Author: christian

Eisenhower, Federal Budget, Idaho Statehouse, John Kennedy, Johnson, Martin Luther King

Great Speeches Week

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JFKEisenhower, Kennedy and King

It is Martin Luther King, Jr, Day, a good day to remember Dr. King’s remarkable impact on the evolution of American notions about civil rights and to acknowledge the work that remains.

And, even though King made his most famous speech in August, no MLK Day is complete without remembering one of the great speeches ever delivered in the English language, his “I Have a Dream Speech” from 1963.

This week also marks the 50th anniversary of two other truly memorable speeches – Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell were he warned of the rise of the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural where he summoned the nation to “ask not” what the country can do for us.

Remarkably these two speeches – delivered just three days apart in January 1961 – speak to us still across half a century.

Eisenhower, the popular president and former five star general, it is now clear, labored at length over his final speech from the White House considering it, as his grandson says, a significant part of his legacy of public service. Fifty years later, with the American military engaged in two wars and the nation’s enormous power projected in every corner of the world, Eisenhower’s words speak an enduring truth and, like Kennedy, he called the country to informed, engaged citizenship.

As David Eisenhower told NPR over the weekend, his grandfather’s “farewell address, in the final analysis, is about internal threats posed by vested interests to the democratic process. But above all, it is addressed to citizens — and about citizenship.”

Kennedy’s great speech, delivered on January 20, 1961, can be read as a companion piece to the speech of his predecessor and it was also about citizenship and responsibility. Speaking in the context of the nuclear arms race with the then-Soviet Union, Kennedy said: “So let us begin anew — remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”

Those words, in the context of our domestic politics today, certainly ring true.

In the age of Twitter and text messages some might argue that the spoken word or political rhetoric has lost its power to inform and stimulate. Three classic speeches we remember this week leave us with an entirely different message. Enduring truth, delivered with genuine conviction and deeply imbuded with knowledge, is always powerful.

As Dr. King so powerfully said: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

All three great Americans spoke in their most famous speeches to “the ultimate measure of a man” and their words live on.

Civil Liberties, Egan, Idaho Politics, Poetry

Billy Collins

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CollinsThe History Teacher

When I saw the story that Idaho’s State School Superintendent Tom Luna had pulled a pop history quiz on lawmakers on the legislature’s education committees, and that 17% couldn’t name the year Idaho became a state and that 15% didn’t know Lewiston was the original capital, I thought immediately of Billy Collins’ wonderful little poem – The History Teacher.

Trying to protect his students’ innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years

when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
“How far is it from here to Madrid?”
“What do you call the matador’s hat?”

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

Idaho became a state in 1890, by the way.

 

American Presidents, Giffords, John V. Evans, Obama

Mourner-in-Chief

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Obama mourningA Good Dose of Humility

My favorite presidential historian, Robert Dallek, as well as anyone has, caught the essence of last night’s remarkable speech in Tucson by Barack Obama.

“The president is not just the prime minister, he’s also the king,” says Dallek. “And he has to be a healing force to speak to the grief.”

As a time when pundits, critics and pretenders to the Oval Office were wondering whether Obama had the right stuff to pull off a unifying speech in the wake of the Tucson tragedy, he came up with, I think, just the right tone and several great lines, including this one:

“What we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another.”

TIME magazine has a great take on the demanding, delicate job of the President as Consoler-in-Chief. While it may be hard to make the case that any one speech from any one president really has lasting impact in this superheated media age, think of the lasting impact of Lincoln at Gettysburg, Reagan after the Challenger disaster or Clinton after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

A pitch-perfect, heartfelt speech of mourning, as each of those were, has historically helped define a presidency. Obama’s speech at McKale Memorial Center in Tucson may prove to be the moment when the nation sized him up as a leader and not just as a politician.

Basques, Giffords, John V. Evans, Media

The Giffords Story

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Mourning GiffordsThe Whole World is Watching

“Anger, hatred, bigotry” – the headline in the Sydney, Australia Morning Herald.

“A disturbing story about American political culture” – said the editorial in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s major national newspaper.

A blogger for the Financial Times writes, “The idea that there is anything in common between the politics of the United States and Pakistan might seem absurd. But both countries have suffered appalling acts of political violence this week. And in both cases, the victims were moderate voices who spoke out for liberal values.”

While the debate continues in U.S. newspapers and over the air about the cause and meaning of the tragic attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others in Tucson last Saturday, the press in the rest of the world is watching and commenting. It is a fascinating case study in how the U.S. is seen by much of the rest of the world.

A while back I heard a speaker who had lived in Canada for a number of years quip that “Canada is the place where everyone has health insurance and no one has a hand gun.” There was nervous laughter from the U.S. crowd.

The Globe and Mail’s editorial on the Tucson shootings got quickly to its point: “Start with guns: Legally, they are sacrosanct. And not just any guns. In Arizona, any ‘law-abiding’ person over 21 is allowed to carry a concealed handgun practically anywhere in the state, including into the state legislature, in bars and on school grounds.”

In a round-up of world coverage of the story, the GlobalPost site noted:

“Argentina’s biggest daily, Clarin, published a 500-word piece by their Washington correspondent, Ana Baron, who focused heavily on Arizona’s tough stance on Latino immigration and what she described as the ‘growth of hatred and intolerance in U.S. politics.’ Perhaps tellingly, the story’s first quote was Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik’s widely-recounted remark that his home state of Arizona has become a ‘Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.'”

The same site noted that Britain’s politically-oriented print media covered the shootings as political commentary. The right-leaning Daily Telegraph criticized American blogs and liberals for rushing to paint the attacks as a product of a right-wing fanatic despite the lack of evidence that the shooter had anything to do with the Tea Party or any other group.

“This is highly inconvenient for certain people on the Left so they ignore it,” wrote the paper’s Washington editor. “They would much prefer the shooter to have been a white male in his 50s.”

Outside of Britain, the GlobalPost site notes, “the story has received slightly less attention. The French press is consumed by the murder of two Frenchmen murdered in Niger by an African subsidiary of Al Qaeda. The German press has major flooding along the Rhine to contend with.

“But the lack of prominence given to the story could be down to this: For many in Europe, violence of the sort that occurred in Tucson on Saturday is almost expected in America.”

Major media outlets in the U.S. provided prominent coverage over the last several days to the assassination – and that word was always used and interestingly has generally been avoided in the coverage of the Gifford’s shooting – of a major political figure in Pakistan, indisputably a country with enormous strategic importance to the United States. The lead in the Washington Post, for example, said of the Pakistani killing, in words that might have been lifted from an article about Rep. Giffords: “an outspoken liberal in an increasingly intolerant nation, was shot…” because of his public stance on a controversial issue.

As the Financial Times writer, Gideon Rachman, pointed out it is not all that comfortable to be compared to the dysfunctional, frequently violent politics of Pakistan, but there we are.

Rachman wrote on Sunday: “Of course, the relative reactions to political violence in both countries show that Pakistan is much, much further down the road of violent intolerance. This profoundly depressing report by Mohammed Hanif illustrates how cowed liberal and tolerant voices now are in Pakistan, where many television commentators essentially argued that the governor of Punjab had it coming to him.

“In the US, by contrast, all mainstream politicians and commentators are united in condemning the attempted murder of Giffords. I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies.”

Indeed.

Baseball, Giffords, John V. Evans, Politics

Tragedy in Tucson

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giffordsPolitics, Guns and America

President Obama spoke for most Americans yesterday, as presidents do when tragedy strikes and something truly senseless happens, when he said we “would get to the bottom” of the horrific events on a sunny Saturday morning outside a Safeway store in Tucson.

Get to the bottom indeed.

We all tend to measure the impact of big events by the closeness of personal connection. For me, this one is close and truly does, as Tucson resident and former Bush Administration Surgeon General Richard Carmona said, make your heart bleed.

I spend a good deal of time in Tucson. Our place is less than two miles from where the mayhem that took six lives, including a respected federal judge and a nine year old girl, took place. I’ve been in that Safeway store a hundred times, often on a sunny Saturday morning, to get my daily newspaper fix.

I’ve also followed from a distance the promising political rise of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who now fights for her life not to mention a chance for a further political career. Before going to Congress, Giffords represented parts of Tucson in the state legislature and struck me – regardless of your partisan tint – as the kind of bright, well-spoken, committed young person we want and desperately need in our politics.

While it is much too early to come to judgments about the motive – if any – of the apparently badly troubled young man who is in custody and accused, perhaps with unidentified others, as the murderer. It is nonetheless inevitable that getting to the bottom of this American tragedy will turn to politics and guns.

It is already being asked if our American political culture has become so coarse, so bitter and tinged with the language of violence that such events directed at political people are made more possible. An eyewitness to the Tucson events said there was no doubt the gunman’s real target was the Congresswoman.

The wise and experienced old sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik – he’s been sheriff for 30 years and is respected for his blunt candor – said it explicitly.

“Let me say one thing,” the 73-year old Dupnik told reporters yesterday, “because people tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by the people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.”

Dupnik, in sadness and in anger, said Arizona has become “a Mecca” for intolerance and bigotry.

This much we know. Giffords’ Tucson office was vandalized during the intense blizzard of national vitriol surrounding the health care legislation, she was shouted down at town hall meetings and, by all accounts, the campaign in Arizona’s 8th District last year was bitter and nasty. And, of course, Sarah Palin and others used tough language and imagery, including putting crosshairs over Giffords’ district, to target her for defeat last November.

Giffords made note of the Palin’s actions last fall when she said, “She [Palin] depicted the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize there are consequences.” Palin, it must be noted, was one of the first to condemn the outrage.

Ironically, Giffords was a true moderate in the House. She was a “Blue Dog” Democrat who cast a protest vote last week again Nancy Pelosi. She voted instead for civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, who was himself once beaten senseless in the name of politics. Giffords proudly read the First Amendment on the House floor last week during the reading of the Constitution and she was widely regarded as a calming voice in a divided district.

Consequences. Words are powerful weapons and, at times, the alarming coarseness of American political rhetoric does seem seriously deranged and dangerous. Calls for civility have never seemed more timely or more necessary. The Los Angeles Times editorialized this morning calling out the truly moronic postings – from all points of view – regarding the Giffords shooting. Read it and weep again.

Getting to the bottom also requires a mature society to engage in real and sober self-reflection about our culture of guns. I know, I know, this is the third rail of American politics, but finding the discussion uncomfortable or politically difficult doesn’t make the self-reflection any less important. How can a culture that claims to value the sanctity of life tolerate the level of gun violence we seem to now find tolerable?

Once again American politics intersects with guns and violence. Ours is a great country, but the tragedy in Tucson suggests once more many uncomfortable things about our less-than-perfect Union. We have some work to do to get to the bottom and try to learn from – and rise above – yet another horrific tragedy.

Basques, Guest Post, Internet., IRS, Media, Polling

Now…the News

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chartPew Survey: Internet Grows As News Source

The new Pew Research Center report dealing with where Americans turn for their daily news fix shows, not surprisingly, that the Internet’s impact is growing and newspapers are declining. Television is also in decline, while radio is essentially flat.

Again, no big surprise, young people, in vast numbers, are surfing the net for news, while – as a former TV reporter I love this headline – TV news still dominates among what Pew calls “the less educated.” People in the West are more likely than any other part of the country to turn to the Internet for news, but I’m guessing those numbers are skewed by “the left coast” effect of California, Oregon and Washington. Still the trends in where we seek out news are dramatic and show no signs of changing.

Interesting to me, cable news and the traditional broadcast networks are both in steady decline as news sources, while local television news seems to be holding its own as a source of information. Older folks, again no big surprise, turn to television and much less to the Internet.

What the survey doesn’t answer is where on the Internet Americans are turning for information. Are they using the major newspaper and broadcast websites? Or are Internet news consumers turning to specialized sites that cover politics, business, energy or the environment? Or are they looking to sites like the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post, websites that aggregate news with a decided slant on what is featured and how the information is packaged? Or, as I suspect, based on the trend of increasing partisanship and a “point of view” approach on cable television, are Internet consumers seeking out information that already reinforces their political or social views?

This much is beyond debate it seems to me: there is no longer any comprehensive place where Americans can turn for a shared sense of what is happening in American politics and culture. Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley once could gather us around the national hearth and we could share a national experience – men landing on the moon – or a national tragedy – the Kennedy assassination. No more.

Pew also offers some regular analysis of what type of information Internet consumers seek. In the week between Christmas and the New Year – a pretty quiet news cycle – the top story was the seriously bad weather on the east coast.

I’ve long subscribed to the “more is better” theory about news and information. More sources, more points of view and more delivery systems should make us smarter, more informed and better and more engaged citizens. I hope that instinct is true, but doubt it is. To make it true we must have not just consumers of news and information, but discerning, skeptical and critically thinking consumers.

Other recent Pew research suggests that Americans have a 30,000 foot view of the issues and challenges facing the country. We know a few basic facts, but very few details. Americans aren’t big on nuance. We know, for example, that the GOP made big gains in Congress, but not what those new members really intend to do, or even that the Republicans won control of the House. We know that BP ran the oil well that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, but no idea about who serves as the British Prime Minister. We know the budget deficit is a big problem, but have no idea where all that money is being spent. And, John Boehner. Whose he?

There is clearly a tremendous amount of information out there on the Internet, cable and broadcast television, even in shrinking newspapers, but the jury is out as to whether all that information, in an increasingly complicated and interconnected world, is making us any smarter or better able to understand and engage the world. That, in a modern democracy, seems to me to be a real problem.

Baseball, CIA, Military History, Politics

That’s Accountability

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LewdNavyStIf All Government Operated This Way

Accountability, at least most of the time, is sure and swift in the United States military. Just ask Captain Owen Honors, who has been sacked as the C.O. of one of the U.S. Navy’s most prestigious sea commands.

By now most everyone has heard the story of how Honors, as the then-Executive Officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise, hosted racy videos with homophobic, sexual and other offensive content that were broadcast during “movie nights” on the big aircraft carrier. He subsequently became the Commanding Officer of the Enterprise, the videos came to light and his career is as ruined as it would have been if he had run his ship aground in San Francisco bay.

The certainty of consequences for bad behavior or unethical conduct is one of the reasons that order, morale and effectiveness remain as high as they do in our all-volunteer military, while at the same time two wars and countless deployments have made military life incredibly difficult for thousands of young American men and women.

As I read about the Captain’s truly silly behavior – and, yes, I admit to finding the videos on YouTube and did take a look – I thought about the relative lack of accountability for bad behavior or performance on the civilian side of our government. It is a truly bipartisan problem.

Take your pick: the Treasury Secretary’s failure to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, various senators in both parties with ethical problems ranging from sweetheart home loans to sexual peccadilloes, heck even a former New York governor now has a prime time show on cable while the documentary about his frequent visits with prostitutes runs in theaters. Closer to home, a sitting Idaho state representative remains dogged by his tax problems and an Idaho tax commissioner operates under an ethical cloud.

Some might argue that the standards applied to the Captain of the Enterprise are a little harsh give the frat boy nature of his offense. Still, the Navy’s top brass demanded accountability – and swiftly – and not for the first time.

When the Captain’s boss “lost confidence” in him, he walked the plank – immediately.

Admiral John Harvey, in announcing that the can was tied to the Enterprise’s video host, talked about the Navy’s determination to maintain its values of “honor, courage and commitment.” Officers, Admiral Harvey said, simply must be held to the highest standards. The military code of conduct system demands it. End of story.

In the wake of his own bad behavior, Eliot Spitzer got his own television show. Increasingly, it seems, the American political system allows that sort of “accountability.” Little wonder then why the American public gives the military high approval ratings, while the public approval of Congress and other governmental institutions sinks to all-time lows.

No accountability, no confidence.

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Politics

Richard Ben Cramer

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cramerThe Best Political Book No One Bought

Before Richard Ben Cramer, the campaign political book genre was dominated by the great Theodore White and his remarkable Making of the President series. That changed after the appearance of Cramer’s monumental door stop of a book on the 1988 presidential campaign.

Now every book about American politics is measured against Cramer’s masterpiece – What it Takes: The Way to the White House. Cramer’s book, a classic piece of “new journalism,” not only provided the inside account of the campaigns of politicians like Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden, Gary Hart, Bob Dole and the eventual nominees, George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, but also offered fascinating, in depth profiles of the candidates. It was a book about character as much as politics and it has become a classic for political junkies and Cramer and his approach have become a role models for a new generation of writers who see politics as less an insiders game and more a study in character and motivation.

[One might argue that the 1988 campaign did a great deal to shape the current presidential campaign environment. Just remember some of the moments: Biden’s plagiarism, the Willie Horton ad, Dukakis is a silly helmet in a tank, Bush 41’s “read my lips” and Lloyd Bentsen’s put down – “you’re no Jack Kennedy” – delivered at Dan Quayle expense.]

Politico has produced a must read profile of Cramer with insights into his book – the book was panned by reviewers when it came out years after the ’88 election and never sold well – that is also a great look into what now passes for political reporting. Most big-time Washington reporters continue to focus their political coverage on the inner workings of the campaign. It’s reporting analogous to covering a baseball game – report on the balls and strikes, throw in a little strategy, compose a clever opening graph and you’re good to go.

Cramer’s book – he claims to have done more than 1,000 interviews – concentrated instead on why these remarkable men came to be where they found themselves in 1988. He was interested in who they were as people and what made them tick. This approach – the motivations of people, their background and the details of their lives – is vastly more enlightening to voters than most of what we get in more standard political reporting.

I suspect that one of the reasons we don’t get more of the kind of reporting Cramer does, in addition to the fact that it is darn hard work, is that candidates generally hate this kind of reporting. As Cramer told Booknotes interviewer Brian Lamb in 1992, most politicians aren’t introspective. They never spend 15 minutes thinking about who they really are and what they really hope to accomplish. Cramer’s book gets to these questions.

The big book of the 2008 campaign was Game Change by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, a book full of gossipy detail and the interesting, but not always insightful, “inside baseball” of politics. Cramer, never one to mince words, is dismissive of Game Change because, as he told Politico, it “almost religiously eschews any understanding of who [the candidates] are.”

Cramer became disillusioned with reporting on politics after the initial tepid response to What it Takes – he still owes his publisher $200,000 from the advance he received – and hasn’t written about politics or candidates since. Instead, Cramer has produced books on baseball, including a book on Ted Williams and a devastating biography of Joe DiMaggio, and is now at work on a book on Alex Rodriquez.

It’s never too early to get ready for the next presidential election – candidates are already planning trips to New Hampshire and Iowa – so, if you haven’t read What it Takes, haunt a used book store and lose yourself in one of the best political books ever written. What it Takes is a classic.

And thanks for checking in here during 2010…a Happy New Year to you and yours.

Civil Rights, Film

A Good Movie

Posted on by christian

kings speechThe King’s Speech

In a year of generally lackluster output from Hollywood, there comes at the end of the year a truly exceptional film from – England.

With inspired performances from Colin Firth as the second prince and future king, George VI, and Geoffrey Rush as his Australian-born speech therapist, The King’s Speech provides a mostly historically accurate period piece look inside the British monarchy in the days leading up to World War II. The would-be king, called Bertie by his hard and cold family, has been a life-long stutterer. The thought of standing at a microphone and proclaiming is mostly unthinkable. Until, that is, having exhausted other avenues of professional help, he turns to a small-time actor turned speech therapist who helps unlock the mystery of the stutter.

The movie really works on several levels. It is a look at England in the run up to the war. The bit roles for three British prime ministers – Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill – are just right.

The film also, in a tight and believable way, provides insight into the still scandalous affair Bertie’s older brother, the eventual King Edward VIII, had with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Edward, who abdicated in 1936 for the “woman he loved,” is portrayed, as he was, as a selfish, boorish cad with apparent pro-fascist sympathies. Edward’s shocking decision to give up the throne made the not terribly well prepared Bertie the king.

The movie is also about the breakdown of class and social lines in the 1930’s that allowed a outwardly rather stuffy and shy member of the royal family to engage a long-term friendship with one of his subjects, an outgoing and very worldly man.

Maybe the best scene in the movie is when the King and Queen, played with perfection by the superb British actress Helena Bonham Carter, show up at the speech therapist’s flat. Its funny, insightful, clever and played just right.

Should you think nothing good is coming from the big screen these days, take heart – England rules with The King’s Speech. Here’s the trailer. Go see it.

Andrus, FDR, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy

On This Day

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FDRFDR’s Arsenal of Democracy Speech

Seventy years ago this evening – December 29, 1940 – Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered one of the most important speeches of his presidency and helped set in motion a vast expansion of presidential power in the realm of foreign affairs.

Fresh from re-election a month earlier to an unprecedented third term, Roosevelt used one of his tremendously effective “fireside chats” via radio to proclaim America “an arsenal of democracy” determined to aid a beleaguered Great Britain that seemed to be on its last legs against Hitler’s powerful army and air force.

Speaking from the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House, Roosevelt said this would not be “a fireside chat on war,” but rather “a talk on national security.” He proceeded to lay out what he saw as the threats to the United States if the British, blockaded and bombed, were forced to capitulate to the Germans. While the speech was widely praised and well accepted, not everyone, to say the least, agreed. [You can hear the full speech, including the fascinating CBS announcer’s introduction here.]

The non-interventionist bloc in Congress remained very strong in 1940 and 1941. Roosevelt was concerned enough about the anti-war sentiment in the country that he made comments near the end of his 1940 campaign against Republican Wendell Willkie that he would have to eat. He famously said “our boys are not going to be sent into a foreign war.”

Montana’s progressive Democratic Sen. Burton K. Wheeler condemned Roosevelt and his advisers as “warmongers” and Wheeler urged the president to utilize his position and leverage to seek a negotiated end to the fighting in Europe. (Idaho’s William E. Borah, a Republican, who had died in January 1940, surely would have agreed with Wheeler and other leading non-interventionist like Ohio’s Robert Taft and California’s Hiram Johnson, both Republicans.)

Roosevelt followed up his “arsenal of democracy” speech with legislation – forever known as Lend-Lease – that gave the president, in Wheeler’s view and it was a credible view, vast new powers – even dictatorial powers – to aid those countries, debt free, that the president deemed vital to America’s national security. By the end of the war in 1945, Lend-Lease had supplied $50 billion (more than $750 billion in today’s dollars) in material to Britain, the Soviet Union, France and China.

There is little debate that the aid was essential to the war effort. No less an authority than Josef Stalin confirmed that when he told FDR that American equipment had allowed the Allies to win the war. There is also little debate around the fact that Lend-Lease, and Roosevelt’s administration of the program, finally and forever shed the American foreign policy cloak of non-intervention or isolationism. With Lend-Lease, the country was committed to full and unrelenting international engagement and the country has seldom looked back since the act was signed into law in March 1941.

Fundamentally, what Montana’s Wheeler and Idaho’s Borah, among others, were objecting to was the inherent expansion of presidential power in the realm of foreign policy. Wheeler repeatedly warned of the rise of “an American dictator” who would run over the top of the Congress in the establishment of foreign policy.

History has recorded that FDR, while not always candid or even completely honest about his intentions, used his vast foreign policy power with restraint and with a deep commitment to democracy. But those who opposed Roosevelt, even if now mostly forgotten, have also been validated by history. The steady expansion of presidential power in the area of foreign policy that, in many ways, began on a December evening 70 years ago continues to this very day.

The United States has spawned no dictator as Sen. Wheeler feared, but we do have a commander in chief whose power to involve the country militarily in every corner of the globe is routinely unchecked and often not even really debated by the Congress. Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy is well recognized for its sweeping impact on domestic policy, but the 32nd president’s legacy in foreign policy is just has profound and it began with a speech on this day seven decades ago.