Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom

...If he has an opinion on the proper relation of the President to his constituents he is not saying what it is...

...This curious slovenliness in the author's discussion of the origins of war with Japan seeps into his treatment of the origins of the Cold War...

...In October of that year German submarines torpedoed the USS Kearney, and FDR's ringing speech to Americans stopping just short of demanding a declaration of war stirred the American people into a thunderous snore...

...Though the bewildering lurches of diplomacy between governments, and strategic disagreements within governments, shrouded reality, the fact remains that from the summer of 1940 powerful elements in Japan were looking greedily to the south rather than the north (that is, to Russian Siberia which of course became highly vulnerable when Germany attacked Russia in June 1941...

...but he would no longer be Burns' great opportunist and -remembering the power of isolationists and other antiwar elements-he might no longer be President...

...No other historian whom I have read conveys so sensitively the temper of the American people in the early forties...

...Members of Roosevelt's cabinet urged the President "to take the lead" against Germany, but "the President would not lead...

...If a President is an opportunist he will have to follow a policy of laissez faire with the American people...

...Two final points perhaps indicate that even his recording of events is unfocused...

...If there is "no more he could say...no more he could do," how can Burns lay the fault with the President...

...Unpleasant experiences at Harvard made him ambitious and disdainful of tradition...

...Those parties resident in Congress are generally provincial, while those in the executive are more cosmopolitan...

...Yet the supposed recipients of all that welfare legislation, and those liberals who have made liberalism a fetish, ambushed him...

...The Japanese, then, were anticipating war with America...

...Working the old Rooseveltian coalition and adroitly unbalancing budgets, he even followed his master's example in foreign policy with the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964-an affair with a surprising likeness to Roosevelt's naval tactics in the North Atlantic in 1941...

...Japan now looked to the Dutch East Indies for oil, though Japanese planners realized that to take the Dutch Indies meant war with the United States...

...Early in his narrative Burns celebrates the virtuosity of FDR's opportunism...

...With exception of Foreign Minister Matsuoka no important Japanese desired war with Russia...

...He had been following a middle course...

...All these qualities rushed him along in the political undercurrent of the twenties-an undercurrent which became the wave of the thirties, cresting with the New Deal, the modern liberal state characterized by enormous concentration of power, insouciance to tradition, ephemeral but potent moral concerns...

...But Burns is befuddled...

...No American historian has depicted Roosevelt's life during the Second World War with Burns' eloquence and care for detail...

...I find the new revisionists tendentious and occasionally dishonest (the September Alternative will feature a thoughtful account of this controversy by a gifted young historian...

...The First Great President in the Last Great War Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom by James MacGregor Burns Harocourt, Brace, Janovich, $10.00 Writing the history of a controversial public figure in a tumultuous era is a hazardous endeavor made all the riskier when the historian is himself something of a public figure in his own troubled time...

...When on 26 July 1941, FDR froze Japanese assets, both nations moved into a collision course...

...Today that very White House which Roosevelt made into a cathedral of hope is for Richard M. Nixon an embattled bunker, from which he gingerly attempts to deal with Roosevelt's enraged constituents...

...Roosevelt, he writes, entered the war years with a divided mind...

...I use the phrase "querulous tone" advisedly, for it is Burns' tone which manifests displeasure with Roosevelt's prewar leadership...

...Today the Fulbrights are urging Congress to limit the chief executive's power over foreign policy...

...Roosevelt's patrician upbringing was secure and obviously quite special...

...James Madison would answer that citizens should have elected him for his "enlightened views...

...Yet when Roosevelt the proctor of the public interest ventured down into the grubby world of politics, he immediately learned that if he were to survive he had best put aside his moralism and pursue power...

...R.Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...His desire for power encouraged a cunning which complemented his neglect for punctilio...

...In the later sixties, everything began to come apart, and has been coming apart ever since...

...Indeed America might go to war with Germany...

...During the Eisenhower calm of the fifties, Burns could write a political biography (Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox) which was first-rate...

...In such doldrums Burns, the apologist for FDR's opportunism, cannot fault the great opportunist's inaction-there were no opportunities...

...In the early years of the sixties, John F. Kennedy restored Roosevelt's graceful ethos to the White House...

...All this is not to say that the book is without merit or that it is uninteresting...

...By the late thirties eighty per cent of Japan's oil came from the United States...

...He has had to overcome both a bewildering past and a disconcerting present, and the confusions in his narrative manifest his frustration...

...The two nations had signed a neutrality pact (13 April 1941...

...Roosevelt's teachers inculcated self-righteousness, didacticism and a strong sense of what early Americans called "Republican virtue...

...Long portions of this six-hundred-page book simply sprawl...

...This division seems contrived...

...Unfortunately such complications and contradictions have blurred the vision of an historian who is himself unclear as to the soundest means of statecraft...

...The author is an artful writer, and I believe a man of high ideals-the only problem is that those ideals have lost their magic...

...Any man who has-like Burns-grown up wise in the convictions of the New Deal, run for office on its principles (Burns ran for Congress), and lectured on politics in the academy, would have to be insulated not to feel disoriented by its sudden disesteem...

...Should Americans in 1940 have elected Roosevelt for his mind or his mouth...

...Burns' problems with American constitutional process run deeper than the vagrant priorities of liberal convention, and they flaw his biography of America's wartime President...

...Burns, however, does not make this point clear, and merely confounds things when he writes that: "Eventually an open conflict with Germany must come...

...The last decade has experienced the triumph of Rooseveltian liberalism in every sphere of American life...

...Yesterday's moral missions are today's abominations...

...Japanese planners drafted plans for attacks on the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines and Hawaii...

...Most evidence indicates that the national parties are loose amalgamations of fifty autonomous organizations...

...FDR was "assuming the imperfect moral stand of condemning Hitlerism as utterly evil and bent on world domination without openly and totally combating it, he faced a thicket of secondary but irksome troubles...

...if Japan had not yet entered the war, perhaps it would stay out for the same reason it had kept out of the Russo-German conflict...

...Writing in the sixties was not so easy for a Rooseveltian liberal...

...Johnson's legislation was unsatisfying and the tergiversations of the intellectuals exiled him to the Pedernales...

...As the German menace grows and FDR awaits a bellicose shift in public opinion, Burns suddenly takes on a querulous tone...

...The history he is writing about, and the later history in which he played a minor role, has confused him and this confusion reveals his own fretful dissatisfaction with Roosevelt...

...I am always a little uneasy when scholars begin elucidating "moral stands" as reasons for political action...

...Persons of his background needed not trouble themselves with introspection, for their thoughts were high-toned...

...This is an extension of a theme from the author's earlier volume and deserves elaboration for many of the problems of the period, 1940-45, trace to FDR's divided conscience...

...In light of the work of men like George F. Kennan, Burns is really not telling us much when he says that: "While the roots of post-World War II hostility between Russia and the West are of course multifold, lying deep in Russian, European, and American history, I have concluded that the decisive turn toward the Cold War came during the war...

...Those individuals who only ten years ago wished to rearrange constitutional process want today to restore it...

...Thus far the confusions I have found in Burns' book are confusions arising from shaken convictions or at least issues he has not resolved...

...Roosevelt was always crossed by contradictions...

...For a Roosevelt biographer and card-carrying liberal such an alteration must have appeared insidious...

...Exactly...

...Unfortunately he has brought this whole daft contrivance into Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, and if his yearnings for a more importunate prewar President render his grasp of American democratic process suspect, his insistence on this singular notion of American politics reinforces the suspicion...

...In this whole discussion, extending over 150 pages, Burns is perplexingly ambiguous...

...only a very confident historian would attempt to penetrate its workings during World War II, what with the shifting political terrain of that era, the animosities he aroused, the devotion he inspired...

...In fact, the best explanation of the Cold War's origins (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "Origins of the Cold War," Foreign Affairs, October 1967) builds from a similar position...

...he had been stranded midway between his promise to keep America out of war and his excoriation of Nazism...He had called Hitlerism inhuman, ruthless...He had even issued the ultimate warning: that if Hitler won in Europe, Americans would be forced into a war on their own soil...Now-by early November 1941-there seemed to be nothing more he could say...

...After criticizing FDR's reluctance to lead and then stating that FDR was unable to lead, the author commences to discuss morality in politics-a preposterous topic if ever there was one, but an interest Burns insists on dragging through this biography...

...He can discreetly urge them to act, but if they fail to respond he must patiently await events...

...Consider the author's treatment of events of 1941 in the North Atlantic...

...It is Federalist Ten which raises most poignantly for Americans the questions of whether politicians should -be "Representatives.whoseenlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices" or merely obliging voices for passing majorities...

...When I first read his version of America's drift toward war with Japan, I felt he had merely underemphasized an issue which I am convinced had crucial significance-to wit, the question of oil...

...The author's theme is sound enough...

...Burns is no exception...

...It must have been difficult for James MacGregor Burns, an erstwhile political activist, to write Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom during the sixties-a time which belied some of the wisdom of the New Deal without ushering in a more satisfying politics...

...As usual the President was trying to gauge public opinion, and as usual public opinion was blurred and drifting...

...Bearing in mind the fate of our most recent Rooseveltian opportunist, President Johnson, I sympathize with Burns' befuddlement...

...In spite of his claim that this Cold War issue is a "subtheme" of his biography, he does almost nothing with it...

...When Roosevelt for strategic reasons curtailed that oil flow in 1940-41, Japan moved toward war...

...Legislation to revise the constricting neutrality laws cleared the Senate (4 November) by only 50 to 37 and the House by 212 to 194...

...After all the American constitutional process does (as Senator Fulbright reminds us) restrict the action of the executive even in matters of foreign policy...

...This book would have been a splendid opportunity to set, or reset, the record...

...As Burns puts it, "The master interpreter to the American people of complex problems at this point seemed to have lost his touch...

...Franklin D. Roosevelt possessed almost an impregnable character...

...From the summer of 1940, Washington was embargoing the shipment of strategic materials to Japan, especially high octane gasoline...

...Here Burns is caught in the present's conflict with the past, and if we want evidence of how the tumult of the sixties has done violence to those New Deal verities Burns once endorsed we need look no further...

...The elements of that constellation of interest groups which has for forty years received government's extraordinary attention is tearing itself apart...

...There are formidable arguments against the revisionist position...

...There seemed to be little more he could do...

...The issue itself is an exceedingly hot item in historical circles at the present time, due to the work of the New Left revisionists who ascribe the Cold War not to Soviet truculence but to avaricious or ill-advised American liberals...

...Burns is an excellent writer and a talented historian, but his active public life has not left him well insulated...

...But Roosevelt's legacy seems decrepit today, and Burns is not sure he wants to defend it...

...In the early sixties the aging Rooseveltian liberals urged that the chief executive receive increased power over foreign policy...

...The Reuben James was torpedoed, with loss of 96 of its crew (Burns claims 115 were lost...

...From the eminence of Hyde Park, a young man living at the turn of the century came to view the world with assuredness, optimism and a vague sense of suzerainty...

...If FDR agreed with Madison he would have spolcen forthrightly in favor of aiding the Allies, even to the reaches of war with the Axis, he would run for re-election in 1940 frankly proclaiming his "enlightened views and virtuous sentiments...

...One statesman's morality is another's atrocity...

...I recommend it, shortcomings notwithstanding...

...Still Congress and the people were unmoved...

...The President nationalized the Philippine army, making Douglas MacArthur commanding general of Far Eastern Forces...

...Conversely a President may force public opinion to his enlightened views, but if the public refuses to follow, he either loses his freedom or they lose theirs...

...At best Burns' thesis is bizarre, and most political scientists dismiss it...

...Though I am unsure as to what Burns considers a "perfect moral stand," it does seem that a man could possess enough fissionable material for the moral stand of an archangel and still refrain from "openly and totally combating" evil-especially if that man were President of the United States...

...Our trials in Vietnam should have presented Burns with evidence enough that thickets of "irksome but secondary problems" are not obviated by moral stand's...

...The education of an aristocrat does not often anticipate the experience of a politician...

...Japan desired oil in the south, not war in Siberia...

...How much control does a President have...

...Roosevelt's growth is a kind of Burkean nightmare, and it is little wonder Burns finds him complicated and contradictory...

...Then came Vietnam...

...Some years ago Burns while arguing tor changes in the American system of government (The Deadlock of Democracy) introduced the theory that America's two-party system is actually a four-party system, composed of Presidential Democrats, Presidential Republicans, Legislative Democrats and Legislative Republicans...

...but Japan could not remain neutral for the same reason it remained neutral with Russia, because Japan was planning war with America-the strongest elements in Japan o wanted war with America...

...Burns cannot have it both ways...

...As Senator Fulbright said in 1961, "the overriding problem of inadequate presidential authority in foreign affairs, however, derives not from internal relationships within the executive branch, but from the 'checks and balances' of congressional authority in foreign relations...

...Burns does not seem to have an answer-though the question nags him...

...Yet the denouement has been bitterness and frustration...

...Though Nixon has brought forth programs that the New Dealers could only have dreamed of, and his legislation has been more innovative than anything since Roosevelt's first hundred days of 1933, the ethnics snarl, students urge his impeachment, blue-collar workers follow their own muse, and the intellectuals-men who praised Roosevelt's idealism while recommending his pragmatism-deride Nixon's unsuitable moral vision while adjudging him politically devious...

...On 27 January 1941 Admiral Yamamoto began planning for Pearl Harbor...

...His major theme is sound, and his lesser themes-that the third term, rather than the earlier New Deal, transformed our government into "modern presidential government," and that the war years worked vast and subtle changes on American society-are informative and convincing...

...In the middle years a genuine son of the New Deal, Lyndon B. Johnson, wheeled a surprising array of restyled New Deal legislation through Congress...

...Unfortunately, though most historians disagree with the new assault on Rooseveltian foreign policy, few have bothered to refute it...

...Burns asserts that "the United States seemed deadlocked-its President handcuffed, its Congress irresolute, its people divided and confused...

...And the confusions continue...

...But from his tone it is obvious that Burns attributes the languid state of public opinion in and out of Congress to FDR: "the immediate proximate reason lay with the President of the United States...