Roosevelt in Retrospect
Cohen, Jacob
ROOSEVELT IN RETROSPECT JACOB COHEN "Believe me, Roosevelt was no lover of the Jews," my antagonist in the audience began, after hearing me say something slightly to the contrary. She proceeded to...
...It is endless delay and agonizing debates in Congress and delaying tactics by the isolationists...
...As a condition for passing the Lend Lease Bill, the Congress, still eager to grasp some thread of an already thoroughly compromised neutrality, had stipulated that no American merchant ships should convoy strategic material to belligerent nations...
...Bailey and Ryan argue forcefully that Roosevelt and Churchill had long since agreed that the defeat of Hitler was the first order of business and, to achieve that, it would be best if neither the United States nor Britain were distracted by a strong land and naval commitment in the Far East...
...To me, the most revealing poll of the period is the one showing that 79 percent of Americans agreed that America was already "in the war for all practical i purposes...
...Roosevelt, for his part, had led the nation to the brink, profoundly educated it along the way—but could not for the political life of him think of the next step...
...Perhaps the Japanese attacked first believing they were about to be attacked...
...Roosevelt knew that somehow, some way, America would have to enter the war and that if the proper circumstances could be created it would, united in good faith...
...Roosevelt, he says, is the true cause of World War II, for it was he who urged the Poles to resist reasonable German demands and therefore he who had forced Germany to attack Poland in self-defense...
...Let's face it, she continued, we loved him, when we did, for his enemies—the bundists who pronounced his name "Rosenfeld," the rabid isolationists who insisted that his cautious interventionism was a Jewish plot to bring the country into a Jewish war...
...When nations act foolishly, look for the pathology...
...Robert Dallek...
...Bailey and Ryan submit that Japan's ambitious political economy was being starved to death by a trade embargo which Roosevelt initiated on July 25, 1941...
...the people most prominently making those accusations could only make him look good...
...The Fflhrer told his submarine commanders to defend themselves, but he did not order them to attack...
...out of the war, considering the recalcitrant mood of Congress at the time...
...Had not Roosevelt sold his program precisely as a way both to salve the American conscience and to keep out of the war...
...Let me briefly suggest three that I see, not as proven truths, but as propositions for discussion: (1) It is the presidential office which is the nub of things insofar as the international interest of Jews is concerned...
...America was ready...
...I tell you the blunt fact that the German destroyer fired first upon this American destroyer without warning and with deliberate design to sink her...
...110-135...
...A recent television documentary charges that Roosevelt connived with British Intelligence to forge documents purporting to prove that the Nazis were about to move into South America...
...As Charles Beard pointed out many years ago (and as the Israeli government has lately argued), when a government states its fondest goal as a precondition for the start of negotiations, it is, in effect, declaring itself to be in a state of war...
...Lend Lease...
...As I suggested earlier, stories imply lessons and the reader may already have begun to ponder the possible relevance of this tale to the predicaments of the moment...
...Hitler had ordered his submarines to avoid the Americans, firing only if fired upon...
...2) the wish of 70 percent of Americans to do everything to break Hitler, even if it means war...
...3) We are never safe within the cold calculations of state...
...his impoundment of German assets...
...He had taunted the enemy to near the breaking point...
...1979...
...How could such a contaminated society prevail against German supremacy...
...How did it come to happen, and what lessons are contained in the answer to that question...
...Our cause and reputation are helped by our persistence even if it generates hostility as well: And the hostility, vulgar as it is, provokes sympathy and support...
...Were any secret promises made...
...Did he want war...
...If that were his motive, one would have expected him to negotiate explicitly with the Japanese, offering a declaration of war against the Americans in return for help against the Russians...
...Perhaps, but he had no firm assurances from the Japanese that they would divert attention from their own war to do so...
...if Russia were to fall (it was just then under siege by Hitler), Roosevelt promised to find an incident to justify America's full participation in the war—so said Churchill...
...Hitler then rehearses all of the antagonistic acts Roosevelt had perpetrated in the previous years: his gifts of military equipment and his active naval support of the British...
...The Democratic Platform in 1940 was as explicit as could be on the subject: "We will not participate in foreign wars to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas, except in case of attack...
...He mocks the aristocrat making warm fireside speeches while German soldiers are "fighting in snow and ice...
...Was the Prime Minister exaggerating in order to boost flagging British morale...
...Roosevelt, he says, is "the main culprit of this war...
...Where Roosevelt had conspicuously failed to solve the economic problems posed by the Depression, he, Hitler, had ended unemployment and brought prosperity to the German people...
...But neither do we want peace so much that we are willing to pay for it by permitting him to attack our naval and merchant ships while they are on legitimate business...
...The war against Germany did not begin until December 12, and then only after Hitler first declared war on the United States in an elaborate speech the day before...
...But that, too, seems insufficient reason to reverse a prudent policy and, at any rate, at that stage of the war Hitler had fairly complete control of his military establishment...
...Can it be in the insatiable ambition of the President to want to have a hand in the domination of the world...
...There would be no war unless the enemy started it, and massively...
...To Jewish pleas and demands that he bomb the death camps, bomb the bridges, roads, railroad tracks leading to the camps, he turned deaf ears, or his generals did, which is just as bad...
...I hate war," he said again and again during the presidential campaign of 1940...
...Of course, Hitler was under pressure from his own frustrated U-boat commanders who were pressing him to answer escalating provocations by the Americans...
...However, though the public rooted hard for the Allies, supported each of Roosevelt's actions, and renounced the blatant anti-Semites at home and abroad, poll after poll reveals that a solid 70 percent and more nonetheless opposed full entry into the fighting...
...But in another poll in the same month only 6 percent of the sample responded "Jews" when asked "What persons or groups do you think are most active in trying to get us into the war...
...President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (New Haven, I94S...
...Why did the Japanese attack...
...Indeed, we know now that Hitler entered that agreement in order to keep the Americans out of the war...
...To be sure, polls show a sharp increase in anti-Semitism at the time...
...to come in" but felt stymied by a Congress which had recently approved additional Lend Lease only by a narrow margin and which would be likely to debate "the issue of peace or war" for months (if it were presented merely as a proposition for debate and not in the context of a major crisis...
...The cry of American mothers at nst another war that would rob them of their sons is not heard by this group...
...But why did the Japanese attack United States forces and territory...
...No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938-1945 (Detroit...
...One need only imagine another president in his position (and there are recent models), not necessarily an isolationist at all, but a cautious follower of public comfort rather than a shaper of public ideals, a bungling leader in contrast to this artist of artists, in order to get some measure of his achievements for the nation—and, incidentally, for its Jews...
...And in Russia, where the fabled Russian winter was setting in, Hitler was suffering Napoleonic frustrations...
...British fliers and sailors were trained in the United States...
...Meanwhile, Roosevelt tried to stir public outrage after the inevitable clashes occurred between Nazi U-boats and America's ever more adventurous navy...
...There was, however, a condition in all this which Roosevelt, always the possibilist, laid upon himself and upon the Jewish leadership in America...
...If, in the final analysis, he was not responsible for the war, he did prepare the way for American entry in every manner but the final one...
...Professor Jacob Cohen is Chairman of the Department of American Studies at Brandeis University...
...In the ensuing two years he would relentlessly denounce the "brutal Nazi Dictatorship" and its (alleged) dreams of world conquest in the most unequivocal terms, eventually attacking Hitler again and again by name...
...The compulsive, if highly selective, idealism of Americans, properly appealed to, is a source of Jewish strength...
...Every time Hitler seized another country in Europe, Roosevelt froze the assets of that country which were under United States control, depriving Hitler and his stooges of stocks, bank deposits, credits and other forms of wealth...
...We do not seek it now...
...Clearly, Churchill desperately needed some commitments from Roosevelt to bolster flagging spirits at home, but he does not seem to have gotten the open promise he sought...
...In late 1940, with things going badly in Europe, Roosevelt arranged to send 50 surplus destroyers to England, persuading the American public that they were not needed for our own defense and that we had been well paid for them by a promise from Britain to cede to us sites for eight new military bases...
...but here there is a further recognition that the friendship may need to be covert, even inadvertent, to be effective...
...And I noticed as well an assumption beneath her discourse which one frequently encounters when Jews survey their prospects today: Jewish interests are endangered by workaday raisons d'etat...
...2) While anti-Semitism will always rise when Jews seem to ask some discomfort from the public on behalf of their own cause, there is no danger to us if we press Jewish interests ardently and conspicuously...
...Step by step, the tale continues, Roosevelt maneuvered the nation to the brink of war, all the while denying that he was doing so...
...that is what happened...
...Soon thereafter, Roosevelt ordered American ships to "shoot on sight," as a defensive measure, of course, and requested of Congress that it again amend the neutrality laws to permit the use of armed American merchant vessels in convoying war material to the allies...
...There is no evidence that Hitler knew about the Japanese attack beforehand...
...war production was lagging...
...Now inv speech after speech he loudly hinted that America had been attacked, awaiting the public's response and that of the Congress...
...These circumstances he set about trying to create, dissembling, winking, disguising his clear intentions, masking his reading of events, sometimes blatantly lying to serve what he saw as a higher cause...
...A few years later, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, testifying before a Congressional committee which was suspicious about the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of war, revealed how thoroughly the Japanese had misread the American political process: "We would have to wait until it came," Stimson explained...
...In early September a German submarine fired two torpedoes at the American destroyer Greer and a nine-hour duel ensued...
...Yes, and soon...
...And in March, 1941, when Roosevelt shepherded through Congress the historic Lend Lease Bill which eventually was to send thirty billion dollars of material to England and later to Russia and China, he was, say the authors, "virtually declaring war on dictators...
...The message is clear: thank Roosevelt for big things even if you cannot forgive him for little ones...
...There were serious labor troubles...
...Hitler vs...
...1973...
...Bailey and Ryan believe he was, pointing out that in his voluminous correspondence with Churchill, now available, Roosevelt continually dodged Churchill's high pressure blandishments to enter the war or at least to declare his future willingness to do so...
...Can it be in moneyed influences against whom Hitler has committed some special act which '' they resent...
...What Lyndon Johnson was to the Vietnam war and Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were to the secret war in Cambodia, they say, Roosevelt was to America's participation in World War II.1 But where that makes Roosevelt a villain to the isolationists and revisionists, it makes him heroic, a closet semitist, to the Jews...
...Hungry for oil and other vital materials, faced with demands from the United States that they totally withdraw from all the territories they had occupied in Manchuria, China, and (lately) Indochina, the Japanese did what any energy-starved, ambitious, land-hungry power would have done in their place, indeed they did precisely what Roosevelt fully expected them to do somewhere, sometime soon: they attacked...
...Certainly Hitler's sudden declaration of war was a dramatic reversal of his previous policy which had been to steer clear (at considerable cost) of an open confrontation with Roosevelt...
...Roosevelt infuriated Hitler with his partisan policies...
...Our most realistic politics must retain a few drops of prophetic passion...
...The real nightmare is not life in a right-wing isolationist country which blithely resists involvement in the war...
...She proceeded to recite what has become a familiar litany: He was more than indifferent to the plight of the refugees: he was criminally callous, or his administration was, which is almost as bad...
...But the shooting has started...
...At the same time Roosevelt had ordered the seizure and harassment of German shipping lying in American ports and sequestered the merchant ships of nations conquered by Hitler, turning them over to the British for use in convoying vital materials of war...
...Under no circumstances could it appear that the U.S...
...1. The classic isolationist statement of this position is by Charles A. Beard...
...Why not let Roosevelt start the war and face a divisive domestic hassle...
...But that treaty only obligated him in the event that Japan was attacked by the United States...
...attacks on German submarines...
...Finally, in this recitation of the landmarks of Roosevelt's undeclared and severely limited war against Hitler, we must consider the extraordinary Atlantic Conference, in late August 1941, when Roosevelt and Churchill met in secret on a boat in the North Atlantic to publicly state war aims and allegedly to begin planning for the post-war world...
...When Roosevelt proposed sending 50 destroyers to Britain, the first great breach of neutrality, the public approved 62 to 38 percent...
...A day later Congress did what most historians agree it never would have done but for that stunning and treacherous provocation...
...The surfacing of overt anti-Semitism may lead to temporary unpleasantness, but that is no reason to hush up...
...A war, at last, on behalf of world Jewry, the same war as that for all mankind...
...His thinking was that Roosevelt wanted Germany defeated, first and foremost, but would be loathe to enter the European conflict if he knew that a Far Eastern war would ensue...
...Elsewhere in the speech he uses no codes, speaking openly of Roosevelt being dominated by "the Jewish element" and of America being ruled by the "Jewish clique...
...Soon Roosevelt had extended the definition of the Western Hemisphere to include Greenland, where among other things weather stations vital to the Allied cause throughout the war were created, and then to Iceland, where an American base was established just 400 miles to the west of Great Britain...
...Both of them were the tools of 'international Jewry.' " In the final analysis, then, the true reason for Hitler's impetuous and self-destructive declaration, the historical bottom line, may actually be the one that Jews are most easily disposed to accept: he was an anti-Semite and in his obsessive hatred of Roosevelt, whom he hated as a symbol of Jewish power, he declared a war on the American people, just as he had declared a war to the death upon the Jewish people...
...So Roosevelt had little cause to fear the accusation that he was plotting to enter a Jewish war...
...Why not, say, the Dutch East Indies, rich in oil, and/or British and French possessions in Southeast Asia...
...Jews are invited to contemplate how they would have felt and what they would have done in an isolationist country when they heard news of the Holocaust and, possibly, of Hitler's survival after a military stalemate and a patched-together truce between the Allied and Axis powers...
...It is important in any assessment of Roosevelt to review the landmarks in this "undeclared war...
...Why did Hitler give the interventionists in America the chance they were looking for by declaring war on the United States on December 11...
...Actually, it is an old isolationist version of the President which a new generation of revisionist historians has lately revived...
...Presidents are not "lovers of the Jews"—but non-lovers are not necessarily haters...
...Bailey and Ryan suggest that Hitler had a "Gotterdammerung complex...
...Certainly there were Americans who favored an American initiative...
...As Hitler saw the moment, they say, "it was better to go down in history as a Nero than a zero...
...It is hearing reasonable arguments based on American self-interest (and wishing they were not so persuasive)—such as the argument, frequently made at the time, that Russia, not Hitler, was the real long-term enemy of the United States and that the course of genuine political wisdom was to allow the Russians and Germans to devastate each other, rather than to help destroy Hitler and enable Russia to reign triumphantly after the war...
...The purpose of our defense is defense...
...Eleven days before Pearl Harbor when Roosevelt told his friend Harry Hopkins that war with Japan was inevitable, Hopkins replied, "too bad we [cannot] strike, the first blow and prevent any surprise...
...mere real-poliiik, whether wielded by American policy makers, domestic Jewish leaders, or Israeli leaders (though here I go beyond my subject) leaves us the exposed plaything of history...
...Roosevelt indicated, said Churchill, that he would "wage war" but "not declare it," becoming "more and more provocative," thereby forcing Hitler to either back down or initiate a showdown...
...And our concern must be not only that the incumbent have the right priorities, but also that he be politically effective...
...He had good reason for his reticence...
...The isolationists feared that Roosevelt made secret concessions to Churchill binding us to fight, but a close scrutiny of their correspondence fails to reveal any secret signaling between the two friends...
...he could not have wished a rerun of World War I, when America's late and dramatic entry into the fray had sealed Germany's fate...
...You know he'll return it later...
...As things turned out it was a disastrous move uniting a divided nation in a single stroke and, as things eventually turned out, foiling Japan's ambitions in the area (at least for the time being...
...Why did he opt to solve all of Roosevelt's political problems for him...
...1972...
...He brags that his own National Socialist achievements far eclipse Roosevelt's paltry New Deal achievements and derides Roosevelt's vaunted brain trust as "parasitic...
...By the Fall of 1941 the war was not going as well for Hitler as it had in its triumphant beginnings...
...As the history we have reviewed reveals, when anti-Semitism increases in this country it provokes a reaction from deeper and more fundamental wellsprings of semitism—and from a commitment to fairness, to "doing the right thing...
...But Roosevelt's rejoinder is also instructive: "No, we can't do that, we are a democracy and a peaceful people...
...That is what we wanted...
...The most obvious answer may also be the most fundamental one...
...it is a code word...
...Further, from the point of view of a president sitting astride the sprawling American political system in a complex world, Jewish interests, per se, will always be peripheral...
...the Japanese and Germans were not close, and, at any rate, even if Hitler were obligated by a treaty, he had never been one to scruple at breaking treaties when it suited him...
...Who is sponsoring this bill, asked Ohio Republican Representative Thomas A. Jenkins, who feared that a policy of lending and leasing war materials to Britain, already at war, would eventually lead to America's full participation in the fighting...
...On the one hand, if the polls are any indication of historical inclination, Americans supported the allies by large majorities as indeed they had supported each of Roosevelt's escalations of the "undeclared war" against Hitler...
...There was a third and more realistic option which, indeed, most Americans felt Roosevelt had already taken, and wisely: active, but limited, intervention, and strong moral support for the Allies...
...4. See Charles Herbert Stember...
...And Roosevelt could not but have known the truth, say Bailey and Ryan, when he kept the facts about the naval engagement and about the mission of the American ship from the American public...
...Roosevelt himself was skeptical that the public would support war with Germany: "I seem to be conscious of a still lingering distinction in some quarters of the public between war with Japan and war with Germany," he told Lord Halifax on December 9. Halifax reported this back to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill whose long-time ambition had been to bring the United States into the war against Hitler...
...Two important new works on Roosevelt's foreign policy,3 revising the revisionists, as it were, suggest still another version of the story of Roosevelt and the war, and, to these not at all disinterested eyes, also suggest somewhat different lessons for Jews in these perplexing times...
...Thus, Churchill's report to the British cabinet about Roosevelt's war intentions was verified in every detail...
...On September 3, 1939—the day England declared war on Germany after Hitler invaded Poland— Roosevelt announced in a fireside chat that America would be netural ("I hate war") in political fact, "but not in conscience...
...Until the moment of his fiery declaration, Hitler had been playing egre-giously to the isolationists in America, capitalizing on their fears that Roosevelt was conspiring to bring the nation into open war...
...Beard, of course, was one of the most highly respected historians America has ever produced...
...In the intercourse between nations such relentless verbal bellicosity is itself the occasion for war, Bailey and Ryan argue...
...Lend Lease legislation was favored by 56 percent with 27 percent decidedly against...
...If, in retrospect, Pearl Harbor appears like the indispensable opening wedge in America's slide into the great war, then those of us who are, retrospectively, cheering that prospect along have the Japanese to thank (ironically) more than the President...
...He had fibbed, sometimes downright lied, concealed his intentions, failed to | fully confide his reading of events (in brief, led the country), but in the end his own position turned out to represent that of the majority of his countrymen...
...Hitler's torpedo was directed at every American...
...Roosevelt deserves some thanks, though not obeisance, for it was he, above all others, who made it possible for American Jews to enjoy a brief time when their Jewish souls and their American souls were uncomplicatedly at one...
...I believed her, believe me...
...No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S...
...We must finally venture an answer to that question...
...The President did proceed to "wage war without declaring it," did become "more and more provocative," and did seem to be daring Hitler to initiate a showdown which would lead to war...
...A month later, the American destroyer Kearney was torpedoed and eleven American sailors died, the first American war deaths in the Second World War...
...The significance of the Lend Lease legislation was that it enabled Roosevelt to transfer huge accumulations of needed material while relieving the beleaguered allies of paying cash on delivery...
...In October, after Roosevelt accused Hitler of firing the first shot, 70 percent of the public concurred in a proposition put to them by the pollsters that it was more important to defeat Hitler than to keep out of the war...
...The "Destroyers for Bases" deal, say Bailey and Ryan, was a flagrant transgression of every known canon of neutrality...
...It is life in an America fully involved in a Far Eastern war and half-heartedly involved in a European war, while news of the Holocaust and of a military stalemate in Europe wafts to our shores...
...It doesn't figure: for one thing Hitler didn't strike dramatically, gaining military advantage, as the Japanese had...
...What he did, finally, to bring the United States into the war, he did for his own political reasons and the nation's, not ours...
...The public, for its part, was apparently ambivalent on the subject of the war...
...If ever there was a less propitious time to bring the United States into the war at full tilt, this was it...
...Roosevelt: The Undeclared Naval War (Free Press...
...Judging from that document, it seems that Hitler was declaring war against Roosevelt himself, whom he obviously had come to hate with a burning passion...
...Bailey and Ryan argue powerfully and persuasively that in actuality Roosevelt had been waging an undeclared war against Hitler and that Hitler had sedulously avoided responding to provocation after provocation, much to Roosevelt's dismay...
...After the Kearney incident, when the President dramatically announced that the shooting had started and Germany had started it, Congress took three rancorous weeks to pass his urgent request to use and arm American merchant ships...
...again arid again he publicly denounced the President for trying to set a trap...
...Added together, the usual reasons of state simply do not provide a sufficient sum...
...Entry into World War II (New York...
...However, I believe that there is one very strong reason to accept Churchill's report to the Cabinet as a reliable assessment of the secret promises Roosevelt made at the Atlantic Conference: simply, over the course of the ensuing months, Roosevelt proceeded to do precisely what Churchill predicted that he would...
...Soon after the end of the Conference a stiff note was sent from the United States to Japan demanding that the Japanese withdraw from all occupied territories as a precondition for peace talks...
...he merely declared war, at best freeing his navy to attack American ships...
...using his bully pulpit he had educated the public concerning the moral and historical imperatives of the moment...
...Churchill was avidly awaiting news of an American declaration against Germany...
...A month after his declaration Hitler was to tell his military staff that America was "half Judaized and the other half negrified...
...The revisionists stop short of accusing Roosevelt of arranging the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or even of knowing about it, specifically, but their insinuations are clear: Without Roosevelt at the helm, working in his Machiavellian way, America would not have entered the war...
...Why did Hitler decide to save us from this agony and assure his own defeat at the same time...
...Lord Halifax, who was sending descriptions of Roosevelt's state of mind back to England throughout this period, described the President's quandary perfectly: "his perpetual problem was to steer a course between . . . (1) the wish of 70 percent of Americans to keep out of war...
...According to the report, Roosevelt promised at the Atlantic Conference to openly use American ships to convoy material as far as Iceland...
...Churchill called Lend Lease the "most unsordid act in history...
...Informed about Hitler's final solution to the Jewish question, he kept the news a secret for months and then exacted pledges from compliant Jewish leaders to keep the matter under wraps even longer...
...In letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese would be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone's mind as to who were the aggressors...
...one poll, in October, 1941, found 25 percent of Americans willing to say out loud that Jews were less patriotic than other Americans...
...Jews in the Mind of America (New York...
...3. Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan...
...But Roosevelt soon hedged on that promise, as well, playfully evading the reporters who relentlessly queried him about the matter, and by the Fall of 1941 the President was asking Congress for still further revisions of the neutrality legislation which would permit him to arm American merchant ships—which, he now conceded, were convoying material to the British...
...Roosevelt scored 19 percent in the same poll.4 If anything, the virulent anti-Semitic movements of the time helped the Jews, as historian Geoffrey Smith had pointed out in his important study of the role of the extreme Right in bringing the United States into the war.s The vulgar hate-mon-gering of Father Coughlin and his National Union for Social Justice, of William Dudley Pelley and his Silver Shirts, and of Fritz Kuhn and the German-American Bund, only discredited the isolationist position, says Smith, and persuaded the American public that it stayed aloof from the great European struggle at the risk of promoting fascism at home...
...isolation...
...Did he expect it...
...These reflections suggest another and even more perplexing question: Why did Hitler give the interventionists in America the chance they were looking for by declaring war on the United States, on December 11, when it would seem that his every interest would have been better served by keeping the Americans tied up in the Pacific war, and away from the European one...
...That last phrase, "except in case of attack," it is reported, was added to the platform at Roosevelt's urgent insistence...
...We have sought no shooting war with Hitler...
...Neither the public nor the Congress wanted the war, so this version goes, or at least they didn't think they did...
...As the story changes, we will draw different instruction from it (and I do not deny that the reverse is true as well...
...Bailey and Ryan uncover a report, recently released, which Churchill made to the British Cabinet and which suggests to me that indeed there were such promises—although, as the authors suggest, Churchill had reason to exaggerate the promises he had received...
...1973...
...Early in 1941, British and American military personnel were engaged in the most intimate war planning ("contingency planning," Roosevelt called it...
...The most intelligent revisionist work on the subject is a short book by the well known political scientist Bruce M. Russet...
...By this time American destroyers were actively seeking out German submarines, having been ordered by Roosevelt to "shoot on sight" any aggressive enemy submarines so that America might more adequately "defend...
...Lately, however, I have heard a new Roosevelt story which seems to suggest a different approach...
...That Roosevelt < i an attack (the Japanese cuuc nau been broken), and said so frequently to intimates (though not to the American public) can no longer be seriously disputed...
...Although the terms of the rewritten Neutrality Law did not permit such materials to be carried on American merchant ships, Roosevelt soon had created "neutrality patrols"—a euphemism for the use of American destroyers to protect British merchant shipping—throughout the Western Hemisphere...
...torpedoes were not enough...
...They want Hitler destroyed for a different reason than what most of us have for his destruction...
...and, over and again, his insulting references to the Fiihrer and the Third Reich...
...Presidents are not omnipotent—but non-omnipotent people are not necessarily impotent...
...And elsewhere: "I have said this before and I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars...
...Again, it seems likely that if Hitler had not suddenly declared war on the United States the considerable isolationist bloc in Congress—preferring to fight one war at a time— would have seriously obstructed the efforts of interventionists to declare war against the Fiihrer, if only by threatening protracted and divisive debate over the question...
...the German submarine was, indeed, acting in self-defense, as Hitler had claimed...
...Like the other story about Roosevelt, this one contains assumptions about the nature of things political as they affect Jews: again, there is the recognition that we need powerful semitists on high...
...In truth, the Greer was not merely carrying mail, nor was it innocently escorting British merchant ships...
...Since the campaign in 1940, when the voters craved reassurance that America would not be sucked again into the whirlpool of a European conflict, Roosevelt had reiterated over and again that America would only fight if attacked...
...The promises were merely politic...
...Before the German torpedoes were fired in the direction of the Greer the British bombers had dropped depth charges from the air...
...Furthermore, we now know that at the time of the Japanese attack Roosevelt seriously questioned whether the United States was economically and militarily ready to enter the war...
...Presidential support of Jewish causes will depend on their conformity with American interests as he perceives them—no matter what he says...
...It was History and Hitler that cast FDR in the role of our champion...
...When your neighbor's house catches fire," Roosevelt explained to the American public, "you lend him a garden hose and don't ask for the fifteen dollars...
...and perhaps, too, that there is peril in a policy of publicly cajoling American political leaders into conspicuous gestures of solidarity with our people and our causes...
...It is difficult to imagine how Roosevelt might have engineered American entry into the war, no matter how devoutly he may have wished it (and I think his actions established that he wished it very much indeed...
...The revisionist historians err in describing the options before the country at that time as intervention vs...
...Eventually, American destroyers were actually escorting British shipping across the ocean and patroling decidedly unneutral water, crawling with German U-boats, from the North Atlantic to the Red Sea...
...It has been said, for example, that Hitler was obligated to declare war by a mutual defense treaty he had signed with Japan the year before...
...His] grandiose fantasies were apparently inflamed by this exalted self-image...
...Did he expect the Japanese to attack Russia from the rear and relieve the growing pressure he was feeling on the Eastern front...
...2. Food for these thoughts can be found in Saul S. Friedman...
...19661...
...was about to fight a war for Jewish purposes, else the American public would not wish to fight it and there would be a precipitous increase in anti-Semitism as well...
...as we have seen, his interests were best served by keeping the United States at bay...
...Obviously not, what man wants war...
...And now Roosevelt was conspiring to solve America's economic problems by creating a world war and conniving to insure that America profited from it...
...The Kearney had come to the rescue of Canadian escort vessels which were shooting it out with the Germans...
...His dream of invading England (Operation Sea Lion) had been abandoned after his enemy heroically repulsed the dreadful "blitzkrieg" in 1940...
...In the discussion which follows, I take it as axiomatic that after the beginning of World War II (on September 3, 1941 when Britain and France declared war on Hitler after he invaded Poland), the paramount interest of Jews was in the total destruction of the Nazi regime and hence in America's maximum participation in that project...
...Little of it was returned, of course, as Roosevelt surely expected...
...Already in 1939 Roosevelt was successfully urging a strongly isolationist Congress to rewrite neutrality legislation to which it was fetishistically attached in order to enable the United States to sell strategic materials (to be sure for cash on delivery) exclusively to Hitler's opponents...
...Her implied counsel was to be direct, and unrelenting, and also not to expend much energy in empathizing with the difficulties American leaders must be having with us...
...Asked by Gallup if America should help Britain "at the risk of war," 68 percent said yes...
...It is, rather, life in a liberal country which satisfies its conscience by helping the British with arms and money and weather stations in Greenland and bases in Iceland...
...When Hitler speaks of the "parasites" around Roosevelt, he means, of course, Jews...
...By the time he acted, Roosevelt did not need to act for "the sake of the Jews...
...Did he, like the Japanese, simply decide to strike before he was struck...
...damaged British ships were refitted in American ports...
...1979...
...A week later Roosevelt gave the public a version of what had happened in a radio address in which he likened the Nazis to "rattlesnakes": "The Greer was carrying American mail to Iceland...
...The people most prominently making those accusations could only make him look good...
...Roosevelt and Jewish leaders had already seen clear signs of this ugly spectre during the debate over the lend lease legislation in March, 1941...
...I have been seeking the real genius of this bill...
...The best clues for Hitler's motive in declaring war may be found in his own words and particularly in that remarkable speech he delivered on December 11...
...Franklin Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy (Oxford...
...So, despite the wisecracks of interventionists that their countrymen were willing to fight to the last Briton, Americans were sleeping quite well on the eve of Pearl Harbor...
...the American side of the Ocean," which by Roosevelt's definition now included the waters around Iceland...
...One cannot "expect a State like that to hold together," he said, "a country where everything is built on the dollar...
...Whenever there was a specifically Jewish claim on his policy, he ignored it...
...Decisively and swiftly (with only one dissenting vote, from Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a feminist and pacifist) Congress declared war—but against Japan only, not Germany, despite President Roosevelt's forceful reiteration of a favorite point of his, that Hitler was egging the Japanese on by promising them the Pacific as the spoils of war...
...It is now generally agreed by historians that the Greer was out looking for German submarines with the purpose of radioing their positions to British bombers flying overhead...
...5. Geoffrey S. Smith, To Save a Nation, American Countersubversives and the Coming of World War II (New York...
...Nor does an analysis of domestic anti-Semitism at the time alter the judgment that the public was almost entirely sympathetic to the anti-Hitler cause...
...news of the parlays was kept from the American public...
...we are safe only in the hands of powerful leaders whom we can trust and who are also visible, front and center, semitists...
...The margin of victory was the closest ever for one of Roosevelt's just-short-of-war measures...
...He could make 1941 the year in which he proclaimed war to the death with the two archenemies of human survival: international Communism . . . and international finance capitalism (the United States...
...What would the world have been like for American Jews if not for Pearl Harbor and—more to the point—if not for Hitler's declaration of war...
...And Roosevelt cleverly told them what they wanted to hear...
...The prospects of the loss of lives and loss of property and the bankruptcy of the nation do not deter this group...
...Churchill had the impression, he reported, that Roosevelt was "determined...
...The Fiihrer compares his own impoverished background with Roosevelt's wealth, his own military service in the First World War with Roosevelt's cushy desk job...
...It is growing frustration and anger by American Jewish leaders and Jewish citizens and growing impatience with their tantrums by the general public...
...Again Roosevelt's radio talk disguised the events and he seemed to be urging the public to see in them a pretext for war: "We have wished to avoid shooting...
...And Hitler seemed to know it...
...And History has recorded who fired the first shot...
...As late as 1945, with the war coming triumphantly to a close, 79 percent were telling curious pollsters that until Pearl Harbor Roosevelt should have been trying to keep us out of the conflict...
...Bailey and Ryan argue that if the Japanese had avoided a direct confrontation with American forces and moved only for the needed raw materials and fuel, simply ignoring or deflecting Roosevelt's belligerent demands for total withdrawal, they could very well have kept the U.S...
...The United States entered World War II as a full and fighting participant only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941...
...Roosevelt had little cause to fear the accusation that he was plotting to enter a Jewish war...
...And it was that phrase which proved the operative one...
...that there may be dangers in forcing a public showdown on every issue of Jewish concern as if all such issues were equal in importance...
...And yet, Hitler still refused to nibble at the bait Roosevelt seemed to be offering him...
...et al...
...There are powerful influences in the United States of America that would not stop in their determination to involve us in this war, regardless of how dire the consequences migM be...
...It is not clear whether Roosevelt actually told his friends among the Jewish leadership, Rabbi Stephen Wise in particular, to keep a low profile, or whether they sensed the necessities of the moment without being told.2 In either case, according to this theory, Roosevelt's apparent indifference to the refugees, and, indeed, the cautious approach to the refugee problem of many Jewish leaders at the time, can be explained by their desire to minimize anti-Semitism and keep their eye on the big prize: America's full and undistracted commitment to defeating Hitler, totally and unconditionally...
Vol. 5 • December 1979 • No. 1
