Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945
Dallek, Robert
BOOK REVIEWS Clare Boothe Luce once remarked that every major world leader had a characteristic gesture. Hitler had the upraised arm and Churchill the "V" sign. When asked what Franklin Roosevelt's...
...While admitting that these criticisms have "some merit," Dallek claims that they ignore the...
...Dallek describes Roosevelt's approach to the Soviet Union as "equivocal") Roosevelt accepted what he did not have the power to change, such as Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, while in other respects he tried to limit the expansion of Russian power...
...Dallek notes how Roosevelt responded favorably to the advice of such staunch anti-Japanese advocates as Secretary of War Henry Stimson without questioning whether there was something radically amiss in American Far Eastern policy immediately prior to Pearl Harbor...
...Although detesting Hitler and eager to do more to help the British, FDR repeatedly backed off from anything that might have eroded his political standing among what he termed "the ladies' peace societies...
...These included a public supposedly-opposed to sustained overseas involvement, a Congress suspicious of bold diplomatic initiatives, and a State Department which Roosevelt believed to be stodgy and rigid...
...Elected because of the public's revulsion to "Watergate" and his own vague promises to restore integrity and trust to government, he has found himself out of his depth in foreign affairs...
...FDR was a superb politician, continually fearful of staking out advanced positions and ending up without a following...
...Jimmy Carter shares this experience...
...Yet FDR felt that he could do little in any case regarding Eastern Europe...
...This was particularly evident in the 1930s during the debate over neutrality legislation...
...But if so, this *'realism" did nothing to stop the rise of German militarism or the outbreak of war in Europe...
...There were, after all, no fundamental issues of national interest worth going to war with Japan over, especially since , the major threat to America and Britain was Germany...
...Wilson with his New Freedom, Roosevelt with his New Deal, Truman with his Fair Deal, and Johnson with his Great Society were liberals eager for changes in the nation's social and economic fabric, and yet each soon found himself mired in diplomacy...
...Robert Dal-lek's thick volume on Roosevelt the statesman is concerned with discovering the sources of this vacillating, and at times passive, diplomacy...
...Dallek argues convincingly that much of Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy was designed to avoid a repetition of the isolationist resurgence which followed World War I. Thus he continually reassured the public that the Big Three were laying the basis for a lasting peace free from the rivalries of the past...
...His failure to communicate his concern was a prime ingredient in the public's obliviousness to the dangers looming on the horizon...
...When asked what Franklin Roosevelt's was, she wet her index finger and held it up...
...His greater prestige and reputation as an advocate of Soviet-American friendship would have made it easier for him than for Truman to muster public support for a hard line...
...Dallek, on the other hand, believes that Roosevelt's pacifist sympathies, particularly during the 1920s, stemmed from " simple political realism...
...Accordingly, Roosevelt's mistake, as John Lewis Gaddis argues in The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, was failing to prepare the American people for Soviet control along her western borders...
...constraints within which FDR had to operate...
...Dallek also asserts that Roosevelt's purported naivete regarding the Soviets has been considerably overdrawn...
...Yet, while the United States believed Germany to be public enemy number one and American military officials were pleading for more time to prepare for military action in the Pacific, the Roosevelt administration adopted a policy designed to force Japan's hand...
...Never was Roosevelt more carried away by this vision of a brave new world than in the speech he gave to Congress on March 1, 1945, reporting on the Yalta Conference...
...Having been led by the President's own rhetoric to expect self-determination everywhere," Professor Gaddis writes, "Americans reacted angrily when the Soviet Union proceeded to extract territorial concessions from its neighbors, and to impose spheres of influence on them...
...In view of the current disarray of American foreign policy, brought on by a President with no experience beyond the cotton and peanut belts, a familiarity with the world scene is not to be taken lightly...
...Roosevelt believed that Russia had legitimate security demands along her western frontiers, but that no territorial agreements could be made with the Soviets until after the 1944 election...
...When Roosevelt grew alarmed in late 1939 over the refusal of the nation to take the European war seriously-"The country," he wrote, "does not yet have any deep sense of world crisis"-he had only himself to blame...
...None of these five Presidents had any extensive experience in diplomacy before assuming office and, with the exception of Roosevelt, none had evidenced even the slightest interest in it...
...He has been described as superficial, naive, excessively timid, and devious...
...His visceral sympathy for the Chinese, which most Americans shared, led him to exaggerate the importance of China and deflect the nation from a clear perception of its interests in Asia...
...Fearing a backlash among ethnic and Catholic Democrats, he preferred to leave the settlement of territorial and other questions to the postwar peace conference...
...It is difficult to imagine a more clumsy and ill-conceived strategy than America's Pacific policy of 1941 -speaking loudly while carrying a small stick...
...A prediction in 1975 that Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young would, within two years, become two of America's major spokesmen on foreign affairs would have elicited incredulity and amazement...
...Robert Divine is undoubtedly correct in maintaining that one of the major lessons of Roosevelt's tenure is that we have a political system "which produces leaders on the basis of their political talents and domestic programs and then confronts them with the responsibility for international issues of enormous complexity...
...Roosevelt resembles Wilson, Truman, and Johnson in one striking way...
...And yet our worst fears have come to pass...
...Or did Roosevelt see in the United Nations a means to draw the -Soviet Union into extended cooperation with the West and to satisfy internationalist sentiment at home...
...As Paul Schroeder argues in The Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations, 1941, the United States should have attempted to wean Japan away from the Axis alliance rather than taking a categorical anti-Japanese line during 1940 and 1941...
...FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, 1932-1945 Robert Dallek / Oxford University Press / $19-95 Edward S. Shapiro Yet one can legitimately ask whether Roosevelt learned the right lessons from his experience...
...Roosevelt's tendency to substitute rhetoric for action, his refusal to risk his political capital, is clearly shown by his policy toward the Soviet Union...
...He tellingly quotes Averell Harriman's recollection of a meeting with the President in November of 1944, during which the President stated that "he wanted to have a lot to say about the settlement in the Pacific, but that he considered the European questions were so impossible that he wanted to stay out of them as far as practicable, except for the problems involving Germany...
...Roosevelt's "abiding concern" over the Polish issue, Dallek points out, was that it not become a major dispute between the Americans and the Soviets...
...These were encouraging words for Wilsoni-ans, but did Roosevelt really believe them...
...All four Presidents were elected largely for domestic reasons, and yet each one's reputation rests mainly on his conduct of foreign affairs...
...We do not like to believe that the American people elect fools for Presidents, despite our recent history...
...By the time of the peace conference, of course, the Red Army would be occupying Eastern Europe and the United States would be powerless to influence the future of the region...
...Neville Chamberlain, not usually associated with steadfast policies, concluded after Roosevelt's famous Quarantine Speech in Chicago in October 1937 that "it is always best and safest to count on nothing from the Americans but words...
...The Crimea meeting, he asserted, meant "the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balance of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries-and have always failed...
...Roosevelt's Asian policy prior to the outbreak of the war was another example of his previous experience leading him astray, in this case his family's long involvement with China...
...In contrast to the bold and experimental nature of the New Deal, Roosevelt's statecraft was marked by a tentativeness and even timidity which has been duly chronicled by historians...
...He had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy during Wilson's administration and World War I had left an indelible impression on him...
...We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join...
...Roosevelt's reputation as a diplomatist is not very high today among historians...
...For Dallek, the inconsistencies and caution of Roosevelt's foreign policy can be explained in large part by his sensitivity to congressional and public opinion...
...He agreed to station American troops in southern Germany after the end of the war, attempted to acquire air and naval bases in the Pacific and the Atlantic, and encouraged the illusion of China as a great power so that China could act as a political counterweight to Russia...
...One hopes that Dallek is right in saying that Roosevelt's verbal support of the United Nations was simply rhetorical flourish...
...Edward S. Shapiro teaches diplomatic history at Seton Hall University...
...As Robert Divine maintains, in Roosevelt and World War II, FDR's ''fundamental aversion to war [resulting from World War I] determined his responses to the hostile acts committed by Italy, Japan, and Germany in the 1930s...
...In the process, he confused both his advisors and our allies...
...Dallek points out that, with the exception of his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, FDR was the most cosmopolitan President since John Quincy Adams...
...Had Roosevelt not died, in April 1945, Dallek speculates, he would "probably have moved more quickly than Truman to confront the Russians...
Vol. 12 • October 1979 • No. 10
