The President’s Attempt to Push Us Into War

J. Michael Sharman

Do you remember the famous speech the President gave pushing us into a war without borders?

The President sat at his Oval Office desk. A few famous friends were there to support him, a senator from his party, and of course, his ever-supportive mother. When you’re down in the polls, and Congress is eating your lunch, it helps to have your mom on your side.

The President spoke through the microphone and directly to the American people, bypassing the media that had constantly been harping at him and criticizing his decisions.

He said he was not giving us a talk on war, but rather, “It is a talk on national security; because the nub of the whole purpose of your President is to keep you now; and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last‑ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours.”

He used our patriotism – and our fear – to push us into the conflict: “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now." Our enemies, he warned, have “a program aimed at world control—they would unite in ultimate action against the United States."

He tried to persuade us to launch aggressive military action because the enemies’ leader had supposedly said, “There are two worlds that stand opposed to each other…With this [other] world we cannot ever reconcile ourselves."

He flat-out rejected the suggestion that we might be able to become friends or at least obtain neutrality with those whose goals were so different than ours. “Americans never can and never will do that,” he claimed. “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”

He did not attempt to reconcile their different beliefs with ours, but instead he claimed that: “What they have in mind is but a revival of the oldest and the worst tyranny.”

He asked us to believe that our enemies were “[A]n unholy alliance” whose goal, he claimed, was “to dominate and enslave the human race.” He tried to convince us to get into the war because of their supposedly evil intentions, and, "For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself."

His pitch was that it was up to us, the United States, to save the whole world: “We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” he told us.

Remember how he told us that his advisors had told him we could not wait any longer to engage in military action. And who can forget his claim that, “I base that belief on the latest and best information.”

America was not yet convinced by President Roosevelt’s December 29, 1940 militaristic message, because the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was yet a year in the future, and we Americans still were not persuaded to fight Hitler and Mussolini in Europe.

But  while his mother, Sara Roosevelt, and his friend, Clark Gable, and Clark’s wife, Carole Lombard, and Kentucky's Senator Barkley kept him company in the Oval Office, FDR ended his 15th fireside chat  with this warning for us to hear today:

“The American appeasers ignore the warning to be found in the fate of Austria, Czechoslovakia., Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Neth­erlands, Denmark, and France. They tell you that the Axis powers are going to win anyway; that all this bloodshed in the world could be saved; and that the United States might just as well throw its influence into the scale of a dictated peace, and get the best out of it that we can. They call it a ‘negotiated peace’. Nonsense! Is it a negotiated peace if a gang of outlaws surrounds your community and on threat of extermination makes you pay tribute to save your own skins?”

 “Such a dictated peace,” President Roosevelt reminded us, “would be no peace at all.”

By J. Michael Sharman Click here for bio and archived articles