DLC Neo-Cons Spit on
Franklin Roosevelt's Grave
by Jeffrey Steinberg
In 1946, barely a year after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his son and wartime aide, Elliott Roosevelt, published a stirring account of the late President, with a Foreword by his mother, Eleanor Roosevelt. In his own introduction to As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce), Elliott Roosevelt explained why he was compelled—indeed, driven—to write the book.
"The decision to write this book," he began, "was taken more recently, and impelled by urgent events. Winston Churchill's speech at Fulton, Missouri, had a hand in this decision; the meetings of the Security Council at Hunter College in New York City and the ideas expressed at those meetings were influential; the growing stockpile of American atom bombs is a compelling factor; all the signs of growing disunity among the leading nations of the world, all the broken promises, all the renascent power politics of greedy and desperate imperialism were my spurs in this undertaking."
Directly taking on Churchill and U.S. President Harry Truman's right-wing, anti-Communist scare campaign, Roosevelt continued:
"The tempo of our times is such that our opinions are not keyed to history but to headlines. Whether we trust or distrust Russia is not conditioned by that nation's mighty contribution to our victory in the war, still the greatest single fact of our lifetime; rather it is molded by scare-print on the front pages of three or four days' newspapers—newspapers often irresponsible in the past, and therefore surely doubly to be doubted in the tremulous present.... The unity that won the war should be, must be, a fact today, if we are to win the peace.... But more and more since V-E Day, and since the atom bomb first fell, this unity has disappeared."
He escalated: "It is because I doubt that we have only drifted away from this unity, it is because I am convinced that we are being shoved away from it, by men who should know better or—in Walter Lippmann's phrase—'little boys playing with matches,' that I felt it important for me to write this book."
After briefly recounting his own eyewitness role as FDR's aide and personal confidant at the wartime conferences with Churchill, Stalin, and the other Allied leaders, Roosevelt explained:
"My opportunities to witness these conferences, then, were on two levels: one as an official Presidential aide, the other as a most intimate friend to the man who was primarily responsible for the unity of the United Nations. It was on this second level that I shared his most intimate thoughts and listened to his most cherished aspirations for the world of peace to follow our military victory. I knew what conditions he predicated for the structure of world peace; I knew what conversations led to them; I knew of the bargains and the promises.
"And I have seen the promises violated, and the conditions summarily and cynically disregarded, and the structure of peace disavowed.... I am writing this, then," he concluded, "to you who agree with me that Franklin Roosevelt was the wartime architect of the unity of the United Nations, who agree with me that Franklin Roosevelt's ideals and statesmanship would have been sufficient to keep that unity a vital entity during the postwar period, and who agree with me that the path he charted has been most grievously—and deliberatley—forsaken."
Elliott Roosevelt profoundly understood that his father's successor in the White House, the small-minded haberdasher from Independence, Missouri, Harry Truman, had sold out the FDR legacy; squandered the enormous American sacrifices to defeat Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese imperialism; needlessly dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, after the Emperor had already petitioned to surrender; and aligned with Churchill to launch a senseless anti-Communist crusade, that would divide the world and hold it hostage to the perpetual threat of thermonuclear extinction for the next 45 years.
It is not clear from As He Saw It, that Elliott Roosevelt shared his father's deeper understanding, that the ultimate enemy was an international synarchist banking oligarchy, and that this Anglo-Dutch-dominated apparatus had grabbed power in Washington within moments of FDR's death. What is clear, is that Elliott Roosevelt held President Truman accountable for the reversal of virtually everything that FDR held dear for the postwar world.
The DLC Trojan Horse
Thus is it perfectly lawful, today, that the nest of synarchists, otherwise known as neo-conservatives, who have infiltrated the Democratic Party, through institutions such as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), and the financier circles of Lazard banker and DLC/PPI bankroller Felix Rohatyn, have chosen to launch a new "movement" to "save" the Democratic Party, by reviving the values and traditions of ... Harry Truman.
The so-called Truman National Security Project was launched in the wake of the 2004 Presidential elections, ostensibly by a 20-something-year-old Oxford Rhodes Scholar, Rachel Kleinfeld, and another young Oxford grad, Matthew Spence. At the time she launched the Truman Project, Kleinfeld was a "Senior Consultant to Booz Allen Hamilton, where she worked on information-sharing across the military, intelligence, and law enforcement communities, homeland security, and trade and security issues," according to her official biography. While at Booz Allen, she penned at least one joint op-ed with the firm's vice president, R. James Woolsey, the first CIA Director under President Bill Clinton; a member of Donald Rumsfeld's all-neo-con Defense Policy Board (chaired by Richard Perle); and the co-chairman today of the hard-core imperialist Committee on the Present Danger, along with Bush-Cheney Administration godfather and leading synarchist George P. Shultz.
While Kleinfeld and Spence deny that they are a bunch of wanna-be neo-cons or right-wing Republican shills, the Project's last conference, in June 2005, featured a post-election panel discussion titled "What Democrats Did Wrong, Republicans Did Right, and Neo-Cons Did Better." The Truman Project's website features a series of policy papers, all of which come down to the idea that right-wing Democrats can do a better job of marketing the same Global War on Terror and free-trade dogmas than their GOP counterparts.
While it may be a coincidence, the Truman Project was launched at nearly the identical moment that another new "project" was being launched across the Atlantic, at Britain's Cambridge University, called the Henry Jackson Society. Named after the late U.S. Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wa.), whose 1976 failed campaign for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination launched the neo-con movement, the group is actually dominated by the new generation of British Tory Party MPs. The group's founding principles are a carbon copy of the Truman Project's beliefs. The Jackson Society's International Patrons include Americans: Bruce Jackson, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Clifford May, Richard Perle, Joshua Muravchik, and Michael McFaul.
Beyond the Kleinfeld-Woolsey links, the Truman Project's Advisory Board includes an all-star cast of Democratic Leadership Council luminaries, and other Democratic super-hawks, including Will Marshall, the President of the DLC think-tank, the Progressive Policy Institute; former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; Kurt Campbell, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; William J. Perry, the former Clinton Secretary of Defense who recently advocated a pre-emptive strike against North Korea's missile launch sites; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the director of the Princeton Project on National Security, which is chaired by George Shultz. As EIR revealed earlier this year, the Princeton Project teamed up with Felix Rohatyn's own center at Middlebury College, Vermont in October 2004, to host a conference promoting the "privatization of national security," which openly advocated a "new feudalism" modelled on the British East India Company, to serve the requirements of an "American neo-imperialism." (See EIR, March 31 and April 7, 2006.) The Princeton Project and the Progressive Policy Institute are officially listed as partner organizations of the Truman Project.
More Than an 'Insurgency'
In an astute column in the Los Angeles Times May 28, 2006, the paper's former editorial writer Jacob Heilbrunn warned about the real mission of the Truman Project, under the headline "Neo-Cons in the Democratic Party." Drawing the parallel between the Truman Project on National Security and the mid-1970s first generation Democratic Party neo-cons of the Henry "Scoop" Jackson and Jeane Kirkpatrick camp, Heilbrunn asked: "Where will all this lead? To an internecine Democratic war, of course. Just as Republicans are being riven by debates between realists and Bush administration idealists, so the Democratic Party is about to witness its own battle.... The new Democratic hawks, like the old neo-conservatives of the 1970s, represent an insurgency, a direct challenge to the establishment. And if they are to revamp the party, they will have to do a lot more than simply evoke the ghost of Truman and Co."
The term "internecine war," used by Heilbrunn, however, profoundly misses the point. As Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly emphasized, the fight between those in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and those in the tradition of Harry Truman is a fight for the very soul of the Democratic Party. "FDR won the war against Fascism and Nazism, and the ghost of Harry Truman lost the war," LaRouche recently said.
