Worlds at War: The A. J. P. Taylor Collection by Taylor A. J. P

Author:Taylor, A. J. P. [Taylor, A. J. P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

5 - ROOSEVELT

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the odd man out among the war lords of the Second World War. While all the others had seen military service in one form or another 20 years earlier, Roosevelt was totally civilian. During the First World 'War, he had held the-assistant secretaryship of the American navy, but this was a political appointment. Nevertheless, it made him regard the navy thereafter as his special service, to the degree that, during the Second World War, General Marshall once asked him not to refer to the navy as 'us' and to the army as 'them'.

Roosevelt was also the odd man out in another way; he was totally political. If you look at the others, you will see that they had other interests. All of them wrote books, though of different kinds. Roosevelt never wrote anything, except rather casual private letters. He did not even write his own speeches; he had an army of speechwriters labouring for him. However, some of the finest phrases, such as 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself were inserted by Roosevelt at the last moment.

His background did not prepare him at all to be a war lord. In theory, of course, he was a war lord from the moment he became president of the United States. Under the terms of the American constitution, the president is always the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

But in 1933, when Roosevelt first became president, he was far from thinking in warlike terms. In those days, he had to save his country from a tremendous economic crisis, perhaps the worst crisis that any modern country has ever faced. It was as the force of his personality, his improvisations, his readiness to pursue any kind of policy in order to restore confidence, which began the New Deal and lifted the United States up from the Great Depression.

Roosevelt had no preconceived ideas about economics or, for that matter, about war. I am tempted to say that he had no principles. I do not mean by that that he was wicked, but that he operated only in response to a situation, and decided only at the very last minute. There is a story from the early days of the New Deal, when the dollar had gone off the gold standard and two economists came to see him. One of them had a paper advising that the dollar should go back on to the gold standard. The other one had a paper advising quite the contrary - that it should be allowed to float and to depreciate. Roosevelt looked through the two papers and said: 'Take these into the next room and mix them together.' This was always his reaction when faced with contradictory arguments: 'Go away and mix them together.'

Averell Harriman said of him: People make a great mistake if, when the president says 'yes', they think it means he agrees with them. It only means: 'Well, I've heard what you say, but I'm not going to make up my mind now.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.