FDR at the Helm
Bernstein, Barton J.
BOOKS FDR at the Helm Roosevelt. The Soldier of Freedom, 1940-1945, by James MacGregor Burns. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 722 pp. $10. Reviewed by Barton J. Bernstein TVTearly a generation has...
...Yet it founders on formidable obstacles and is often flawed by elliptical analyses, by curious imbalances, by troubling ambiguities, and by unanswered questions...
...Not only are the sources voluminous, but often there are no monographic studies to guide the scholar...
...Why did it evoke little comment and no opposition from Stalin...
...THE REVIEWERS BARTON J. BERNSTEIN, associate professor of history at Stanford, is on leave for a year at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois...
...Roosevelt, Burns tells us, expected a "replica" of his strategy in the Atlantic, "a slow stepping-up of naval action in the southern seas, with Tokyo bearing the responsibility for escalation...
...The task is to paint history on a broad canvas: Roosevelt guiding America at home and abroad...
...His is a bold, ambitious enterprise which commands respect for its courage, its energy, and its intelligence...
...Burns finds that Roosevelt did delay until November, but he decided to follow Winston Churchill's counsel of "peace with firmness" and Secretary of State Cordell Hull's "insistence on adherence to principles," rather than Secretary of War Henry Stimson's and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox's "urgent advice to stall...
...Departing from the limited architecture of his "political biography" of the New Deal Roosevelt (The Lion and the Fox), Burns has cast the sequel in a larger framework and takes on yet an additional assignment: a survey of the alterations in American society, including the migrations of blacks and whites, the emergence of a new culture, and the creation of war industries...
...He painted a picture of an innocent American mail ship wantonly attacked by the Germans...
...He wrote "The Greek Stones Speak" and "The Mute Stones Speak...
...It is too simple to view Roosevelt, as Burns does, as a "realist and idealist" divided against himself...
...For Roosevelt and Burns, Hitler was bent on world domination, and America was in danger...
...Recall, to cite a few, the Atlantic Charter, the "undeclared naval war" in the North Atlantic, Pearl Harbor, the delayed second front in Europe, Teheran, and Yalta...
...Was America an imperialist power protecting its colonial and economic interests...
...Perhaps he also hoped to use the atomic bomb for a similar purpose...
...That enterprise is more formidable...
...At Yalta many of the troubling issues briefly came to a head: Poland, Eastern Europe, and Germany...
...Why didn't he delay and string along the Japanese...
...By July, 1941, when Roosevelt decided that the American Navy would replace the British in Iceland, he was pushing events "in a direction that would deepen the Cold War with Hitler in the Atlantic and produce a crisis...
...Burns approvingly presents Roosevelt and Burns, Hitler was bent be pushed into war" by Hitler...
...Reviewed by Barton J. Bernstein TVTearly a generation has passed ^ since the nation, in the twilight of war, mourned the death of its great leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...The opportunity was lost, and the Grand Alliance by 1943 foundered on "broken promises and crushed expectations...
...He first appeared in The Progressive in 1964 with the article, "Nightmare in Mississippi...
...This analysis raises troubling questions...
...Burns assumes correctly that Soviet policy toward the West was still in flux in 1942 and 1943, susceptible to concord, or renewed discord, with the West...
...Or coal strikes, and race riots in Detroit and Harlem...
...Curiously, Burns omits the dispute at Yalta over Germany and ignores the disagreement on the amount of German reparations...
...Colonialism was preferable to Communism, and right-wing dictatorship to left-wing revolution, but ultimately the goal was a particular organization of the world—without colonialism or dictatorship—in which America could flourish...
...This time it is Roosevelt, not as Machiavelli's lion at times and fox at other times, but as "a Soldier of Faith, battling . . . for an ideology of peace and freedom, and a Prince of the State, protecting the interests of his nation in a tumultuous and impious world...
...The period is more tumultuous, the problems more difficult, the important issues and events more complicated and numerous...
...He implies that, had there been a second front when promised, Stalin might have yielded in his hostility to the Polish exile government in London and compromise might have been possible...
...He wanted to avoid war with Japan because...
...That may explain what Burns does not adequately analyze: why Roosevelt continued to conceal from the Russians the fact of research on the atomic bomb...
...CATHARINE HUGHES is a free lance writer...
...The United States, the President realized, could not long survive if Britain fell to the Reich, and so he awaited adequate provocation...
...A Communist-dominated Poland with a pretext of free elections...
...Why did Roosevelt err and stumble into war with Japan...
...Yet Roosevelt never discussed the subject with Stalin...
...He miscalculated...
...Perhaps the American leader was holding it back as a later bargaining card to lure the Soviets out of Eastern Europe...
...In September, when a German submarine fired on the American destroyer Greer, which was broadcasting the U-boat's position to a British plane, the President seized the occasion to justify a previously unannounced policy: German ships in that part of the North Atlantic would be shot on sight...
...The President had also transformed the cold war in the Atlantic into a hot war...
...He admits that the agreement on Poland was loose, that "Roosevelt was under no illusion about Soviet plans for Poland," that he considered Poland "a bellwether of Communist ambitions in eastern Europe," that Roosevelt had no choice but to accede to Soviet power, but leaves unclear what FDR expected in Poland...
...Three or six months later, when the Pacific outposts were strengthened, Roosevelt might have sought the "back door," Burns acknowledges...
...For the war-ravaged Soviet Union, funds for reconstruction could come from only two sources: German reparations or American financial aid...
...Roosevelt, as Burns skillfully shows, manipulated events and information to dramatize the Nazi challenge and to counter the isolationist sentiment...
...He wrote "Students, Politics and Higher Education" and co-edited "Students in Revolt...
...Until recently, however, none ventured beyond the New Deal to examine closely Roosevelt and his wartime administration...
...Burns, though critical of Roosevelt in places, still seems to believe that Roosevelt was the best America had, perhaps the best she could produce for the time...
...Why was the Pacific so important to Roosevelt...
...He expected the Japanese to move into the Dutch East Indies, or Thailand, or maybe the Philippines, but not Hawaii...
...He analyzes, among other problems, the transformation of the Presidency and the expansion of the bureaucracy ("the foundation of modern Presidential government"), relations with a prickly Congress, the maneuvering leading to Pearl Harbor, operations of the Grand Alliance, and the origins of the Cold War...
...Later on," Burns notes, "an odd notion would arise that the President, denied his direct war with Hitler, finally gained it through the 'back door' of conflict with the Japanese...
...This is the challenge that James MacGregor Burns, distinguished political scientist at Williams College, has ably accepted in this sweeping, impressive book, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 1940-1945...
...It is here that Burns is most disappointing: his treatment is brief, elliptical, ambiguous...
...Like some "revisionists," Burns finds the "decisive turn" in the Anglo-American two-year delay of the second front in Europe which Roosevelt had promised in 1942...
...Perhaps Churchill and Stalin, as well as Roosevelt, recognized that it was ineffectual—a sop to American public opinion...
...He edited "Towards a Dissenting Past" and "Politics & Policies of the Truman Administration...
...In mid-November, Roosevelt prepared his own compromise but abandoned it when he learned that the Japanese were moving troops toward Formosa...
...While locating the roots of postwar hostility deep in Russian and American history, Burns finds that "the most determining single factor was the gap between promise and reality that widened steadily" in 1942 and 1943...
...Once more, as in The Lion and the Fox, Burns does not solve the persisting "riddle" of Roosevelt but again takes refuge in a theory of ambivalence...
...With the issue of reparations postponed, the loan requested by the Soviet Union took on even greater significance...
...The origins of the Cold War constitutes one of the major themes of this volume...
...Roosevelt, as Burns notes, disregarded that there was no evidence that the Germans knew the ship was American and carefully omitted any reference to the Greer's actual activities...
...It is an uneasy final judgment that may betray the author's own ambivalence about the recent past and the liberal tradition...
...He studies Roosevelt as a politician, a national leader, and a commander-in-chief...
...And if the agreement on Poland was "a bellwether" for Eastern Europe, then what did the Declaration on Liberated Europe, with its rhetoric about free elections, mean...
...What did it mean to save China from Japan and for Chiang, or Indonesia for the Dutch, or Indochina for the French...
...This is the opposite of what he was trying to do...
...he feared a two-front war, and American strategy was definitely set on fighting Hitler first...
...A democratic Poland under Soviet influence...
...In the end, then, he finds reason for pride in the President who led America with courage, intelligence, and skill, and who, he admits, contributed significantly to the Cold War and left American society unprepared to deal with racial hostility and urban disorder...
...PHILIP G. ALTBACH is associate professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin...
...These are some of the profoundly important questions of foreign policy, of the American world-view, from which Burns shrinks...
...This delay meant the sacrifice of Russian lives and aroused renewed Russian fears of capitalist encirclement and of Western hostility...
...The conduct of foreign policy and of war, rightly, is the main subject of this study...
...In the decades since then, some of America's outstanding liberal scholars of politics have written full-scale studies of Roosevelt and his New Deal...
...PETER WEISS is a practicing psychologist in Madison, Wisconsin...
...There were the promises and hopes, the idealism of common goals, but beneath it all statesmen "were pursuing Realpolitik and national interest...
...In foreign policy, these need not be polar oppo-sites, for there are ways of integrating them in terms of "ideology": many means may be used to create the world of peace and prosperity, of democracy and economic multilateralism, upon which American democracy and prosperity were believed to depend...
...Instead, he let Hull draw up proposals representing Washington's most stringent demands, which the Japanese would not accept...
...PAUL MacKEN-DRICK is professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin...
...JOSEPH E. ILLICK is associate professor of history at San Francisco State College...
Vol. 34 • December 1970 • No. 12
