The ongoing debate concerning America’s response to the Holocaust—and, more precisely, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR’s) record with regard to the Jews of Europe from 1933 to 1945—is passionate and highly contentious. It is largely characterized by two opposing and seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints, leaving little room for nuance and shades of grey. On the one hand, critics of FDR condemn the president for having stood by while Adolf Hitler and the Nazis persecuted the Jews of Germany and, subsequently, attempted to carry out their “Final Solution.”  On the other hand, defenders of Roosevelt argue that the president did everything in his power to save the greatest possible number of Jews.

The avowed goal of Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, co-authors of FDR and the Jews, is to “challeng[e] both extremes in this dispute” (p. 2). Admitting that “[n]o simple or monolithic characterization of this complex president [FDR] fits the historical record”, Breitman and Lichtman argue that “FDR was neither a hero of the Jews nor a bystander to the Nazis’ persecution and then annihilation of Jews” (p. 315). Thus, the authors endeavour to strike a balanced view and to deliver a neutral assessment of President Roosevelt’s record with regard to European Jewry during his years in office. But are they successful? The answer, quite simply, is no.

On the surface, Breitman and Lichtman appear to remain faithful to their goal of arriving at a balanced and neutral assessment of FDR’s record, thereby challenging the two extremes in the debate over President Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust. The authors are at their best when they discuss the various pressures exerted upon, the conflicting priorities of, and the challenges faced by FDR. Breitman and Lichtman retrace the various phases FDR went through on Jewish issues in response to the changing circumstances of his presidency—what they call the “four Roosevelts.” Thus, they show the way in which Roosevelt gave particular attention to some matters, while relegating others to a place of secondary priority, at various times throughout his tenure in office.

The “first Roosevelt”—corresponding to FDR’s first term—did very little—if anything—in the way of assisting the Jews of Germany. In fact, according to Breitman and Lichtman, Roosevelt’s first term marked the only moment in FDR’s twelve-year presidency in which the president was a veritable “bystander to Nazi persecution” (p. 3). In the midst of a worldwide depression, FDR placed priority on economic reform and recovery. In short, restoring the health of the American economy became Roosevelt’s foremost objective, which trumped all else—including the Jews. As a result, FDR remained silent in the face of the ever escalating persecution of German Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. Moreover, not wanting to find himself on the end of a public antisemitic backlash in the United States, President Roosevelt refused to expend any political capital in order to ease U.S. immigration restrictions against refugees. European Jewry, it would appear, had drawn the short straw.

The “second Roosevelt” emerged after the landslide election of 1936. With his election secured and the economy continuing to improve, FDR changed course—taking a greater interest in, and putting a greater emphasis on, Jewish concerns. This more decisive and “now-activist Roosevelt” (p. 3) attempted to use his executive powers for the benefit of the Jews, namely, by loosening U.S. immigration restrictions and promoting the resettlement of Europe’s Jews to foreign lands. Nevertheless, in the absence of domestic and international support, FDR proceeded with caution and, ultimately, tempered his aims.

The outbreak of war in Europe in the fall of 1939 triggered the emergence of the “third Roosevelt.” FDR’s activism with regard to Jewish issues rapidly took a backseat to more pressing concerns: protecting the United States from potential enemy subversives and aiding the Allies in their struggle against the Axis. When the United States entered the war in December 1941, rescuing Europe’s Jews became a matter of even lesser concern. The overriding priority became the attainment of military victory over the enemy. The remnants of European Jewry, FDR believed, could only be redeemed through Allied success on the battlefield.

Finally, in late 1943, with an Allied victory appearing all the more likely, the “third Roosevelt” gave way to the “fourth.” Once again, FDR changed direction and “addressed Jewish issues with revived interest” (p. 4). This Roosevelt, however, would never match the activism of the “second,” as a result of his declining health and his obvious preoccupation both with bringing the war to a successful close and preparing for the post-war world. Nevertheless, President Roosevelt approved the plan to establish the War Refugee Board, backed a declaration denouncing the crimes perpetrated against the Jews, and pursued plans for the post-war resettlement of refugees.

It would appear, then, that, at least on the surface, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman have succeeded in their endeavour to offer a fair, neutral, and balanced assessment of FDR’s record with regard to the Jews of Europe during his years in office, thereby providing a necessary corrective to a debate too often characterized by seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints. But does this “balanced view” withstand closer scrutiny? Not at all.

Even though the overarching thesis of FDR and the Jews, as we may recall, is that “FDR was neither a hero of the Jews nor a bystander to the Nazis’ persecution and then annihilation of Jews” (p. 315), Breitman’s and Lichtman’s final verdict on President Roosevelt is, nonetheless, rather favourable. In fact, the authors paint a generally favourable portrait of FDR—whereby his decisions, policies, and moral stance concerning Jewish issues appear as having been, on the whole, laudable. Although arriving at a positive appraisal of FDR’s record with regard to the Jews is not problematic in and of itself—that is to say, that it is not necessarily indicative of an unbalanced or unneutral assessment on the part of the authors, one reads FDR and the Jews and gets the distinct impression that this particular favourable evaluation is being forced upon the reader. This becomes painfully clear when one holds up to closer scrutiny some of the interpretations offered and arguments made by Breitman and Lichtman, which enabled them to arrive at their final and rather favourable verdict on Roosevelt’s record.

Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman undermine their own efforts to strike a balanced view and to deliver a neutral assessment of FDR’s record with regard to European Jewry in two ways: firstly, by making blatantly exaggerated claims and failing to reconcile some rather glaring inconsistencies, and, secondly, by having recourse to a number of arguments that cannot be supported by verifiable facts.

One of the more sensational claims made by the authors concerns the “second Roosevelt.” According to Breitman and Lichtman, following his landslide re-election in 1936, “FDR finally smashed the bureaucratic barriers to the expanded admission of Jewish refugees to the United States” (p. 316, emphasis added). This is an astonishing claim, especially in light of the authors’ own admission that FDR was reluctant to fight for an increase in immigration quotas, as a result of public and congressional opposition to such a measure. Why, then, did Breitman and Lichtman make such a clearly overdrawn assertion? Were they simply overeager to stress President Roosevelt’s role in loosening U.S. immigration restrictions, even if he was successful only to a modest degree? In this particular instance, the reviewer is willing to give the authors the benefit of the doubt. The same cannot be said, however, for some of the other inconsistencies found in the book, namely, with regard to the War Refugee Board.

The War Refugee Board (WRB), an agency which was charged with the development and the execution of plans and programs for the rescue of victims of Nazi persecution, Jewish and otherwise, was established on January 22, 1944, following President Roosevelt’s issuance of Executive Order 9417. As Breitman and Lichtman rightly observe, FDR established the WRB “while under pressure from an increasingly assertive Congress” and “only at the prompting of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. and his activist staff” (p. 263, emphasis added). The authors also explain how, throughout its tenure, the Board “remained underfunded, undermanned, and dependent on a military [i.e., War] and State Department with decidedly different priorities” (p. 325)—all problems that could have been remedied by President Roosevelt, had he wished. The critical appraisal, offered by Breitman and Lichtman, of FDR’s record with regard to the War Refugee Board is corroborated by Rafael Medoff’s book Blowing the Whistle on Genocide: Josiah E. DuBois, Jr., and the Struggle for a U.S. Response to the Holocaust (2009)—a (somewhat unorthodoxly organized) study which deals almost exclusively with the origins and the activities of the WRB.^[i] It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find the War Refugee Board  described as having been President Roosevelt’s “chosen instrument of rescue” (p. 325). Thus, it would appear that Breitman and Lichtman allow FDR to have his cake and eat it, too, by giving him credit for the work done and the lives saved by the War Refugee Board^[ii]—even though the WRB was an agency that Roosevelt, at best, established reluctantly, and, even then, was never given the necessary resources to carry out its rescue operations effectively.

Even more disconcerting is the way in which Breitman and Lichtman have recourse to arguments that can best be described as unconvincing, in order to arrive at their favourable verdict on Roosevelt. Each of these arguments serve to paint a rosier picture of FDR’s record with regard to the Holocaust than is in fact warranted.

The authors’ interpretation of the Évian Conference on refugees, convened at the initiative of President Roosevelt in July 1938, is, for example, an almost textbook case of “cherry picking”—that is, the use of selective evidence. When discussing FDR’s motivation for convening the conference, Breitman and Lichtman write: “[n]o hidden political motive underlay Roosevelt’s humanitarian initiative. To the contrary, […] he had little to gain and much to lose politically” (p. 108, emphasis added) from such a conference. Conspicuously absent from the discussion on the Évian Conference is the interpretation that attributes to Roosevelt cynical motives for convening the conference, an interpretation found, for example, in Arthur D. Morse’s While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (1967). According to Morse, the Anschluss between Germany and Austria provoked a public outcry in the United States for greater action on behalf of refugees. The State Department, wanting to counteract this outcry, deemed it preferable to “get out in front and attempt to guide the pressure, primarily with a view toward forestalling attempts to have the immigration laws liberalized”^[iii]. Thus, a conference on refugees was seen not as a “humanitarian initiative” (p. 108), but was something very different, a means of “silenc[ing] the critics of apathy”^[iv]. One could argue therefore that, contrary to what the authors of FDR and the Jews maintain, President Roosevelt had, in fact, something to gain and much less to lose politically from convening the conference that took place at Évian-les-Bains, in France.

All of this begs the question: why did Breitman and Lichtman choose not to challenge this interpretation of FDR’s motives for convening the Évian Conference or, at the very least, acknowledge its existence? Is it because they were ignorant of its existence? That is unlikely: firstly, because both Breitman and Lichtman are too good of scholars not to have taken cognizance of an interpretation that ultimately contradicts their own, and, secondly, because Arthur D. Morse’s While Six Million Died is repeatedly cited in the endnotes. The answer thus lies elsewhere. Could it be that they simply did not have a counterargument and therefore decided to sweep this alternative explanation under the carpet? One thing is certain: by not challenging an opposing interpretation, Breitman and Lichtman cast FDR in a more favourable light. In so doing, however, they also invite criticism—and, ultimately, enable their readership to question whether or not their study is truly as disinterested as they claim it to be.

In FDR and the Jews the co-authors also utilize a number of arguments that fall into the broad class of fallacies of relevance. Consider the following example. In their chapter entitled “Zionism and the Arab World”, Breitman and Lichtman argue that “[t]hrough action and not just words, Roosevelt helped stop the Nazis’ [sic] from extending the Holocaust from Europe to the Middle East and North-west Africa” (p. 260). How so? The answer: by sending and redirecting war material, such as Sherman tanks and A-20 bombers, to British forces in Egypt and Libya—war material that, the authors point out, was used by the Allied forces to defeat Erwin Rommel’s forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein and to end the German threat to Alexandria, Suez, and Palestine. A curious argument, indeed. But it gets better. “Roosevelt”, Breitman and Lichtman underscore, “undoubtedly sent direct military aid to buttress British positions in Egypt and its [sic] hold on the Suez Canal—not to aid Palestine’s Jews” (p. 261, emphasis added). Such a statement immediately begs the question: how is this argument in any way relevant to Roosevelt’s record with regard to the Jews of Palestine, or any other region for that matter? Breitman and Lichtman justify (what some might consider) their digression by asserting that FDR “was conscious of the Nazi threat to Jews in the region, and his action helped to save them, regardless of his motivation” (p. 261). “Weak” would be a rather generous adjective to describe the strength of this argument. What Breitman and Lichtman are essentially saying can be summarized thus: FDR should be given credit for saving the Jews of Palestine, not because he made the conscious decision of trying to save them, but rather because his decision to send war material to the Allied forces in Egypt—a decision that, the authors openly admit, had absolutely nothing to do with the Jews—had the indirect consequence of preventing them from falling into the hands of the Nazis. How the authors can make such an argument and still profess to have produced a balanced and neutral study is unclear.

In the final analysis, FDR and the Jews seemingly offers a balanced view of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s record with regard to the Holocaust, particularly when the authors discuss the various pressures exerted upon, the conflicting priorities of, and the challenges faced by the president during his years in office. Nevertheless, on the whole (and despite Richard Breitman’s and Allan J. Lichtman’s avowed profession of neutrality), the book reads like an apologia.

 

This book review has been made available to the Faculty Forum courtesy of the Jewish Political Studies Review. 

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