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« Back to Who Was FDR? main page    Transcript for: Who Was FDR?Transcript ANNOUNCER: Think Tank is made possible by AMGEN, recipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. AMGEN, helping cancer patients through cellular and molecular biology. Improving lives today and bringing hope for tomorrow. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT (From video.): Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. Many Americans believe that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the greatest president in the 20th Century. He certainly has the newest and biggest presidential memorial in Washington, seven acres on the Tidal Basin. And surely he left a big legacy. To help us explore that legacy, we're joined by Robert Dallek, professor of history at Boston University, and author of Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932 to 1945; Michael Beschloss, presidential historian, and author of Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance; and John Morton Blum, professor emeritus at Yale University, and author of V Was For Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II. The topic before the house, who was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this week on Think Tank. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: America was on hard times when FDR was inaugurated in 1933. The nation was in the fourth year of a great depression, 25 percent of the work force was unemployed. Roosevelt's first task was to reassure America. PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT (From video.): I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis, broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were, in fact, invaded by a foreign foe. MR. WATTENBERG: In the legendary first 100 days of the Roosevelt presidency, FDR launched his New Deal. Congress passed 15 major laws, putting half-a-million people to work, opening banks, creating the Securities and Exchange Commission, and setting into motion the Tennessee Valley Authority which was to bring water, electricity, jobs and hope to poor Southern states. In May of 1997, President Clinton dedicated this $52 million memorial to our 32nd President. PRESIDENT CLINTON (From video.): First, the America he built was a memorial all around us from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Grand Cooley Dam. MR. WATTENBERG: This monument has been controversial, but so was Roosevelt, and so he still is today. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. The late Claire Booth Luce had a thought, which was that every American president is ultimately summarized by a single sentence. George Washington, father of our country. Abraham Lincoln, freed the slaves. What about Franklin Roosevelt, what's the sentence? MR. DALLEK: He humanized our American industrial system and transformed American foreign policy. MR. WATTENBERG: Michael Beschloss? MR. BESCHLOSS: I think he improvised a way of fighting, not winning the fight against the great depression, and also to win World War II, and thus changed the United States and the world in ways that he never, at the beginning, anticipated. MR. WATTENBERG: We are getting complex sentences, which I don't know if it's in the spirit of Claire Luce. John? MR. BLUM: I don't think I've ever been in the spirit of Claire Luce. Franklin Roosevelt led the United States to the creation of a system of economic security for its people, and to victory in what was for the world the most dangerous war since the beginning of American history. MR. WATTENBERG: So, we end up -- this is what I expected, I must say -- that he is perhaps of the great presidents, of the most important presidents, the one that you really do need a complex sentence. You can't say he just fought the Depression, or he just fought the war. He really -- those were the two pillars, and you have to link them in summarizing Franklin Roosevelt. MR. BLUM: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: Fair enough? MR. DALLEK: Absolutely. And he served for 12 years, the longest period of time of any president in American history. MR. BLUM: Well, he, both with Depression or the fight against Depression and with war, he contributed to what Michael has quite properly called improvisations. His extraordinary spirit. His personal confidence which somehow he could make palpable to the country, most of which adored him, his ebullience and, as I said, his self-confidence, somehow communicated itself to this enormous constituency that had been through three dreadful economic years. Working people without jobs, a middle class people who had lost their savings and were expecting to lose their homes until a federal program saved them. A country with no confidence and no hope. And this man brought to that country a spirit which had -- which transcended the palpable legislation with which your comments began, of course, there were 15 or more great statutes passed, but there has never been a president in a time of national crisis who had a more immediate impact on the national cultural psyche than FDR did. And he did it again the day after Pearl Harbor. MR. WATTENBERG: But let me ask, John has sort of sketched out this, the great personal characteristics of Roosevelt coming in and sort reinspiriting a nation. And we'll talk about that, but let's sort of stipulate that that's so, and it's a great accomplishment. But, ultimately, the argument is made that it was really sort of a trick, he didn't solve this Depression. The Depression ended under the economic trigger of World War II. Economists now, mostly conservative economists, I guess, but say, that stuff didn't work. MR. BLUM: That's not true. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, let's hear from the children on this panel here first, and then we'll come back to you. MR. BESCHLOSS: Well, in terms of sheer statistics, the United States was not out of the Great Depression by World War II. That was basically solved by building this arsenal of democracy that sure was not built to solve the Depression, but was required to fight fascism in Europe and Asia. The thing that's fascinating to me, I was born 10 years after Roosevelt died in 1955, and as I've been growing up, you hear of FDR so often spoken of as a big government ideologue. The fascinating thing to me is how little ideological Roosevelt really was. When he came to power in 1932, certainly he wanted to fight the Depression. He felt that perhaps the government was perhaps the instrument of last resort, and he was certainly eager to expand government to do it, and this was someone who grew up in politics as an admirer of Woodrow Wilson. MR. WATTENBERG: But didn't he campaign in the 1932 election to reduce government spending and balance the budget? MR. BESCHLOSS: He campaigned on a balanced budget in a speech in Pittsburgh, and the advice was given him, deny you were ever in Pittsburgh when they unbalanced the budget later on. MR. BLUM: However, Michael, he did say in that Pittsburgh speech, after saying he would try to balance the budget, but not at the cost of human suffering. MR. BESCHLOSS: Absolutely. MR. BLUM: And that demurer is what really predicted New Deal policy. MR. BESCHLOSS: Exactly. MR. DALLEK: That, you see, seems to be the bottom line. We have all this time that's passed now, and you have the retrospective, and so one can say the Depression did go on, and I think Michael is absolutely right, it took the arsenal of democracy to conquer that. But it's the more fundamental things that were put into place, like the wages and hours law that is very much with us still, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Social Security -- MR. BLUM: Which we hope is very much with us. MR. WATTENBERG: What was Roosevelt like personally, privately? There are all these stories that he was -- just what John said, ebullient and life-giving and inspiriting, but that privately he was a terribly devious man. Is that right? MR. DALLEK: Well, devious I think puts a pejorative spin on it. MR. WATTENBERG: A bad spin. MR. DALLEK: He was a great politician. And by the very definition of the term, it means there is a degree of deviousness or manipulativeness. I mean, how do you manage a country of -- MR. BLUM: He called himself a juggler. MR. DALLEK: A juggler. MR. BLUM: He also once said to Henry Morganthau, I never let my right-hand know what my left-hand is doing. So Morganthau said, which hand am I, of course? MR. DALLEK: Right, and Harold Ickes complained to him, you know, you're the hardest man in the world to work for, and Roosevelt said, why, because I'm so tough? And Ickes said, no, because you play your cards so damned close to your vest. MR. BESCHLOSS: And this is fascinating because we're talking about people who were thought of as very close to Roosevelt, Morganthau, the Treasury secretary; Ickes, the Interior secretary. And what you've both said captures something that's essential, which is that Roosevelt always made these people feel insecure, never made them feel that they were people who even had the assurance of being employed one month hence. MR. DALLEK: He was the greatest politician of the 20th Century. And one can take from that the fact that this does not necessarily mean that you're a nice guy. MR. BESCHLOSS: That's exactly right. MR. WATTENBERG: When did Roosevelt have the sense that there was international trouble of a monumental magnitude? I mean, Adolph Hitler takes office the same year that Roosevelt does, 1933. MR. DALLEK: That's right, a couple of months before. MR. WATTENBERG: Excuse me? MR. DALLEK: A couple of months before. MR. WATTENBERG: When does Roosevelt begin to -- MR. DALLEK: Very early. MR. BLUM: He knew it right away, but he couldn't do anything about it right away. MR. DALLEK: The country was intensely isolationist. See, Roosevelt lived -- you know, you were talking about his deviousness. The man had what I would describe as a public face and a private face, particularly when it came to -- MR. WATTENBERG: I was not talking about his deviousness. I was talking about other people talking about his deviousness. MR. DALLEK: Oh, okay. MR. WATTENBERG: Despite my tone. Hey, geographers, I am trying to play devil's advocate. MR. DALLEK: He was convinced that the country was, and accurately so, intensely isolationist in the '30s. They wanted no part of involvement in another war, certainly not another war. MR. BESCHLOSS: No, World War I was a mistake. MR. DALLEK: World War I was a terrible mistake, and the country was just not going to be drawn into -- MR. WATTENBERG: But did he understand, did anybody understand the potential magnitude of what was going on in Europe? MR. BLUM: Roosevelt understood it in '33. MR. DALLEK: Absolutely. MR. WATTENBERG: He did understand it. MR. BLUM: And he did something about it. MR. WATTENBERG: Which was? MR. BLUM: He officially recognized the Soviet Union. MR. WATTENBERG: That's right. MR. BLUM: And he privately said that he did it for a very specific reason, to bring Russia into the balance against Germany in Europe, and against Japan in Asia. MR. WATTENBERG: Japan in Asia. MR. BLUM: He can see the whole thing coming. But, as Bob has said, he was too sensitive a politician to buck public opinion, which was so heavily isolationist. Roosevelt, as Bob has said about domestic affairs, had both a private and a public posture, and the private man was constantly pushing to move us closer to an active aid for the opponents of Hitler, and the public man was exercising a restraint because, as he put it, he didn't want to get too far ahead of his army. MR. BESCHLOSS: Now, one other element, if I could just pipe in for a second, is presidential power. Roosevelt, to fight the depression, sought a degree of president power from Congress and the people that was really unprecedented. And the Congress to a great extent said, we weren't able to avert this depression, we're going to give the president extraordinary powers. And as much as Roosevelt took power in domestic affairs, Congress took away power and so did the people in foreign affairs. So you have Congress passing enormous isolationist legislation. In 1937 -- MR. WATTENBERG: Such as? MR. BESCHLOSS: Well, in 1937 the House passed something called the Ludlow Amendment, which would have required a national plebiscite to declare war. As it turns out it required two-thirds so it didn't go through. Had that passed, and as I said it got a majority, it would have been very hard to fight World War II. MR. DALLEK: What we shouldn't lose sight of is that that man was a great realist in foreign affairs. What he understood was that there had been a long, unspoken, unwritten history of alliance with Great Britain, an American reliance on the British Navy for U.S. national security. Consequently, when he's making the destroy bases deal with Britain in 1940, what he wants Churchill to commit to is sending the British fleet to North America to Canada, if Britain is successfully invaded by the Nazis. Now, Churchill won't acknowledge this in public, because he doesn't want there to be a suggestion, a hint of defeatism on the part of Britain or even think of it. But, what Roosevelt was speaking to here is the extent to which the British Navy is a defensive arm for the United States. And Roosevelt from very early on is committed to the idea that Britain and France are the first bulwark of American democracy. PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: (From video) We shall send you in ever-increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns. That is our purpose and our pledge. MR. WATTENBERG: President Roosevelt rallied most of the American people around his New Deal domestic programs. But, for the second time in the 20th Century war was brewing overseas. Most of Europe fell to Hitler's Blitzkrieg. But, America was still reluctant to join the conflict. Then on December 7th, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: (From video) Since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire. MR. WATTENBERG: December 7th, 1941, Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, is Roosevelt relieved? MR. BLUM: If the Germans and the Italians hadn't declared war on us after the Japanese piece at Pearl Harbor. MR. DALLEK: Indeed, immediately after Pearl Harbor, Morganthau and Ickes, and Stimson, they wanted Roosevelt to declare war on Germany. But, he knew through magic this capacity to read Japanese military diplomatic traffic, that the Germans and the Italians were going to come into the war against us. They were going to issue a declaration of war four days later. And so why should we take the -- MR. WATTENBERG: How was Roosevelt -- I mean, at that time we had five star generals -- MR. BLUM: I don't think we did. I think we had only four star generals. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, I mean, during the war, that became -- Eisenhower got a fifth star and Bradley and I guess a few others, Marshall. Franklin Roosevelt was the six star general or the seven star general. But, how was he as a commander and chief during the war? MR. BLUM: Eric Larabee's (sp) book, Commander in Chief, is a simply a gem of a book. And it shows how deeply Roosevelt's influence penetrated American strategic decisions, not tactical, but strategic. Roosevelt ran that war, much more than any of his generals, much more than any one of his allies, except Stalin, who had a great area in which to maneuver. MR. WATTENBERG: Was this just balance of power politics that he didn't want big powers, or was it because the nature of these two powers, Japan and Germany, were totalitarian and threatening ideologically? MR. BLUM: I think it was both. I don't think you can separate them in Roosevelt's mind. But, Roosevelt understood global power and global diplomacy. And there were very few Americans of whom that could be said at that time. MR. WATTENBERG: But, Roosevelt rallies the free nations of the world, rallies the American people, builds up the industrial base of the United States. The argument is made that in part because of Franklin Roosevelt's failing health and in part, it is alleged, because he was very naive about the Soviets, that he gave away the store in Yalta? MR. DALLEK: No, let me argue against that. Roosevelt's basic policy during the war was to have this public face and the private face. The public face said, we are locked in this monstrous war, our ally is the Soviet Union. They are sacrificing millions of people. And we have to be as sympathetic and supportive of them as we possibly can. Now, Roosevelt was reflecting mass opinion in the United States, if you go back and look at Henry Luce's article in Life Magazine in 1943, which describes the Soviet Union as just like the United States. The article says the Soviet citizens are like Americans, they speak like us, they dress like us, they think like us, why, they even have an NKVD, which is just like our FBI. MR. WATTENBERG: More than he knew. MR. DALLEK: More than he knew. MR. WATTENBERG: This is Henry Luce, the arch-anti communist? MR. DALLEK: Of course, and also Wendell Wilke publishes a book in March of '43 called One World, which instantly becomes the greatest nonfiction best seller in American history. In that book, it's a fantasy about how much the Soviet Union is becoming like the United States. Indeed, the message of that book, One World, is that inside of every Russian, inside of every Chinese, inside of every African, every European, every Asian, is an American waiting to emerge, you see. MR. WATTENBERG: Kind of what we believe now? MR. DALLEK: We've always believed it. MR. WATTENBERG: And we may have been right. MR. BLUM: The theory is that the good ones come here and the bad ones stay home. MR. DALLEK: The basic point is that Roosevelt was catering to the Wilsonian universalism in this country, to the naive assumption that at the end of the war we were going to have a love feast with the USSR, that we were going to have four great powers, Britain, the United States, China and Russia. MR. BLUM: Four policemen. MR. DALLEK: Four policemen, we were going to police the world, we were going to cooperate and the United Nations is going to work very effectively. So there will be a kind of Wilsonian collective security. Roosevelt doesn't believe this. MR. WATTENBERG: So therefore, he says at Yalta, to the communists, to Joseph Stalin, who has already killed 20 million of his own people by that time, where there is no freedom of speech -- none of the four freedoms that Roosevelt talks about -- he says, okay, you guys can have Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary -- MR. DALLEK: What he says is, in his own mind, I am a real politician. The Soviets have fought their way across Eastern Europe. They are there in Eastern Europe. The United States is not going to go to war with them to out them. We are going to strike some kind of bargain with them and strike a balance of power in Europe. MR. BLUM: I think Roosevelt in Yalta was recognizing the situation as it had become. One thing he wanted to do was to nail down Stalin's commitment to a U.N. Another thing he wanted to do, even more urgently, was to get Russia into the war against Japan. Something he didn't want to do was to keep American troops in Europe after the war. All of his post-war priming was predicated on the assumption, the boys come home. The Russians were in East Europe. He was trying to commit them to free elections in East Europe, which Stalin said he was going to hold. Indeed if Stalin had lived up to the Yalta Accords, we wouldn't have to worry about expanding NATO tomorrow. MR. WATTENBERG: What did Roosevelt know about the holocaust? What could he -- MR. BESCHLOSS: He knew more than he'd like to admit. MR. WATTENBERG: What could he have done about it that he didn't do? MR. BESCHLOSS: That's a different question. Through international Jewish correspondents American Jews, Rabbi Wolheist (sp) and others were really pretty fully informed about the holocaust while I was occurring. Now, the question apart from that, Bob and I once spent a whole day talking about it, was what could we have done about it and that's a very tough question. There are revisionists who argue that we should have bombed the areas around the gas chambers. MR. WATTENBERG: Auschwitz. MR. BLUM: Auschwitz especially, but that raises some very tough questions, because the German defenses -- MR. WATTENBERG: But, we could have at least let in some refugees. MR. BESCHLOSS: That's -- one place we could have done more was in refugee policy. We were too late in getting to it and we let in too few. MR. DALLEK: He didn't show any significant political courage. Again, he is the politician. MR. BLUM: Neither did anyone else in the world except the Danes. The story of the holocaust is the story of total international moral failure, with the single exception of the Danish people. The Swiss are recently being uncovered for just the hotel keepers they were. MR. BESCHLOSS: I think there was also in Roosevelt a little bit of sort of an insensitivity that you don't see in other areas of his life. There was a feeling that there were people who were pleading with him to do things like bomb the railroad lines and the other things that could have been done, really with very little effort. And Roosevelt was so focused on the idea of simply winning the war as quickly as possible, that when you're confronted with perhaps the great crime of human history, Roosevelt really fails the test, because that was something that should have superseded war strategy. He didn't see it that way. MR. DALLEK: And he also failed the test -- MR. BLUM: After all, he was not great on human rights. The incarceration of the Japanese Americans was a dreadful case of the misuse of federal power. MR. WATTENBERG: And politically he was elected four times with the vote of the segregationist south. MR. BLUM: And he resisted -- MR. DALLEK: Or pretty much tied to segregation as a politician. I mean, no one should raise him to sainthood, but the point is he was a great politician. MR. BLUM: He was a great president, one of the three greatest. MR. DALLEK: But, he wasn't a saint. And I've never met any saints in my reading of political history. MR. WATTENBERG: I have two questions, was he the greatest, let's say, of the 20th Century? Was he the greatest, was he the most important? MR. BLUM: Great presidents, of course, are presidents at the very least who face great crises, Roosevelt confronted two of the greatest crises in American history, the Great Depression and the Second World War. Great presidents must have a sense of national priorities, they must define them, they must get Congress and the electorate to go along with their solutions, they've got to have solutions to these crises. Roosevelt did these things. Washington had the great crisis of American nationality. And that put him as the first great president. Lincoln the great crisis of American union and that put him as the second great American president. Franklin Roosevelt, the crisis of economic pain such as the nation had never before experienced, which he ameliorated, and of a foreign threat greater than any that we've all confronted since the war of independence, which he helped to overcome. Priorities, correct; solutions, operable; constituency, in line; great president. MR. WATTENBERG: Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, Michael Beschloss, John Morton Blum, and Robert Dallek. And thank you. For Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to: New River Media, 1150 Seventeenth Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036; or e-mail us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank visit PBS On-line at www.pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank. MR. WATTENBERG: A note to viewers, whether you admire Franklin Roosevelt or not, this remarkable and controversial memorial is something to see. (Musical break.) ANNOUNCER: This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in association with New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content. Think Tank is made possible by AMGEN, recipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. AMGEN, helping cancer patients through cellular and molecular biology. Improving lives today and bringing hope for tomorrow. Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lilly Endowment and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. (End of program.) Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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