Weak defense

Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman are firmly in the apologist camp in their justification of FDR’s actions

By MECHAEL MAOZ
WWII Roosevelt Signing Declaration of War521 (photo credit: US Library of Congress)
WWII Roosevelt Signing Declaration of War521
(photo credit: US Library of Congress)
Franklin D. Roosevelt was the “perfect politician,” according to H.L. Mencken. This was clearly a compliment of the backhanded sort, for Roosevelt was utterly “without conscience,” Mencken continued.
This verdict, although an old one from 1946, is increasingly troubling for Jews. The Jewish reverence for FDR has a long tradition, to be sure. To many Jews from a certain era, Roosevelt was a president of Mosaic moral stature. His domestic policies aligned nicely with Jewish liberal sympathies. More importantly, of course, he fought the good fight against the Nazis.
And yet the waters soon muddied.
Could FDR have done more to save the Jews during the build-up and then fullon conflagration of the Holocaust? The fate of 254 Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis turned away from US shores seemed like damning evidence. And, without trying to sound sardonic, no less an authority on bombing targets than George W. Bush declared that the US should have bombed Auschwitz when it had the chance.
The historical reckoning of Roosevelt continues with Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman’s FDR and the Jews. The book is presented as serene in its neutrality, but it’s tough to affect this pose convincingly when half of the business of scholarship is in tearing down saints and the other half is in vigorous counterattacking.
The fact is, the battle between Rooseveltologists has been going on for some time.
The revisionist corner is headed by David Wyman and Rafael Medoff. Breitman, for his part, has trafficked more in the camp of the apologists.
The Breitman and Lichtman position is the weak version of the apologist argument.
It goes something like this: We can’t defend the indefensible, but if you look at the facts in historical context, then relatively speaking, FDR really wasn’t so terrible. He may even have possessed a modicum of moral exceptionalism.
But modicum is a serious downgrade from Mosaic.
The weak defense of FDR is a package deal. We get the standard chestnuts from the strong defense. Roosevelt’s commitment to crushing the enemy was total, no distractions tolerated, one argument goes.
The real culprits were the anti-Semites in the State Department. They smothered massacre reports and didn’t lift a finger to save European Jewry marked for extermination.
On the domestic front, Roosevelt was afraid of isolationists eager to paint him as a pawn of the international Jew.
Just think recurring nightmares of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.
On the plus side, it was under FDR that the War Board was formed – no matter that it was in the late afternoon of the war, January 1944. Nor can we ignore the stellar Jewish names forever linked to FDR: Frankfurter, Baruch, Rosenman and Morgenthau. In fact, Breitman and Lichtman are at their best when they spotlight FDR’s Jewish entourage. Henry Morgenthau, in particular, is painted with deft brush strokes. His pained expression at being petitioned as a Jew into playing Queen Esther is almost visible on the page.
Writing of the pressure put on him by Rep. Hamilton Fish, Morgenthau acknowledged that “he goes after me because I am a Jew. Let’s use plain and simple language. He doesn’t go after me because I am Secretary [of Treasury]; he goes after me because he thinks that I have done something for the Jews because I am a Jew.”
Still, the weak defense cannot rest with the satisfaction that FDR was a moral colossus in a wheelchair. It has to perform some extra heavy lifting, recruiting three basic strategies, not all equal in cleverness.
The first is to fracture his relation with the Jews into four distinct stages, tracked throughout the president’s 12 years in office. Creative opportunities multiply when you break a thing into pieces. But Roosevelt isn’t Ludwig Wittgenstein; his career doesn’t split cleanly into early and late. The FDR that was “a bystander to Nazi persecution” in his first term looks an awful lot like the FDR who refused to meet with Orthodox rabbis in 1943.
The second is to dilute the moral failings of the Auschwitz bombing and MS St.
Louis refugee debacles. Both have been picked clean by scholars. Without new documentary evidence, there is no way to augment FDR’s standing. The solution is simply to add more benchmark events that bind FDR to the Jews. Of course, the add-ons make him seem more heroic regardless of degrees removed. The strongest candidate for newest fateful moment is, oddly enough, the British defeat of Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein in October 1942. Since the US was generous in supplying arms to Britain through its Lend Lease Act, future Jews of Israel owe FDR a debt for preventing the Holocaust from franchising into Palestine.
Finally, the weak defense enjoys easy historical comparisons. FDR supposedly acquits himself well when stacked against other US presidential responses to genocide.
This might be its feeblest platform.
Woodrow Wilson’s non-intervention when Turkey exterminated one and a half million Armenians doesn’t factor in air power. The Allies held overwhelming aerial superiority over Germany by the autumn of 1944. Wilson couldn’t have bombed the Turks into submission.
Jimmy Carter’s inaction in Cambodia is part of a larger theme of an incompetent presidency. Bill Clinton’s delayed response to the massacre of Bosnian Muslims is really a mark of shame on Europe, as it happened in its own backyard. The lack of action on Darfur, I confess, is difficult to justify. But does anyone seriously think FDR would have been more proactive in either Bush’s or Barack Obama’s place? FDR is still an enigma to us because a politician “without conscience” who nevertheless behaves nobly does not quite compute. We see this in the very expression “Rooseveltian.” What does it actually imply? US presidents are often adjectivalized. Nixonian and Clintonian, for instance, carry unsavory connotations.
Breitman and Lichtman offer a suggestive answer. They note that FDR’s first public reference to Jews as Nazi victims came on July 21, 1942. FDR’s speech sounded a “Rooseveltian compromise” in stating that the Nazis would never succeed in “exterminating their victims any more than they will succeed in enslaving mankind.” But if enslaving mankind wasn’t on the Nazi agenda, then what qualms would FDR have had about those victims? David Oshinsky of The New York Times recently wrote in defense of FDR that for the Roosevelts, “when it mattered most, their nobler instincts took over.” Well, maybe Eleanor’s. ■