Friday reflections: Trouble ahead, trouble behind
Book recommendation of the week: FDR At War by Nigel Hamilton
There is “trouble ahead,” as there has been “trouble behind.”
It has always been so in America.
The greatest President of the 20th century was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He 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 be a far darker place. He saved the world. Literally.
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. 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.
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 conversations with his friend, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, are particularly poignant, given our arrival at the hour he foretold. 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. FDR imagined a world that, in many ways, would come to pass. He didn’t spend late nights in the White House plotting coups and the ruination of the American experiment. He imagined the type of world that could be created for Americans and all people. He dreamed about better.
FDR told 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 76 years old, and most all of the participants of the Second World War have come to the end of their long human life spans.
The passing of the final World War II combat veteran to receive the Medal of Honor this week was a powerful moment in a country moving beyond the boundaries of a fading era.
What FDR architected and imagined into being was built and sustained from Truman through Obama. It was nurtured by Presidents of both American parties, who all believed in liberty, justice and freedom.
The disaster unleashed by Donald Trump and his appeasers, enablers and accomplices is enormous. It will take years to overcome. The years ahead will be dangerous and unstable. The stories of our greatest leaders are most important in our most dangerous hours. Every American should know more about the man that was the closest we have had to being a peer to Abraham Lincoln.
This trilogy is a must read.
I hope our Republic will endure. All of us must engage and vote! I am 78 years old and fearful for my children and grandchildren. I want them to live in our free country. Trump needs to be convicted of just one of the felonies he has committed so that he can’t run again.
Thank you. Far too many Americans have no inkling, much less an appreciation, for what Roosevelt accomplished and bequeathed to future generations. I'm 71, and the benefits I've enjoyed are staggering. I took it all for granted until Trump lucked into the presidency and began taking an axe to the pillars of our democracy and the international order that's protected us from a WW III.
We need stronger leadership, not just in the White House but Congress, too — individuals with the rare combination of vision, oratory skills that uplift and excite, and force of will. Granted, Roosevelt wasn't as constrained as Biden in many ways. Here we sit with democracy on the precipice and existential climate change wreaking havoc. Yet the Justice Department appears restrained and plodding. And a Senate Democrat blocks action to combat the climate crisis, content with letting the planet and its people suffer horribly — and likely terminally — as he enjoys the riches from deep financial holdings in the fossil fuel industry.