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When Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 prepared to ask Americans for a stronger defense against the danger of Adolf Hitler, his handlers reminded him that the country was isolationist and such boldness would jeopardize his third-term campaign. Roosevelt overrode that advice. He presided over American history's first peacetime draft call—a week before the 1940 election. His isolationist ambassador to London, Joseph Kennedy, bluntly told him, "You will go down either as the greatest in history—greater than Washington or Lincoln—or the greatest horse's ass." FDR replied that there was "a third alternative": if he didn't strengthen America's defenses, Roosevelt said, Hitler could rule the world and "I may go down as the president of an unimportant country."
-- Michael Beschloss for Newsweek
I'm sleepy and it's nappy time and I only skimmed this four-page article, and I'm mainly getting this down to have in the archives, but I thought I'd share this little historical nugget. The piece is about presidential courage. I'm not sure that Bush wouldn't feel that he was engaging in an exercise of great political courage by bucking all the voices to cut our losses in Iraq, though I suspect that that is not what Beschloss would have intended. Bush would have to win to be proven right, and that would seem to require a genuine miracle at this point.
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When Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 prepared to ask Americans for a stronger defense against the danger of Adolf Hitler, his handlers reminded him that the country was isolationist and such boldness would jeopardize his third-term campaign. Roosevelt overrode that advice. He presided over American history's first peacetime draft call—a week before the 1940 election. His isolationist ambassador to London, Joseph Kennedy, bluntly told him, "You will go down either as the greatest in history—greater than Washington or Lincoln—or the greatest horse's ass." FDR replied that there was "a third alternative": if he didn't strengthen America's defenses, Roosevelt said, Hitler could rule the world and "I may go down as the president of an unimportant country."
-- Michael Beschloss for Newsweek
I'm sleepy and it's nappy time and I only skimmed this four-page article, and I'm mainly getting this down to have in the archives, but I thought I'd share this little historical nugget. The piece is about presidential courage. I'm not sure that Bush wouldn't feel that he was engaging in an exercise of great political courage by bucking all the voices to cut our losses in Iraq, though I suspect that that is not what Beschloss would have intended. Bush would have to win to be proven right, and that would seem to require a genuine miracle at this point.
