Memories of The Great and The Good

by Alistair Cooke

  All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, a trauma with two strokelets: the first registering the name—the president of the United States! The second, that he was a cripple. The president of the United States was a paraplegic!! It is something everybody in the world knows now though our not knowing it is disbelieved by succeeding generations who have seen the Roosevelt family’s home movies and documentaries based on, no less, the whole history of his affliction. Yet if, at almost any time during the twelve years of Roosevelt’s presidency, you had put the bare question (“Did you know that the president is a cripple?”) I’m pretty sure that most of the population would have said something like, “I heard he had poliomyelitis at one time.” But since the first fatal attack in 1921, he was never filmed for movie theater newsreels (there was, of course, no television throughout his lifetime) or ever photographed by news reporters in his wheelchair. This taboo was observed for twenty-five years—even by the press chains, like Hearst’s, that hated him—throughout his governorship of New York State and throughout the four terms of his presidency. It is, I should think, a unique example of voluntary restraint. The result of it was to confirm triumphantly the psychologist’s old discovery that the thing seen very soon obliterates the thing heard or read. That explained why the vast majority of the American population never thought of Roosevelt as a cripple. What, for a quarter century, was impressed on everyone’s senses was the powerful upper body, the bull neck, the strong hands clasping the lectern, the handsome head tossing the spoken emphases, the happy squire waving to everybody from an open car, the perpetual optimist and Savior of America in the darkest days. So, though most people could accept the reminder, if ever it came up, that the president was paralyzed, it was a truth buried deep at the back of the mind.

  As for the taboo that kept it there, a taboo that was faithfully observed by the national press for over twelve years, it is inconceivable that today it would be maintained for a week or a day. Some British tabloid would be sure to offer a fortune to the first to break it.

  The sharpness of this memory obviously prejudiced me in his favor when, in the spring of 1937,1 came as a news correspondent to Washington fresh from England, to report on the man who by then was a beacon to the peoples of the European countries that had not lost their liberties to Hitler on the rampage or foaming Mussolini or the man of steel (Stalin) in the Kremlin. In England, which I knew best, the old still lived with the memories of the enormous slaughter on the Western Front, and the young found little inspiration in a Tory government on the defensive moving backward, one step at a time, before Hitler’s oncoming shadow. To many of the idealistic young, though, there was a rousing alternative to stomping Fascism and defensive Toryism. The public face of Communism in the Soviet Union had been so brightly painted by an older generation of early believers—Shaw and Lady Astor and the Webbs among them—and the private terror by which the system worked was so well disguised or disbelieved that “to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability” seems a positively Christian doctrine.

  But for the undifferentiated mass of still-free, self-governing Europeans, there was yet another exhilarating choice, and, across the Atlantic, Franklin Roosevelt was the heroic cast of it. To a Europe bereft of notable leaders who were not tyrants, here was a man who, defying the current totalitarian models and denouncing them, was reinvigorating the largest democracy by democratic means and with the enthusiastic consent of the mass of his people. What Europeans didn’t know, or didn’t care, was that Roosevelt had been able to exert a power usually prohibited by law to leaders in a democracy. He had demanded in his first inaugural speech powers beyond the restraints of the Constitution “if the normal balance of Executive and Legislative authority” did not prove “wholly adequate”; then “I shall ask the Congress for broad Executive power … as great as the power that would be given me if we were, in fact, invaded by a foreign foe.” As he spoke those alarming words, he was already exercising extraordinary executive power: he had closed all the nation’s banks, and he would decide which ones were to survive and which would go under. And the Congress, as fearful as the rest of the country of widespread civil disorder, gladly gave him the dictatorial powers he wanted, and America took its first fling at National Socialism. It was not at the time recognized as such. With a cheering smile, an open checkbook, and a logo (a blue eagle symbolizing the NRA—the National Recovery Administration), Roosevelt appropriated the lawmaking power, suspended the antitrust laws and set up what amounted to government by trade association. Employers were required to bind themselves to a code that fixed prices and wages and labor practices for about seven hundred industries, from the steel makers to the humblest commercial theatre. (I saved for many years the NRA code as it applied to all burlesque companies, solemnly setting the maximum wage for first banana, second banana, star stripper and so on.)

  The honeymoon of America’s benevolent dictator lasted for just over two years, when, after disputing an oil case and the sale-of-a-chicken case, the nine old men of the Supreme Court found the whole NRA codemaking authority “flagrantly unconstitutional.”

  Having given big business more than its due in running the country, he now turned to elevate the status and define new rights for the labor unions and the farmers, and embarked on the consummate political act of his career, assembling a vast, shambling but dependable, coalition of the unlikeliest allies. This ever-smiling, confident patrician—the very patent of good breeding and a gentlemanly conscience—never had a second’s hesitation in making up to anyone he needed: rough labor leaders here, wily southern conservative senators there, the dictator of Louisiana, the men who ran corrupt city governments (in Chicago, Memphis, Jersey City). They were powerful and they could deliver the Democratic vote.

  Many times in press conferences, and on the last two presidential campaigns, I came to marvel at the ease, the beautifully played cool, of his behavior to us, the press, the morning after a congressional defeat, a jolt from the Supreme Court. The secret spring of this ease and seeming indifference to the mounting criticism of the press and the hatred of him by the Republicans was his deep, undisturbable sense of what the mass of the people wanted. Not, as in Winston Churchill’s liberal period, when he was appalled at poverty and wanted to return the poor to the decent estate to which God had ordered them. Roosevelt truly felt from the first to the last days in the White House that, after the degrading plunge into the Depression, everybody wanted not a return to the status quo ante but a better life altogether. He was so sure of the lightness of this instinct that he could toss off a defeat like a common cold. He had a new idea every day. As a testy columnist put it: “He started giving people federal money … to dig a ditch across Florida and build a dam to harness the tides of Fundy. The ditch and dam seemed not so good once they were under way; so, all right, skip them, and how about a new kind of Supreme Court?” This same columnist, an artful juggler with the English language, one Westbrook Pegler, paid Roosevelt the ultimate compliment, all the truer for coming from a man who for all of FDR’s later years harbored an almost pathological hatred of him: “Never in our time have people been so conscious of the meanness which a complacent upper class will practice on the help, and of the government’s duty to do something real and personal for the assistance of those who are so far down that they can’t help themselves…. He needs to be fought all the time … but if the country doesn’t go absolutely broke in his time, it will be a more intelligent and a better country after him.”

  Not long after I settled in here as a foreign correspondent, I came, like the Americans I lived and mingled with, to forget all about Roosevelt’s affliction. Only from time to time did the memory float up as a question: by what miraculous inner drive could this cripple undertake the prodigious business of pulling American up by its shoddy shoes from the depths of despair and misery? (I had seen lots of both in two long drives across the country in 1933 and 1934, and was constantly amazed and relieved that there had been no ou
tbreak of the threatened revolution.) And often in the Oval Office, I admired the marvelously assumed ease and casualness after some stunning blow, as at his press conference on the Tuesday, two days after Pearl Harbor, when he alone knew the shattering damage to the Pacific fleet (five battleships sunk or disabled, fourteen other ships, a hundred and twenty aircraft destroyed, two thousand seamen and four hundred civilians killed).

  We did not know until Roosevelt had died, in April 1945, how distraught and disoriented he had been, how mortally sick, for the last year of his life. We never knew for twenty more years until Churchill’s doctor published a diary that during the three and a half years when Roosevelt and Churchill were companions in arms, and during which Churchill had borne responsibility for the daily operations of every theater of the war, that Churchill had suffered one serious heart attack, three pneumonias, two strokes, an abdominal operation, hernia, deafness, an intractable skin disease, eye trouble and innumerable minor ailments.

  That these two great men and chronic invalids should, more than any other two humans, have run and won the war for us is a mystery that, as Dr. Buechner might say, “some people call luck, some coincidence, and some call the grace of God.”

  6

  Maker of a President:

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  (1962)

  Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the widow of the thirty-second president of the United States, died last week in New York City where she was born seventy-eight years ago. Except for increasing deafness in old age, she had never been troubled with anything much more bothersome than a cold or a broken ankle until she took to a hospital bed a few weeks ago with a pestiferous condition that was eventually diagnosed as anemia complicated by a lung infection. “Eleanor,” Franklin Roosevelt used to say, watching her and her notebook whirl continuously around the United States to check on soil erosion, unemployment, sick leave among nurses, or silicosis among miners, “has time for everybody’s troubles but her own.”

  It was a proud complaint which, in the missionary days of the New Deal, the newspaper cartoonists turned into a national joke. Until Mrs. Roosevelt, First Ladies were supposed to be the most gracious furnishing of the White House. They kept the silver polished and the fires burning against the unpredictable return of the great man from the crushing appointments of his office. It is a tradition honored up to 1933 and since 1945. The twelve intervening years turned the White House into a sort of national hotel operation under emergency conditions. Protocol was packed off with the bags of Mr. and Mrs. Hoover. The president’s bedroom was invaded at breakfast by the Brain Trust. Lunch was a sandwich on a tray dispensed to visiting governors, labor leaders, national committeemen. Birthdays, national holidays, and most Sunday evenings were the occasion of the famous and inedible Roosevelt buffets.

  This genial chaos was the logical extension, on a national scale, of the domestic free-for-all which Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had developed at Hyde Park and Campobello, and at their house in New York, as the boisterous childhood of five children coincided with the effort of Mrs. Roosevelt and Louis Howe to boost her paralyzed husband into national politics and to save him from the fate which his mother prescribed with such grim resolve: “My son must come home to live in Hyde Park: he’s going to be an invalid the rest of his life and he needs rest and complete quiet.”

  Even now, forty-one years after the famous chill at Campobello and the black two years during which Roosevelt agonized over the hardest task of a lifetime (“trying to move one toe”), the transformation of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt from an upper-class couple of no particular personal distinction into two iron characters who have left their permanent brand on history appears to be nothing less than a human miracle.

  Eleanor’s childhood and youth seemed a pathetic prelude to a life of social martyrdom. Her father was a gallant drunk, her mother the spoiled and beautiful daughter of a beauty more petulant still. She was a nuisance and butt. From earliest girlhood her mother mocked her for her gravity, her prominent teeth and shapeless mouth. She comforted herself in her journal with the thought that “no matter how plain we may be, if we have virtue and trust, they will show in our faces.” She went to work in a settlement house and came to know the daily aspect of poverty, a running sore on the body politic that astonished and embarrassed Franklin.

  Then came New York State politics in Albany, and the dreadful summer, and the dedicated battle with his mother, and soon his discovery that if he listened more and tossed his head less, he could like people and they could like him. Eleanor took night classes in government and sociology and fed her lessons to Franklin, while Louis Howe massaged his legs for hours on end. It is the symbolic picture of the rest of their lives. In the White House, when the steel braces grew too heavy, he took them off and Eleanor, fresh from the Midwest or the Deep South, read over the compassionate statistics she learned on the road with such unflagging and humorless devotion.

  “The concept of duty,” writes her biographer, “was Victorian, soft-headed, and entirely un-American, in the brassy 1920s. But Eleanor Roosevelt had it and it guided her entire existence.” It transmuted an ugly duckling school-ma’am into a great woman, and it planed away the emotional fat in a feckless, generous man, knotted his fiber, and produced a great president. There are few women in the history of great nations who could claim such a personal achievement, and none less likely to make the claim. The people, though, sensed it and year after year, to the annoyance of her chuckling detractors, she was voted, in a national poll, the First Lady of the World.

  For herself she simply listed in the Who’s Who entry only three or four offices she filled on her own account. She might have recorded the sum of her great life with nothing more than her vital statistics and the single entry: “Created the thirty-second president of the United States.”

  7

  General Marshall

  (1959)

  It has been a habit of these letters to honor, as W. H. Auden put it, “the vertical man,” the Americans in all their variety who are up and doing. But Americans themselves are great celebrators of their eminent dead. And when the calendar reminds us of a great one who was born or died fifty or a hundred years ago, he is obediently honored in the tomb by people who would have feared or hated him in the flesh. For Americans, an impetuous but ceremonial people, are soon ready to pay tribute to a man once the wind is out of him.

  Lately we observed as a holiday the date kept aside as Columbus Day, which celebrates the discovery of this country by a man who neither discovered it nor ever saw it. And a few days later we nodded respectfully in the direction of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where—a hundred years ago—John Brown, a near-lunatic with a hot eye and a single purpose, started on his wild and brief campaign to set up a free state in the Appalachians as a sanctuary for escaped Negro slaves. Next day, a man died who had been born just across the Pennsylvania border from Harpers Ferry who had an equally single purpose but who was so prosaic, so deeply disdainful of drama and public exposure, that not one American in a million would have recognized him on the streets, and not even his close friends knew a pungent or delightful story about him. He was almost impossible for a newspaperman to know, for he winced at the word “newspaper” and he therefore acquired no public personality, not even a couple of identifying adjectives in Time. In the last few years of his life he used to drive downtown most days from his small house in Pinehurst, North Carolina, buy his groceries in the supermarket, tote them to his car to the accompaniment of a nod from the townspeople, a bit of gossip with the drugstore clerk, and then get into his car again, receive the flourish of a salute from the traffic cop, and drive home again. Yet on a bright day, wherever in the world the American flag flies, it was lowered and flown for him.

  I hope I won’t be misunderstood if I say that he was a most un-American figure because he was so remarkably self-effacing. The United States has as many people as anybody afflicted with self-effacement, but it usually springs from social discomfort, or g
enuine shyness, or that other form of shyness which, as somebody wisely said, is a sure sign of conceit. This man was not shy, but the subordination of self to teamwork was almost an instinct with him, and I suppose few men who take to soldiering took to it for a better reason. Most Americans were willing to credit the reports of his eminence but it was something they had to take on trust; for General George Catlett Marshall, of all the great figures of our time, was the least “colorful/’ the least impressive in a casual meeting and the least rewarding to the collector of anecdotes. He was a man whose inner strength and secret humor only slowly dripped through the surfaces of life, as a stalactite hangs stiff and granity for centuries before one sees beneath it a pool of still water of marvelous purity.

  He was always uncomfortable when anyone mentioned the great plan that bears his name, the plan to repair the fabric of European life after the devastation of the Second War. He took no credit for it, and he was nearly right. For it was first conceived by underlings in the State Department and seized on by Undersecretary Dean Acheson when he realized that all the largesse of UNRRA and Breton Woods, and the loan to Britain, and other loans to Greece and Turkey, were far from enough. It was time to jettison Europe or to throw out a lifeline. Acheson developed the plan, and it was worked on in the White House, and he floated it as a trial balloon in a speech at Cleveland, Mississippi. No one in the country took particular notice of it. Marshall had been in Europe and when he came back, Acheson told him about it, not without misgiving, for Americans had not marveled at his trial balloon, and a sudden Communist stab at Hungary might puncture it once and for all. Marshall, it must be said, now saw the necessity of speed and a public forum and contrived within two days to speak at the Harvard commencement. He was no orator, and the dramatic novelty of the plan went unnoticed by everybody except a trio of British correspondents and the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who sat by his bedside in England and heard a transatlantic broadcast and responded to it at once as “a lifeline to sinking men … the generosity of it was beyond our belief … we grabbed it with both hands.” So it is not for the Marshall Plan that we honor the general.