Could FDR have saved more Jews?

• Author: Breitman, Richard
• Position: The World Yesterday

PUBLIC and congressional opinion, P bureaucratic pressures, limits on resources, and the views of Allied powers all constrain the foreign policy of even the most powerful U.S. presidents. Well-intended foreign policy and military decisions may have unintended or even perverse results, exposing presidents to a crossfire of criticism. At the time, critics assailed Pres. Barack Obama's decision to intervene in the Libyan civil war and halt atrocities perpetrated by dictator Muammar Gaddafi as risky and not in the U.S.'s interest. After the murder last September of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, some even claimed that American interests and human rights are less secure in Libya today than during Gaddafi's rule. Yet other critics also have blasted Obama's decision not to intervene in the Syrian civil war. They charge that he must act to limit the mayhem in Syria and arm the rebels fighting the dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Abstract principles translate into precise blueprints for action only in untestable, retrospective judgments. The world and international law recognizes intervention as morally and legally justified in the case of genocide. In December 1948, the United Nations, pushed by pioneering genocide scholar Raphael Lemkin, adopted a convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide that authorizes any outside nation to intervene: any move by a regime toward genocide overrode its right of national sovereignty. Nations of the world ratified the Genocide Convention in response to the widespread belief that outside powers had stood by during the mass murder of Armenians during World War I, and then of Jews during World War II.

One influential American had experience with both genocides. A young Henry Morgenthau Jr. went to Istanbul during World War I to help his father, Henry Sr., the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, who had urged Pres. Woodrow Wilson to help stop the genocide against Armenians. Nearly three decades later, Morgenthau Jr., now Secretary of the Treasury in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Cabinet, induced the President to establish a War Refugee Board, because the U.S. had done too little to aid European Jews during what we now call the Holocaust.

Armed with the invincible power of hindsight, scholars have condemned Roosevelt for callously watching while Hitler persecuted German Jewry and then exterminated nearly two thirds of Europe's Jews. Playwrights, filmmakers, and political figures have replayed this story of ironic betrayal by a famously humane president whom Jews of his time revered. Liberals...