Commentary The American Spectator has been possessed by an unimaginable motive to run extensive excerpts from Francis Sempa’s portentous new assault upon Franklin D. Roosevelt as a failed president. FDR’s defenders are represented as a cabal of mythmakers. Sempa, a lawyer from Scranton, bases his claim on non-delivery of adequately swift progress out of the depression; on dealing incompetently with Stalin, according to Ambassador William C. Bullitt; on being misguided by pro-Soviet opinions from his associate Harry Hopkins and treasury official Harry Dexter White and other communist sympathizers; and, finally, for being the founder and enabler of the managerial state, by which is meant all the overgrowth of government in these last 90 years. These charges have all been made and rebutted many times before. When Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, there were machine gun nests at the corners of the great federal buildings in Washington for the …