosevelt fell for it and we had a war with Japan. None of this was in the documentary. Nixon, shown as forcing the decent and honorable Mor- genthau out of office, was cast as a villain. But it was Nixon, along with Congressional Investigator Robert Stripling and Congressman Karl Mundt, who destroyed White’s credibil- ity. Without a financial genius like White, a well-meaning lightweight like Morgenthau Jr. could never have run the treasury. Without a dupe like Morgenthau, White could not have triggered Pearl Harbor, put 110,000 Japanese-Ameri- cans behind barbed wire, or starved two million baffled Germans. None of that was in the documentary. As a family history, this film came off as a pre-emp- tive strike to save the shady reputations of two guys named Henry. Opinion Special needs housing: The time to act is now by State Senator Kevin O’Toole & Ridgewood Mayor Paul Aronsohn Recently, the New Jersey Council on Affordable Hous- ing established its latest housing regulations. It was a long- awaited attempt to clarify an increasingly complex situation and to provide our communities with clarity on this issue. While we can spend hours debating the merits of such rules imposed on our municipalities, a housing shortfall must be addressed beyond this new set of COAH rules. This issue poses its own set of moral and practical challenges, as a relentless source of anxiety for many New Jersey fami- lies. Specifically, we are talking about our state’s signifi- cant shortage of special needs housing. Ask any parent of an adult with cognitive, developmen- tal, or physical disabilities about housing opportunities and you are likely to get the same concerned look, hear the same compelling plea, and feel the same sense of urgency. It is not just a matter of independence for their adult child. It is possibly a matter of life and death, because their adult child may have no place to live once the parents have died. For thousands of parents, guardians, and children impacted by a backlog of special needs housing across the state, we must act now. We must address the housing needs of our most vulner- able, and we must provide towns, such as Ridgewood, with more flexibility to make such housing a reality. To that end, we have introduced Senate Bill 2132 to allow and encourage municipalities to work together to create regional affordable housing opportunities for adults with special needs. The bill would permit any city or town to transfer up to half of its COAH obligation to another city or town within a 10-mile radius, which would receive 1.5 COAH credits per unit of affordable housing to meet its fair share. Among other things, this legislation would allow built-out communities – those with no space for additional housing -- to help meet the needs of its special needs resi- dents, but to do so in neighboring towns. In the past, similar regional contribution agreements have been legal and have been successful in creating thou- sands of affordable homes for people around the state. This bill is different, however, in that it focuses on people with (continued on page 22)