A review of The "Jewish Threat": Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army by Joseph W. Bendersky Basic Books, $30.00 556 pages

Generally, people like to assume that military officers, given the seriousness of their work—preparing for and fighting wars and the imperative of successfully carrying out that mission—are serious, intelligent, professionals, not given to irrationality or ignorance.

And often it has been true that when military leaders implement policies (often decided on by civilian leadership, at least in this country) they often do so far more directly and efficiently than their civilian counterparts. President Truman's decision to desegregate the armed forces comes to mind.

Whether desegregated more efficiently, or not, however, it is also true that the military is hardly immune to the same prejudices and bigotry that infect the rest of society. In that regard it is dismaying—but not altogether surprising—that the U.S. military has had numerous anti-Semites in its ranks.

It is one thing to accept that the military had so many Jew haters. It is another thing entirely to read in detail that these bigots were among the most senior ranks in the U.S. Army.

Well, thanks to Joseph Bendersky, a professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, we have to believe it. Be warned: this is, at times, a shocking book. It is also an extremely worthwhile read, though after doing so it may be some time before you can bring yourself to utter the expression "an officer and a gentleman" with a straight face.

After ten years of research in more than thirty-five archives, the author has convincingly documented evidence of pervasive anti-Semitism in the U.S. Army, from the turn of the century right up to the 1970s.

One can argue that it is wrong to criticize the prejudices of an earlier era from the perspective of more liberal times. But it is still dismaying to read how many career officers—especially those in military intelligence, who by definition are supposed to be more skeptical of the information they receive—accepted literally every paranoid, conspiratorial, unverified anti-Jewish allegation that anyone has ever reported.

It seems that at one time or another every anti-Jewish canard ever invented—from the links between Jews and Bolsheviks, the Jewish International, the forged czarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Jewish conspiracy to subjugate Christian civilization—was put down on an index card, stamped secret, and forwarded up the chain of command. (Incidentally, many of these files were not declassified until the mid-1970s.)

Over the decades, military intelligence officers actually routinely wrote comments like "I am so thoroughly convinced of the reality of a Jewish movement to dominate the world that I hate to leave a stone unturned." Such pathetically laughable remarks recall every bad joke about "military" and "intelligence" being mutually exclusive terms.

Even worse was that such assertions were generally accepted as truth without hesitation. According to Bendersky this revealed a "critical predisposition toward Jews that extended beyond mere prejudice":

"It was part of a broader worldview in the army officer corps that was quickly becoming institutionalized. This worldview embodied various aspects of xenophobic geopolitics, anticommunism, and racial theories. It presumed a superior 'true American' society and government of Anglo-Saxon heritage under siege by various radical alien forces and particularly racially inferior Easter European immigrants. The mixture of biological racism with national security issues would prove instrumental in creating the impression of a Jewish threat at home and abroad."

Many of these officers were convinced of the physical and moral inferiority of Jews and feared that their "superior" Anglo-Saxon/Nordic culture [an early version of Nazi Germany's "Master Race"] was threatened by a radical and destabilizing Jewish conspiracy.

Their ideology predated the 1919 Red Scare and persisted long after the anti-Communist and anti-foreign hysteria of the 1920s had subsided. Most of the underlying assumptions had manifested themselves among officers long before World War I and were perpetuated right up into the Cold War era through attitudes and institutions within the Army.

And many of the officers who held such views at relatively low ranks at the beginning of their career of course rose to important positions. Some became generals in World War II and influenced later generations of officers. These included many luminaries— for example, Col. Ralph H. Van Deman, the "father of American military intelligence" and his successor Marlborough Churchill; Lt. General George Van Horn Moseley, a former deputy Chief of Staff; Gen. George Patton; Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer, commander of the China-Burma-India Theater in WWII—to name just a few.

Some might say that in a democracy, especially given the tolerance granted in the U.S. under the First Amendment, it is nobody else's business what one's personal views are. The problem is that the American military officers' anti-Semitic bigotry had a direct effect on policy discussions and decisions, affecting such matters as how to deal with Nazi Germany, immigration, refugees, military strategy, and the establishment of Israel.

For example, many officers excused anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland and other countries and the Kristallnacht riot in Germany as defensible attempts by the Germans to protect their sovereignty or living space (Lebensraum), thus using the same analogies that Nazi propagandists used to justify these horrific crimes. In fact, as it turns out, many of the same racist, Social Darwinist lectures that were given at the War College were echoed by Adolph Hitler when he wrote Mein Kampf.

Even with Hitler's crimes in evidence, American secret agents scoured Europe in a desperate attempt to prove the existence of the Jewish conspiracy. General Moseley, a close friend of Eisenhower's and one of the Army's most decorated officers, demanded the sterilization of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.

Shockingly, even in the 1970s, retired officers were still warning against the secret forces of Judaism and their alleged manipulation of presidents and the American public (even going so far as to label Henry Kissinger a KGB spy).

The "Jewish Threat" is simultaneously a disturbing and fascinating book. Its insights into the linkages between the xenophobic and nativist sentiments of a time that is only a generation or two in the past compel one to wonder what other prejudices might be present in today's commissioned corps.

The "Jewish Threat": Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army by Joseph W. Bendersky http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465006175/o/qid=98131 4998/sr=8-1/ref=aps_sr_b_1_1/102-7485725-0624149

David Isenberg is an analyst at DynMeridian. He is also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and an associate fellow at the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. The views expressed here are his own. He is a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.