FDR MEMORIAL CAN'T CHANGE SADNESS, REVULSION OR HISTORY : PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE.

Byline: David Horowitz 

WHEN President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died April 12, 1945, the nation and the world mourned the man whom historians have since come to mark as the best, or second-best president (to Abraham Lincoln), this country has ever had.

On May 2, the nation will honor him with the addition of the FDR Memorial in the Monument District in Washington, D.C.

I was just as devastated as anyone else at his passing. Though a child, I could not imagine life in the United States without his leadership, his vision, his compassion. I have since come to understand that none of his vast accomplishments, though they reverberate in our society to this day, erase his crimes before and during World War II.

Not many people are aware of them, I grant you. But through the years, I have come to know more than I can bear about his role in the demolishing of generations of European Jews.

This so-called man of compassion, who created a social security system designed to give every man and woman a dignified retirement, was knowingly compliant in Hitler's ``final solution,'' choosing to appease the Anti-Semites in his State Department, the Congress, some of the better-known clergy of the day, large segments of the population who believed Adolph Hitler had the right answer for Europe and, in general, a society of immigrants determined to pull up the ladder into the United States, once they had ascended it so no others could follow behind them.

For years, Roosevelt turned his back to Hitler's suggestion that other nations absorb Germany's Jews. Easy deals were offered: take them, they're yours.

Rather than fight his own State Department, Roosevelt dreamed up a farce called the Evian Conference, held in France, with 33 nations attending.

The United States, which had called for the meeting, announced in the opening statement its policy that it would not extend its immigration laws but expected the other 32 nations to do so. Not one country took in one Jew.

For years he ignored the evidence that Breckenridge Long, the assistant secretary of state to Cordell Hull, was exhorting the American Embassies around the world to ``stall and stall and stall until no one gets in,'' the result of which was that not even 50 percent of the pitifully low legal immigrant limits were not met in any year, while millions begged for the chance to save their skins.

Measures were introduced in Congress to open the doors, if only a fraction. Roosevelt consistently refused to back them, choosing to appease the isolationists in Congress, so he might get their acquiescence on other issues more interesting to him.

After Evian, Hitler made it clear that, if the rest of the world wasn't concerned about the Jews either, he could institute his ``final solution,'' and no one would balk. He was, of course, right.

And so began the systematic murder of millions. The Allied refusal to bomb the concentration camp ovens and railways is well-known. ``They would only rebuild,'' was the American answer. Forget that it would take months and economic resources the Nazis didn't have at that time. Any old excuse in a storm.

Like many American Jews of my generation, I revered Roosevelt, became a lifelong Democrat because he was a Democrat. How blind we all were. Where was the difference on this issue of life and death between Roosevelt and the Republican isolationists? There wasn't any.

So, as the country and, undoubtedly, high-level representatives of most of the world celebrate and honor him with a beautiful memorial, I will look upon May 2 with a mixture of sadness and revulsion, remembering his unconscionable complicity in the death of millions.

Believing in Heaven, as I do, my only consolation is that Roosevelt has surely, by now, met his victims in the next world. I wonder if his excuses play as well there as they did in this world 60 years ago.