The Failed Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt

Virtually every poll of historians - including the most recent C-Span poll - places FDR in the top five of all U.S. presidents.

This is so despite persuasive revisionist historical works that paint a very different picture of FDR's presidency.

In her book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes shows that the New Deal - so lionized by liberal historians and Democrats - did not restore the U.S. economy as promised by FDR and his "Brain trust," but instead extended the sufferings of the Great Depression for seven more years.

An even greater failure of FDR's administration in the 1930s was the nation's lack of preparedness for the Second World War.

MacArthur sensed as early as 1934 that another war was on the horizon, but FDR's budget director proposed to cut the Army's budget by half and to reduce War Department expenditures by $80 million.

At one White House meeting between the secretary of war, MacArthur, and FDR, the president repeatedly resisted with harsh and bitter words the war secretary's pleadings to provide more money for the armed forces.

FDR's defenders usually note that while FDR sensed the gathering storm of war abroad, the American people and Congress were wholeheartedly opposed to war preparation, and FDR would not move forward in this area without public and political support.

General MacArthur once described FDR as "a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well." Even as FDR covertly began involving the United States as a belligerent in the wars in Asia and Europe, he promised the American people in the 1940 campaign that their sons would not be sent overseas to fight in foreign wars.

FDR repeatedly led his top military adviser General George Marshall to believe that he fully supported Marshall's and the U.S. Chiefs' commitment to an invasion of northwest Europe, only to later side with Britain's Mediterranean strategy.

Jay Winik in his book 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History decries what he calls FDR's "Silence, his seeming refusal to see, hear, or speak evil of the death camps" in Hitler's Reich.

FDR's economic policies made the Great Depression last longer and set the nation on a course of virtually unlimited federal power.
 

https://spectator.org/the-failed-presidency-of-franklin-roosevelt/