Carter and the Jews IV. The Mantle and the Cape

...Roosevelt-like all Democratic Presidents after him save Carter-was a "coalition" President, bringing together farmers, labor, blacks, Jews, all the big-city strains North and South Roosevelt did all this easily, with that jaunty upward jut of his chin Truman did it Kennedy, beating down anti-Catholic bigotry, did it Johnson did it, until he stumbled over Vietnam But Carter has, by and large, been huddling with fellow-Georgians-learning, learning Perhaps he is learning about coalition politics, perhaps he has learned enough about it to reject it He has been learning now for three-and-a-half years The Jews have been trying to learn his mind along with him, but he is always quicker He is quick at learning and quick at cajoling When he cajoles ,it seems like compromise, but it is not He is a man of certain convictions, and he does not compromise...

...The Mantle and the Cape Camp David He is good for the Jews The UN vote He is bad for the Jews And so he has been the best, and he has been the worst He has presided over the very peace that seemed a chimera-impossible, mythic, heroic, and he presides over the very uneasiness that seems unshakable-yet tremulous and watchful He is open and he is masked He is seen as decent, compassionate, loyal, humane, straightforward, benignly uxorious, rationally tentative, intelligent, a driving reader, and he is suspected of being untrustworthy, duplicitous, perilously stubborn and in league with the perilous, obtuse, ill-at-ease, naive, unschooled in his own best opportunities-his brother's brother, in fact...

...He is not the first President to be both good and bad, to break and perplex the hearts of his Jewish constituency Roosevelt was worshipped for delivering social reforms and Depression hope, and Roosevelt did what no other President before him had dared to do-appointed Jews, in marvelous brainy numbers, to high-level Washington posts But in the end I heard my father say "He sold the Jews under his cape " In the end he was understood to have been in conspiracy with the Jew-hating State Department, and with the vomit of the Holocaust, by keeping out refugee Jews from every haven and cranny He kept them out of America and he kept them out of Palestine He refused to bomb the tracks that led to Auschwitz He promised the King of Arabia that no survivors would reach the Holy Land In the shadow of that history, the Jews who once loved Roosevelt no longer love his memory Roosevelt once wore the mantle of Jewish trust Jews, even naive and hopeful American Jews, are learning to look under the cape...