"clifto" wrote in message
news
Frank Dresser wrote:
"clifto" wrote...
Yeah, especially high-ranking Republicans like Joe Kennedy.

Whatever influence Joe Kennedy had in the Roosevelt administration ended
when Roosevelt fired him for insubordination.

1. Kennedy resigned. At that time Roosevelt asked him to continue as
ambassador.

Keeping Joe Kennedy in London minimized the impact Kennedy might have had on
the election of 1940.

Kennedy had to nag Roosevelt to be relieved of duty.

Roosevelt ordered Kennedy to Washington DC after he figured he had the
election in the bag. Roosevelt verbally reamed his ambassador and allowed
him to "resign".


2. Kennedy lost little influence at that time; he was well connected
with Congress and influential members of society.

My point concerned Kennedy's influence in the Roosevelt administration.


Had the Boston Republican brahmins been more hospitible to Irish
Catholics,
the Kennedys might have been as Republican as the Rockefellers. Joe
Kennedy
did ended up liking Joe McCarthy much better than he liked Roosevelt.

I never did figure that one out. Bobby Kennedy worked for McCarthy, too.
Then again, I never got the feeling of extreme liberalism out of John F.
and Bobby as I have from the rest of that family.

He was
making too much money doing business with Hitler.

OK, you've got me there. I've heard about Kennedy's sleazy financial
deals
and mob connections, but I missed Kennedy's business ties with Hitler.
Please fill me in.

Okay, he wasn't doing business *directly* with Hitler, he was doing
business with the Nazi govermnent. That's well documented, and almost
any decent history book will regale you with the tale.

Hmmm. Any web links? A quick check just brings up a bunch of Sherman
Skolnick stuff and the usual allegations about John D. Rockefeller and Presc
ott Bush.



On the contrary, I'm pretty sure by this time Roosevelt had the WPA and
other stuff going and was well on the road to the free-money-for-the-
indolent economy.

Roosevelt was an anglophile and became a strong freind of Winston
Churchill
well before the Pearl Harbor attack. He was way ahead of the American
public in wanting to give direct aid to the British. His opposition
came
from those who wanted to keep American money and weapons in America.

I don't see any contradiction in being a welfare statist and wanting to
get
America involved with the war.

It's very simple. Dollars spent on military aren't buying you votes
from the indolent. That's why the percentage of GNP spent on military
stuff has consistently decreased since WWII, while the %GNP spent on
welfare has consistently risen.

Franklin Roosevelt was calling for a military buildup before the Nazis
invaded Poland. The US was demilitarized under the rugged individualist
Republican administrations between the World Wars.


Would that press also include such prominent isolationists as Col.
Robert
McCormack of the Chicago Tribune?

AAMOF, once Pearl Harbor was a fact, he pretty much went with the flow.
I don't suppose he'd have had much choice; people back then would
boycott a product for antisocial behavior.

Both the Pearl Harbor attack and Hitler's declaration of war against the
US
ended the isolationist movement. The isolationists weren't pacifists,
but
they weren't interested in war with nations which weren't declared
enemies
of the US.

On the contrary, probably more than half the isolationists of the period
would have fit right in with the hippie antiwar movement thirty years
later. Ask an old person (while you can!).

Oh, I'm sure the non interventionists were a mixed bag, just like the
hippies. Some were marxists, some were Jeffersonian types, some were
pacifists, some were facists, some were anti-semites. I expect there were
more prohibitionists among the noninterventionists and more free love
advocates among the hippies. Given the best known advocates of
isolationism, such as Col. Robert McCormack, Father Coughlin, Charles
Lindbergh and many Republicans, I picture the bulk of them as conservative.



Many US liberals of the era were admirers of the Soviet Union and ended
their neutrality earlier when the Nazis broke the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Liberals have always admired the Soviet Union. They're still trying to
establish such a government right here in the USA.

So what is liberalism, anyway? If trying to establish a communist police
state in the US is a defining characteristic of liberalism, there just ain't
enough liberals around to bother with.

Frank Dresser