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I’ve got to disagree with your selection of books (a few of which can be read at http://www.rooseveltmyth.com/), as well as that of John Flynn by Freekeys. Each one of them follows Charles Beard, the far-left economic historian, in blaming the United States for responding to Pearl Harbor by making the case that the U.S. was not neutral prior to being attacked. Jim Powell’s book also suffers when it leaves economics to tackle foreign policy, as do all of his books on presidents when they leave the field of economics.

FDR was an economic populist whose administration was riddled with, if not communists, fellow travelers. Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace-— the list goes on and on of those who may have been working for the USSR and, in any case, acted as though they did. He prolonged the Great Depression sparked by Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff though his tightening of the money supply at exactly the wrong time. FDR tried to become "a king", as my grandfather told me, when he tried to pack the court. A soldier who'd fought under Patton, he, like Ronald Reagan, appreciated the hope and determination FDR conveyed during the war-— but he never could forgive Roosevelt for that. Was FDR an economic ignoramus, at best?

Of course.

But it is also true that FDR’s strength and conviction carried this nation through the time that the United States needed it the most and the world most needed the United States. One only need think of President Carter's time in office to see the deadly harm the lack of those qualities in a chief executive can do, and how fatal that lack would have been during the war. And for all her inane leftism, Eleanor Roosevelt opened the White House to black pioneers of education like Mary McLeod-Bethune-— something that may seem small, but helped set the Democratic Party on the road to dominating the the black vote because in politics, symbolism has substance and that one wasn’t small at the time.

Without U.S. aid to Russia and England, those nations would have been over-run by Hitler, as Oliver North related in describing the dangers the Merchant Marines went through on “War Stories” the other day.

farmer18th asks, “who ever had reverence for FDR?”

Well, Ronald Reagan, for one--- and that should tell us something.

Beard actually turned on Roosevelt over the US entry to WWII.

Beard was an isolationist (from the Left) who thought that Roosevelt engineered Pearl Harbor. Beard saw the 1940 election as a repeat of 1916, when Wilson ran on an isolationist platform but did everything possible to get the US into the European war. FDR was right there.

Ronnie can be forgiven his sins, because he borrowed the optimism of FDR and sh%t-canned the old Bolshevik’s policies.