OpEd: In defense of Democrats and FDR's legacy (2020)
thehill.com

... This column was generated by Mark Levin recently saying, on his Dec. 20 television program, to Sinologist Michael Pillsbury that "FDR was playing footsie with Hitler right up to Pearl Harbor." Levin ripples with hatred for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Yet, FDR pulled the U.S. ambassador from Berlin after the infamous "Kristallnacht" of 1938; Hitler withdrew his ambassador just before Roosevelt evicted him. Roosevelt loaned Britain 50 destroyers to help cope with German submarines in 1940. He then persuaded Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act " which Winston Churchill called "the most unsordid act in the history of any nation" " giving the British and Canadians anything they needed on relaxed repayment terms and with the U.S. lease of some bases in Newfoundland and the Caribbean.

On Dec. 29, 1940, Roosevelt famously declared that "no combination of dictators" would prevent America from being "the great arsenal of democracy." He unilaterally extended American territorial waters from three miles to 1,800 miles, then ordered the U.S. Navy to attack German ships. When FDR and Churchill met in Newfoundland in August 1941, Roosevelt said he would "make war without declaring it" on Germany.

None of this was "playing footsie" with the Nazis.

To be a plausible commentator on American politics, Levin should stop defaming the entire history of the Democratic Party and cease his demonization of Roosevelt. Almost alone, FDR and Churchill bore the responsibility for saving Western civilization. There is plenty of room for controversy about the New Deal, which gets a respectable pass as economics but an almost perfect score as catastrophe-avoidance. And FDR was sincere when he told Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, "I am the greatest friend American capitalism has ever had" -- because he saved 95 percent of the economic system that collapsed during the Great Depression.

Mark Levin has piercing insight into the dangers of the present. But he should be more rigorous about America's past. ...