Lend-Lease did more than transform the power structure of the U.S. government. It also introduced a revolutionary principle into our foreign policy. I’ll just put it out there in the words of “Junior Stettinius,” the Hopkins protégé whom we just saw putting the heat on Kravchenko in 1944—or at least conducting it, since Stettinius was, by all accounts, the emptiest of well-tailored suits.94 As Stettinius wrote—or, perhaps better, in words attributed to Stettinius:

The principle was contained in the words defining eligibility for Lend-Lease aid—“any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” The word “vital” was the heart of the matter. To favor limited aid to the allies as an expedient device for saving friendly nations from conquest was one thing. To declare that the defense of those nations was “vital” to our own national security was quite another. If we adopted the bill with those words, we would, in effect, declare the interdependence of the American people with the other freedom-loving nations of the world in the face of Axis aggression [emphasis added].

We did indeed adopt the Lend-Lease bill with those words. This makes March 11, 1941, the day the Lend-Lease bill passed after three months of rau- cous congressional debate, America’s Interdependence Day. It was the first day of a new global order under which all manner of international intervention is automatically declared “vital”—i.e., essential to life—to U.S. interests. It no longer even draws comment when American presidents routinely declare the destinies of far-flung peoples “vital” to that of the United States, whether in Saudi Arabia (Roosevelt), Iraq (Bush), or Afghanistan (Obama).

So how did Lend-Lease, this de facto American declaration of global interdependence—this de facto reversal of nonbelligerence if not also this de facto declaration of war—come about? Notably, the dispensers of conventional wisdom draw a stunning blank on its origins. Roosevelt biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin’s explanation is typical: “How Roosevelt arrived at this ingenious idea, which cut through all the stale debates in Washington about loans and gifts, is unclear,” she writes in her 1995 Pulitzer Prize–winning book No Ordinary Time.

Goodwin goes on to quote Robert Sherwood, who, citing Harry Hopkins, described Roosevelt’s unseen, supposedly creative mode by which policy was hatched—a mysterious “refueling process,” as Sherwood described it. “Then one evening,” Hopkins told Sherwood, recalling a two-week postelection fish- ing trip he accompanied FDR on in December 1940, “he suddenly came out with it [Lend-Lease]—the whole programme.”

Sounds like a fish story, but Sherwood happily took the bait from Hopkins’s hook: “One can only say that Roosevelt, a creative artist in politics, had put in his time on this cruise evolving the pattern of a masterpiece.” Then again, according to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the “masterpiece” didn’t take any time at all. She wrote that Lend-Lease was a “flash of almost clairvoyant knowledge and understanding,” describing FDR’s quasi-divine policy revelation as being akin to when a musical genius suddenly perceives “the structure of an entire symphony or opera.”

In fact, the evidence suggests Lend-Lease was a con job, and a really big one, put over by another Soviet tool: Soviet go-between, Soviet money-launderer, Soviet hobnobber Armand Hammer. So reports Edward Jay Epstein, who, in his groundbreaking 1996 biography of Hammer, assembled a convincing record indicating that Hammer was the person who floated the original Lend-Lease notion back in 1940. As Epstein discovered, Hammer had transformed himself “virtually overnight . . . from a businessman specializing in importing art and barrel staves from Stalin’s Russia to a geopolitical strategist concerned with helping Great Britain get immediate aid from the United States.” Before Dossier, incidentally, Epstein’s Hammer biography, which establishes Hammer as a traitor with revelations of Hammer’s pro-Soviet activities, the “international businessman” was generally billed as a nice old philanthropic “man of peace.”

That quick transformation of Hammer’s back in 1940 is odd on its face. Given that Hammer had Soviet interests at heart (and in the bank), why would he start beating the drum—taking out newspaper ads urging British aid, contributing money to pro-British funds—for Britain? Meanwhile, given the only marginal profitability of Hammer’s businesses at that time, Epstein notes “it was not clear where he was getting the funds for his campaign.” While Hammer wrote of his concerns as a Jew regarding Nazi Germany, Epstein notes Hammer was simultaneously helping to facilitate oil trade into Germany— scoring a 10 on the hypocrisy meter. The fact is, helping Britain at this early stage in hostilities helped the Kremlin, and was in fact the Communist Party line du jour. “The longer the British pursued the war” against Hitler, Epstein explains, “the more time Stalin would have to prepare the Red Army” for what he considered to be an inevitable war with Hitler. After all, they had read Hitler’s plans for them in Mein Kampf, and even had plans of their own.

Epstein tells us Hammer not only launched a PR campaign on Britain’s behalf but also lobbied the British Embassy in Washington with an idea that re-sembled the initial Lend-Lease policy, under which the United States “lent” destroyers for the “lease” of British bases, which famously eliminated the need for money to procure aid. The British were cool to Hammer’s query, already having established that he was part of the Soviet “secret regime” in the West. Too bad they didn’t mention that to us. Then again, maybe they did and the intelligence somehow found its way to that nice, quiet bureaucratic dead end where all too much anti-Soviet intelligence disappeared. Undeterred, Hammer tried the U.S. Senate, where he convinced a friendly Senator William H. King (D-UT) to present, unsuccessfully, aid legislation that Hammer himself had drafted in September 1940. Finally, Hammer briefly met with FDR himself at the White House on November 28, 1940. Epstein calls this meeting the “five minute summit.” It seems to have done the trick. FDR and Hopkins embarked on that postelection two-week “refueling” cruise in December, which Sherwood mentioned above, immediately after which FDR announced the plan for Lend-Lease in a press conference. He followed up in a Fireside Chat with the Hopkins-crafted declaration that the United States must now become “the arsenal for democracy.” Epstein further notes that FDR dispatched “deputy President” Hopkins to New York City at least two times to confer with Hammer further on this aid idea. Like a cuckoo’s egg, then, Lend-Lease was laid inside the White House nest by Hammer the Soviet tool, where Stalin’s best friend Hopkins had only to keep it in place so the president could hatch and crow about it.