What FDR Wrought

In the realm of foreign policy, many liberals, particularly in the academy, revere Roosevelt not only for what he accomplished, but for what they believe he would have done had he lived to complete his fourth term. According to this line of argument, Roosevelt’s vision of international order, rooted in international organizations and the cooperation of the world’s “Four Policemen,” could have averted the worst excesses of the Cold War with the Soviet Union that the “inordinate fear of Communism” of Roosevelt’s successors incited, widened, deepened, and perpetuated.

A small but growing number of recently published works severely criticize Roosevelt, mounting two main lines of attack. Some have assailed Roosevelt for manipulating the United States into World War II. Others see the New Deal as an economic failure that increased the severity and duration of the Depression and laid the foundation for a leviathan state menacing to the economic freedom on which prosperity depends. Conservative internationalists have typically taken an intermediate view of Roosevelt: praising him for his repudiation of isolation and his conduct as a war leader during World War II, but reproaching him for what they consider his naive view of communism and Joseph Stalin.

Now Conrad Black, the embattled Canadian press baron whose company faces a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, has produced a massive biography of 1,280 pages that largely defies the conventional fault lines on Roosevelt. Written from an unabashedly conservative point of view, Black’s “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom” contends that Roosevelt “was the most important person of the twentieth century, because of his accomplishments as one of America’s greatest presidents and its most accomplished leader since Lincoln.”

The book has received mostly glowing reviews from across the political spectrum–and with good reason. It is the best biography of Roosevelt by far, notwithstanding the fact that Black relies almost exclusively on secondary material. He tells Roosevelt’s story engrossingly, combining historical rigor with a novelist’s eye for detail and character. He paints vivid pictures of Roosevelt’s formative years as a scion of a famous family, his ascent in New York state politics, his tenure as secretary of the Navy during World War I, and his campaign as the Democratic party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1920. He recounts Roosevelt’s excruciating pain and heroic triumph over polio, his remarkable but difficult marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt, his rise to national prominence as a progressive governor of New York, his seminal twelve-year presidency, and his death from a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945–withered and exhausted, but on the verge of the defeat of Nazi totalitarianism, which Roosevelt, along with Churchill, did more than anyone else to achieve.

BLACK SHOWS THAT Roosevelt was also much more intelligent and well read than even some of his supporters believed, particularly in the areas of naval history and strategy. Yet Black does not ignore the less savory aspects of Roosevelt’s character: his deviousness, his propensity to blame others for his own mistakes, his vindictiveness toward opponents (which sometimes entailed abusing the powers of his office), his penchant for stretching or twisting the truth, and his emotional detachment even from political allies and family.

Despite his unabashed admiration for Roosevelt, Black does reproach Roosevelt for some of his outlooks and policies. He concedes that Roosevelt did not really understand free enterprise and had a patrician’s unwarranted disdain of entrepreneurs. He criticizes Roosevelt for Japanese internment and for not doing enough before the war to rescue Jewish victims of Nazism (although he defends with plausibility Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust during the war). He admits that Roosevelt made some atrocious appointments, most notoriously the defeatist Joseph P. Kennedy as ambassador to Great Britain, and, worse, the fatuous dupe for the USSR, Henry Wallace, as vice president in 1940.

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom” is not without flaws. Though Black largely substantiates his case, he overstates the merits of Roosevelt’s achievements. The book does not really prove Black’s argument that the New Deal succeeded in bringing the United States out of the Depression. Free-market economists have demonstrated more convincingly than Black admits that many of the New Deal programs failed.

It was World War II rather than the New Deal that ultimately solved the Depression, and a close look at even Black’s own data undermines his argument about the economic efficacy of the New Deal. Black uses 1940 as the benchmark to measure the New Deal’s success, without pointing out that rearmament and the Two-Ocean Navy bill of July 1940 propelled the partial recovery of the American economy on the eve of World War II more than any of Roosevelt’s often ill-advised economic programs. Many of Roosevelt’s much-derided opponents, who resisted the New Deal’s more extreme measures, deserve more credit than they receive for saving capitalism and ensuring the primacy of markets in the United States.

Second, though Roosevelt recognized sooner and more clearly than any major political figure besides Churchill the mortal threat Nazism posed, he was less resolute than Black grasps. When World War II began in Europe in September 1939, Roosevelt hoped, like most Americans, that American aid to Britain and France would suffice to defeat Hitler. American rearmament began in earnest, and Roosevelt became convinced of the necessity for direct American involvement in the war, only belatedly, when the fall of France in June 1940 shattered this illusion. The United States entered World War II woefully underprepared and nearly too late, grievous mistakes for which isolationists bear most, but not all, of the blame.

BLACK MARVELOUSLY REFUTES the isolationist case for staying out of war, and wisely distinguishes between honorable but mistaken isolationists such as Robert Taft, and rogues such as Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy. What Black does not address sufficiently is whether Roosevelt was too hesitant to expend his vast political capital to press more vigorously for more robust rearmament and support of the allies sooner. Granted, this would have tested Roosevelt’s talents to the limits, given the formidable isolationist opposition he faced.

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom” stretches plausibility to the breaking point by resolutely defending Roosevelt’s dealings with Stalin. He imputes a Reaganesque, hardline view of the Soviet Union to Roosevelt, despite massive evidence to the contrary. This is, after all, the president who chose Henry Wallace as vice president in 1940. One shudders to think how the Cold War might have turned out had Roosevelt died just months sooner, before the 1944 Democratic convention when he finally replaced Wallace on the ticket with Harry Truman, or had Eleanor Roosevelt succeeded in her bid to keep Wallace as vice president.

Even Black’s own account belies his extravagant claims for Roosevelt’s prescience about the Soviet threat. Roosevelt always felt, Black admits, “that there was a susceptibility in Stalin to deal honorably with an American leader who was not a European imperialist.” He hoped, Black added, “that Stalin would succumb to the temptation of being a figure of stability and gradually a reliable associate in the governance of the whole world.” Discussing the particulars of the Yalta Conference, Black gives credence to the idea that Stalin may have been “slightly affected by the tremendous impulse to comradeship at this decisive moment.”

THIS IS NONSENSE. The unbridgeable gap between Leninist-Stalinist and Western values precluded any genuine accommodation. The Soviet Union was neither a defensive nor a traditional imperial entity seeking security. It was engaged in a relentless drive to achieve hegemony in Eurasia. Former Soviet foreign minister and ambassador to Washington Maxim Litvinov aptly summed up Stalin’s motivations in a revealing interview with a Western correspondent in 1946: “The ideological conception prevailing” in the Soviet Union is “that conflict between Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable,” Litvinov said. “Western acquiescence to the Soviet Union’s territorial demands” would not satisfy Stalin, but would lead merely “to the West being faced with a fresh set of demands.”

Some of Roosevelt’s most virulent critics in recent years have wildly exaggerated the deficiencies of Roosevelt’s wartime diplomacy and strategy. Isolationism and appeasement, not Roosevelt, are mainly responsible for the tragedy of Soviet dominance of much of Eastern Europe after World War II. An American military and political presence in Europe after World War I might have stabilized the continent and deterred the Germans from gambling on Hitler in the first place. The democracies could have stopped Hitler up until the German remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 without relying on Soviet power, had statesmen ignored Roosevelt’s isolationist critics and heeded Churchill’s warnings about the imperative of strong preemptive action. Even as late as the Munich Crisis of September 1938, France and Great Britain alone could have defeated Nazi Germany. By 1939, however, the democracies had squandered their enormous material advantage pursuing the morally and strategically bankrupt policy of appeasement–and Roosevelt was then right to see that Hitler represented a greater present danger than Stalin. Limited collaboration with the Soviet Union was therefore necessary, however distasteful, to avert the greater moral and geopolitical evil of a Nazi victory.

Roosevelt’s superb instincts as a strategist also served, overall, to mitigate some of the more dangerous aspects of his naive views of communism. Roosevelt was right to insist on a cross-channel invasion of France in June 1944, which contributed to containing Soviet influence in Europe. He and Churchill were right to insist on the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, which paved the way for both vanquished powers to emerge as vital components of the successful democratic alliance system that triumphed over an evil and dangerous Soviet empire.

Yet a more sagacious Roosevelt would have heeded Churchill’s advice in 1945 to push as far into Eastern Europe as possible, which at least would have saved all of Berlin and most of Czechoslovakia for the West. A less naive Roosevelt also would not have fanned dangerous illusions about the efficacy of international organization and collective security.

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom” has its shortcomings, but it is nonetheless a marvelous book about a great president who richly earned the title Conrad Black bestows on him: co-savior, along with Winston Churchill, of Western civilization at a perilous hour. Roosevelt understood that robust American power and the willingness to use it are indispensable conditions not only to defending freedom and making the world a better place, but for protecting civilization against the next devil that always lurks around the corner in international relations.

The author of “Henry Jackson: A Life in Politics,” Robert G. Kaufman will shortly be joining the Pepperdine School of Public Policy.