We should honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt today as the greatest commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in our history, bar none - including President Lincoln.
From Nigel Hamilton
Traditionally Presidents Day was Washington's birthday. It was celebrated as a public holiday on February 22 each year, in peace or in war.
As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan - in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair.
I grew up and lived in a Britain in which strikes and the threat of strikes had become part of the social fabric - and it was not very nice.
The moral was, in time of anarchy, tough leadership is the only solution - even though the collateral damage may be heartbreaking. Mrs. Thatcher's strident, take-no prisoners approach was in some ways repugnant, but it was surely necessary.
My father had risen in the British Army under the revolutionary aegis of General Montgomery, who was mad about training for battle, not muddling into disaster.
Republican isolationists had certainly tied the hands of every U.S. president, year after year - berating Franklin Roosevelt in particular and his attempts to ready the nation for inevitable attack.
For all the failures of naval, air and army defense, the men who died at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines would not die in vain.
Since his inauguration in 2009, President Obama has upheld FDR's vision of America as a nation that keeps its word - a nation still committed to uphold the 'four freedoms' that President Roosevelt set down in the great Atlantic Charter of August 1941.
Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan's consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union - the only competing world empire at the time - was bound to collapse!
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