Failing to surmount partisan politics
Equating the struggle to overcome the coronavirus to a war for national survival seems like a thing of the past — a distant past. Apparently, President Trump no longer views himself as a wartime commander-in-chief.
The coronavirus war is practically won. Call out the Blue Angels for a national flyover. The president is in a post-war state of mind.
While COVID-19 mitigation was never the equivalent of World War II, there are certain similarities — shared sacrifice maybe being the most important.
President Trump has failed on so many fronts in this crisis. He’s failed especially to summon a spirit of home front solidarity. Once again it must be said: Donald John Trump is no Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Now, it’s easy from this distance to claim FDR’s judgments during the years of World War II were always right. Time flattens all curves, or bumps in the road. Roosevelt had his share of lapses, but he nearly always made up for them, which is more than can be said so far for Trump.
To cite a few examples:
n Months before the U.S. entry into the war, FDR convened a White House meeting with his top military advisors, including new Army chief of staff Gen. George C. Marshall.
As Marshall later recalled, Roosevelt went on and on about the need to ramp up airplane production. Forget about ground troops, new rifles, and tanks. The airplane was the thing.
The president asked each of those in attendance what he thought. There wasn’t a dissenting voices in the room, except Marshall’s.
“I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with that at all,” the general said.
Marshall thought he maybe had blundered his way out the door. The other brass at the meeting thought so. They came up to Marshall to wish him well on his next assignment.
To FDR’s credit, he not only listened, but took the advice of the Army chief. He learned to trust Marshall, not because Marshall was always right, but because he always told the commander-in-chief the truth, as he saw it.
Advisors didn’t have to tread lightly around Franklin Roosevelt.
n On more than one occasion Roosevelt vented his frustration with the press. Returning from a meeting with British prime minister Winston Churchill, FDR noted, “The radio talks … and the commentators are mostly silly or very mendacious!”
Returning to Washington, the president complained, “I fear 50 news hawks will meet us. That part will be harder than the conference itself.”
These were private remarks. FDR never publicly complained about media questions. He didn’t target reporters. He didn’t think or express the idea that the press was “the enemy of the people.”
n As for politics, FDR remained capable of playing the game at the highest, or lowest, levels.
As war loomed, in 1940, he made what might be the all-time presidential duplicitous political statement. Just days before that year’s tough campaign came to an end, he told anxious American mothers that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war,” when he knew such was all but inevitable, given the near certainty that the U.S. would someday be attacked.
Asked by aides to explain himself, the president said if attacked, the war would no longer be a “foreign” one.
In a sense, FDR had already redeemed himself by engineering, in the teeth of fierce opposition, a deal to provide the British with the ships they needed to carry on the war against the Nazis.
As one biographer observed, “After years of fox-like retreats and evasions, he took the lion’s role. He assumed the responsibility and taken the risk.”
That’s what presidents – great, effective presidents – do.
In the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the president, a Democrat, sought an “adjournment of party politics.”
“It was one of his favorite roles,” according to historian James MacGregor Burns. FDR relished being the “high-minded chief of state acting for the whole country, rising above sordid group and party interests.”
Roosevelt stayed out of the 1942 mid-term congressional elections with one exception: he voiced support for Republican senator George Norris of Nebraska.
FDR’s bipartisanship, even non-partisanship, while not always or necessarily visible, was a long-standing theme. In 1920, when running for vice president, he stated that World War I was “won by Republicans as well as Democrats. Men of all parties served in our armed forces. Men and women of all parties served the government at home.
“It would therefore {ill} serve our high standards should any person in the heat of political rivalry seek to manufacture political advantage out of a nationally conducted struggle.”
Men and women of all political stripes have died in the current pandemic. Likewise, we have no idea about the political leanings of the doctors, nurses, grocery and drug store clerks, truckers, and other front line workers who have braved the epidemic to serve the rest of us.
President Trump specializes in slicing and dicing the country into blues and reds. What a shame the president has been unable to rise up partisan divisions at this time of national crisis.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.