Franklin Delano Roosevelt

 

From a Memorandum by William Christian Bullitt, 11 March 1944 …     Hull said that he was at his wit’s end and wished that he could get out of the State Department but added quickly that he had so few months to remain that he thought he would stay and try to keep things running. He said that he was trying to make a good record of friendliness toward the Russians for future use; that he was trying to get some sort of cooperation with the Senate; and that he was trying under terrible difficulties to keep some hand on our larger international policies. He added that he still did not know what had happened at Teheran and that he had no knowledge whatsoever of the constant stream of communications that was being exchanged between the President and Churchill and Stalin. He added that the President seemed to be cut off from advisers of all kinds of international affairs. He certainly was not consulting him, Hull; Hopkins had been ill for some time and he was so ill that he might never come back to work and the President was apparently just making decisions without consulting anyone. He said that while Stettinius was a very decent fellow he was entirely inexperienced in foreign affairs except in the domain of Lend-Lease and could not be expected to advise the President. FOR THE PRESIDENT Personal and Secret Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt. Boston : Houghton Mifflin 1972, p. 604.   From The Great Globe Itself, William Christian Bullitt 1946 Few errors more disastrous have ever been made by a President of the United States, and those citizens of the United States who bamboozled the President into acting as if Stalin were a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson deserve a high place on an American roll of dishonor.   (Etc.) New York : Charles Scribner's Sons 1946.   From Twenty-Year Revolution from Roosevelt to Eisenhower, Chesly Manly 1954 President Roosevelt was himself no Communist. He knew nothing about communism, and therefore was not repelled by it. Members of his official family have reported that he rarely read a book and that when he did it was a whodunit, a treatise on stamp collecting, or a tale about war at sea. Frances Perkins, in The Roosevelt I Knew, says the President was “simple” in his judgment of others. Although a Roosevelt idolater, she implies that Sidney Hillman and his communist collaborators in the labor unions used the President for revolutionary purposes. “The degree to which the PAC and other political activities in the labor movement could have been relied upon as a permanent support for Roosevelt is open to question,” Miss Perkins writes. Roosevelt collaborated with the Communists because they held the balance of power in New York State, through their control of the American Labor Party, and were a major factor in other populous states, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois, because of their influence in the CIO. There was almost as much truth as humor in a remark once made by H. L. Mencken: “If Roosevelt thought cannibalism would get votes, he would immediately start fattening up a missionary in the White House backyard.” Chicago : Henry Regnery 1954, pp. 41-42.     Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882-1945. Title For the President, personal and secret; correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt. Orville H. Bullitt, editor. With an introd. by George F. Kennan. Publisher Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Description xlvi, 655 p. illus. 25 cm. ISBN 039513997X Language English Note Bibliography: p. [627]-630.

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Last updated 24 February 2005

W. Paul Tabaka
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