THE FAILED PRESIDENCY OF FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: William Bullitt’s Warning.

Recently in The American Spectator, I wrote a somewhat controversial article claiming that Franklin Roosevelt was a failure as president. One of the areas of failure, I argued, was FDR’s decision-making during the Second World War, which resulted in the replacement of the Nazi threat with an even greater Soviet threat. Some critics have retorted, What else could FDR have done? The postwar world was largely shaped by where the Anglo-American and Soviet armies ended up when the fighting stopped. But consider the case of William Bullitt’s warning to the president.

On January 29, 1943, William Bullitt, then a close adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt, wrote a memo to the president that Bullitt characterized as “as serious a document as any I have ever sent you.” In that memo (which he followed up with related memos and letters in June and August of that year), Bullitt attempted to persuade FDR to approach U.S. relations with Moscow more realistically and to wage World War II with a view towards the postwar balance of power.

* * * * * * * *

But it was all to no avail. FDR thought he could use his personal charm and political skills to persuade Stalin to join the democracies in establishing a just and stable postwar world. It was a view based on personal naïveté, ignorance about communism, and advice FDR received from the likes of Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, Sumner Welles, and other Soviet accommodationists within the administration.

Those who argue that FDR’s options were limited by the positioning of the armies at the end of the fighting are correct. But had the president listened to Bullitt’s advice and waged war so that the Anglo-American armies met their Soviet allies, in Churchill’s words “as far to the east as possible,” the Soviet postwar threat would have been lessened and many of the peoples of central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans might have been spared the misery of 45 years of communist rule.

Add to the above Roosevelt’s decisions regarding the Holocaust and his prolonging America’s Depression, and it’s not difficult to have a revisionist view of his presidency:

● New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II.

● FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): To know if someone is a failure, you have to know what they intended. Roosevelt drastically and at least semi-permanently expanded the power and wealth of the professional/managerial/academic/political class and thus in their eyes his presidency will always be a huge success.