Kerry Isn't FDR but JFK. It is grotesque that Eric Fettman, in trying to discredit John Kerry, would praise Franklin Roosevelt, especially with this quote: "conferences are out of the window. You never get anywhere with a conference." I seem to remember a conference FDR did participate in, at Yalta, USSR, which issued a declaration that included this exalted language on one of its aims: "assisting the peoples liberated from the domination of Nazi Germany and the peoples of the former Axis satellite states of Europe to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems." One of the issuers of that declaration then went on to impose Communism on the whole of East Europe, making "Axis satellite states" into Soviet satellites instead!
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FDR was the supreme Communist sympathizer who also, bizarrely, admired British imperialism while dismantling our own empire, and thus laying the basis for Castro's dictatorship in Cuba and Marcos's dictatorship in the Philippines. In foreign poilicy he was on the wrong side of almost everything, and provides no authority for Fettman's stupid premise.
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J.F. Kerry met the first JFK, as did Clinton, who made an enormous impression upon both. Kennedy was anti-Communist, and an adamant and progressive internationalist who implemented a proposal from Hubert Humphrey, another "liberal", to establish a Peace Corps. The first JFK also embarked upon an Alliance for Progress in Latin America, which subsequent presidents stuck to, altho they abandoned the name. It is because of that decades-long U.S. pressure and internationalist engagement that almost all of Latin America is today democratic.
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The first JFK was very much a "Massachusetts liberal" — and proud of it. We were never in my lifetime (and I'm almost 60) as happy as a Nation, or as proud, as when the first JFK was President. And we went nuts when he was assassinated.
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Would a latter-day JFK bring us a second "Camelot"? The second Bush sure hasn't.
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(Responsive to "Flunking the FDR Test", by Eric Fettman, New York Post, October 21, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:49 PM