President's soft on Russia, hard on press? Must be FDR

(WARNING: The following column contains historic references that may be disturbing to the mental health of anyone who grew up thinking that there is any such thing as a “safe space.” Read at your own risk.)

The departure of Gen. Michael Flynn as President Trump’s national security adviser offers a perfect opportunity to continue the discussion of similarities between Trump and FDR.

Trump dismissed Flynn as the result of his apparent failure to level with the president and vice president about top-secret discussions he had held with Russian officials prior to the inauguration.

Partly as a result of this story, Senate and House Democrats are demanding hearings on whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton and whether Trump himself has an inappropriately close relationship with the Russians.

As I noted last week, history reveals that no president had a closer relationship with the Russians than Franklin Roosevelt — the massively popular Democratic president who served from 1933 to 1945. His right-hand man (“deputy president”) Harry Hopkins oversaw the Lend-Lease program that allowed the U.S. to send billions of dollars in military aid to the Soviet Union. For details, read “From Major Jordan’s Diary,” first published in 1952, which tells the fascinating story of how — long before the first atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima — uranium was making its way through Great Falls to the Soviet Union under the direction of Hopkins.

Based on documents that were smuggled out of Russia in the 1990s as well as the Venona files that were intercepted by the U.S. government, it is now fairly well established that Hopkins was not just a Soviet sympathizer, but a Soviet agent. No one has proven that about Gen. Flynn, although the national media sure wants you to believe they have.

And just as Roosevelt’s coziness with Russia outdoes anything so far proven about Trump, so too does FDR’s animosity for the press. One example will suffice:

When Drew Pearson, the most popular columnist of the day (think pre-TV Bill O’Reilly), wrote a piece in August 1943 alleging that Secretary of State Cordell Hull was “anti-Russian,” Roosevelt exploded in a press conference. In the words of columnist Raymond Clapper, “President Roosevelt cut Pearson’s throat from ear to ear in the most savage outburst of temper I can recall at a White House press conference.”

As reported by the Associated Press at the time, Roosevelt said Pearson’s comments “were very detrimental to the United States and to the United Nations and therefore to the winning of the war.

“He said the comments were a lie, the man who wrote them a chronic liar and they demonstrated bad faith with the country. Furthermore, he added, they represented a kind of journalism which hurt the press and the country, and he said the columnist was not the only one.”

In other words, he called Pearson and other journalists exactly what President Trump has been saying for the last year and a half — “the dishonest media” — and accused them of pandering “fake news.”

Mind you, President Trump is apoplectic because he thinks his aides are unfairly being painted as pro-Russian whereas the reason Roosevelt got so incensed was because his secretary of state had been called ANTI-Russian. It was President Roosevelt himself who was famously PRO-Russian. The newspapers had a good time in the ensuing days taking sides on this important issue. The Somerset American in Somerset, Pennsylvania, summed it up nicely when they wrote, “President Roosevelt has been exceedingly kind to Russia.”

Probably most Americans today don’t realize it, but it was President Roosevelt who first recognized the Soviet Union as the legitimate government of the Russian people. That was in 1933, Roosevelt’s first year in office, and 16 years after the Russian Revolution. We don’t have to assume that FDR was “soft” on communism, but lots of Americans did, including members of Congress.

Actually, Secretary Cordell Hull probably was “anti-Russian,” but pragmatically so. He understood the importance of bringing Russia into the alliance to defeat Germany and he acted accordingly. But the true friend of Russia in the State Department was Sumner Welles, the long-serving undersecretary of state who was a personal friend of FDR.

When Welles resigned in 1943, there was considerable speculation that he had lost his battle with Secretary Hull for dominance in the department. It was Welles who had the most contacts with Russia, and if anything, he provides the more exact analogy to Gen. Flynn in the current scenario. Oddly enough, just as there are now questions about why Flynn’s resignation took so long, so too there were rumors flying in 1943 about Welles, who languished out of sight for several months before his resignation was confirmed. Asked directly about it, FDR feigned ignorance. But there were no congressional hearings to get to the bottom of the controversy as are now being demanded in the case of Flynn’s resignation. Possibly, that’s because there was more to the story than was made public at the time. A multi-racial sex scandal has been alleged by various sources involving an indecent proposal that Welles is alleged to have made toward several railroad porters. Certainly, in today’s world of 24/7 cable news coverage, the Sumner Welles resignation story would have been fodder for endless speculation, character assassination and cheap shots.

None of that excuses anything Donald Trump has done, or might have done. He’ll have to take the heat because, as Harry Truman observed, he is now standing in the political kitchen.

But the heat these days is way hotter than anything experienced by Truman or Roosevelt. Indeed, the more I learn about FDR, the more convinced I am that he could not have survived in the modern political era. You can start with him disguising his paralysis from the public; throw in his affair with Lucy Mercer; and add his autocratic if not dictatorial tendencies, his brash and swaggering manner, and his administration’s coziness with the Russians, and what you would wind up with in the era of political correctness is a political disaster.

It is surprising that the Democratic Party that has disowned Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson has not done the same thing to the president who ordered the detention of thousands of Americans of Japanese, Italian and German descent during World War II and intentionally excluded black athlete Jesse Owens from the White House after his amazing performance in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Did I mention that FDR appointed Hugo Black, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, to the Supreme Court? Do the Democrats in Congress who tried to paint Trump and his attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, as a racist know that? I’m sure they don’t care, but what does the record say about Jeff Sessions? When he was attorney general in Alabama, Sessions actually put Klan members in jail, while the Democratic icon, President Roosevelt, put them on the bench. Go figure.

The point of this whole exercise in historical analysis isn’t to excuse Trump from any consequences of his own decisions or appointments, but rather to point out the ignorance of the national media, which continues to act as if the news coming out of D.C. today has no precedent. On the contrary, virtually everything that is breathlessly reported by our esteemed media elites in the capital has been seen and done countless times before. The people who run our country are not saints. They never have been. They make mistakes. They have human foibles. They do their best, and sometimes that isn’t good enough.

What’s really surprising is that, based on their hysterics and hyperbolic reporting, the national press corps apparently thinks those failings just started the day Trump was sworn in.

I think the American people as a whole are smarter than that, but we shall see.

There is certainly a lot of controversy swirling around President Trump based on the issues raised in the last two weeks, but voters who wanted Trump to “drain the swamp” need to step back and ask themselves how much of the chaos in Washington is a result of the alligators biting back.

It appears, in particular, that the war between the president and the intelligence community may have deep roots and even deeper implications. In a future column, we will look at that war from a historical perspective. For now, suffice it to say that Donald Trump is not the first president to take a shot at the CIA, nor the first one to have had the CIA return fire.

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana.