The Lion Abroad

Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 By Robert Dallek Oxford, 657 pp., $19.95 Franklin D. Roosevelt was a President evidently so superior to his successors that his many failures are increasingly forgotten as nostalgia takes over. Historians who criticize his conduct of foreign relations tell us how great he was in domestic affairs. They forget such failures as the Supreme Court Packing Plan, the 1938 Primaries Purge Campaign, and the disasters of the fabled NRA even before the Court threw it out. Haters of the New Deal tell us he did well as a war leader. They pass over his signing of Neutrality Acts in which he did not believe, they forgive his misconceived promise to Stalin to open a second front in Europe in 1942, his misapprehension of the role of China in defeating Japan, and many other mistakes.

But the New Deal is mostly accepted as a given nowadays, while historiographical turmoil buffets Roosevelt’s reputation as a maker of foreign policy. His critics have staged three distinct offensives. The first tried to show that he “lied us into” the Second World War, that he and not Japan was “really” responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack. These charges were easily refuted, although suspicion lingers among the non-reading public. The second campaign was a more sophisticated effort to lay the blame on Roosevelt (and Truman) for the cold war. This suffered from the inherent implausibility of finding Stalin innocent. Reasonable historians like Louis J. Halle demolished these infantile leftists.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 By Robert Dallek Oxford, 657 pp., $19.95 Franklin D. Roosevelt was a President evidently so superior to his successors that his many failures are increasingly forgotten as nostalgia takes over. Historians who criticize his conduct of foreign relations tell us how great he was in domestic affairs. They forget such failures as the Supreme Court Packing Plan, the 1938 Primaries Purge Campaign, and the disasters of the fabled NRA even before the Court threw it out. Haters of the New Deal tell us he did well as a war leader. They pass over his signing of Neutrality Acts in which he did not believe, they forgive his misconceived promise to Stalin to open a second front in Europe in 1942, his misapprehension of the role of China in defeating Japan, and many other mistakes.

But the New Deal is mostly accepted as a given nowadays, while historiographical turmoil buffets Roosevelt’s reputation as a maker of foreign policy. His critics have staged three distinct offensives. The first tried to show that he “lied us into” the Second World War, that he and not Japan was “really” responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack. These charges were easily refuted, although suspicion lingers among the non-reading public. The second campaign was a more sophisticated effort to lay the blame on Roosevelt (and Truman) for the cold war. This suffered from the inherent implausibility of finding Stalin innocent. Reasonable historians like Louis J. Halle demolished these infantile leftists.