As I have mentioned here many times, there is no way around ranking Franklin Roosevelt as one of our top five Presidents: his handling of World War II from the U.S. perspective and his leadership during the Great Depression, which didn’t so much fix the economic problems as raise the public’s faith in our system of government when it easily could have collapsed, are so important and momentous that all of his missteps and blunders pale by comparison. Nevertheless there were many of these, some quite damning.

I only recently learned about one of them that I somehow had missed all these years—probably because our historians have been and are still overwhelmingly left-biased and inclined towards hagiography where FDR is concerned.

Henry Morgenthau Jr. was Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1934 until FDR’s death. He was a trusted advisor whose scope of interest and influence far exceeded the usual territory of his office. In 1944, Morgenthau got far over his metaphorical skis and proposed a scheme for the post-war world, specifically, as he said, “I want to make Germany so impotent that she cannot forge the tools of war – another world war.”

You know, because that strategy worked out so well the first time, after World War I…

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