As to the particulars;
Is this the Churchill who earlier made a hellish bargain with Stalin involving Greece?
A grand victory march to the Baltics? You're the master strategist are you?
U.S. citizens chomping at the bit to fight on and free the Baltics because many of them hailed from there? What percentage of Americans are of Baltic ancestry? I can tell you that noone I knew felt that way.
Your granparents felt betrayed? Well, my parents didn't even though we lost relatives in the concentration camps that Roosevelt failed to liberate earlier. He did the best he could...and that was damned good.
Please not those old saws about Roosevelt and the Left. Roosevelt had plenty of anti-semites and outright German sympathizers yelling in his ear as well. The man was no fool. He knew who the Communists were, who the Nazis were, where people stood. He was born in the 1880 to a political family. He remembered WWI and the Revolutions which followed. He was President while the Communists and Nazis fought it out on the streets of Europe. He was noone's dupe . He did what he did because he believed it was the best that could be done. As a politician he had no equal and as a President his record will stand with anyone's.
It has been the business of Roosevelt democrats to rewrite history for the past 60 years.
The role of Hiss is central to understanding Roosevelt's attitude toward Stalin. He, Roosevelt, never acknowledged Stalin's reign of terror and believed that he was able to influence Stalin. He was completely deluded.
The Baltics were open to an immediate tour following the fall of Berlin. Russia was not about to engage in open warfare with her allies, particularly since that would have meant a civil war in each of those countries. The Baltics were waiting for a liberation that never came. Instead of membership in a European alliance they felt the heel of Russian opression. It took another 50 years and a man of profound courage to right this wrong.
It was, after all, the Roosevelt democrats in the 80's who vigorously opposed Reagan's hard line toward Russia. Once this position was made firm and clear, that despotic government fell. It could have been done at any time prior to then. There was never the moral courage or the clarity of understanding to make it happen.
Play it any way you like. the facts stand on their own. Entrance into the war in the 30's was not an unpopular cause in the US. Roosevelt was too busy trying to create a socialist state here to pay any heed to the clouds of war looming over the world. We entered the war when it became impossible to avoid, not when it was the moral and right thing to do to save tens of millions of lives.
Cowardice prolonged our entry into the war and cowardice withdrew us before the war was won. All in the name of governmental domination of society. The same pathological commitment to socialism continues unabated today.
The strength of our nation lies in the freedom of its people not the power of its government. A free people seek freedom around the world and will bleed and die for that freedom. Freedom was the cause on the lips of every American soldier who fought in WWII. It is the same battle cry today that resonates in the Baltics and the Mid East and wherever people are opressed by their government, even here in our homeland.
Larry, here's where I'm calling you a fraud.
Bush wasn't assailing Roosevelt's record wholesale but merely remarking on what MANY people refer to as a mistake -- and something you concede as a "possible mistake"
That being said, I don't fault Roosevelt for this particular decision, nor do I praise him for it. However, I do note that there is room for fair criticism of it. Furthermore, I note that to throw a hissy (as you have) when such criticism is made is absurd.
What is it that Bush is most criticized for? Stating that 'Yalta followed in the "unjust tradition" of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the secret nonaggression deal between the Nazis and Soviets in 1939, and the British appeasement of Hitler in the 1938 Munich pact.'
Here's a clue. Bush is 10000000000% right. What was done to the Baltics was unjust whether or not it was done for political expediency, i.e., "to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability".