“On the eve of World War II,” says the Dec. 7 cover of
Parade magazine, “the U.S. government turned away the S.S.
St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 men, women, and children
fleeing the Nazis.” The “U.S. government” here mainly means
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He turned them away. Pleas were made to
Roosevelt to save the passengers; he ignored them. And because of
it hundreds of people lost their lives in the concentration camps
of Europe.
Yet FDR is a great president, we are told. You don’t often hear
liberals accuse him of callousness. They reserve that charge for
Ronald Reagan. It still outrages them that Reagan didn’t
singlehandedly stop the AIDS virus.
“More Americans died of AIDS during Ronald Reagan’s presidency
than in all of this nation’s wars in the last 30 years,” writes
Hillary Rosen in Daily Variety. “…We will never know how
many of these deaths could have been prevented if Reagan had been
the moral leader [Reagan] revisionists would have him be.”
Yes, AIDS spread because of a failure of moral leadership. But
not Reagan’s. It is not that he didn’t offer a solution to the
crisis. He offered the only proven solution to the AIDS crisis —
abstinence; Rosen and her friends simply didn’t like his solution.
That’s not Reagan’s failure of moral leadership. It is theirs.
Given Rosen’s rhetoric, one would think Reagan personally spread
the virus. He didn’t spread it; those who ignored his common-sense
morality did. Rosen wants candor about the Reagan legacy. This is
rich given the total lack of candor and sense of moral
responsibility from liberals like her who rationalize and justify
the conduct of those who actually spread the disease. When will we
get some candor about that?
“Reagan and his political cronies, the same ones who are now
crying foul, aided and promoted the ignorance [about AIDS]. The CDC
[Centers for Disease Control] knew how to alert the public about
health risk,” writes Rosen. This also is a rich claim given that
the CDC was discouraged from speaking plainly about the disease due
to politically correct pressure from Rosen’s friends. As it has
been widely documented, AIDS was not treated like other diseases
(where hard-headed public health actions are deployed) for
ideological reasons. Again, still no candor from the left about
that.
To say that Reagan didn’t address the crisis is a lie. He just
didn’t address it in the approved PC manner of his accusers, frauds
who demand moral accountability from everyone except
themselves.
If the left wants to talk about real presidential omissions of
duty, they could start with FDR. The S.S. St. Louis
incident illustrates what a cynical, immoral operator he could
be.
He turned away Jewish passengers fleeing Hitler for reasons of
pure base politics. The boat had landed first in Cuba, but hack
Cuban political officials kicked them off the island. It then
headed to Florida. “Urgent cables were sent to every level of the
U.S. government, including two personal appeals to President
Franklin D. Roosevelt,” Lyric Wallwork Winik writes in
Parade. “He never replied. Instead, Coast Guard boats
patrolled to prevent anyone from swimming to shore.” (Perhaps a
precedent the Elian Gonzalez-snatching Reno Justice Department had
studied.)
Even Conrad Black, in his admiring biography of FDR, has to
acknowledge that FDR’s treatment of Jewish refugees was an
“unedifying” episode of his presidency. “There were many editorials
asking Roosevelt to be merciful to these unfortunates. He didn’t
reply to any of it. Concerned that Hitler’s next ploy would be to
try and inundate the United States with his indigent and terrified
victims, Roosevelt did not alter the challenging means test that
Hoover had decreed for immigration candidates, screening out anyone
who it seemed could become a welfare case in the United States,” he
writes.
Turning his back on thousands of European Jews (FDR maintained
strict immigration controls after the incident), even though he
knew that Hitler had every intention of killing them, FDR presaged
his disgraceful diplomacy at Yalta. It is no wonder that a
president who couldn’t be bothered to save a boatful of Jewish
refugees had no problem blithely handing the peoples of Eastern
Europe over to Joseph Stalin.
It would take Reagan to undo FDR’s folly at Yalta. That the left
who love FDR castigate Reagan for not rescuing “victims” shows the
depth of their perverse historical memory.
