Who is Franklin D. Roosevelt?

Polio-stricken patrician elected US president four times who fought the Depression with the New Deal and led the Allied coalition through the Second World War.

What is Franklin D. Roosevelt known for?

Franklin D. Roosevelt is known for: Polio-stricken patrician elected US president four times who fought the Depression with the New Deal and led the Allied coalition through the Second World War..

Franklin D. Roosevelt — Biography, Career & Key Ideas

The Anatomy of Greatness

Great of History profile

A doted-on Hudson River patrician, arrogant and unremarkable at thirty, whom polio stripped of everything but his nerve, taught to perform an ease he did not feel, and turned into the most gifted handler of people in American politics, a gift he used to rescue a collapsing country and lead it through a world war, and also to deceive colleagues and the public, abandon black Americans to the filibuster, and uproot some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.

Top traits

Critical acts

1
Refusing the Invalid's Chair
"Franklin had no intention of conforming to my quiet ideas for his future existence," Sara noted. He insisted his physiotherapist come every day, though others managed three days a week, and named the exercise board "the morgue!"
2
Buying Warm Springs
In April 1926 he bought the Merriweather Inn, its pools and 1,200 acres "for $201,667.83—approximately two thirds of his fortune," and set up the Warm Springs Foundation with banker friends. He hired an orthopedic surgeon, became "Old Doctor Roosevelt" leading exercises in the pool, and set the rate at $42 a week.
3
Taking the 1928 Nomination, and Then Governing "MYSELF"
In Smith's version Al finally asked whether he would refuse to run if drafted, "FDR hesitated," and the deal was done. "Curt," he told the inn manager, "when you're in politics you've got to play the game." He then barnstormed the state, sometimes fourteen times a day, carried up back stairs and fire escapes.
4
The Bank Holiday and the Hundred Days
He warned in his inaugural that if Congress failed to act he would ask for "broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."
5
The Court-Packing Plan
He rejected a constitutional amendment ("Give me ten million dollars and I can prevent any amendment to the Constitution from being ratified") and chose instead a scheme to add a judge for every one over seventy, "The answer to a maiden's prayer."
6
Arming Britain Before Congress Would
He traded fifty destroyers for leases on British bases in the hemisphere without asking Congress, a deal Smith says was made "probably in violation of the Constitution (and certainly contrary to statute)." In the campaign he promised: "I have said before, but I shall say it again and again and again.

Maxims

Fall in public, then laugh first
On a marble lobby floor in 1922 he said, "There's nothing to worry about.... Give me a hand there," and then "Let's go." He described it to a friend as a "Grand reception." See "The Lobby at 120 Broadway."
Accept the humiliation, then walk on as if nothing happened
Carried up a fire escape in 1928, he "smoothed his hair, linked his arm in his son Jim's, and walked out on the platform as if this were nothing unusual." Perkins dated his greatness from such moments. See "The Fire Escape in Yorkville."
Show no fear and others will borrow your nerve
"Roosevelt sat immobile and unflinching" as the shots hit the people around him in Miami, and three weeks later he told a frightened country that fear itself was the enemy. See "Five Shots in Bay Front Park."
Try something; if it fails, say so and try another
His Oglethorpe creed and his cabinet refrain were the same: "We have to do something.... If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along." The bank holiday took six hours of Congress's time.
Run it yourself, or it isn't yours
He refused Al Smith's chief of staff because "she would inevitably plan and develop the work of the Governor of New York in such a way that I would not really put myself into it." It cost him Smith's friendship.

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Part IThe Story

The Lobby at 120 Broadway

On October 9, 1922, after fifteen months away, Franklin Delano Roosevelt went back to work at the offices of Fidelity & Deposit on Lower Broadway, and he meant to walk in: from the car, across the sidewalk, through the front door and the whole length of the lobby to the elevators. A crowd gathered as he heaved himself across the pavement with his chauffeur at his side. Drenched in sweat, he began to crutch himself across "the highly polished floor of the marble lobby." His left foot gave way. The chauffeur could not hold him, and "Franklin crashed flat on the marble, his crutches clattering down beside him."

The onlookers rushed in, then drew back, not knowing what to do. He wrestled himself into a sitting position and laughed. "There's nothing to worry about," he told them. "We'll get out of this all right. Give me a hand there." Two young men and the chauffeur lifted him, and his hat was put back on his head. "Let's go," he said, and the spectators watched "breathlessly" as he hauled himself across the floor, "smiling and nodding, one laborious step after another, his knuckles white on the handles of his crutches."

To his friend Livingston Davis he described the day only as a "Grand reception at 120 Broadway where I lunched and spent 4–5 hours." After that "FDR allowed himself to be whisked in by wheelchair." One of the men who lifted him off the marble was Basil O'Connor, who became his law partner and his friend for life.

Much of what made Roosevelt great, and much of what made him troubling, is in that lobby: the courage to fall in front of strangers and laugh first, the instinct to turn a humiliation into a cheerful story, and the decision never to let anyone see it again. He was a doted-on Hudson River patrician, arrogant and unremarkable at thirty, whom polio stripped of everything but his nerve. It taught him to perform an ease he did not feel and made him the most gifted handler of people in American politics. He used that gift to rescue a collapsing country and lead it through a world war. He also used it to deceive colleagues and the public, to abandon black Americans to the filibuster, and to uproot some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. He is one of the lives in The Anatomy of Greatness, and he belongs there with all of it attached.

By the Numbers

The Roosevelt Record

63Years lived (1882–1945)

39His age when polio paralyzed him in August 1921

23Years he could not stand unassisted

2/3Share of his fortune spent buying Warm Springs

Under 6Hours from House introduction to signature for the 1933 bank bill

70–20Senate vote that killed the Court plan

0Civil rights laws passed in his twelve years

The Only Child of Hyde Park

He was born late in the evening of January 30, 1882, after twenty-six hours of labor that his mother, Sara, narrowly survived. He was her only child, raised under a fixed timetable and constant approval. "Granny [Sara] was a martinet," his daughter Anna said, "but she gave father the assurance he needed to prevail over adversity." His biographer Jean Edward Smith sees behind the assurance "his conviction that he was a man of destiny."

It came with a hardness. As a Harvard freshman he decided that his nephew Taddy, who had married a dance-hall girl, could no longer be considered "a true Roosevelt," and he never saw or spoke to him again. He later joked, "I took economics courses in college for four years and everything I was taught was wrong." Smith's judgment is that he "was not a reflective thinker, nor an original thinker. He learned by doing."

He learned young to keep a secret. During his secret engagement to Eleanor, his fifth cousin once removed, he "told beautifully concocted lies and deceived us sweetly in every direction," and his cousin Corinne "told him he had a very deceitful nature." They married on March 17, 1905, and Eleanor's uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, gave the bride away.

The Awful Arrogant Fellow

Frances Perkins, later his Labor Secretary for twelve years, first knew him in 1910 as a state senator "artificially serious of face, rarely smiling," who answered colleagues asking him to be reasonable with "No, no, I won't hear of it!" Tim Sullivan of Tammany called him "Awful arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt." Perkins believed he had "a youthful lack of humility, a streak of self-righteousness, and a deafness to the hopes, fears, and aspirations which are the common lot." He later agreed: "You know, I was an awfully mean cuss when I first went into politics."

He lost his first big fight in Albany, against Tammany's choice of William Sheehan for the Senate in 1911, and all but three of his twenty-one fellow insurgents were later defeated. Two days afterward he told an audience, "I have just returned from a big fight," one "that went sixty-four rounds," and for the rest of his life he told it as his first victory. When the Triangle fire killed 146 workers that year, he "said nothing about the Triangle fire and took no part in the legislative effort the tragedy produced."

The Navy, and the Letters in the Suitcase

Offered a place by Woodrow Wilson, he chose Assistant Secretary of the Navy: "I'd rather have that place," he said, "than any other in public life." There he learned patronage, keeping the Tammany chairman of House Appropriations "happy" with favors for the Brooklyn yard and blaming "The old man" when he had to refuse. He also learned to improve on the record. In his retelling of a 1918 crossing, a U-boat "came closer and closer until he had almost seen it himself," and as the vice-presidential candidate in 1920 he "claimed to have written the Haitian constitution." Smith: "As with many of FDR's stories, fact and fiction mingle freely."

In the summer of 1916 he fell in love with Eleanor's social secretary, Lucy Mercer. In 1917 Lucy enlisted as a Navy yeoman and was assigned to his office. "To believe FDR did not have a hand in the assignment," Smith writes, "is to believe in the tooth fairy." In September 1918 Roosevelt was carried off the Leviathan with influenza and double pneumonia, and Eleanor, unpacking his luggage, found "a neatly bound packet of love letters from Lucy Mercer." "The bottom dropped out of my world," she said. "I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time."

The accounts diverge. The Roosevelts believed Eleanor offered a divorce and Lucy, a Catholic, could not marry a divorced man; Lucy's cousin said Lucy told her that "Eleanor was not willing to step aside." Sara ended it: if he left his family she "would not give him another dollar." Louis Howe warned that divorce would end his career. Eleanor's price was that he never see Lucy again, and he then told Lucy, falsely, that Eleanor would not agree to a divorce.

"I can forgive, but I cannot forget," Eleanor said. Their son James called the marriage "an armed truce." The relationship with Lucy did not end. Roosevelt arranged for her to watch each of his inaugurals from a White House limousine, phoned her in French so as not to be overheard, and from 1941 saw her under the Secret Service code name "Mrs. Johnson."

Like an Iceberg

In August 1921, at thirty-nine, he was paralyzed from the chest down within days. Eleanor said that when Dr. Lovett confirmed polio "he was completely calm. His reaction to any great event was always to be completely calm. If it was something that was bad, he just became almost like an iceberg, and there was never the slightest emotion that was allowed to show."

The cheerful stories began at once. He "disingenuously" assured Josephus Daniels that "the doctors are most encouraging," and visitors never heard him "utter a complaint or a regret or even acknowledge that he had had so much as a bit of bad luck." Howe kept planting hopeful items in the press, and told Eleanor, "I believe someday Franklin will be President."

By spring 1923 Dr. Lovett found him still "paralyzed from the waist down," and Dr. Draper wrote, "I cannot help feeling that he has almost reached the limit of his possibilities." Sara wanted him to "retire to the pastoral comfort of Hyde Park and settle into the graceful life of an invalid country squire, much as Mr. James had done," and the struggle at home turned "acrimonious." "Franklin had no intention of conforming to my quiet ideas for his future existence," she noted. He insisted his physiotherapist come every day and named the exercise board "the morgue!" Fitted with fourteen-pound braces, he crutched up the gravel drive at Hyde Park: "I must get down the driveway today—all the way down the driveway." Missy LeHand later told Perkins there were days on the houseboat "when it was noon before he could pull himself out of depression and greet his guests wearing his lighthearted façade."

He never walked again, and he engineered his life around the fact. He resisted electrifying Hyde Park's rope-pulley trunk elevator, "believing a power failure would leave him trapped," built a wheelchair out of "an armless kitchen chair," and drove a Model T fitted with hand controls. "For the last twenty-three years of his life, Franklin Roosevelt could not stand unassisted."

The Happy Warrior

He rehearsed every public walk. In 1924 he measured the distance to the rostrum in his library and practiced it. At Madison Square Garden his son locked his braces at the door, and he asked a colleague to "shake the rostrum" before leaning on it. Then he made his way to the podium on crutches and his son's arm to nominate Al Smith as "the 'Happy Warrior,'" and the Times called him "the outstanding personality of the convention."

Perkins, who had found him arrogant, now saw a man with "a firmer grip on life and on himself than ever before," who "would never be so hard and harsh in judgment on stupid people." By 1928 he walked with a cane and a son's arm, and told Elliott that "No one should perceive the difficulty their effort entailed." The press agreed not to comment on his walking, and photographers destroyed plates that caught him "in an awkward pose."

Old Doctor Roosevelt

In 1924, in the warm, buoyant pool of a run-down Georgia resort, his unbraced legs held him upright and he thought he felt "life in his toes" for the first time since 1921. Eleanor "fretted that Franklin was squandering his resources and lacked the patience to succeed." In April 1926 he bought the Merriweather Inn, its pools and 1,200 acres "for $201,667.83—approximately two thirds of his fortune," and set up the Warm Springs Foundation.

He became "Old Doctor Roosevelt" leading exercises in the pool and set the rate at $42 a week. "But no one was turned away for lack of money": when the Patients' Aid Fund ran out he asked that bills "be sent to him personally at Hyde Park." Perkins says he wanted it "simple and cheap... more like a camp than a hotel," and patients were told "I did it, you can do it."

Smith calls Warm Springs "the opportunity to be in complete charge of a significant undertaking—a means of reestablishing his self-esteem." It also educated him. Georgia showed him rural families without electricity or shoes: "Year after year at Warm Springs he was exposed to the brutal reality of rural poverty." The foundation grew into the March of Dimes, which supported Jonas Salk's vaccine.

The Fire Escape in Yorkville

In 1928 he planned two more years on his legs before seeking the governorship. Al Smith, now the presidential nominee, needed him to carry New York. Roosevelt wired that "AS I AM ONLY FORTY-SIX I OWE IT TO MY FAMILY AND MYSELF TO GIVE THE PRESENT CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT A CHANCE TO CONTINUE." The sources disagree about the decisive call. Perkins has Roosevelt ask her, "Do you think carrying New York depends on my running for governor?" ("I'm afraid it does"). Smith has him dodge Smith's calls ("Tell the governor I've gone on a picnic") until Al asked whether he would refuse to run if drafted, and "FDR hesitated." "Curt," he told the inn manager, "when you're in politics you've got to play the game."

He barnstormed the state, carried up back stairs and fire escapes. In a crowded hall in Yorkville, Perkins stood in the wings: "I realized with sudden horror that the only way he could get over that fire escape was in the arms of strong men. That was how he arrived." At the top he "got up on his braces, adjusted them, straightened himself, smoothed his hair, linked his arm in his son Jim's, and walked out on the platform as if this were nothing unusual." She could not remember a word of the speech: "his speech was less important than his courage."

This man had accepted the ultimate humility which comes from being helped physically. He had accepted it smiling.
— Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew

It taught her what the religious teachers meant "when they said that humility is the greatest of virtues, and that if you can't learn it, God will teach it to you by humiliation." The man who had once walked away from bores now sat and nodded at tiresome local Democrats. "Now he could not walk away when he was bored. He listened," and he learned that "everybody wants to have the sense of belonging, of being on the inside."

Governor, by Himself

He won by 25,608 votes out of more than four million while Al Smith lost the state. Smith offered him Belle Moskowitz as secretary, and Roosevelt refused: "I have got to be it MYSELF. If I weren't, if I didn't do it myself, something would be wrong in here." He never showed Moskowitz his speeches, though he left Smith thinking she would be kept on, and Perkins thought the affair "had more to do with separating the two men than any other one thing."

Over Smith's doubts he made Perkins industrial commissioner: "I've got more nerve about women and their status in the world than Al has." When the Republican legislature balked he began the fireside chats, and "A flood of letters would deluge the legislature after each talk." In August 1931 he told a special session that government "owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot," and that aid must come "not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty." Smith calls it "the genesis of the New Deal." He created TERA, the first state relief agency, where Harry Hopkins rose to run it.

He chased the presidency with one face in public and another in private. When Farley announced in 1930 that Roosevelt could not escape the nomination, Roosevelt told him privately, "Whatever you said, Jim, is all right with me," while publicly "giving no consideration or thought or time to anything except the duties of Governorship." When Time repeated in 1931 that he was "utterly unfit physically," he submitted to a panel of physicians, who reported he "can walk all necessary distances," and Howe mailed 200,000 reprints.

At Oglethorpe University on May 22, 1932, he gave the country his creed: "The country needs, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. Take a method and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." Nominated in Chicago, he flew through storms to accept in person, "breaking the absurd tradition" of waiting to be notified. H. L. Mencken found him "one of the most charming of men," one who left "the impression that he is also somewhat shallow and futile."

Five Shots in Bay Front Park

On the evening of February 15, 1933, the President-elect spoke to some 20,000 American Legionnaires in Miami from the back of an open car. He had just slid down to chat with Chicago's Mayor Anton Cermak when five shots rang out from no more than forty feet away. A Secret Service agent was hit in the hand, a woman was hit twice in the abdomen, and Cermak crumpled. "Roosevelt sat immobile and unflinching, his jaw set, ready for what might follow."

He stopped the departing car twice and had Cermak lifted into the back. "I put my left arm around him and my hand on his pulse, but I couldn't find any pulse.... For three blocks I believed his heart had stopped.... I remember I said: 'Tony, keep quiet—don't move. It won't hurt if you keep quiet.'" The gunman, an unemployed bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara, said, "I hate all presidents."

On the yacht that night Raymond Moley watched for a reaction and found "Not so much as the twitching of a muscle." "I confess that I have never in my life seen anything more magnificent than Roosevelt's calm that night." Cermak died on March 6. Smith concludes that "his cheerful contempt for danger, brought forth a national surge of confidence": "It was abundantly clear that FDR lacked physical fear, and his courage rallied the country behind him."

Eight Days

By inauguration day, March 4, 1933, thirty-eight states had closed their banks, the Stock Exchange had suspended trading, and "Piece by piece the nation's credit structure was falling apart." Howe's draft of the inaugural contained the sentence about fear; Roosevelt "added the sentence and embellished it."

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933

He warned that if Congress failed to act he would ask for "broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." By the early hours of Monday he had recalled Congress and, under an old wartime act Hoover had twice refused to use, proclaimed a national bank holiday. "The entire legislative process, from the bill's introduction in the House to the president's signature, took less than six hours." He then "turned right before he turned left," demanding federal salary cuts of at least 15 percent, and then asked for beer.

After his first fireside chat, deposits exceeded withdrawals "by more than two to one," and Moley proclaimed, "Capitalism was saved in eight days." Will Rogers said he "had explained the banking situation so well that even the bankers understood it." Perkins watched him broadcast: "His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor with them." He "never thought of them as 'the masses.'" Smith notes the conservative core: he chose "to preserve the banking system more or less as it was rather than take advantage of the crisis to nationalize it."

Congress stayed a hundred days and passed the CCC, the AAA, the TVA, the NRA, the Securities Act and deposit insurance, among much else. Perkins insisted the New Deal "was not a plan, not even an agreement," and that its one constant was "Roosevelt's general attitude that the people mattered." When the Bonus Army of veterans returned in 1933, he sent Eleanor and Howe instead of troops: "Above all," he told them, "be sure there is plenty of good coffee. No questions asked." The veterans went home. He met the press "every Wednesday and Friday and answered off the cuff," and at the first conference "hard-bitten Washington reporters broke into spontaneous applause."

The Juggler at Work

"I'm a juggler," he told Henry Morgenthau. "I never let my right hand know what my left hand is doing." Smith describes "Machiavellian cunning, and crafty deception." "His appointments were calculated not only to reward, but co-opt," and Perkins became the first woman in a presidential cabinet.

He learned through people. "He used us all as eyes and ears. He wanted to see the country through our eyes." In cabinet he would cite Eleanor's field reports: "my Missus says that they have typhoid fever in that district." For Social Security, Perkins proposed a cabinet committee, and "He saw at once that a program developed by a committee of the cabinet would be under his control." He signed the act on August 14, 1935, and explained the payroll tax candidly: "We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions... With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."

Behind the crowded household and the easy first names lay "an impenetrable reserve that protected him against undue familiarity." Asked whether he was a communist, a capitalist or a socialist, he said no to each. "Philosophy? I am a Christian and a Democrat—that's all."

Sewed Tight

Re-elected in 1936 by an unprecedented margin, he turned on the Supreme Court, which had struck down six New Deal laws. Smith argues the real problem was "not the Court but the law, compounded by the hasty drafting of early New Deal legislation." Roosevelt rejected an amendment ("Give me ten million dollars and I can prevent any amendment to the Constitution from being ratified") and chose a scheme to add a judge for every one over seventy, "The answer to a maiden's prayer." He hid it from Congress, his staff and all but one cabinet member and presented it as a cure for judicial delay. "The claim was absurd, and Roosevelt should have known better." When opposition grew he told Farley: "Hold up judicial appointments in states where the delegation is not going along."

Chief Justice Hughes demolished the delay argument, and the Court upheld minimum wages, the Wagner Act and Social Security. Roosevelt "refused to compromise," and the Senate killed the bill 70 to 20. "To attack the Court was wrongheaded. To persist after the cause was won was petulant." The fight split the Democrats into a conservative coalition, and "The victory in the Court fight of 1937 belonged not to Roosevelt but to Hughes." Perkins called it the one program "to which he did get himself sewed tight." Afterward Farley found him "fuming against the members of his own party," and Roosevelt told him: "I've got them on the run... They'll be sorry yet." In 1938 the White House had Hopkins use the WPA in Alben Barkley's primary, which led to the Hatch Act.

Economics was his blind side. After meeting John Maynard Keynes he complained of "a whole rigmarole of figures," and Keynes had "supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking." James MacGregor Burns wrote that "Roosevelt's deficiencies as an economist were as striking as his triumphs as a politician." In 1937, thinking the battle won, he slashed spending to balance the budget and set off the "Roosevelt recession." Smith: "he shot the country in the foot."

I Did Not Choose the Tools

Since 1933, eighty-three black Americans had been lynched. In April 1937 at Duck Hill, Mississippi, two handcuffed prisoners were "chained to a tree, mutilated with blowtorches, doused with gasoline, and set afire." Senator Wagner's bill would only let federal authorities charge local officials who let a lynching go unprosecuted for thirty days. Gallup found more than 70 percent of the public in favor, and the House passed it.

Roosevelt had explained himself to the NAACP's Walter White: "I did not choose the tools with which I must work... But I've got to get legislation passed to save America.... If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass.… I just can't take that risk." When Eleanor was invited to an NAACP rally, Missy wrote in the margin, "President says this is dynamite." Tommy Corcoran put it bluntly: "He does his best with it, but he ain't gonna lose his votes for it."

In January 1938 a Southern filibuster held the Senate for six weeks. Asked by reporters whether he favored the bill: "I have not referred to it at all," he said. "I should say there was enough discussion going on in the Senate." Smith judges that "If Roosevelt had intervened decisively—perhaps if he had simply offered a word of encouragement—cloture could have been obtained and the bill passed." Wagner withdrew it. "During the twelve years FDR was president not one piece of civil rights legislation became law." When the DAR barred Marian Anderson from Constitution Hall, he did approve the open-air concert: "Tell Oscar [Chapman, assistant secretary of the interior] he has my permission to have Marian sing from the top of the Washington Monument if he wants it."

A Garden Hose for Britain

In the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, Winston Churchill begged for "forty or fifty of your older destroyers." Statute and international law seemed to bar the way, and Roosevelt believed "Congress is in no mood at the present time to allow any form of sale." He was also seeking a third term. He told Perkins, "Don't you know I'm through in January 1941?" while Frank Walker was "pledged to keep it secret" that he would run. He stayed away from the Chicago convention: "People will get promises out of me that I ought not to make. If I don't make promises, I will make new enemies." Mayor Kelly meanwhile had men in the basement producing "a bedlam of cheers" through hidden loudspeakers whenever his name was mentioned.

He traded fifty destroyers for leases on British bases without asking Congress, "probably in violation of the Constitution (and certainly contrary to statute)." In Boston he promised: "I have said before, but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Wendell Willkie's verdict: "That hypocritical son of a bitch... This is going to beat me."

After winning, he sold Lend-Lease as a garden hose: "I want my garden hose back after the fire is over." When a U-boat fired on the Greer in 1941 he "seized on the incident" to order "shoot-on-sight," though the Navy had found "no positive evidence that submarine knew nationality of ship at which it was firing." By Pearl Harbor American warships were escorting British convoys. Perkins saw December 7 lift a weight from him: "His terrible moral problem had been resolved by the event."

Be as Reasonable as You Can

After Pearl Harbor, West Coast opinion turned on the Japanese. A vegetable-growers' manager admitted, "We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do." General DeWitt argued that "the very fact that no sabotage has taken place... is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken." Against him stood J. Edgar Hoover, who called evacuation "utterly unwarranted"; General Stilwell, who called the sabotage reports "wild, farcical, and fantastic stuff"; and Attorney General Biddle, who thought it "ill-advised, unnecessary, and unnecessarily cruel."

On February 11, 1942, Stimson raised it by phone. Roosevelt "expressed no opinion on the evacuation" and told him "to go ahead on the line that I thought the best." John McCloy relayed the message: "We have carte blanche to do what we want to as far as the President is concerned.... as he puts it, 'Be as reasonable as you can.'" A week later Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, covering forty thousand immigrants barred from citizenship and some eighty thousand American-born citizens. When Biddle objected, Roosevelt called it "a matter of military judgment."

Families sold refrigerators for a dollar. When Morgenthau raised their property, Roosevelt said, "I am not concerned about that." Smith calls it "one of the shabbiest displays of presidential prerogative in American history": "There was no military necessity for the order." Perkins, whose memoir resolves every doubt in his favor, does not mention it.

Uncle Joe

At Teheran, after three days in which Stalin was "correct, stiff, solemn," Roosevelt warned Churchill ("Winston, I hope you won't be sore at me"), whispered to Stalin that "Winston is cranky this morning," and teased the Prime Minister about John Bull and his cigars until "Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw." Then he called him "Uncle Joe." Perkins found him "capable of almost childish vanity about his skill in catching fish, his seamanship in small boats, his exploits in teasing Winston Churchill and in making Stalin laugh and unbend."

He backed the atomic bomb after hearing out a report from Albert Einstein, on "his hunch that Einstein, like his fellow scientists, was truthful and wise." On refugees he moved late. After Treasury staff produced a report titled "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews," he created the War Refugee Board in January 1944 to strip the State Department of refugee work. It sent Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest.

Last Post

He kept his body's failure secret too. In March 1944 the cardiologist Howard Bruenn found congestive heart failure, which untreated meant "the president was unlikely to survive for more than a year." Admiral Ross McIntire refused to tell the patient and "also misled the public," and Roosevelt "chatted amiably with Dr. Bruenn throughout the examination but did not inquire about his condition." Ed Flynn begged him not to run: "I felt that he would never survive the term." Perkins writes that before the nomination "No one in the cabinet had any fears for the President's health." By January 1945, though, "His lips were blue. His hand shook," and when Ilo Wallace asked if he was well, "I put my finger to my lips, and she put her finger to her lips. We knew we must not talk about it." On the eve of Yalta he whispered, "You'd better pray for me, Frances."

On April 12, 1945, at the Little White House in Warm Springs, he sat for a portrait. Shortly before one o'clock he said, "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head," slumped forward and never regained consciousness. Lucy Mercer was there; Smith writes that "her face was the last FDR saw before he died."

That night a soldier outside the White House told Perkins, "I felt as if he knew me—and I felt as if he liked me." Smith's verdict on the whole is that Britain was saved and America ended the war "the most powerful nation in history."

Part IIThe Playbook

Roosevelt never wrote down a method. It comes to us through Perkins, who admitted her book was "biased in his favor," and through Smith, who admires him and still convicts him on the Court plan, the recession, race and internment. Several of these principles cut both ways.

The principles

1.Show no fear, and others will borrow your nerve.
2.Try something, and keep the right to change it.
3.Decide, then stop worrying.
4.Learn the country through people.
5.Run it yourself, or it isn't yours.
6.Speak to one family at a time.
7.Choose the battleground, and never say the other man's name.
8.Build the benefit so no politician can take it back.
9.Keep an exit, and know when you have lost it.
10.Whatever you hand to others, you still own.

Principle 1

Show no fear, and others will borrow your nerve.

He was "like an iceberg" at the polio diagnosis, "immobile and unflinching" under Zangara's fire, and laughing on the marble at 120 Broadway. Three weeks after Miami he told a country with its banks shut that fear itself was the enemy, and it believed him because it had just watched him prove it. The calm was partly performed; Missy LeHand saw mornings when he could not face guests until noon. His first rule, as Perkins listed them, was "Never let fear rise."

Tactic: In a crisis, manage your own visible state before anything else. Do your fearing in private.

Principle 2

Try something, and keep the right to change it.

"This is very bad, but one thing is sure. We have to do something," he would tell the cabinet, then: "If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along." He worked like a modern painter who "begins anyhow, and then, as he paints, his plan evolves out of the material," and Perkins admitted that "Roosevelt's plans were never thoroughly thought out." The method saved the banks in 1933 and failed in 1937, when he cut spending into a recession. Experiment only works if you read the results honestly.

Tactic: Act fast on your best guess, and say in advance that you will change course if it fails.

Principle 3

Decide, then stop worrying.

Sam Rosenman: "He would think a problem through very carefully. Having come to a decision, he would dismiss it from his mind as finished business. He never went back to it to worry about whether his decision was right." The habit let him carry banks, war and a dozen agencies at once. It also let him avoid asking a cardiologist what was wrong with his heart.

Tactic: Separate deciding from ruminating, but set a fact or date that forces you to reopen the question.

Principle 4

Learn the country through people.

Perkins doubted "that he had ever read any of the standard works on trade unionism." Two trade unionists Eleanor brought to his sickroom, Rose Schneiderman and Maude Schwartz, taught him the labor movement, and Warm Springs taught him rural poverty. He held facts the same way: Perkins gave him a one-page outline so the case "would photograph itself upon his memory," and years later heard him recite its figures.

Tactic: Build a network that sees what you cannot, and ask what they saw before you ask what they think. Give busy people one page.

Principle 5

Run it yourself, or it isn't yours.

"I have got to be it MYSELF." He refused Al Smith's chief of staff because she would plan the governor's work "in such a way that I would not really put myself into it," and it cost him Smith's friendship. The shadow side was secrecy. Doing it himself meant hiding the Court plan, and Smith concludes that "His failure to consult... denied him the support he needed when opposition crystallized."

Tactic: Refuse inherited agendas, but bring your allies inside before the fight, not after.

Principle 6

Speak to one family at a time.

He wrote his 1928 nominating speech "wholly for the benefit of the radio audience and the press," and sold Lend-Lease as a hose lent to a neighbor. His rule: "You want to make it simple—very simple. So simple that everybody will understand it." In person he "gave each person the feeling that the President had just been waiting for him to come along." In the 1937 sit-down strike he rang the head of General Motors, a man he had never met: "Is that you, Bill?" GM recognized the union.

Tactic: Picture one listener and talk to them. Find a household image for every abstract policy. When a deal is stuck, make the personal call.

Principle 7

Choose the battleground, and never say the other man's name.

"Never let your opponent pick the battleground on which to fight," he told Rosenman. "If he picks one, stay out of it and let him fight all by himself." On rivals: "Call him anything, but never call him bad names... And never mention his name. Many people, hundreds of people, just cannot remember names." His reasoning: "They have heard my name so often and so long that it in itself is a political asset."

Tactic: Keep talking about the issue you want the contest to be about, and never give your rival free publicity.

Principle 8

Build the benefit so no politician can take it back.

Workers paid into Social Security, so they felt they had earned a right, and "no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program." Most reforms die because their beneficiaries have no stake in defending them. Roosevelt designed the stake in from the start.

Tactic: Design incentives so the people a program serves will defend it, and make that group large.

Principle 9

Keep an exit, and know when you have lost it.

"He was a great believer in alternatives. He rarely got himself sewed tight to a program from which there was no turning back." The one time he did, on the Court plan, he kept fighting after the Court had already given him what he wanted, lost 70 to 20, and split his party.

Tactic: Before you commit, define a partial win and agree to take it. When the other side yields, stop.

Principle 10

Whatever you hand to others, you still own.

He gave internment to Stimson with "Be as reasonable as you can," and antilynching to the Senate with "I have not referred to it at all." Both are on his record. The same method opened the Bank of America when an official would not take responsibility for keeping it shut. What separates the cases is who is left without a defender. Delegation moves the work. It does not move the responsibility.

Tactic: If you would not defend an outcome in your own name, do not let it happen in someone else's.

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Part IIIMaxims

Fall in public, then laugh first. "There's nothing to worry about.... Give me a hand there." Then: "Let's go."
Accept the humiliation, then walk on as if nothing happened. Carried up a fire escape, he smoothed his hair, took his son's arm and walked onstage.
Show no fear and others will borrow your nerve. Miami made "fear itself" believable.
Ask everyone's advice; promise no one anything. "Always ask their advice," he told Perkins, "whether you take it or not."
Let people go out on a limb at their own risk. "Say what you please. Use your own judgment. But if it turns out wrong, the blood be on your own head."
Charm is a tool; a secret is a time bomb. He hid the Court plan, Lucy Mercer, the polio and, in 1944, his heart.
Whatever you leave to others, you still own. Internment and the filibuster are both on his record.
Never let them see you need sympathy. He would never "acknowledge that he had had so much as a bit of bad luck."