I recently discovered some old papers of mine. “FDR was an amazing man and a great president because he knew what he was doing,” I wrote in a school report when I was eleven years old. “[He] was not physically strong but his spirit was.” For anyone who doesn’t have time to read this book, that’s all you need to know. Even when he didn’t consciously know what he was doing, the instinctive part of him did. The year I wrote that, 1968, was closer to 1933 than to 2006. The people who gave me the consciousness to think that way are my parents, Jim and Joanne Alter. Along with several gifted teachers, they bestowed the love of American history and politics that made this book possible.
In examining the voluminous collection of published and unpublished work about Roosevelt, I tried to rely on primary sources. This approach helped me unearth some intriguing and overlooked documents and oral histories and to peruse obscure books that have been out of print for more than sixty years. But I’ve also come to a fresh appreciation of those legendary historians who have brilliantly brought FDR and his times to life, including Michael Beschloss, Alan Brinkley, James MacGregor Burns, Blanche Cook, Kenneth S. Davis, Frank Freidel, Doris Kearns Goodwin, David M. Kennedy, William E. Leuchtenberg, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Geoffrey C. Ward. I owe a special debt to Beschloss, Brinkley, and Ward (whose work on the young Roosevelt is definitive) for reviewing the manuscript. They have all deepened my appreciation for the idea, attributed to the Dutch historian Peter Geyl, that “history is an argument without end.”
During my visits to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, archivist Bob Clark was especially useful in filling the black hole in the records between January 1, 1933, when FDR left the governorship, and March 4, 1933, when he became president. Thanks also to Karen Anson, Virginia Lewick, Mark Renovitch, and Alisha Vivona at FDRL. (Note to scholars: They suggested I not cite the box numbers from which FDRL documents came, because the entire classification system is being overhauled.) Diane Lobb-Boyce of the National Park Service gave me a private tour of FDR’s Hyde Park study and bedroom, and a great tip about an attic find that revealed how much Ogden Mills despised Roosevelt. William vanden Heuvel of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Lincoln scholars David Herbert Donald and Harold Holzer were important early sources of encouragement.
At the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, I’m indebted to Timothy Walch and Dwight M. Miller for pulling together the fascinating documents that shed light on the HH-FDR relationship, and to Brad Bowers, Matthew Schaefer, and Craig Wright for their suggestions. At the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the staff helped me navigate the Raymond Moley Papers, which have been consulted by surprisingly few historians of the period. I’m also grateful to the Library of Congress and to the Columbia University library for their invaluable oral history collections.
Special thanks to Mary Bain, Leon Despres, George Elsey, Patrick and Richard Flynn, Robert Morgenthau, the late Richard Neustadt, Robert Rosenman (who gave me access to some papers of his father not available at FDRL), Martin Siegel, Walter Sondheim, the late Michael Straight, and Studs Terkel for their personal memories of FDR and the period, and to Susan Thomas Armour for recalling her late husband’s story of witnessing the Zangara assassination attempt as a child. Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton were generous enough to explain to me how Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats influenced them.
I was fortunate to find energetic and talented research assistants at various points, including Sarah Childress, Geoff Gagnon, Barney Gimbel, David Greenhouse, Seth Stevenson, Dan Stolz, and Alan Wirzbicki. Dan Blumenthal helped me find a couple of gems in the Hyde Park archives and introduced me to his mother, Dr. Ellen Blumenthal, who along with another psychiatrist, Dr. James P. Frosch, gave me a better understanding of the origins of FDR’s self-confidence. Several friends came through magnificently in reading drafts, including the awful early ones, and in providing other support. Thanks to Barbara Azzoli, Ian Frazier, Peter Kaplan, Jonas Klein, Judy McGhee, David McKean, Newt Minnow, Cliff Sloan, Keith Ulrich, and Jacob Weisberg for saving me from myself. Michael Waldman deserves special mention for talking me through this from start to finish. Fellow alumni of The Washington Monthly, including Jason DeParle, Jim Fallows, Phil Keisling, Joe Nocera, Walter Shapiro, and our FDR-loving leader, Charlie Peters, all offered terrific suggestions. Walter Issacson, an early source of book-writing inspiration, and Evan Thomas, were wise men in helping me find structure. My agent, Amanda Urban, and her husband, Ken Auletta, have always been there for me.
Thanks to Rick Smith, Mark Whitaker, and Tom Watson of Newsweek for putting up with the work interruptions this book required, and to Andy Nagorski and Ellis Cose for logistical advice. And I’m especially grateful to historian and Managing Editor Jon Meacham, who read the manuscript twice. I get other good karma at work because Newsweek is located in the old General Motors Building at 251 W. 57th Street, where FDR kept an office at DNC headquarters during 1928. Over at Rockefeller Center, Jeff Zucker of NBC News assigned me to report a 1999 Today Show story on great turning points of the twentieth century that first sparked my interest in the Zangara assassination attempt. At Simon & Schuster, Roger Labrie, Elizabeth Hayes, Victoria Meyer, Ann Adelman, Lisa Healy, and Serena Jones smoothed the way. Of course the book owes its existence to the legendary Alice Mayhew, who patiently had lunch with me every year or so for more than a decade to discuss book ideas. When I finally got going on FDR in 2001, she offered encouragement, tough love, meticulous line editing, a title, and the peerless editorial instincts that made this happen.
In the middle of writing, I was diagnosed with lymphoma and underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and a stem cell transplant. Studying FDR’s example—both the cheerful spirit in which he fought his own disease and the hope he conveyed to a despairing nation—turns out to have been more personally inspiring than I could have imagined. I’m thankful to Dr. Andrew Zelenetz, Dr. Lawrence Werther, Dr. Barry Salky, Dr. Stephen Nimer, Dr. Tarun Kewelramani, Dr. Audrey Hamilton, and the staff of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for keeping me healthy enough to complete this book, and to Dr. Jerome Groopman for being my great friend and tireless advocate through a difficult time. The same goes for literally hundreds of other friends who have reached out to me in the last couple of years. I wish I could list you all.
Most important, my family backed me all the way. My brother, Harrison Alter, and my sisters, Jennifer Alter Warden and Jamie Alter Lynton, offered both moral and editorial support, as did their spouses and other Lazars, Greenhouses, and Lyntons. My father read the manuscript, clued me in to “When Thousands Cheer,” and otherwise offered wise counsel, and my mother, who spent three days shepherding Eleanor Roosevelt around campus when she was a student at Mount Holyoke in the 1940s, was the catalyst for the project. Mom was characteristically frank while keeping her long-held faith that this day would come.
Finally, our terrific children, Charlotte, Tommy, and Molly, were understanding when I was holed up night after night on the third floor, and my wonderful wife, Emily, my rock, showed her usual good sense and good humor while anchoring everything in the rest of our life so I could get this done. To them, all of my love.