Blinken’s Holocaust Gaffe

(JNS) Was Breckinridge Long our 32nd president, rather than Franklin Roosevelt?

From Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent remarks, one could erroneously conclude that it was actually Assistant Secretary of State Long, not President Roosevelt, who decided American immigration policy in the 1930s and 1940s, and that the United States should refrain from intervening to aid European Jewry.

Long, a campaign contributor and personal friend of the president, was FDR’s first ambassador to Italy. One of the first to praise Mussolini for making the trains run on time, Long was promoted by FDR to assistant secretary of state, putting him in charge of 23 of the State Department’s 42 divisions, including the crucial Visa Division.

Speaking at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on April 8, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Secretary Blinken described how Long “had immense power to help those being persecuted,” yet “made it harder and harder for Jews to be granted refuge in the United States.”

That’s correct, but misleading. It wasn’t as if Long conducted some kind of rogue operation. Numerous documents, including Long’s posthumously published diaries, recount how he regularly briefed President Roosevelt on his efforts to keep the Jews out. In one diary entry from 1940, Long wrote that in a discussion at the White House on ways to curtail immigration, he “found that [FDR] was 100% in accord with my ideas,” and “expressed himself as in entire accord” and “wholeheartedly in support” of what Long was doing.

Blinken recalled Long’s infamous advice to his State Department colleagues “to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.” True—but the president was fully aware that these tactics were successfully suppressing immigration far below what the law allowed. In a 1935 letter concerning visa applicants from Germany, FDR wrote: “I am informed that nearly all immigration quotas have been considerably under-issued during the past four years.” He even cited the year-by-year statistics.

According to Secretary Blinken, Long “established onerous security checks, claiming they were necessary to prevent enemy spies from infiltrating the U.S., even though there was no evidence that refugees posed that risk.” But it was President Roosevelt who falsely claimed at a June 1940 press conference that some refugees, “especially Jewish refugees,” had agreed to spy for the Nazis for fear that their relatives back in Germany “would be taken out and shot.” That became a stock excuse for shutting America’s doors even tighter.

“Assistant Secretary Long did still worse,” Blinken continued. “He blocked cables with reports of the mass killing, which would have increased pressure for America to take in more Jews.” That’s correct. But the president, too, often ignored or downplayed news of Nazi persecution.