Free Republic

The FDR bible used by Mayor Bill de Blasio for his swearing in vanished after the New Year’s Day ceremony, sparking a panicked, hours-long search for the historic tome. “They had the whole detail looking through blankets,’’ a police source said of the scramble by at least 50 NYPD detectives and city officials to find the Bible, which was given to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a gift at his first inauguration in March 1933. Former President Bill Clinton performed the ceremony Wednesday as de Blasio laid his hand on the bible.

The First Lady, who was born on October 11, 1884, became a subject of controversy when people suspected she was romantically involved with journalist Lorena “Hick” Hickok. While the two never publicly addressed their relationship, their letters did nothing to dispel rumors. 1. March 5, 1933: Eleanor to Hick, on the first evening after FDR’s inauguration Hick my dearest— I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. you have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without...

On Sunday, a stunned audience sat in silence as Doris Kearns Goodwin turned the keynote address at the opening ceremony for the 150th anniverary of the Battle of Gettysburg into a political lecture focusing on women's and gay rights. Missing from much of her keynote: Gettysburg. Self-centered, insular, and oblivious to the occasion, the historian who was infamously caught plagiarizing merely recycled much of what she has said before about herself in previous speeches. And her rambling, self-promoting, and borderline inappropriate lecture touched upon nearly everything except for the heroic sacrifices made on that battlefield. In so doing, she desecrated...

It’s difficult to imagine that he was surprised by the outcome. But the White House response that ensued after Author and Journalist Bob Woodward dared to question and criticize the President should be an eye-opener to the world. And the fact that America’s beltway media culture has essentially “sided” with the President and seems quite comfortable with the White House hostility is a very telling sign. Consider the relationship between the presidency and the press over the course of American history. Believe it or not, the White House has been home to lots of outlandish and at times illegal...

Mickey Kaus writes: Do you sense there is some large mass of dark matter, an unseen Scandal Star, the gravitational pull of which is warping the coverage of what seems, on the surface, a pretty dull presidential race? I do. So does Ron Rosenbaum. I thought the Dark Star was the Edwards affair allegation. But Rosenbaum says "everyone in the elite Mainstream media" knows about another juicy scandal that the LAT is supposedly sitting on. I guess this is proof that I’m not in the elite, because I don’t know what he’s talking about. … My vestigial Limbaugh gland tells...

Cynthia Nixon is trying a different kind of sex in the city, the Daily News has learned. For almost 10 months now, the Emmy-winning actress has been dating another woman, sources say. Back in June of 2003, Nixon split with Danny Mozes, the father of her two children. Last January, according to friends, she began a lesbian relationship. Right now, Nixon, 38, does not want to be as outspoken as Rosie O'Donnell, the sources say. But Nixon did not flinch when we asked her yesterday whether she is involved with another woman. Speaking exclusively with the Daily News, she said,...

Freepers, I am looking for a quotation that I was SURE was from Churchill to FDR, only I can't find it anywhere. It went something like this (referring to Britain's situation in 1940): "You will sell us (or give us, don't know which) what we need as long as we can pay for it, and when we can no longer pay for it, you will give it to us anyway." I thought it was in Paul Johnson's book "Modern Times," but it isn't. Anyone know of this?

Editor's Note (1999): In his new book, A Republic, Not an Empire, Patrick Buchanan claims that as of mid-1940 Hitler "was driven by a traditional German policy of Drang nach Osten, the drive to the East." He did not want war with the West, insists Buchanan. (Pp. 268-69.) Why then did Hitler, following Pearl Harbor, declare war on the United States? Buchanan insists this was the irrational act of a madman. In fact, insists Gerhard Weinberg, it was consistent with an objective Hitler had long nourished. It had been an assumption of Hitler's since the 1920s that Germany would at...

On Saturday, Nov. 16, the United States marks a milestone: the 80th anniversary of when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union and "normalized" U.S.-USSR relations. It is a day that should live in infamy. But it's a day that hardly anyone has ever heard of. I certainly hadn't before researching my book, "American Betrayal." As I studied the event, however, it became clear that it was on this day 80 years ago that what I call "American betrayal" began. It is the date on which the U.S. government institutionally learned to lie. After the Bolsheviks seized dictatorial powers...

CBS News reports that the Obama Administration was warned before al-Qaeda attacked the Consulate in Benghazi. Al-Qaeda had posted its three top targets in Libya on its website. These targets were the Red Cross, the British, and then the Americans in Benghazi. By July of 2012 the first two targets had already been hit. In the summer of 2012, Lieutenant Colonel Andy Wood, one of the top American security officials in Libya, warned both Ambassador Stevens and the State Department that Benghazi would be next. The CBS revelations were dismissed as “Monday morning quarterbacking” by Secretary of State John Kerry....

BETRAYAL OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY By Alfred E. (Al) Smith [Alfred E. Smith, Democratic governor of New York during four terms, became the Democratic candidate for President in 1928 but lost to Herbert Hoover. In 1932 he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for President, but by 1936 he was so shocked and alarmed by what he saw happening that he decided to warn his Party. Because of the popularity of President Roosevelt this step was considered by some to be virtual treason. Nevertheless, on January 25, 1936, Alfred F. Smith gave the following speech in Washington, D.C., to warn the American ...

India’s temples are resisting divulging their gold holdings - perhaps nearly half the amount held in Fort Knox - amid mistrust of the motives of authorities who are trying to cut a hefty import bill that is hurting the economy. The central bank, which has already taken steps that have slowed to a trickle the incoming supplies that have exacerbated India’s current account deficit, has sent letters to some of the country’s richest temples asking for details of their gold. It says the inquiries are simply data collection, but Hindu groups are up in arms. “The gold stored in temples...

Here's my response to Commander Zer0's verbal assault on reason that took place last night. I realize that our Dear Leader's plans to provide al-Qaeda air cover may not materialize, but keep this in mind: We have a failing dictator who's willing to start world War III to distract the country from his varied scandals and Zimbabwe-like economy. Anything is still possible with this pile of human debris in the White House. Without further ado: *** For the last couple of days, we've been exposed to an endless stream of war propaganda in support of Chairman Obama's Syrian adventure. Without...

The 50 year anniversary of Martin Luther King's march on Washington is causing a lot of people in my generation to reminisce. In doing so, it is hard not to be struck by two puzzling facts: (a) the fall of racial barriers to success almost everywhere and (b) the lack of economic progress in the black community as a whole, relative to whites. On the one hand, it would seem that a black in America can achieve almost anything, even being elected president of the United States. On the other hand, if we compare the economic condition of blacks and...

My parents were New Deal Democrats, but I grew up at a time and in a place when Republicans were extraordinarily rare. I’ve often said I never actually met a Republican until I went to college and, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t until my junior year. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-30s that I became an ex-Democrat, and so I completely understand the quasi-religious reverence that Democrats have for FDR, Harry Truman and JFK. What puzzles me nowadays is that some conservatives seem to share that attitude. National Review has published a...

This Fall, Harvard University Press will release The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, by the 35-year-old historian Ben Urwand. Alexander Kafka previewed the book in The Chronicle Review. “Urwand found that Nazi officials considered some American films ideologically useful—among them Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Our Daily Bread (1934), and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)—and that the studios expressly marketed certain titles in that vein,” Kafka writes. “ For instance, Gabriel Over the White House, an American fascist fantasia about a fed-up, divinely inspired president dissolving a chaotic Congress and whipping the...

According to Soviet intelligence reports, we now know that one of FDR’s top officials, the Treasury Department’s Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet agent, who, among many other deceptions, subverted relations between the US and Japan by inserting “ultimatum” language into the cable flow that actually spurred the Japanese attack. This was language written in Moscow, passed to White by a Soviet handler in Washington, D.C., and dropped into a State Department communiqué sent to Japan. This brilliantly executed influence operation doesn’t live in infamy – at least not yet. ... “A continuous stream of fighter and pursuit planes is...

Little known is it that FDR is not the first president to have relocation camps, and Japanese Americans were not the original target. Nearly 30 years prior to World War two, German Americans were the targets and the most interesting thing is that very little is written about this. History has been virtually expunged of this topic. Historians do not write about it, so history books don't contain it, and even from various news journals at the time it was largely unreported. When it was reported, some of the blurbs on it were small and not noteworthy. The first American...

INDIANAPOLIS — A professor at an Indiana college says he has found film footage showing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt being pushed in his wheelchair, depicting a secret that was hidden from the public until after his death. Ray Begovich, a journalism professor at Franklin College south of Indianapolis, said Tuesday he found the eight-second clip while conducting unrelated research in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The National Archives and the FDR Presidential Museum and Library couldn’t say for certain if other such footage exists but both said it is at least rare.

American POWS sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area. The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to...