Jay Winik’s 1944 presents itself as an admiring biography of a segment of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s career, but also contains a forceful indictment of his failure to take direct action to help the Jews in Hitler’s Europe. In reviewing the book, Terry Teachout connects this failure with the basic attributes of the president’s personal and political character:
Well aware of the persistent prevalence of anti-Semitism among American voters, [Roosevelt] was prepared to do no more [in response to reports about the mass murder of the Jews] than allow the Allies to issue a joint declaration condemning German conduct as “bestial.” Nevertheless, the State Department continued to stand in the way of refugee relief, and Roosevelt declined to make any strong public statement on the subject.
Not until January 1944 did he set up a War Refugee Board whose mission was “to rescue victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death.” . . . But he appears to have taken no part in the subsequent War Department debate over whether to bomb Auschwitz to stop the killings. In the end, no such bombing took place, and Winik claims that there “is little doubt that the refusal to directly bomb Auschwitz was the president’s decision or at least reflected his wishes.” Other historians differ on whether FDR was in fact consulted on the matter, or whether bombing would have made a difference; but one thing is sure: it was never even tried. . . .
Roosevelt’s genius—and his tragedy—was his ruthless pragmatism, his seemingly infallible grasp of the limits of political power. For all the passion with which he would later speak of the horrors of the poverty that he longed to ameliorate, he was at the outset of his career the opposite of what we now call a “conviction politician.” Rarely would he put more than a sliver of his own carefully hoarded power at risk in the service of the ideals that he claimed to espouse.
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