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Every list of the "greatest" American presidents I have ever seen includes the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt near the very top, usually second only to that of Abraham Lincoln. The canonization ceremonies for him have long since been completed. Even the Republican Party, which so reviled him during his 12 years in office, now invokes his name at its tribal gatherings.
In this book Jonathan Alter, a senior editor at Newsweek and an analyst for NBC News, tries to pin down why and how Roosevelt, perceived in his early career as a lightweight dilettante, was able to rouse the country from its defeatist funk and set it on the road to recovery.
Alter tries hard to be even-handed, but in the end his admiration for Roosevelt, though tempered by important reservations, shines through clearly.
His major thesis is that Roosevelt was no heavyweight ideologue with a set program, nor even a particularly deep thinker; he was an actor, a master of "Presidential stagecraft" who led by practicing the fine political art of "calculated ambiguity." The New Deal that he created did not, Alter admits in the end, cure the Depression --- but it inspired a mood of confidence and hope that gave the American people the will to tackle their problems with the belief that they could somehow be solved.
Alter's thesis is not a new idea. There is a huge shelf of books about FDR that make much the same point. Alter's approach is not to write a conventional biography of FDR but to concentrate on the period from his first nomination to the end of the famous "hundred days" that began his first term.
He begins by teasing out of FDR's childhood and youth many of the qualities of mind and personality that came to the fore during that first term. He is illuminating, for example, on the influence exerted over FDR by his formidable mother Sara, the trauma of the 1921 polio attack that made him a cripple for life and the unsuccessful attempt on his life in Miami shortly after he took office.
These ideas also are not new, but Alter adds a piquant twist to many of them by making constant comparisons (often in his footnotes) with later presidents. The unspoken subtext is usually to FDR's credit rather than that of his successors.
He lays heavy emphasis on the grave crisis that gripped the country on the very day that FDR took office in 1933. Banks all over the nation were closed, unemployment was rampant, rumors of violence and revolution were in the air. Some said the country needed a dictator.
Alter's interpretation of this frightening moment is characteristically double-edged. He faults Roosevelt for seemingly allowing the crisis to get worse rather than offering cooperation to the dour Herbert Hoover so he could make a more dramatic entrance as the nation's hoped-for savior; but he lauds Roosevelt's famous inaugural address and enthuses over his calls for action --- any action --- to get the country's economic engine started again. A fair number of Roosevelt's early initiatives, Alter reveals, were actually thought up by Hoover lieutenants.
Alter has plumbed the vast ocean of Roosevelt literature deeply. He agrees with the conventional wisdom that FDR governed by playing off his team of "brain trust" advisors against each other while covering his own tracks with an air of "affable impenetrability."
His thesis --- never spelled out in so many words --- seems to be that presidents who govern by theatrical gesture and opportunistic illusion-making can be just as effective, if not more so, than those who come to office with rigid ideological agendas. Sometimes, Alter seems to be saying that political magicians are just what this country needs. Hmmmm...does the shoe fit today?
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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