Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

While he had described at Swarthmore the basic outline of the Nazi plot against Roosevelt, Rogge had not, per his boss’s instructions, quoted from some of the remarkable top-secret cables a German operative in America sent back to the Foreign Office in Berlin during the 1940 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. Like the one explaining how a Nazi influence campaign helped secure the anti-interventionist plank of the Republican Party’s official platform, vowing to keep America out of foreign wars: “The success of the isolationist Republicans in the field for foreign policy was made possible in part by the promotion campaign authorized by telegraphic instruction No. 666, of June 17. This fact is reflected, for instance, by the circumstance that the…principles of the Republican platform on foreign policy were taken almost verbatim from conspicuous full-page advertisements in the American press (e.g., New York Times, June 25, p. 19), which were published upon our instigation.”