Jonathan Alter: What FDR Teaches Us
On one level, it's unfair to compare a sitting president to his predecessors, especially when he has more than two and a half years to go. And it's doubly unfair to compare George Walker Bush, currently experiencing some of the lowest approval ratings in the history of polling, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is on the list of even conservative historians as one of our best presidents. But juxtaposing the two men may shed some light on both Roosevelt's unusual gifts and Bush's current troubles. FDR's presidency can offer some useful lessons—for today's White House, and for anyone intrigued by the mysteries of leadership.
Before reaching office, bluebloods Roosevelt and Bush had a great deal in common, even sharing some ancestors. FDR went to Groton and Harvard; Bush to Andover and Yale. Their academic records and the assessment of friends suggest roughly equivalent IQs. Both grew up with tough mothers and bearing the name of a previous American president. Both had a clubby charm and enjoyed bestowing cutting nicknames on aides. Both were tagged by top pundits of the day with the exact same epithet—"lightweight." Both lost for higher office, suffered business setbacks and experienced a personal crisis before becoming governor of a major state.
But the crises left entirely different imprints on the political style and character of their presidencies. FDR, stricken with polio at age 39, spent much of the 1920s building a clinic for polio victims at Warm Springs, Georgia. There, "Old Doc Roosevelt," as he called himself, shed his snobbism and learned to connect with ordinary people, as Bush does naturally. FDR restored the hope of polio patients, though neither he nor they would ever walk again.
Two weeks after barely dodging assassination in Miami in February of 1933, Roosevelt took office and performed a similar conjuring act on a larger stage. With the banks closed and millions of Americans wiped out, FDR used his "first-class temperament" to treat the mental depression of Americans without curing their economic one. In the days following his "fear itself" Inaugural and first "Fireside Chat," the same citizens who had lined up the month before to withdraw their last savings from the bank (and stuff it under the mattress or tape it to their chests) lined up to redeposit patriotically. This astounding act of ebullient leadership marked the "defining moment" of modern American politics, when Roosevelt saved both capitalism and democracy within a few weeks and redefined the bargain—the "Deal"—the country struck with its own people.
In "The Defining Moment," my new book examining FDR's election and storied Hundred Days, I don't draw explicit comparisons with Bush. But they're hard to ignore. Also at age 40, Bush conquered his own, less debilitating disease, a battle with the bottle that left his wife Laura saying, "It's me or Jack Daniels." He emerged with a single-minded focus and discipline that took him far. But when discipline hardens into dogma, a president loses the suppleness to respond to problems. Bush's adherence to routine—a frequent attribute of those who have beaten substance abuse problems—may have slowed his adjustment to new circumstances.
By contrast, Roosevelt was so flexible that many Democrats tried to stop him from gaining the 1932 presidential nomination because they saw him as a straddler and flip-flopper on issues like the League of Nations and Prohibition. (Neither "wet" nor "dry," he was a "damp.") But by calling for "bold, persistent experimentation," he turned flexibility into a principle. When man met moment in 1933, FDR cut left and right at once, putting people to work and regulating Wall Street for the first time, but also resisting pressure to nationalize the banks and slashing federal spending by 30 percent, the deepest cuts ever.
Read entire article at Newsweek
Before reaching office, bluebloods Roosevelt and Bush had a great deal in common, even sharing some ancestors. FDR went to Groton and Harvard; Bush to Andover and Yale. Their academic records and the assessment of friends suggest roughly equivalent IQs. Both grew up with tough mothers and bearing the name of a previous American president. Both had a clubby charm and enjoyed bestowing cutting nicknames on aides. Both were tagged by top pundits of the day with the exact same epithet—"lightweight." Both lost for higher office, suffered business setbacks and experienced a personal crisis before becoming governor of a major state.
But the crises left entirely different imprints on the political style and character of their presidencies. FDR, stricken with polio at age 39, spent much of the 1920s building a clinic for polio victims at Warm Springs, Georgia. There, "Old Doc Roosevelt," as he called himself, shed his snobbism and learned to connect with ordinary people, as Bush does naturally. FDR restored the hope of polio patients, though neither he nor they would ever walk again.
Two weeks after barely dodging assassination in Miami in February of 1933, Roosevelt took office and performed a similar conjuring act on a larger stage. With the banks closed and millions of Americans wiped out, FDR used his "first-class temperament" to treat the mental depression of Americans without curing their economic one. In the days following his "fear itself" Inaugural and first "Fireside Chat," the same citizens who had lined up the month before to withdraw their last savings from the bank (and stuff it under the mattress or tape it to their chests) lined up to redeposit patriotically. This astounding act of ebullient leadership marked the "defining moment" of modern American politics, when Roosevelt saved both capitalism and democracy within a few weeks and redefined the bargain—the "Deal"—the country struck with its own people.
In "The Defining Moment," my new book examining FDR's election and storied Hundred Days, I don't draw explicit comparisons with Bush. But they're hard to ignore. Also at age 40, Bush conquered his own, less debilitating disease, a battle with the bottle that left his wife Laura saying, "It's me or Jack Daniels." He emerged with a single-minded focus and discipline that took him far. But when discipline hardens into dogma, a president loses the suppleness to respond to problems. Bush's adherence to routine—a frequent attribute of those who have beaten substance abuse problems—may have slowed his adjustment to new circumstances.
By contrast, Roosevelt was so flexible that many Democrats tried to stop him from gaining the 1932 presidential nomination because they saw him as a straddler and flip-flopper on issues like the League of Nations and Prohibition. (Neither "wet" nor "dry," he was a "damp.") But by calling for "bold, persistent experimentation," he turned flexibility into a principle. When man met moment in 1933, FDR cut left and right at once, putting people to work and regulating Wall Street for the first time, but also resisting pressure to nationalize the banks and slashing federal spending by 30 percent, the deepest cuts ever.