The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  At the end of March Roosevelt left for Warm Springs. The usual crowd was waiting when the train pulled into the little Georgia town. There was the usual bustle of activity at the end of the rear car. But something was different. Roosevelt’s big frame, slumped in the wheel chair, seemed to joggle slightly as he was rolled along the platform. His face, once so strong and well fleshed, seemed wasted; the jaw, once so firm, quivered perceptibly. A murmur swept through the crowd.

  But as usual, after a few days of rest, the gray pallor faded, some of the old vitality returned. Doctors sent reassuring reports to Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington. Sitting in his cottage, watching the fresh green countryside under the warm sun, the President was able to relax, to look over new stamps, to play with Fala, to think about the past and about the future.

  It was early April, and the culmination of the war was at hand. Reports arriving daily told of victories on all battlefronts. In Europe, American and Allied troops were sweeping into the heart of Germany. In the Pacific naval forces were fighting off the heaviest Japanese air attacks of the war and clamping their grip on Okinawa. It was the culmination for Roosevelt too. He knew that war in Europe would be over in a few weeks. He knew now that Japan could not fight long against the power that would be massed against her after Germany’s defeat. He knew that delegates from the united nations would meet soon in San Francisco to set up the permanent peace organization, and he knew that the United States would join it.

  It was a time for rest—a time when the President could think about the long vacation that he would take in the summer and about a trip to Britain, a time when he could even toy with the idea of quitting the presidency as soon as the big jobs were done. He could think about the house at Hyde Park that was awaiting him, about the library with its mass of papers and mementos.

  It was time too—though no one knew it at the moment—for a last look at the living man.

  DEMOCRACY’S ARISTOCRAT

  Those who knew Roosevelt best could agree fully on only one point—that he was a man infinitely complex and almost incomprehensible. “I cannot come to grips with him!” Ickes cried more than once, and the words were echoed by a host of congressmen, politicos, diplomats, and bureaucrats who dealt with the canny politician in the White House. His character was not only complex, Robert Sherwood observed, it was contradictory to a bewildering degree.

  The contradictions continually bemused or galled Roosevelt’s lieutenants. He was almost unvaryingly kind and gracious, yet a thin streak of cruelty ran through some of his behavior. He remained unruffled and at ease under the most intense pressures; yet when pricked in certain ways he struck out at his enemies in sharp, querulous words. He found ways to evade bores and know-it-alls, yet he patiently listened to Ickes’ complaints and demands hour after hour, week after week, year after year. He juggled huge figures with an almost casual air, yet he could work long minutes over a knot to save the string and over a telegram to cut it down to ten words. He liked new ideas, people, and projects, but he wanted an element of fixity in his surroundings. He shifted nimbly from one set of policies to another—from economy to spending, from central planning to trust busting, from intervention abroad to neutrality, from party action to national action.

  In many little ways inconsistency ruled: in the way he thanked some subordinates for their efforts and said nothing to others, intervened in some administrative matters and ignored others, had four men doing a single job in some instances (as Flynn once complained) and one man doing four jobs in others, was unaccountably frivolous about some matters and grave about others.

  And there was the most baffling quality of all—his sheer, superb courage in facing some challenges, and his caution and indirection in facing others. He acted instantly, electrically, on certain decisions, and unaccountably postponed others for months. It was not strange that he should follow Machiavelli’s advice that a leader must be as brave as the lion and as shrewd as the fox, for this had long been the first lesson for politicians. But his metamorphoses from lion to fox and back to lion again mystified even his intimates.

  Roosevelt’s complexities stemmed in part from the demands of political life. Gladstone once remarked that he had known and studied politicians for sixty years and they still remained to him a mysterious breed. Democratic politics is a highly competitive profession, and the successful politician must know how to conceal his hand and present different faces to different groups. Too, Roosevelt took a particular delight in mystifying people by keeping something up his sleeve. But the source of his complexity lay deeper than this.

  Roosevelt was a complex man mainly because he was a deeply divided man. More than almost any other political leader of his time, he experienced a lingering between two worlds.

  He had been born and raised in a class and in a tradition that formed the closest American approximation to an aristocracy. At home, at Groton, at Harvard, at the right houses of Boston and New York, he had absorbed a core of beliefs and a sense of security and assurance he would never lose. His background always brought the needle of his compass, no matter how it might waver for a time, back to true north. The major premises on which this society operated might be inarticulate, or at least fuzzy, but they had meaning. These premises were: that men can live together only on the basis of certain simple, traditional ethical rules; that men are essentially good and those who are not can be improved by example and precept; that despite ups and downs the world is getting better; that the wellborn must never compromise with evil; that the gentleman must enter government to help the less fortunate, that he must enter politics to purify it. And the turn-of-the-century world seemed to validate these ideas: it was stable, secure, peaceful, expansive.

  Roosevelt was projected out of this world into bizarre and unanticipated phases of the twentieth century—a decade of muckraking, a decade of Wilsonian reform at home and Wilsonian idealism abroad; a decade of postwar cynicism and reaction; then the climactic years of depression, the New Deal, abroad the rise of brutish men to power, and the coming of a new war.

  Some nineteenth-century men could not effectively make the shift to the new century; insecure and frightened, they clung not only to the old moralities, as did Roosevelt, but also to the old methods, the old ways of business, the old distrust for government; they huddled within their class barriers. Roosevelt, however, made the jump with ease. He did so for several reasons: because he had not met absolute success socially at Groton or Harvard—for example, in his failure to make the best club in Cambridge—and thus was not absolutely committed to the old ways and institutions; because of the influence of Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt; because he was drawn into the variegated political life of New York State; because he was vital and curious and ambitious.

  Still other men of his generation, rejecting the past completely, found some kind of fixed mooring somewhere in this strange new world—but, again, not Roosevelt. He made no final commitment to any part of that world—not to Wilsonian idealism, nor to business money-making, nor to radicalism, nor to internationalism. Partly because of quick adaptability, partly because of the diverse make-up of his intimates, partly because he had little need for personal introspection, partly because of his tremendous self-assurance, he was able to shift back and forth among segments of this world and to make himself at home in all of them.

  Success fed on success: as Roosevelt found that he could carry off brilliantly a variety of roles—as party leader, as man of affairs, as bureaucrat, as Hyde Park squire, as governor, as campaigner, as a heroic battler against polio—he played the roles more and more to the hilt. This was one reason why he presided so joyously in the White House, for today the great President must be a man of many roles. Roosevelt was a superb actor in the literal sense—in the way his face, his gestures, the tilt of his head communicated feeling, in the perfect modulation of voice and the timing with which he read his speeches, in his sense of the dramatic. He was a superb actor in the far more significant sense that he was responding in each
of his roles not merely to an assigned script but to something within himself.

  The result was a man of no fixed convictions about methods and policies, flexible as a broker because he had to mediate among conflicting worlds and experiences. To some, like Hoover, he seemed a “chameleon on plaid” because of this enormous flexibility. Indeed, even to some of his friends he seemed almost in a state of anomie, lacking any guideposts at all, because he rejected so many doctrines and dogmas. Quite naturally, because the mask often was almost impenetrable, they could not see the inner compass of certainty and rightness.

  Caught between two worlds, Roosevelt compartmentalized his life. The results sometimes were ludicrous, as when he tried to force opposites to work together and could not understand why they failed. The results were at times unfortunate, for Roosevelt’s pseudointegration of his roles weakened his capacity to supply strong leadership and to make long-term strategic decisions or commitments when these were needed. It allowed the warring ideas and forces in American society not only to beat against him from outside but, because he incorporated as well as reflected these forces, to divide him from within.

  Yet Roosevelt’s flexibility and opportunism had tremendous advantages too. In a time of whirling social change he could move fast to head off crisis at home and abroad. In a time when experimentation was vital, he could try one method, quickly drop it, and turn to another. In a time when Americans had to be educated in the meaning of events, he could act as an interpreter all the more effectively because he spoke so many languages of social experience. Leading a people of sublime diversity, presiding over a nation of nations, he could say with Walt Whitman:

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well, then, I contradict myself,

  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

  Lincoln Steffens once remarked that Theodore Roosevelt thought with his hips. Franklin Roosevelt’s thinking was perhaps no more cerebral, but he thought with all five senses, perhaps with a sixth too. He had a radar set that could point in all directions, acute, sensitive, recording everything indiscriminately, and restoring the image in the responsive instrument that was Roosevelt’s mind.

  Was there then no hard center, no core personality, no final commitment in this man? Watching his quicksilver mind run from idea to idea, visitors could hardly believe that stone or steel lay under the bright, smooth flow of talk. But something did. The more that mask and costume are stripped away from Roosevelt, the more the turn-of-century man of Hyde Park, Groton, and Harvard stands out.

  Roosevelt, for all his deviousness, was basically a moral man in the sense that he felt so intensely the need to do right that he had to think he did right. He believed in doing good, in showing other people how to do good, and he assumed that ultimately people would do good. By “good” he meant the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, as interpreted by Endicott Peabody. He meant the “simple rules of human conduct to which we always go back,” as he said in 1932. He meant “old-fashioned standards of rectitude,” as he said in signing the truth-in-securities bill in 1933. Significantly, Roosevelt always looked back into the past for his moralities; he did not try to fashion them anew.

  These rules were not very precise, and Roosevelt did not want them to be precise. It was enough that they were there. Once when Eleanor Roosevelt raised with him the question of their children’s religious upbringing, he said simply that they should go to church and learn what he had learned. “But are you sure that you believe in everything you learned?” his wife persisted. “I really never thought about it,” he said with a quizzical look. “I think it is just as well not to think about things like that.” But he expected others to understand his simple rules of conduct, and to understand his own allegiance to them. When Richard Whitney’s financial irresponsibilities were disclosed, Roosevelt’s wealthy friends wrote to compliment him on not using the unhappy incident as part of a political attack on Wall Street. The President was amazed at the letters. “I wonder what sort of man they think I am,” he said.

  Vague though it was, this set of moral rules embraced one idea in particular that was of cardinal importance to Roosevelt and to his country. This was the idea of man’s responsibility for the well-being of his fellow man. It was simply an extension of Sara Roosevelt’s notions of noblesse oblige, but it found enormous meaning in the new conditions of the twentieth century. For it underlay Roosevelt’s most important single idea—the idea that government had a positive responsibility for the general welfare. Not that government itself must do everything, but that everything practicable must be done. Whether government does it, or private enterprise, is an operating decision dependent on many factors—but government must insure that something is done.

  Such was the essence of Roosevelt’s morality; such was the core of beliefs far below the surface.

  Some politicians preach morality because it is safe to do so, because they prove thereby that they are on the right side between Good and Evil, because they reach the largest common denominator among their audience, not because they take their own preachments too seriously. Not so Roosevelt. Probably no American politician has given so many speeches that were essentially sermons rather than statements of policy. Like a preacher, he wanted and expected his sermons to serve as practical moral guides to his people. Roosevelt was so theatrical that his moral preachments were often dismissed with a smile. Actually he was deadly serious.

  Only a man deadly serious and supremely confident could have spent the time Roosevelt did trying to educate and elevate not only his own people but foreign leaders who seemed to others to be beyond redemption. There was something pathetic and yet almost sublime in the way that Roosevelt sent message after message to Hitler and other dictators. Partly, of course, it was for the record; but even more it was an expression of Roosevelt’s faith in the ultimate goodness and reasonableness of all men. His eternal desire to talk directly with his enemies, whether congressmen or dictators, reflected his confidence in his own persuasiveness and, even more, in the essential ethical rightness of his own position.

  To Theodore Roosevelt the presidency was a “bully pulpit.” To Franklin Roosevelt it was the same—“pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.…”

  How explain, then, the “other side” of Roosevelt—his shiftiness, his compromises, his manipulations? Why did he so often act like a fox?

  Roosevelt was not an absolute moralist about means because, whatever his hopes or illusions about man’s possible redemption and ultimate goodness and reasonableness, he had few illusions about man’s nature. He knew that some men were selfish, irrational, vengeful, and mean. The practical statesman or man of affairs encounters ambitions and passions in his daily experience that put man in a strong, harsh light. Roosevelt got his education at the hands of tough labor leaders like Lewis, city bosses like Murphy and Hague, agrarian demogogues like Long, and—on the level of pure evil—Hitler and his camp followers. He learned the uses of power.

  Roosevelt overcame these men because he liked and wanted power and, even more, because he wanted to defend the position of strength from which he could lead and teach the people. To seize and hold power, to defend that position, he got down into the dusty arena and grappled with rival leaders on their own terms. So sure was he of the rightness of his aims that he was willing to use Machiavellian means; and his moral certainties made him all the more effective in the struggle. To the idealists who cautioned him he responded again and again that gaining power—winning elections—was the first, indispensable task. He would use the tricks of the fox to serve the purposes of the lion.

  During the war years Roosevelt became interested in Kierkegaard, and this was not surprising. The Danish theologian, with his emphasis on man’s natural sinfulness, helped explain to him, Roosevelt said, why the Nazis “are human, yet they behave like demons.” From Peabody’s homilies to Kierkegaard’s realities, from the world of Hyde Park to the world of Hitler, the way was long and tortuous; the fact that Roosevelt could traverse tha
t road so surely, with so little impairment to his loftiest ideals, and with such courage and good humor, was the final and true test of the man.

  Holmes had been right—a second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament. To examine closely single aspects of Roosevelt’s character—as thinker, as organizer, as manipulator, as strategist—is to see failings and deficiencies closely interwoven with the huge capacities. But to stand back and look at the man as a whole, against the backdrop of his people and his times, is to see the lineaments of greatness—courage, joyousness, responsiveness, vitality, faith, and, above all, concern for his fellow man. A democrat in manner and conviction, he was yet a member of that small aristocracy once described by E. M. Forster—sensitive but not weak, considerate but not fussy, plucky in his power to endure, capable of laughing and of taking a joke. He was the true happy warrior.

  WARRIOR’S HOME-COMING

  Warm Springs on Thursday, April 12, was sunny and pleasant. Roosevelt sat in his cottage looking over his stamps. He had put on a dark blue suit and a Harvard-red tie for a painter who was doing his portrait. Sitting in his brown leather chair near the fireplace, he seemed unusually chipper and gay. For some reason he took his draft card out of his wallet and tossed it into a basket nearby. Then he looked at some reports with intense concentration.