Wes Vernon
Wednesday, June 9, 2004

FDR and Reagan were charismatic. Both were optimistic. Both came to the White House when the nation was demoralized. Each had a reassuring personal magnetism that could make Americans feel that despite the difficulties of the time, things would somehow work out all right.

As a youngster, I remember my grandparents regaling me with lectures on what they perceived to be Roosevelt’s infallibility. Later on, as a young journalist, I recall covering national governors conferences where at least two governors - one a Democrat, the other a Republican — were almost insanely jealous of the fact that then California Gov. Reagan would become the focus of attention from the media and passers-by, simply by his commanding presence.

Roosevelt’s leadership during the depression years and in World War II had much to do with the fact that Ronald Reagan voted for him in four elections. It mattered little that unemployment was still rampant in 1938 — just before the run-up to the big war. He appeared to be trying everything at his command to make things better, and for Americans in dire straits, that was all that mattered.

However, the unique talent for connecting with the American people and inspiring them is where the similarity between Roosevelt and Reagan ends.

There were differences in their perceptions of how big government should be. Where FDR favored government expansion, Reagan saw government as the problem rather than the solution. Where Roosevelt was born into wealth and fomented class hatred, Reagan, born and raised in very humble circumstances, believed a rising tide would lift all boats.

In FDR’s case, the march toward greater concentration of power in Washington was propelled, of course, by the Great Depression. Two things about that:

1. In his State of the Union speech toward the end of the war, Roosevelt made it clear that — even without the depression — he intended to pursue a postwar big-government policy.

2. Many books and reports have argued that FDR’s “pump-priming” policies not only did not end the Depression, but arguably made things worse. Personally, I find those analyses compelling, but for our purposes here, we will leave the economic and domestic policy issues for another day.

In terms of how world history would be affected, the more relevant contrast came in their approaches to the Cold War. To make a long story short, Roosevelt got us into it, Reagan got us out of it. Those were the end results of their policies.

Having led the country through the Depression and the war, Roosevelt became an extreme case of the politician who believed his own press releases. He developed a grandiose scheme whereby through his charm and cheerful diplomacy, he could create a postwar world free of the tensions that had led to previous conflict.

In so doing, he glossed over the fact that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was at least as evil and untrustworthy as Adolf Hitler. His aims for world domination were no less ambitious. The aims of communism had been spelled out as succinctly by Marx, Engels and Lenin as those of Nazism had been clearly stated in Hitler’s ”Mein Kampf.”

Moreover, Stalin had already imposed bloody purges in his own country and had collaborated with Hitler in the rape of Poland in the infamous Hitler-Stalin pact, a major factor in starting the war in the first place.

Soviet agent Alger Hiss was at FDR’s side when he dealt with Stalin at Yalta. Over time, the president had been influenced by the likes of his top aide, Harry Hopkins - only recently exposed as having been a pro-Soviet functionary. Hopkins actually lived at the White House. FDR’s administration was honeycombed with at least 349 [now known] Soviet agents (See “The New Dealers’ War” by Thomas Fleming). Roosevelt was duck soup for Stalin at the Tehran and Yalta conferences.

All of the above, combined with Franklin Roosevelt’s megalomaniacal confidence in an ability to woo Stalin and make him a peaceful democrat, compounded by the president’s failing health, left the free world in the position of having won the war and lost the peace.

Largely as a result, within a few years after war’s end, world communism reigned supreme in half of Europe and much of Asia (including the world’s largest nation, China). A third of the world had been plunged into an era of darkness.

Furthermore, as diplomatic scholar George Crocker said in his book “Roosevelt’s Road to Russia,” FDR and Stalin “finalized decisions so malodorous - for slave labor, forcible rapatriation of refugees, the uprooting of millions of human beings from their homes and lands, the breaking of pledges of the right to self-determination, and similar brutalities - that Yalta has become more and more as each year passes, a symbol of international immorality.”

Roosevelt’s naiveté regarding Stalin extended to his attitude toward domestic communists as well. His wife, Eleanor, had said communists were “harmless crackpots” and when State Department official Adolph Berle had warned him of Whittaker Chambers’ revelations about Alger Hiss and other Soviet agents in the government, the president blew him off with an unprintable epithet. That was nine years before the Hiss case emerged in congressional hearings.

By contrast, in the ’40s, Reagan fought the communists in Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors Guild. During the so-called “blacklist” uproar, he received accolades from both sides for fairness in clearing those who had been wrongly accused, while facing down threats from those who had tried to take over the movie industry in the interest of the Soviets.

Throughout the presidencies between FDR and Reagan, much of the emphasis was on “containing” Soviet imperialism and “getting along” with whoever happened to be in power at the USSR at any given time.

That long era was also marked by conflicts (Korea and Vietnam), in which the U.S was forced to fight with one hand tied behind its back — a “no win” strategy whose aim was to appease “international opinion.”

Reagan believed the Soviets were “the evil empire” and that as long as communism was on the march, there would be no peace. He knew there would have to be a much harder line. (See “Reagan’s War” by Peter Schweitzer.)

This view was unpopular at the time, but Ronald Reagan stuck it out. He supported the Solidarity Movement in Poland, where economic sanctions had cost the communist puppet government millions.

He leaned on Middle Eastern powers to lower the price of oil on the world market, adversely affecting the oil-rich economy of the USSR.

He blocked a second pipeline for Soviet gas to the West, further weakening the USSR economy.

He limited commercial credits, which served to limit Soviet access to Western technology.

Thanks to Reagan’s prodding, the Soviet aid spigot to Castro’s Cuba was ultimately cut off.

Psychological warfare played a role in keeping the Soviets tied down in Afghanistan, costing more millions, as did the Reagan Doctrine of preventing the advance of communism by even so much as an inch on his watch. That involved pressure on Soviet clients in the Third World.

Then there was the much-maligned U.S. military buildup, symbolized by the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The Soviets were unable to keep up.

In contrast to what one contemporary critic called “the poker games at Yalta” in the ’40s, Reagan in the ’80s folded his cards and walked out when Mikhail Gorbachev demanded that he give up SDI. Some of his aides were mortified. But the Gipper knew the Soviets would be back at the negotiating table. And the following year, they were.

One can denote some style-oriented similarities between Roosevelt and Reagan — their charisma, the fact that they were both loved by the majority of Americans, etc. But in their approaches to world communism, the evil that resulted in the deaths of at least 100 million human beings (See “The Black Book on Communism” by Courtois, Werth, Panne, Paczkowski, Bartosek and Margolin), these historical presidents were as different as night and day. Honest historians will cite their regimes as the symbolic bookends of the Cold War.

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