Franklin Delano Roosevelt should be studied for one thing above all: how to serve
as commander-in-chief during wartimes. Throughout WWII, Roosevelt maintained a
long-term strategic perspective. Today, if over 7,000 American service
personnel were killed in a single battle, the press would probably call for the
President to be impeached, but that is exactly what happened at Guadalcanal,
relatively early in the war. Director Malcolm Venville and producer-chief
talking head Doris Kearns Goodwin again use her book Leadership in Turbulent
Times as a road-map for the three-part FDR, which starts tomorrow
night on History Channel.
As
in the previous Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, Venville incorporates
dramatic interludes to illustrate episodes from Roosevelt life under discussion.
In this case, the casting of Christian McKay (who was terrific playing Orson
Welles in Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles) is the best of the
History Channel hybrid docs, since Graham Sibley played Lincoln. With the help
of some makeup, McKay convincingly portrays the young and dashing Roosevelt up
through his tragic Yalta decline.
Kearns
and her colleagues’ commentary on FDR’s early years is somewhat revealing. It
probably is not well known how deliberately FDR patterned his political career
on that of his fifth-cousin, Teddy Roosevelt (jumping from the state
legislature, to assistant secretary of the Navy, and then to the governorship).
In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt was more closely related to TR, since she was his
niece. Kearns and company largely admire FDR’s politically astute tight-rope
walking, when he served as a prominent surrogate for Woodrow Wilson’s presidential
campaign, against TR. However, they never hold him to account for supporting Wilson,
who did more than any other president to institutionalize racial segregation.
Unlike,
Teddy Roosevelt, which includes ample criticism of TR, FDR features
nothing but praise for its subject (except for maybe a few minutes on the
Japanese-American internment). The lack of diverse perspectives is glaringly
obvious during talk of the New Deal. Frankly, many of FDR’s policies prolonged
rather than fixed the Great Depression. The timeliness of FDR’s court-packing
debacle is also lost on the collected historians.
Yet,
in terms of political biases, the worst over all three episodes is the
selective editing that makes Wendell Wilkie, the 1940 GOP presidential
candidate, look like an isolationist, when he was probably even more of an
internationalist than FDR, at that time. Seriously, Goodwin should be embarrassed.
It is too bad Poland and the Baltic Republics did not have a supply of
exiled princesses to send to flirt with FDR. If they had, post-war history
might have been much happier for Eastern Europe. Fortunately for Norway, their Crown
Princess forged a critical personal and strategic connection with the
President. That much is true, but the surrounding history gets a generous stretching
in creator-director Alexander Eik’s Atlantic Crossing, which premieres
this Sunday on PBS.
During
a pre-war goodwill tour of America, Crown Prince Olav and Crown Princess Martha
made quite an impression on Pres. Roosevelt, especially the latter. As a result,
the president is delighted to give her asylum after the Germans invade and
occupy Norway, particularly since Prince Olav was evacuated to London, in order
to liaison between the cabinet in exile and the British military. Soon, FDR
even has the royal children calling him “godfather,” but he is still adamantly opposed
to taking any military action in Europe.
Of
course, Norway is desperate for aid, so the princess works behind the scenes to
make Roosevelt more of an internationalist-interventionist. Initially, all the
time she spends with Roosevelt rather irks the peacenik first lady, but
eventually even she warms to Princess Martha’s charms.
Atlantic
has
already stirred up a hornet’s nest of historical controversy for the rather
liberal dramatic license it takes. Churchill certainly gets short shrift for
his concerted effort to woe FDR to the Allied cause. Yet, arguably, admirers of
the Roosevelts have even more to gripe about. Essentially, the show reduces the
Lend-Lease act to a heartsick sugardaddy’s box of chocolates. The truth is FDR
is one of the greatest presidents in American history, precisely because he was
such a disciplined wartime commander-in-chief. What kind of legacy is left when
you take that away? Prolonging the Great Depression and court-packing?
The
eight-part series also goes from Pearl Harbor to the Yalta Conference in the
blink of an eye. We guarantee it did not feel like that to Americans who lived
through the war. In fact, the first three episodes are probably the most
absorbing, because of the way they depict the unrealistic belief Norway’s
neutrality would keep it out of war and the desperate consequences of its
military unpreparedness. Yes, this is the part where I draw parallels between
the denial and appeasement of the 1930s and our similar policies towards the
overtly hostile CCP today.
