Arsonists in the White House
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We will all cross the river. We share this in common.
Less than an hour before he died, while sitting for a portrait at 1:00 pm on April 12, 1945, FDR, a serious philatelist, was thrilled.
He had just spoken to the Postmaster General, who had asked him to attend ceremonies for the unveiling of the United Nations stamp.
At the hour of his death, Franklin Roosevelt had saved the world and imagined a new one, but had the enthusiasm of a little boy to see the stamp he envisioned seen through to the end with skill and mastery. In that moment, he was the most powerful human being that had ever lived in the history of human civilization, and he was about to process the power of Armageddon.
The grubby Führer of Nazi Germany was counting down the last 18 days of his life in a dank bunker before he blew his brains out after nearly destroying civilization and killing up to 100 million people. He was the greatest criminal in history.
FDR had won.
This is a story that should be known before the coming arson. It should make clear that the urgent moral necessity of dousing the flames, lest they burn everything to ash.
Franklin Roosevelt is the architect of the American-led portion of the 20th century that led to the greatest, fastest and most sustained spread of liberty and prosperity in all of the history of human civilization. His ranks among the greatest legacies of any human who has ever lived. He stands with Washington and Lincoln in a rarefied category of greatness that is unknown in modern days.
His conversations with his friend Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King are particularly poignant, given our arrival at the hour he foretold when he could see no further into the future he architected.
In a late-night conversation, an American president imagined a world at peace, one in which the United States would be the dominant military, scientific and economic power. He did not dream of conquest or military adventurism. He sought justice for all people everywhere.
FDR told Prime Minister King his hope: that the new world that would emerge from the ashes of the Second World War would endure for as long as everyone who was alive on the day the war was won was still alive.
The youngest of those people are now 80 years old, and most all of the participants of the Second World War have come to the end of their long human life spans.
FDR saved American capitalism, democracy and all of humanity from the greatest alliance of evil in world history.
He was an aristocrat known for his arrogance, dishonesty, entitlement and ambition as a young man.
His body was ravaged and broken by polio. His character and legendary empathy were forged through his own suffering. He did not turn towards bitterness, but rather towards a type of kindness and decency. He was always enigmatic and unknowable, even to those closest to him.
He was a political and military genius, who bended the world to his will and prevailed. Without President Franklin Roosevelt, the indispensable architect of the global coalition that smashed fascism, the world would have become overcome by tyranny and descended into slavery.
Through his exceptional trilogy “FDR At War,” Nigel Hamilton tells the story of Franklin Roosevelt as commander in chief.
He paints a movie with words as he takes the reader on epic journeys with the president of the United States of America to Placentia Bay, Cairo, Tehran, Casablanca and Yalta.
Roosevelt was known as the “Boss,” and he was.
Hamilton’s accounts of Roosevelt’s days are astonishing – from the long White House visits by Winston Churchill, and his dread over the daily ritual of FDR mixing cocktails that Churchill would sneakily deposit in a West Wing toilet because they so offended his palette, to the near crash landing with General Eisenhower aboard an Army aircraft on Malta.
Hamilton places the reader at the president’s side, crossing the Atlantic on his mighty flagship, the Battleship USS Iowa, as he imagines peace for all humankind, and does his best to build something better for people not yet born from the ashes of a fallen world.
The always-in-command 32nd president is the great architect of the modern world we inhabit.
He bursts into the WH bedroom where Churchill was quartered to find the naked prime minister, having just emerged from his bath, and declares:
Winston, we shall call it the United Nations!
Until that moment, the good guys were still going by the stultifying “Associated Powers.”
The terms the “Allies” and “United Nations” were conjured into existence by political leaders who needed to build new institutions.
They understood the strategic power of communications and branding, but more importantly, they knew evil when it looked them in the eye.
When FDR arrived aboard the USS Augusta to rendez-vous with Winston Churchill aboard HMS Prince of Wales at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, on August 9, 1941, Adolf Hitler had conquered Europe, and was preparing to invade England.
The American people did not support joining England in the fighting that FDR knew was coming. He was doing his best to prepare the nation, while mastering the isolationists and antisemites who suckled Hitler with admiration, money and ideological support.
Winston Churchill had come to the rendez-vous hoping for an American declaration of war. England was in desperate straits. Churchill wondered privately if it was already too late.
FDR had a different idea. He wanted to release an agreement about the aims of a war that America was not yet in, and lay out the possibilities for a sustained peace and enduring dignity for humanity.
The agreement signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, known as the Atlantic Charter, is among the most important agreements in world history.
It stands in rarefied space with the Magna Carta, the US Declaration of Independence, and the United Nations Charter and Declaration of Human Rights as some of the most fundamental building blocks of humanity’s rise from the abyss of slavery to the hope of freedom.
Here is what it says:
(1) neither nation sought any aggrandizement;
(2) they desired no territorial changes without the free assent of the peoples concerned;
(3) they respected every people’s right to choose its own form of government and wanted sovereign rights and self-government restored to those forcibly deprived of them;
(4) they would try to promote equal access for all states to trade and to raw materials;
(5) they hoped to promote worldwide collaboration so as to improve labour standards, economic progress, and social security;
(6) after the destruction of “Nazi tyranny,” they would look for a peace under which all nations could live safely within their boundaries, without fear or want;
(7) under such a peace the seas should be free; and
(8) pending a general security through renunciation of force, potential aggressors must be disarmed.
Donald Trump repudiated this vision and the work of 13 US presidential administrations with this terrifying and immoral declaration of repudiation against them:
The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.
FDR was sitting for a portrait when he raised his hand to the back of his head at 61 years old.
His last words, heard by his cousin Daisy Suckley, were:
I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.
Minutes later, he would collapse from a cerebral hemorrhage.
The issuance date for the United Nations stamp was scheduled for April 25, but when the president died, the US Post Office ordered the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to revise the design of the stamp FDR was so excited about to include “Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
“Toward United Nations” became FDR’s first memorial.
The war came to an end, and there was a moment of global jubilation and despair. Peace had come, but at a price beyond comprehension. Continents were left in ruins that had risen over 5,000 years.
Despair and hope co-mingled easily in those days, when world leaders representing 46 victorious United Nations came to beautiful San Francisco to hold a peace conference.
The Secretary of the Interior had suggested a place for the gathering that was the idea of a local organization, the Save the Redwoods League, that was dedicated to the preservation of something sacred.
Here was the idea put to the president as an idea for a meeting location by Harold Ickes:
Not only would this focus attention upon this nation’s interest in preserving these mighty trees for posterity, but here in such a ‘temple of peace’ the delegates would gain a perspective and sense of time that could be obtained nowhere in America better than in a forest. Muir Woods is a cathedral, the pillars of which have stood through much of recorded human history. Many of these trees were standing when Magna Carta was written. The outermost of their growth rings are contemporary with World War II and the Atlantic Charter.
Source: National Park Service
FDR would take the world’s leaders to a place of grace to ponder mercy and peace.
Some of the trees have lived for a millennium, others for only hundreds of years. The Bicentennial Tree grew with America.
Fifty more years have passed in the blink of an eye from the laying of the Bicentennial Tree plaque, and hundreds more years of life await this testament to the beauty of creation.
There is an astonishing truth about these trees as they soar towards the skies and grow broader than is imaginable.
Unless murdered by the hand of man, they will always be alive. Even in death, they are capable of being the root of new life and trees. They are a miracle, like America.
It doesn’t seem possible — at first glance — that the Bicentennial Tree and the nation it celebrates and has lived with over its entire life share the same threat.
Human beings are capable of creating transcendent beauty and apocalypses of suffering. The same hardness, malice and greed that would lead a human being to cut down such a magnificent specimen of life for a pile of money, or perhaps for no other impulse than to destroy something beautiful, is a symptom of the same terrible disease that threatens the United States.
I think some people look at the swirling chaos and danger of this moment, and focus on the daily acts of institutional vandalism and constitutional disloyalty without pondering deeply enough the disease of the human heart and soul that trigger such destruction, and are the gateway to so much suffering, misery and war. There is wisdom that has accumulated through time, and its lessons that are forgotten are usually remembered as the preface for greater tragedies that eclipse the memories of past disasters.
Perhaps it has always been this way, but what was accepted as a deep truth by American leaders of both political parties over the last 80 years is that there could never be another world war because humanity could not survive it.
The imperfect solution was a doctrine that declared peace will be preserved through an overwhelming military, economic and spiritual strength grounded in the power of human freedom, liberty and progress.
There is a caustic laziness that courses through so much of our political debates and dialogue that has exaggerated differences, inflamed disagreement and obliterated concepts like respect, tolerance, open-mindedness and humility in our politics.
The lack of grace, narrowness of vision and an absence of understanding and compassion in society have awakened a terrible malevolence. The simple truth is that the disease is so terrible and dangerous that it is hard to say the name out loud because such terribleness was supposed to be long extinguished, yet is gathering again.
Have you ever been to the World War II Memorial in Washington DC? It lies directly between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Because that is so, its construction was controversial and hotly debated.
Yet more than 20 years after its dedication, the placement seems perfect. It anchors remembrance of our founding and civil war with the greatest event in human history placed in the middle, which fulfilled a long ago prophesy about the destiny of the United States.
When American independence was won at Yorktown, the Marquis De Lafayette exclaimed, “Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country." He believed slavery would die as deeply as he believed the new world would save the old.
Four hundred and five thousand Americans would die in the fourth decade of the 20th century in a global war against fascism and virulent nationalism. Upwards of 80 to 100 million people — no one really knows for sure — were killed around the world. Nazi Germany systematically murdered 11,000,000 people viewed as subhuman, including more than six million Jews.
Sixteen million Americans served in the Armed Forces of the United States, and tens of millions served the war effort working in factories, ship yards, and a thousand other industries. It was a war between the darkness and the light, between human slavery and freedom.
What does it mean when Trump, a man who refused to honor America’s war dead, while desecrating the service of millions more, delivers a speech to a room full of cheering billionaires that they had won, and what FDR conceived, was rotten?
There is another plaque under the treetops. It sits in a holy place and marks an event that must be remembered by our David Copperfield-like corporate political media that seems hell bent on burning the memory of live events — let alone being able to contextualize past ones.
They called FDR an “apostle of peace.”
Impoverished British children collected pennies to build a statue with love and gratitude to him. He was the world’s foremost “champion of freedom”.
After surviving the storm, the world’s leaders sought shelter and mercy in the grace of God’s majesty.
They did so with humility.
This is an era of dangerous arrogance that seeks to burn what must be saved.
Then:
Now:
What greater legacy could a human being have possibly had than the recognition by the leaders of 46 nations sitting in a temple of God’s creation representing the victory of freedom and dignity over slavery than this?
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Looking forward to the traitor-in-chief counting down his last days in a bunker somewhere.
Disappointing to see reader comments focusing on FDR’s human failings. It’s almost invariably the same for profiles of Winston Churchill too. Without their superhuman courage, foresight and fortitude none of us would be here in the United States of America or Europe today. Think hard about that.
As for the writing, Steve, you continue to outdo yourself.