Diana West

Frank T. Csongos argues that West is right "up to a point." He notes that West rejects the standard narrative that Franklin Roosevelt, like George W. Bush, took drastic steps to "save capitalism." Unlike West, he believes that Roosevelt was merely naive when trusting Stalin. A Kirkus review finds that she has a number of valid points but ends with the warning: "A frustrating mixture of incontrovertible facts and dubious speculation. Proceed with caution." West's book was praised by historian Amity Shlaes, author M. Stanton Evans, Fox commentator Monica Crowley and a host of conservative blogs and websites, including Frontpage magazine, whose reviewer Mark Tapson wrote on July 8, 2014:

Frontpage editor David Horowitz later wrote that he decided to remove the positive review of West's book from the Frontpage website on the recommendation of historian Ronald Radosh. On August 7, 2014, Radosh published what he called his "take-down" of American Betrayal at Frontpage, "McCarthy on Steroids." This essay of roughly 7,000 words launched a long series of posts by Radosh, Horowitz and others based on Radosh's charges.

On May 28, 2013, St. Martin's Press published West's second book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character. West argues that after the fall of the Soviet Union, historians failed to sufficiently "adjust the historical record" to account for newly available Soviet files and archives. West writes on the extent of Soviet influence during the Roosevelt and Truman Presidencies. She argues that infiltration of the American government by Stalinist agents and fellow-travelers had significantly altered Allied policies in favor of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Frank J. Gaffney Jr. finds that West "painstakingly documents how America's government, media, academia, political and policy elites actively helped obscure the true nature of the Soviet Union." West contends that there is a parallel with the failure to face the dangers of communism in the 1930s and the failure to face the threat of Islamic extremism today.

In a similar vein, former Canadian newspaper publisher and FDR biographer Conrad Black published a critique of American Betrayal in the conservative journal National Review in late 2013, to which West responded and Black then rejoined. Like Radosh et al., Black believes West grossly exaggerates Soviet influence in the Roosevelt Administration, whose policies were driven by the extreme social and economic crisis America was going through during the Depression. Moreover, like Radosh, Black believes the alliance with the Soviet Union in the Second World War, while driven by realpolitik, was a dire necessity to prevent the victory of Nazi Germany which had already conquered France and was threatening Britain, and finds West's dismissal of the D-Day invasion of Normandy as somehow the result of Soviet subterfuge to shift the strategic thrust from the campaign in Italy to be an absurd and amateurish contention that ignores the realities of logistics and terrain. All these authors also point out that for the first two years of World War 2 during the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, widely considered odious among liberals, the policy of the FDR administration was at loggerheads with that of the Soviets in aiding Britain through Lend-Lease and point out the irony that at that time communists allied with isolationists and the America First movement, whose legacy West extols.

M. Stanton Evans, author of Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Sen. Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, and co-author most recently with the late Herbert Romerstein of Stalins' Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government, also wrote in support of West. On September 13, 2013, Evans wrote an essay called "In Defense of Diana West". In it, Evans strongly backs American Betrayal and specifically West's contested metaphor that Washington was, in effect, "occupied" due to the influence on policy-making and US actions by hundreds of agents working on Moscow's behalf inside the federal government and related institutions, some of whom actually reaching the inner sanctums of the White House, the State Department, the Treasury, OSS, and elsewhere. Evans writes:

Diana West (born November 8, 1961, Hollywood, California) is a nationally syndicated conservative American columnist and author. She writes a weekly column which frequently deals with controversial subjects such as Islam and is syndicated by Universal Uclick and appears in about 120 newspapers and news sites. She is the author of the books The Death of the Grown Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (St. Martin's Press, 2007) and American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (St. Martin's Press, 2013).