FDR Founded the United Nations
To End Colonialism

by Gerry Rose

[Print version of this article]

The following are the edited remarks of Mr. Rose to The LaRouche Organization’s Fireside Chat on May 27, 2021. Subheads and embedded links have been added. The presentation can be listened to here.

Probably the most controversial action of the Franklin Roosevelt Presidency was taken February 4-11, 1945, at the Yalta Summit of UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Marshal Joseph Stalin of Russia. Tonight, you’ll learn what that action was, who went crazy, and why. Franklin Roosevelt risked his life, then ultimately lost his life, to establish the United Nations—his last great gift to mankind.

‘Freedom from Want’

You have heard many things about the United Nations. All of it is false, frankly, all of it. As Dr. Hans Köchler, President of the International Progress Organization, pointed out, and I think very effectively to Panel 1 of the Schiller Institute Conference, May 8, 2021, as to how the United Nations Security Council, with a veto power reserved to each of its five permanent member nations has made international law impossible. In fact, it was never Roosevelt’s intention that the United Nations become a world government, giving world law. There is no such capability. It was, rather, Roosevelt’s intention, articulated in his State of the Union address on January 6, 1941, that “freedom from want” must be the condition of all people, “everywhere in the world,” and the UN was his last institutional insistence on that proposition.

In 1941, before the United States entered the war, Roosevelt knew we would have to fight, and insisted to everyone’s surprise, in fact, that the purpose for fighting the war, was that unless health systems were established, unless industrial capabilities were established, unless infrastructure was constructed, the world would be condemned to endless colonial wars. This speech was considered his most powerful and set forth the theme of his entire Presidency. As Undersecretary of the Navy, Roosevelt had witnessed the British Imperial system up close and personal in World War I.

By 1942-1943, it was very clear to Roosevelt and his team that, effectively after Stalingrad, and certainly after Normandy in 1944, preparations for the peace had to begin. That if the U.S. did not use its industrial might and scientific capabilities that emerged out of the war that made us the world’s greatest industrial power in the history of mankind, to re-establish a national government committed to the general welfare, then the world would be left in the same situation that had led to World War I and to World War II as a follow-on to World War I.

Roosevelt further knew, that while Wall Street and London would fight on the side of Roosevelt and his commitments, the minute the war was over, this grouping would come after Franklin Roosevelt and his group. Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Eleanor Roosevelt, and his whole team knew that Wall Street and London funded the Nazi war machine! It was not just Prescott Bush, as EIR has documented voluminously.

James Stewart Martin, a U.S. Department of Justice anti-trust attorney was the man Roosevelt and the Army put in charge of investigating the relationship between various U.S. companies such as the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil, and IG Farben, the German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate. He also had the mandate to look into the entire apparatus that funded the Nazi war machine. In his extremely well-documented book, All Honorable Men, he details those investigations.

Not only did Wall Street and London fund the Nazis, but as I will speak on a little later, the loans that were made that allowed the Nazi war machine to take over Germany, had the enthusiastic agreement of Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England (1920-1944); and Hjalmar Schacht, President of the German Central Bank, the Reichsbank (1933-1939), and Minister of Economics (1934-1937). Both Norman and Schacht agreed, and the bonds were floated.

And guess who floated the bonds in the United States? John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, both partners in the law firm Cromwell and Sullivan. John became the Secretary of State under Truman, and his brother Allen became the first civilian director of the CIA! Both Dulles brothers were critical, along with Schroders Bank and other banks having big operations inside London and inside the United States, to the funding of the Hitler war machine.

Roosevelt knew that. He knew what he was dealing with. He also knew that unless he could get worldwide, an agreement for peace—which he forced through at Bretton Woods, and then later at the Yalta meeting—by using the full industrial capacity of the world, most of it residing in the USA, and got governments popularly elected in the developing sector that were committed to the general welfare of their populations, including and emphatically Africa, the world would be in exactly the same situation it was in before World War I, which led to World War I and World War II.

Mission to Yalta

That’s why Roosevelt undertook the mission to Yalta, despite the fact that his health was not good. His heart was not good. This man, confined for 12 years to a wheelchair, held the world upon his shoulders, his shoulders with his team, but it was his shoulders and his good humor, and his great love of all mankind. He held the world up, a cripple who could not stand without help, held the world up. And it had taken its toll. But that never got Franklin Roosevelt down, ever, to his last breath. He knew what he was up to. He knew what he had to establish, because by February 1945, when the Yalta Conference was held, we were only several months away from winning the war. And unless he could establish a set of principles, upon which the world could be reorganized for peace, and end colonial rule, everything would be in a total mess.

So, he traveled, by boat, by air, and finally by car to complete a very treacherous trip through the Crimea to Yalta, six thousand miles, to be there with Winston Churchill and Stalin.

Roosevelt refused to meet with Churchill before the meeting. He refused to coordinate the effort with the British. He knew what they were up to. His primary mission to accomplish was the foundation of the Security Council for the United Nations. The United Nations didn’t come out of nowhere; that was what the allied effort was called, it was called the United Nations.

In the eight days of meetings at Yalta, Churchill attempted several times to box Stalin in. Roosevelt had a private meeting with Stalin, and made certain concessions to Stalin, about which everybody, every idiot on the planet, goes crazy. What people say about what Roosevelt did there is nuts. In a minute I’ll say what really went on. But he made certain concessions to Stalin, and Stalin made certain very dramatic concessions to Roosevelt, to establish the Security Council of the United Nations.

This was never a plan for world government, except that of British lunatics like Bertrand Russell, and H.G. Wells, who wrote about the need for world government. The accusation against FDR is a complete fraud. Never, never a world government. Only evil minds such as Russell and Wells could figure that, well, if we get nuclear weapons, maybe we can scare the hell out of everybody to give up their government for the sake of peace and have one elite run the world, what H.G. Wells called “The Open Conspiracy,” and wrote about in his book by the same name.

But Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill had no such idea. Roosevelt wanted to work with Stalin against Churchill to end colonial rule. By the time of Yalta, Churchill had imposed a government on Greece that nobody voted for. The British had imposed their government-in-exile upon Greece.

As reported in John Toland’s book, The Last Hundred Days, Americans were very serious about the Atlantic Charter, deadly serious about it. They understood that’s what they were fighting the war for, not for Wall Street, not for the City of London, which was made perfectly clear by Roosevelt’s men, Harry Dexter White, a senior Treasury Department official, and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, at the Bretton Woods Conference [the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference] held from July 1-22, 1944. The Federal Reserve is a whole different, other story.

What Roosevelt proposed, first, at Bretton Woods and then directly with Marshal Stalin at Yalta, was that there would be loans, there would be progress for Russia. Russia was devastated, having lost 23 million people, taking the brunt of the war. The idea of starting a war with Russia after the Second World War, was unthinkable to anybody sane—not to Churchill—but to anybody sane.

Sabotage of FDR’s Intention

The discussion process Roosevelt shaped used the non-colonial view of Stalin, against the colonial attempts of Churchill. Now, that didn’t work out for all sorts of reasons. I’m going to go through one of the critical reasons why it didn’t work out.

At Yalta, there was an agreement that each nation would send their top people to San Francisco, April 25-26, 1945, for the first meeting of the United Nations to hammer out the details of its structure, with a commitment by the delegates from 46 nations to make sure there would be no more wars. That was their commitment. What happened? The day that Yalta convened, Allen Dulles, who ran the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) station in Switzerland, began a series of secret meetings with the top Nazi command and some other top Nazis in Bern.

The Nazis proposed something called Operation Sunrise, in which they would be allowed to cross over to Austria to continue the war against the Soviet Union. In other words, make sure the British and the U.S. got into Berlin before Stalin did.

Now, of course, it was Dulles, as we’ll learn later, who was critical to the interface with the Wehrmacht in Switzerland, to protect the patents, loans, and bonds, which the Nazi war machine had sent there. By 1938-39, a lot of such financial dealings couldn’t be legally done in the United States. I’m not sure about Britain. Maybe they could be. I don’t know. But I know about the United States. So, the Nazis shipped certain spinoffs into Switzerland, in which the banking secrecy laws were protected by Allen Dulles of Cromwell and Sullivan, and his brother, John Foster Dulles.

Now, why, the day Yalta begins, would Dulles have such a meeting, and why such a meeting at all? Stalin found out about it two weeks later, and went wild. That was indeed the purpose that Dulles and the Wall Street and London establishment had—to make sure to blow up what was, through Bretton Woods and the United Nations, a working relationship with Russia, certainly with China. Certainly, all of the Ibero-American nations were involved in Bretton Woods, establishing the working relationships to end colonial rule.

By establishing those relationships, the Cold War would not happen. But, the commitment of Wall Street, the commitment of London, as Churchill insisted when Roosevelt died, was the Cold War! The Cold War was never launched against Russia; that was tangential. When Roosevelt died, the Cold War was launched against the commitment of Harry Dexter White, of Henry Morgenthau, of Henry Wallace, of Eleanor Roosevelt, of Roosevelt’s whole team, launched to stop the process of ending colonial rule!

Stalin was at that point not sending Molotov to the UN, and that pretty much would have canceled the United Nations, at least Soviet participation. What happened?

There was a lot of Wall Street opposition within the United States to the idea of a commitment, a peaceful commitment, to the development of Russia, the development of China, to the development of all nations on the planet. But there was also a great number of people who, as long as Franklin Roosevelt was alive, given all he had done in his life, who would fight for him.

‘FDR’s Cause Must Live On’

Within weeks of returning from Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt, on April 12, 1945, died at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. The circumstances at that moment in the U.S. and the world, give us a critical idea of how history is really made.

The reaction to Roosevelt’s death, first, by his son, James, who was then nine thousand miles away in Marine headquarters in Manila: He had just gotten the letter that his father had died. And he said, in a later memoir, that he thought about how the burden of World War II had weighed on his father, much like the Civil War had aged Abraham Lincoln, and World War I had laid low Woodrow Wilson. It seemed to him that his father was just as much a victim of the war as any soldier who died in battle.

Eleanor, FDR’s wife, was the one who had to break the news to Harry Truman, that he was now President—she was in Washington at the time when Franklin died, and was completely clear as to its significance:

And Truman said, “I am not prepared for this,” but he said, “I will do it.” And he said, “Is there anything I can do for you, Eleanor?” And she said, “No, Mr. President. The real question, is there anything I can do for you? Because now you’re in trouble.”

And she meant it. It was not rhetorical in the least. Some of the most profound developments occurred, and I will read you some of it. When Roosevelt died, Ambassador to the UK, Averell Harriman, had to tell Marshal Stalin, and to offer his personal reassurance about the continuation of American foreign policy. Stalin stood silent. Holding Harriman’s hand, without saying a word for perhaps two minutes, before he asked him to sit down. Stalin had appeared distressed, as he questioned Harriman more closely about the circumstances of FDR’s death. He also insisted, as Harriman recounted, the importance to U.S.-Soviet relations that, “President Roosevelt has died.” And this is Stalin: “But his cause must live on.” Then, what perhaps was an indication of his sincerity, he agreed to reverse his earlier decision, and to allow Foreign Minister Molotov to travel to San Francisco, to attend the UN’s first meeting.

Ten days after the President was dead, Ann O’Hare McCormick, a foreign news correspondent for The New York Times wrote a very famous editorial titled, “His Unfinished Business and Ours,” based on a remarkable interview she had held with FDR on March 23rd:

FDR may not be present at the conclave he called [meaning the UN meeting], but, in the most literal sense, he will be conspicuous by his absence, his voice will be the loudest there. His vacant seat will overshadow all of the occupied chairs. It may be well said that the speech he does not deliver, the speech his mind was full of when he fell, will be far more effective in carrying his dream toward reality than anything he could say in person.

There was no way that any Senate of the United States would not ratify the UN Charter. It was ratified 89-2, in the stark recognition of what Franklin Roosevelt had accomplished and his sublime commitment to the future of mankind.

Maybe the most significant response of all in terms of a retrospective that shaped the course of the 20th Century, came in these words, written in 2010:

Today, I am among the mere handful of those few still living veterans of a certain past military service, who were part of what some people today would call, mistakenly, “a conspiracy.” Today, we few represent that handful of those veterans who, today, had lived through that awful morning when the news had come, that our greatly beloved President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. Ours is simply the patriotism of those, among us at that time, who had reacted with a certain, special devotion to that sense of patriotic mission to which we had been called during what was, still then, the ongoing great, long war.

That was, at first, no more than the silent oath to which I committed myself when the news of President Roosevelt’s death reached the few of us who would be gathered that evening in a military encampment at Kanchrapara in Bengal, India. When we met quietly in the dusk of that evening, there, I replied to that group of fellow-soldiers who came to me to ask their question. My words from that past are carved in memory still today: “We have been led, until now, by a great President, who has now died. The new President is a little man, and, I am afraid for our country, now.” One remembers things like that.

The words I spoke in the quiet of that evening, were to return to become my modest, continuing, silent, personal commitment for the ensuing three decades of my life. Then, later, one day, another veteran touched my memories. After that, there was no need to ask “Why?” The silenced trumpet had called again. I was to experience, now, a renewed old, and prolonged warfare, like ghosts from the same, old, opposing sides.

Today, I, for one, am still standing. Let my thought tonight seem to touch your shoulder, “patriot,” as someone, long ago, had seemed to touch my own. There was no “conspiracy” beyond doing one’s duty, even still today, when a silent trumpet calls those few, old, soldiers who never really die.

That was Lyndon LaRouche, in 2010.

The sublime commitment of Franklin Roosevelt—don’t think of it as 12 years where London and Wall Street did not run this country. Think of it as four thousand days. Think of it as the quality of mind that led us from the Depression to the War. That commitment was the inspiration for the United Nations. The United Nations was never a set of laws, never a set of rules. It was a sublime commitment “everywhere in the world” to Glass-Steagall, to Bretton Woods, to the National Bank, and to the commitment to foster the creativity of every person on this planet. That was FDR’s mission for the United Nations. That is the mission that we, also tapped on the shoulder by Lyndon LaRouche, that each of us must now carry on.