FDR as Our Greatest Twentieth Century President

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A few weeks ago I’d published an article on Father Charles Coughlin, the notorious radio priest of the 1930s, and my extensive reading revealed that he had been a far more formidable figure than I’d ever realized.

Although he was relegated to just a sentence or two in my introductory history textbooks, Coughlin had pioneered political commentary in the new medium of radio broadcasting, and partly as a result he had amassed an astonishing audience of perhaps 35 million regular listeners by the early 1930s, a total that may have amounted to one-quarter or more of all American adults. This enormous following probably made him the world’s most influential media figure, someone who dominated large segments of American society. Although the occasional fireside chats of President Franklin Roosevelt were hugely popular and FDR received thousands of letters each day, Coughlin’s own audience was much larger and his daily volume of mail far greater.

As a populist social reformer widely regarded as being on the left, Coughlin had been a strong and important early supporter of FDR and his New Deal economic policies, but he eventually came to regard these as a failure and turned against Roosevelt, also later becoming a leading figure in the effort to keep America out of World War II. That latter political turn led FDR to successfully deploy the full power of his federal government to drive Coughlin from the airwaves and permanently end his political activities.

• American Pravda: Father Charles Coughlin
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 19, 2025 • 8,000 Words

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Coughlin was hardly alone in his strong opposition to our involvement in World War II, with polls showing that some 80% of the American people held similar views, nor was he even the most prominent public opponent.

Earlier this year, I published a long article on the career of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his America First campaign, a political movement that had similarly sought to block our involvement in the war. In that work, I’d drawn very heavily upon an excellent 2024 book of that title by historian H.W. Brands, whose coverage focused entirely upon that Roosevelt-Lindbergh political duel of the early 1940s.

• American Pravda: Charles A. Lindbergh and the America First Movement
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 10, 2025 • 15,600 Words

Although Coughlin and Lindbergh were the primary figures in those articles, in each case President Roosevelt had been their main opponent, so he also had a central role both in my political narrative and in the extensive reading that I had undertaken to produce it.

Prior to Roosevelt, no American president had ever dared to exceed the two term limit informally established by George Washington, but FDR shattered that tradition by winning a third and eventually a fourth term, becoming the longest-serving president in our national history. My school textbooks told the story of how FDR’s New Deal rescued our country from the terrible depths of the Great Depression and then how that same president went on to win the Second World War against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the greatest military conflict in human history.

During his many years in office, FDR had hugely expanded the size and scope of the American federal government, establishing Social Security, Federal Deposit Insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and numerous other basic elements of our society that I had always taken for granted. Along the way, he had become an enormously popular hero to a huge fraction of the American public, notably including a young Ronald Reagan, who began his political career as an ardent New Deal Democrat, and despite his later decades as a conservative Republican still always lionized FDR and many of his policies.

Given such political achievements, it’s hardly surprising that Roosevelt’s Wikipedia page runs 21,000 words, with another 32,000 words devoted to his New Deal policies, with the former declaring:

Historians and political scientists consistently rank Roosevelt, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln as the three greatest presidents.

These articles and my reading led me to realize the very scanty and meager extent of my knowledge of FDR and his New Deal policies. For nearly my entire life, my understanding had been limited to what I had gleaned from my textbooks and absorbed over the years from my newspapers and magazines. However, about eight or nine years ago, I’d read a highly critical late 1940s book about Roosevelt and his presidency, and found it sufficiently persuasive that I’d later summarized some of its surprising information in a 2018 article. But in the back of my mind, I’d always wondered whether that account was merely a severely distorted and one-sided critique, a biased version of events that I had accepted because of my general ignorance of the subject.

Therefore, I recently decided to broaden my historical understanding of that era with an extensive study of FDR and his presidency, focusing my reading upon fully mainstream historiography, and that major project consumed much of the month of June.

The Privileged Life and Early Career of FDR

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I’d been very favorably impressed with the Brands book, and noticed that the same author had previously published a lengthy 2008 biography of FDR that had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, so Traitor to His Class, a doorstop-sized work running around 900 pages seemed like a good starting point for my investigation.

From the beginning, Brands emphasized Roosevelt’s very wealthy and elite family background. The future president was a descendent of the early Dutch settlers who had founded New York, and he followed that family tradition by being educated at Groton and Harvard College. FDR seems to have been a mediocre student with few if any intellectual interests, and years later he always described his failure to be admitted to Harvard’s elite Porcellian social club as the greatest disappointment of his entire life. By all accounts, Roosevelt almost never read any books, with the sole exception being dime detective stories. I’d sometimes come across these sorts of striking anecdotes about FDR in my casual readings, but having them explicitly stated in such a weighty and widely-praised biography fully confirmed their credibility.

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A couple of weeks ago, Israel launched its sudden surprise attack against Iran and within hours successfully decapitated most of that country’s top military leadership. The resulting Israel-Iran war soon drew America into the conflict, with President Donald Trump ordering a massive bombing attack against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities and the Iranians retaliating with missile strikes against an American base in the region. Although many of Trump’s top advisors were pressing for a full-fledged “regime change war” to overthrow the Iranian government, these tit-for-tat blows have temporarily ended the exchanges while Israel and Iran also agreed to a truce.

Before the fighting temporarily ebbed, these dramatic events naturally dominated most of the recent news headlines. Thus, they distracted attention away from an unrelated but extremely dangerous development at the very beginning of this month, an event with potentially greater geopolitical significance.

On June 1st, the world was astonished to hear that Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, one of the three legs of its vital nuclear deterrent triad, had suddenly been attacked by a huge wave of advanced explosive drones, which targeted five major airbases deep in the interior of that enormous country.

The Ukrainian government had spent more than three years locked in a bitter war with Russia, and it took full credit for what it called Operation Spiderweb, claiming that the remarkably bold attack had successfully destroyed one-third of Russia’s nuclear bombers, thus inflicting a severe strategic defeat upon its far larger and more powerful adversary.

The drones involved in the attack had been surreptitiously brought into Russia within shipping containers transported by unsuspecting Russian truckers, then automatically released close to the targeted airbases, a highly innovative military maneuver never previously employed. The Ukrainian government achieved a major propaganda victory by releasing video footage of the burning wrecks of Russia’s strategic bombers at the Belaya airfield deep in Siberia, located thousands of miles from Ukraine.

The actual damage inflicted seems to have been far less than was originally claimed. Although all five of the Russian airbases used by its nuclear bomber fleet were targeted for near-simultaneous drone attacks, apparently only some of those operations succeeded, and by most accounts perhaps only about 10-15% of the Russian strategic bombers were destroyed, with some additional ones suffering repairable damage.

But regardless of those particular details, this constituted the first time in history that the strategic arsenal of a nuclear superpower had been directly attacked, and the vulnerability demonstrated seemed extraordinarily destabilizing.

Hostile pundits initially ridiculed the Russians for parking their nuclear bombers in vulnerable open airfields, but they failed to realize that current nuclear arms treaties with the U.S. required exactly this unprotected visibility to satellites.

Moreover, under official Russian military doctrine, any such conventional strike against the country’s nuclear arsenal could fully justify a nuclear response. The attack was gleefully praised by many Western pundits and media outlets, a viewpoint that surely reflected their many political and national security sources. But the retaliatory consequences of this extraordinarily provocative operation might have been mushroom clouds over Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.

Fortunately, President Vladimir Putin’s government consists of extremely sober-minded and level-headed individuals, and they quickly deemphasized those attacks on their nuclear deterrent, instead choosing to focus upon other Ukrainian attacks against ordinary Russian civilian targets, which they angrily condemned as blatant terrorism. Foregoing any nuclear response, they have merely retaliated with larger waves of the same drone and missile strikes that they have been regularly launching against Ukrainian targets for the last several years.

However, the dramatic importance of this attack against Russia’s nuclear triad cannot be over-emphasized. Virtually all knowledgeable outside observes argued that these highly-sophisticated drone operations so deep within the Russian heartland could not possibly have been carried out without the direct support of Western intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities, almost certainly involving the participation of Western personnel.

Indeed, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s longtime foreign minister, publicly declared that his country had 100% certainty that British forces had been directly involved in orchestrating these attacks, with Prof. John Mearsheimer and other top American experts declaring that Lavrov’s statements were almost surely correct.

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Even absent those Russian claims of hard evidence, it seems extremely unlikely that the West was not directly involved in this attempt to cripple one leg of Russia’s nuclear triad. Ukraine is totally dependent upon the military and financial support of America and its NATO allies. Therefore, such an operation could not possibly have been planned and implemented without the full knowledge and approval of important elements of Western intelligence and military services, even if those elements might have deliberately ensured that their top political masters retained plausible deniability.

Not long before the attacks, President Donald Trump had publicly threatened Putin that some “really bad things” might happen if the Russians continued to reject American demands for an immediate ceasefire. So at the very least it seems plausible that Trump’s subordinates had vaguely informed our disengaged president that they had some “really bad things” ready to go in the near future.

Indeed, I think that Lavrov’s focus on Britain and its MI6 as the primary culprit while ignoring any American role was probably intended to avoid a complete diplomatic rupture with Washington rather than being a candid reflection of the conclusions of Russian intelligence.

Some additional evidence actually points even more strongly towards direct American involvement. A drone operation of such complexity and sophistication would have obviously required considerable testing, and the boastful Ukrainian government quickly declared that the planning had begun more than eighteen months earlier. One of our sharp-eyed columnists quickly noted that this was exactly the time period when large flights of mysterious drones had suddenly been reported in the vicinity of New Jersey and some other parts of the American East Coast. This epidemic of drone sightings provoked all sorts of wild stories of UFOs and Chinese military threats until the U.S. government finally admitted that the drone flights were instead part of a classified American military operation.

And although the Russians restricted their public accusations to Britain, their retaliatory doctrine put that country at potential risk of nuclear retaliation.

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Ten days ago a sudden surprise Israeli attack inflicted a terrible, decapitating blow upon the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, successfully assassinating the country’s top military commanders, its chief nuclear weapons negotiator, and nearly all of its most prominent nuclear scientists. Many of these victims were killed in their own homes together with their family members by explosive drones or missile strikes that sometimes destroyed entire apartment buildings, causing many collateral civilian deaths.

No such sudden massive wave of public assassinations against the top leadership of a major nation had ever previously happened, and the resulting war with its salvos of retaliatory Iranian missiles against Israel has now also brought America into the conflict.

Among other things, these events conclusively demonstrated the near-total control that Israel and its political partisans have achieved over the entire Western global media. Iran was in the midst of ongoing negotiations with the Trump Administration over its nuclear program, so Israel’s sudden strike was obviously an unprovoked attack, totally violating all international laws. Similarly, the assassination of so many of Iran’s military leaders and civilian scientists also broke every existing rule of international warfare. If any other country in the world had committed even a small fraction of these crimes, it would have been universally condemned in the strongest possible terms by every international body and subjected to the harshest international sanctions, quite possibility including coordinated military action to remove its regime and bring its political leadership to trial.

But since Israel’s fervent supporters completely dominate the global media, they can easily transform black into white and up into down. Thus, the bizarre result of this illegal, unprovoked Israeli attack upon Iran was a wave of public statements strongly sympathetic to Israel made by European and American political leaders from President Donald Trump on down, thereby demonstrating that all these powerful, once independent nations had merely become subservient vassals to the Jewish State.

Last year, I noted that more than a half-century ago something similar had happened in the aftermath of the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty:

I’ve often suggested that our media functions as a powerful tool of mind-control, not too dissimilar from what might be found in the plotlines of classic science fiction. After spending weeks or months immersed in such a controlling narrative, thinking independent thoughts let alone completely breaking free becomes a very difficult undertaking. For most individuals, the whisper in the back of their skulls overwhelms their logical reasoning, while their emotional reactions are turned on or off as if by a switch.

A perfect example of this came in the infamous U.S.S. Liberty incident of 1967. While peacefully sailing in international waters, our naval vessel was attacked by the Israelis, whose air and sea forces killed or wounded more than 200 American servicemen, and only by chance failed in their effort to sink the ship with no survivors. This constituted America’s worst naval loss of life at enemy hands since the huge sea battles of World War II, and surely if any other nation in the world had been responsible, our swift and overwhelming military retaliation would have bombed its major cities to rubble and killed many thousands of its citizens, while perhaps also hunting down and executing all the enemy leaders who had ordered that unprovoked attack.

But instead our government completely covered up that incident at the time it occurred, and the only consequence was that the annual financial tribute we paid to the Jewish State steadily increased in size. Even when the facts finally came out a dozen years later, any outrage was confined to just a small sliver of our population, while the majority who heard the story vaguely assumed that since the media told them “nothing to see here” they should move on and pay no attention. Something that under normal circumstances might have been expected to provoke a major punitive war merely produced a few uncomfortable shrugs.

Given its large size and advanced weaponry, America stood as a physical colossus on the world stage of the 1960s, with no other country able to directly challenge our might. But we were still helpless before the nation that had attacked us because the small pro-Israel Jewish minority deployed its tools of media mind-control to transform us into powerless marionettes, jerked about by invisible strings.

Another important conclusion to be drawn from these recent developments is that the Jewish State has certainly now established itself as history’s most prolific and skillful practitioner of assassinations as a technique of statecraft, having easily surpassed the notorious exploits of that small band of heretical Muslims who terrorized Middle Eastern leaders a thousand years ago and gave their name to that lethal tactic. Any introductory history books that describe the famed Order of Assassins as the foremost employers of that craft should therefore be revised.

Although political assassinations have hardly been uncommon throughout recorded history, during the last several centuries major Western nations had almost entirely abandoned such methods, rejecting them as immoral and illegal.

For example, historian David Irving revealed that when one of Adolf Hitler’s aides suggested to him that an attempt be made to assassinate the Soviet military leadership during the bitter combat on the Eastern Front of World War II, the German Fuhrer immediately forbade any such practices as obvious violations of the laws of civilized warfare.

In a long January 2020 article, I described this traditional Western attitude, and then explained that over the last couple of decades the combination of our “War on Terror” and growing Neocon influence had dramatically changed that policy.

The 1914 terrorist assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly organized by fanatical elements of Serbian Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely denied its own complicity, and no major European power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of World War I, and although many millions died in the trenches over the next few years, it would have been completely unthinkable for one of the major belligerents to consider assassinating the leadership of another.

A century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I don’t recall reading of any governmental assassination plots during that era, let alone in the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa disputed ownership of the wealthy province of Silesia by military means…

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Much like individuals, countries may often become victims of their own great success.

This risk certainly applies to criminals, including criminal regimes. Even if they effectively conceal their direct involvement in particular incidents, over time their method of operation—their “M.O.”—may become obvious. This allows the ready identification of their handiwork, whether by law enforcement agencies or interested historians.

Last week’s sudden surprise attack by Israel against Iran was a remarkably successful decapitation strike that assassinated much of the latter country’s top military and national security leadership at a single stroke. According to news reports, the victims included the head of the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, both the head of the Iranian armed forces and his top deputy, and the entire leadership of the country’s powerful missile and drone division. No previous historical example comes to mind in which the high command of a major nation’s military had been so completely annihilated within just a few hours. On June 12th, IRGC commander Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami had publicly declared that Iran “was ready for any scenario,” but 24 hours later he was dead, along with most of Iran’s other military leaders.

Moreover, the losses extended far beyond the armed forces. Ali Shamkhan, the national security advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader and the individual responsible for the ongoing nuclear negotiations with America was killed, as were the head of Iran’s nuclear research program and many of his top scientists.

Last year the Israelis had employed a similar decapitation strategy to eliminate the entire leadership of Hezbollah, effectively destroying that organization. But although Hezbollah had been widely regarded as the world’s strongest and most heavily-armed non-state militia, renowned for having given the Israelis a black eye during the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, it lacked any air defenses and was based in neighboring Lebanon. Meanwhile Iran was a powerful nation of 90 million, possessing advanced weaponry and located more than 1,000 miles from Israel. Iran’s decapitation was simply astonishing.

The exact tactical details of how the Israelis so easily pierced Iran’s robust air defenses cannot yet be firmly established given that elements of the widely published reports might merely constitute deceptive propaganda. But if those accounts are correct, Israel had secretly prepositioned large numbers of powerful drones and other military equipment on Iranian soil, then used these to blind and disable Iran’s network of anti-aircraft defenses, thereby opening the door for the huge air strikes that inflicted most of the destruction, and such a scenario seems quite plausible.

Other explosive drones may have been used for the targeted assassinations of many of the high-profile victims, whose exact locations had been determined by either human or technical intelligence. I’ve also seen claims on the Internet that small Israeli electronic warfare teams had successfully infiltrated Iran and disrupted the country’s military communications channels for hours, severely hampering any defensive measures. But none of these particular details much matter, with the overwhelming end result being the only important fact.

I think that the unprecedented success of this sudden Israeli strike against Iran’s leadership also shifts the probabilities on some other important past events. In April 2024, Iran had launched a retaliatory missile strike against Israel, and despite the best efforts of American and British forces to intercept the missiles in their flight path, the hypersonics and most of the ballistics got through and struck their targets, with Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome defense system proving itself completely ineffective in blocking the attacks. When the Israelis failed to counter-retaliate, the Iranians declared that they had been victorious in that major test of force, thus fully establishing the effectiveness of their missile deterrent.

But then just a few weeks later, Iran’s hardline President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister both died in a still unexplained helicopter crash while returning from a visit to Azerbaijan, leading many to suspect that Mossad had killed the Iranian president. And now that Israel has demonstrated its enormous ability to strike down so many top Iranian leaders in their own country at a time of high military tension, I think that President Raisi should probably be added to the long list of Israeli victims.

Furthermore, Raisi’s sudden death had major strategic consequences. He had been a leading Iranian hardliner, having close relations with Russia and China, and viewed by many as the likely successor to 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Meanwhile, his replacement was Masoud Pezeshkian, a far more moderate figure eager to avoid any confrontation with America and instead hoping to mend relations with the West. Thus, by eliminating Raisi, the Israelis had drastically “reshaped” the subsequent Iranian political landscape.

This same strategy was obviously an important element of last week’s huge wave of assassinations. Iran’s military leadership and especially its powerful IRGC had been among the most influential supporters of their country’s refusal to bend to America’s demands, with many of them even pushing for the creation of a nuclear weapons deterrent. So their elimination along with that of other hardline national security officials may shift the political balance in a very different direction.

Just as no major nation had ever previously suffered such a heavy decapitating blow, most would agree that Israel was the only country in the world that could have successfully carried out such a bold and daring operation. Indeed, proud Israelis would probably be the first to make such a boastful claim. But pride sometimes goes before a fall.

Once all these facts have sunk in and intelligent Americans have given due consideration to the matter, I think that only the willfully blind or the most obtuse will fail to quietly recognize that Israel and its Mossad had played exactly the same role in two of the most momentous events that similarly “reshaped” our own country’s political landscape, namely the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 2001 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

Seen from the broader sweep of history, the combination of those two watershed events, together with many smaller ones, effectively reduced our country to a subservient vassal state largely under Israeli control, and that bitter reality will surely inspire deep resentment as our citizens become more fully aware of it.

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About a year ago, I first began exploring the powerful new AI systems that had been receiving so much public attention, and incorporated some of their features into our website.

For myself and many of our other writers, I added focused chatbots that used the corpus of the written works hosted on our website to simulate the responses of the authors to new questions. This was particularly effective in the case of the Ron Unz Chatbot given that it was trained on the substantial 1.5 million words of my own articles.

Then a few months ago I added another AI feature, having the ChatGPT system automatically produce short summaries and outlines for every article we publish that was longer than 1,000 words, thereby allowing readers to easily get a rough sense of pieces that they lacked the time or interest to actually read.

However, over the last few weeks I’ve begun using a new AI system for an even more important purpose, one much closer to the core mission of this website and my own large body of work.

OpenAI recently released an especially powerful new version of the ChatGPT AI called Deep Research. Whereas the ordinary ChatGPT and most other chatbots are designed to respond to prompts within seconds, the Deep Research AI may spend up to 30 minutes working on a given assignment, but it uses that time to produce remarkably detailed and advanced results. For example, according to Wikipedia a standard benchmark test scored the GPT-4o system at only 3.3% and DeepSeek’s R1 model did much better at 9.4%, but Deep Research rated a vastly superior 26.6%.

I discovered that the Deep Research AI could very effectively be used to fact-check exactly the sort of long, complex articles that I often write, and the results it produced were extremely impressive, fully confirming the sort of performance quality suggested by that standard benchmark. This led me to begin producing such fact-checking runs for the pieces in my lengthy American Pravda series and some other ones.

A couple of weeks ago I published an article discussing this process and the dozens of very impressive fact-checking results that I had already obtained.

• Fact-Checking the American Pravda Series
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 26, 2025 • 8,600 Words

Unsurprisingly these Deep Research runs are enormously resource-intensive, so that a standard OpenAI account limits them to 25 per month, with the first 10 being full-power and the remaining 15 low-power. We soon switched over to a Premium account that raised the allotment to 250 monthly runs, evenly divided between full-power and low-power. The full-power runs usually seemed as if they had been written by an exceptionally intelligent individual who had read nearly everything available on the Internet and also possessed almost total recall.

This new AI system seemed to have great potential value for my own writing and for other controversial content.

Over the last few years I have produced a huge body of work analyzing many of the most important world events of the last century or more, and often coming to extremely controversial conclusions, conclusions that would have enormous impact upon our entire society if they were judged correct and widely accepted. I have always done my best to adhere to the strictest standards of accuracy and care in writing these sometimes inflammatory articles, and as a result I have regularly declared that I would still stand by at least 99% of everything I have written in this huge body of extremely controversial material.

Many of the topics that I have decided to cover in this series are explosive ones and my conclusions are often even more so. This necessarily places my work very far beyond the pale of our mainstream academic and journalistic communities, quite often even far outside the acceptable boundaries of nearly all other alternative writers as well.

For these reasons, I would imagine that the overwhelming majority of those who initially encounter my material might often react with visceral disbelief, perhaps automatically dismissing my analyses out of hand. This has obviously made it quite difficult for my writing to gain any widespread traction.

I have always made every effort to take great care in producing my content and when I reread my past articles I find them quite compelling. But I recognize that this subjective impression might easily be an illusory result, while an objective, third-party analyst would have come to very different conclusions.

For both of these reasons those recent fact-checking runs applying the powerful Deep Research AI to roughly 120 of my articles have been extremely helpful. These reports often validated my own opinion while also providing powerful corroborative evidence of the accuracy of my findings to any interested outside readers.

As I began doing many of these Deep Research analysis runs, I soon discovered an enormous difference in the depth and quality between the analysis provided by the full-power runs and those produced by the low-power version, so much so that I came to regard the latter as being almost useless for serious evaluation of my material.

A perfect example of this came in the fact-checking of my long and detailed 2021 article on the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty. The low-power Deep Research run produced a relatively short and dismissive 3,800 word report that seemed to lack familiarity with many of the important facts and also criticized my article for its “conspiratorial” sources and conclusions. This version of the AI heavily relied upon an article in the notoriously pro-Israel New Republic arguing that the attack on the American vessel had very likely been the result of mistaken identity, and it sharply criticized my own article for not similarly emphasizing such “mainstream” sources of information. Naturally, I found this sort of analysis rather disappointing.

But the results from a full-power Deep Research run were entirely different. This produced an extremely detailed and thorough 19,000 word analysis—five times as long—that fully endorsed nearly all of my claims as being “accurate,” though it carefully noted that some of my resulting conclusions were speculative just as I myself had emphasized. Here are a few of the rather flattering summary paragraphs from that full-power fact-checking report, with boldface in the original: