Jack Kemp

Columnist Byron York writes today at Townhall.com about Joe Biden having delusions of wanting to be Franklin Roosevelt. he includes some background information.


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In early March, President Joe Biden met with a group of seven historians in the East Room of the White House. One topic of conversation: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. "He'd like to be [FDR]," Axios' Mike Allen reported in an inside account of the meeting.

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Historian Michael Beschloss, who attended the meeting, reportedly said that FDR, along with Lyndon Johnson, are "the past century's closest analogues" to what Biden hopes to do. "Beschloss said the parallels include the New Deal economic relief that Franklin Roosevelt brought in 1933, which saved the country from the Depression and chaos," reported Axios.

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Well, one thing FDR did we can be sure Biden doesn't want to do is make an Army veteran who uncovered defense contractor scandals in WWII as his Vice President and successor. During WWII, WWI veteran artillery officer and little known U.S. Senator from Missouri Harry S. Truman, on his own time and driving his own car, drove into Virginia and visited defense plants interviewing workers. There Truman discovered some factories were using sub-grade armoring for military contracts, thus endangering the lives of the soldiers and sailors fighting the war and also cheating the taxpayers. This lead to FDR, visibly ill in 1944, deciding to make harry Truman his Vice Presidential nominee, a situation which could lead to Truman either being elected President in 1948 or perhaps becoming President when FDR resigned or died in office. As most of us know, both these realities happened with the death of Roosevelt in 1945. I say "most of us know" because last week I was speaking to a young man doing customer service for a financial institution who had to ask me my birthday (in 1947) and he then stated, "Oh, you were born before the end of WWII." I had to give him a history lesson about the war ending in 1945.

Another thing that Franklin Roosevelt did happened earlier when he was in the Woodrow Wilson administration. This was brought to the general public by former Newsweek liberal journalist Jonathan Alter. FDR set up a sting to entice and entrap U.S. Navy sailors in homosexual acts.

Wikipedia has it detailed under the title "Newport Sex Scandal" which states that FDR was formally rebuked by the U.S. Congress. The scandal almost ended his political career.

The History Collection also has a long and detailed article about the scandal with sailors confined for months without trial to coerce them to confess.

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The Newport Sex Scandal was an investigation into illicit sexual behavior of Navy personnel. Over 15 men went through court martial proceedings for sexual encounters with undercover investigators. Linked to the investigation was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy and future President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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Reportedly on March 19, 1919, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, signed off on opening an investigation into the "immoral conduct” reportedly happening at the Army and Navy YMCA in Newport.

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Of course, FDR later in WWII  would seize property of Japanese-Americans and confine them to inland camps. This was done at the same time a number of their grown children were volunteering to fight in Europe or  to become code breakers and translators for the U.S. military, training at Camp Savage and Ft. Snelling, both in the Twin Cities area. This is shown in the documentary film "MIS (Military Intelligence Service) Human Secret Weapon by Junichi Suzuki. It was President Truman who called them Human Secret Weapon. Amazon.com has a description of this film and Variety has a review where they state:

"Certainly, he tells viewers a lot they likely didn’t know: for instance, that the Military Intelligence Service program was under way well before the U.S. actually entered WWII, or that, toward the end of the war, MIS soldiers helped save Okinawan citizens from committing suicide during the U.S. invasion."

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Besides Biden's age, I believe Biden is also a produc of school books that glorified FDR and left out a lot of history that was kept as military secrets until fifty years after WWII. Even with the best of mental clarity that Biden has been taught a view of Franklin Roosevelt that is all but comic book- like in its simplicity. Biden may find that trying to be an FDR/Superman clone will be a lot more challenging that the simpler version he was taught about. Some of you may remember a story I wrote about the FDR Memorial in Washington that features Roosevelt wearing a huge cape (like Batman) to cover up his use of a wheelchair. When physically challenged Americans paid for a sculpture of FDR in a wheelchair to be placed just outside the official government monument, then-President Bill Clinton quickly agreed to the additional statue that honors the arguably most accomplished physically challenged American. Meanwhile, the Democrats are denouncing slave holder Thomas Jefferson, among others. Guess who requested the Jefferson Memorial be built in Washington? It was FDR himself.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:44 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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