Posted on 03/12/2013 4:37:19 PM PDT by presidio9
On April 12, 1945, my grandfather approached me as I played outside and asked where my mother was. He looked stricken, and so I quickly followed him inside and heard him say words that made my mother burst into tears: President Roosevelt had died. My mother’s grief and panic were so palpable — her brother was fighting in the Pacific, her brother-in-law was fighting in Europe — that it scared me. In our house, FDR was not merely the President. He was a god.
He is a god no more. His New Deal is no longer solely credited with ending the Depression — World War II did that — and the war in Europe was not won, as we all once thought, primarily by the United States but more so by the Soviet Union.
Yet these to my mind are trifles compared to the criticism that Roosevelt was passive in the face of the Holocaust. It’s not that he did nothing, it’s rather that he did nothing much.
This accusation of immense moral failure is now being addressed by a new book, “FDR and the Jews,” by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman. It sets out to find a middle ground and instead makes things worse.
It is a portrait of a President who, in the authors’ own words, “did not forthrightly inform the American people of Hitler’s grisly ‘Final Solution’ or respond decisively to his crimes.” This is a Roosevelt who almost always had a more pressing political concern and who stayed mum while a bill to allow 20,000 Jewish children into the U. S. died in Congress.
Roosevelt inattentively also permitted a cabal of heartless anti-Semites in the State Department to control the country’s visa policies. Desperate Jews, fleeing from the Nazis,
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
And yet they still faithfully vote Democratic.
Cohen is correct that Roosevelt could have done a lot more to help the Jews, but then he adds that even Roosevelt “saving” the free-enterprise system does not help his moral standing. Roosevelt saved the free-enterprise system!!!??? He almost destroyed it. He had plenty of people in his admin who admired fascism and the way Mussolini did things. The best think Roosevelt did was leave WWII to the admirals and the generals. Even then he handed over eastern Europe to Stalin. Roosevelt fails on many counts.
And still deify FDR.
And let’s not forget trying to pad the Supreme Court by increasing the number of Justices.
My grandfather, an attorney and strong opponant of FDR’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court, cheered that “the SOB is dead”.
Is this part of that commie thing where they pull down their own heroes in order to make room for their new vaunted leader?
So did my grandpa. He was the only person in the family who would admit to being a Republican during FDR's reign.
Both my parents thought he was the greatest. When I was a young teen I found out differently, but I learned that it was useless to try to tell them any differently.
This is Richard Cohen we are talking about. He thinks it gives him street cred to occasionally take positions guaranteed to infuriate his fellow liberals.
Amongst the nonsense of the FDR era, the belief that WWII ended the Depression stands out as particularly nonsensical. It did end unemployment, we can admit that -- forcing 9 million young men into military service will effectively kill unemployment [and a lot of young men, too].
But it did not end the Depression. Americans lived very frugally during the War years. There were very few consumer goods that FDR's government even allowed to be made.
What ended the Depression was FDR's death, itself. Once free of his influence, a newly-elected Republican Congress in 1946 moved quickly to remove most of the New Deal's economy-damaging policies.
Taxes were slashed, business-killing regulations were eliminated, and labor-laws were relaxed. Oh, did I say that taxes were slashed? A boom quickly followed.
But the old chestnut that the War ended the Depression is still believed fiercely -- even among conservatives who should know better. The FDR myth is beginning to shatter. But, damn, it's been 75 years and it still manages to live on with some.
I remember my grandfather cussing FDR. He hated him. One of the happiest days of his life was when FDR died. He hoped then, that the war would be over sooner.
Good to see Cohen starting to think a bit clearly in his older age, rather than just being a mouthpiece for Democrats.
In fact, a couple of years ago, our favorite journalist here, Helen Thomas (an Arab, by the way) said that the Jews in Israel should just “go home”, wherever that was. Mr. Cohen cut her a new one by pointing out that thousands of Jews had been murdered in Poland WELL AFTER World War 2 was concluded...something that I never heard of and something that seems to defy logic.
In any case, I know it’s off-topic, but Mr. Cohen should also look at what happened to AMERICANS that were drawn to (i.e., tricked into going to) Stalin’s Russia, only to later be sent to death camps there (all prior to World War 2). Prior to being rounded up, the AMERICANS pleaded for help from the US Embassy in Moscow, only to be told (likely on Roosevelt’s orders) that they couldn’t prove they were AMERICANS (which was the case, as the Soviets seized their passports upon entry). But it really isn’t that hard to differentiate an American from a Russian - but they wouldn’t help, and tens of thousands of Americans died. There are books on that.
Having read most of what comes out of Cohen's ass keyboard for the past 15 years I can assure you that his unstated implication is that history will revisit the current deification of Ronald Reagan.
I'm glad Cohen stands up for Jews, but he reminds me a little of Joe Lieberman in the sense that he only seems to get it right when Jews are on the short end.
Bingo! We have a winner. And our newly re-elected President is intent on repeating most of Roosevelt's insane ideas.
Two things: First of all, the antisemitism of the Roosevelts should be compared to the bitter racism of Woodrow Wilson, who brought segregation to Washington, D.C.
Second, I read in the memoirs of an broadcast journalist that at the time of FDR’s death he was working at a radio station as one of its two employees, playing music for the station. Working by himself that day, he got a phone call from the other employee telling him of FDR’s death and that he should interrupt the music to give an announcement.
After making the announcement, he went back to playing music, not realizing that the song he was playing was, “I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xb7kIxonPE
i have to disagree with the statement that the soviets won WW2 instead of the US.
YES they carried the battle to the germans but they did it in our equipment while eating our food and firing our bullets
Harry Dexter White, a senior official in the Roosevelt Administration, appeared to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Numerous witnesses, including Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, had implicated White in involvement with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings were another Pearl Harbor exposing the political vulnerability of the United States to Communist infiltration.
Harry Dexter White, a Harvard PhD and Assistant Treasury Secretary, had played a major role in creating the World Bank and the IMF. Shortly after his testimony, in which he denied all Communist activities, White suffered a heart attack. A few days later he died at his farm after supposedly overdosing on a heart medication that has also at times been used as a poison. Whether that overdose was an accident, a suicide or a murder remains unknown.
Communist agents like Harry Dexter White were instrumental in preventing the United States from becoming aware of that third threat, the Soviet Union. And the willingness of leading government officials to blind their societies to that third threat foreshadowed the troubles with Islam that we face today.
The one thing they had was bodies.
Wiki claims 26 mil (civilian and military) deaths.
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