Franklin Delano Bush
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

President Bush, declaring that he won’t be deterred by global protests against war with Iraq, is referring reporters to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The 32nd president overcame protests from isolationists to lead Americans into World War II, Mr. Bush is quoted by the A.P. as telling reporters. “Often the message of protesters is contradicted by history,” Mr. Bush said. This sent us back to a few of FDR’s radio addresses from the years leading up to America’s entry into the war. “Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our own gates,” he said on December 29, 1940, for example. “Your government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out. Their secret emissaries are active in our own and in neighboring countries. They seek to stir up suspicion and dissension to cause internal strife. They try to turn capital against labor, and vice versa. They try to reawaken long slumbering racist and religious enmities which should have no place in this country. They are active in every group that promotes intolerance. They exploit for their own ends our own natural abhorrence of war. These trouble-breeders have but one purpose. It is to divide our people, to divide them into hostile groups, and to destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves. There are also American citizens, many of them in high places, who unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents. I do not charge these American citizens with being foreign agents. But I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States.”