Lincoln and FDR

Lincoln and FDR: "In response to a recent question regarding why Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt seem to be politically sacrosanct, I offer the following suggestions.

1.

Rhetoric. Each man was a master of rhetoric. Lincoln was America's consummate master of the written political word, in an era when the newspaper had become the key mass media technology. FDR was a master of the spoken political word, beginning in the first full decade in which radio was universal. FDR was matched by Churchill and Hitler, two other early rhetorical masters of radio.
2.

Victorious wars. Both Presidents oversaw huge wars that were successfully prosecuted on the battlefield. Churchill had the same post-war battlefield advantage, and he therefore looms large in the textbooks. Victors write the history textbooks. The magnitude of the loss of life and the gigantic economic cost made post-war revisionism difficult to sell to the American public. The public was not psychologically prepared to consider any suggestion that these deaths and costs had been avoidable and therefore in vain. The American public was not told that both men had lured the respective enemy nations into firing the first shot: Lincoln by dispatching a warship to Charleston harbor, and FDR by imposing a peacetime economic embargo — theft from American exporters — on Japan.
3.

Well-timed"..............................