AT 5:30 ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, March 8, Franklin, Eleanor, and Jimmy paid a surprise call on retired Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. FDR barely knew the great justice and he didn’t really have time yet for socializing. But he accepted Felix Frankfurter’s invitation to visit Holmes’s Georgetown house for a little afternoon party to celebrate the justice’s ninety-second birthday.
Here were two sides of the new president on display—the bon vivant who never missed a good party and the politician who never forgot a slight. Roosevelt was more than happy to honor Holmes with a half hour visit, but he left the White House at least partly to settle a score with Herbert Hoover. Five days earlier, on the eve of his Inauguration, FDR had been enraged by Hoover’s haughty comment that “When you’ve been in Washington as long as I have, Mr. Roosevelt, you’ll learn that the president calls on no man.” Roosevelt must have known the former president would read of his visit to Holmes and get the message: This president pays calls on other men. This president shows respect.
Holmes, fortified by bootleg champagne, was in fine form. As reported by his former law clerks, Donald Hiss (brother of Alger) and Tommy Corcoran, the legendary jurist chatted with the new president about the boxer John L. Sullivan, and then recalled his Civil War days. The only thing to do when losing a battle, Holmes said, was to stop retreating, blow the trumpet, and give the order to charge. “And that’s exactly what you are doing,” Holmes said admiringly. “You are in a war, Mr. President, and in a war there is only one rule, ‘Form your battalion and fight!’ ”
After FDR and his family left, Holmes reminded his clerks that it was the new president’s cousin, Theodore, who had appointed him to the high court. Holmes then added, without specifying which Roosevelt: “A second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.”
Alexander Woollcott, the critic and journalist, heard the line and began peddling it widely and it eventually became the most enduring of all descriptions of FDR, though historians now differ over which Roosevelt Holmes was referring to. These presidents shared more than a name. While their differences were significant, both projected immense vitality and a canny political intelligence. Henry Adams’s distillation of Theodore as “pure act” applies as easily to Franklin, whose instinct was always to keep moving, even if he could not physically move himself. Instinct, that rarest and most precious of political gifts, is the mysterious offspring of temperament and timing. In the Hundred Days, his “first-class” temperament helped prove FDR nothing short of an instinctive political genius.
The great historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that “At the heart of the New Deal was not a philosophy but a temperament. The essence of that temperament was Roosevelt’s confidence that even when he was operating in unfamiliar territory he could do no wrong, commit no serious mistakes.” But Hofstadter’s description of the “essence” of FDR’s temperament is incomplete. A fine temperament reflects something more than immense confidence, a sunny disposition, and shrewd sociability. Whether the product of nature, nurture, or some combination, his temperament was what let him see around corners and into the hearts of people.
“Temperament is the great separator,” wrote the political scientist Richard Neustadt in his classic text, Presidential Power. “Experience will leave its mark on expertise; so will a man’s ambitions for himself and his constituents. But something like that ‘first rate’ temperament is what turns know-how and desire into his personal account.” Both Hofstadter, who thought FDR was untrustworthy, and Neustadt, who revered him, appreciated just how rare this quality has been in American politics. A third historian, David Kennedy, neatly summarized how FDR saw his own gift: “His untroubled conception of the presidency consisted quite simply of the thought of him in it.”
Well into the Hundred Days, that “untroubled conception” led some to continue to underestimate Roosevelt. How could someone so seemingly superficial be taken seriously? His rivals and even some of his aides still thought they could manipulate him. More often, “consciously or instinctively,” as the columnist Joseph Alsop wrote, “FDR was deftly using them while they thought to use him.”
A good temperament is multi-layered. Robert Sherwood, the playwright who later wrote speeches for FDR, concluded that his character was “not only multiplex, it was contradictory to a bewildering degree. He was hard and he was soft. At times he displayed a capacity for vindictiveness which could be described as petty, and at other times he demonstrated the Christian spirit of forgiveness and charity in its purest form…. He could appear to be utterly cynical, worldly, illusion-less, and yet his religious faith was the strongest and most mysterious force that was in him.” About all that Sherwood could conclude was that FDR was “the most untemperamental genius I have ever encountered. That is one of the reasons he was able to sleep so well at night.” By not agonizing over decisions, he could move quickly and experiment more than other politicians would dare. John Gunther once asked Eleanor, “Just how does the president think?” She responded, “My dear Mr. Gunther, the president never thinks! He decides.”
Roosevelt didn’t much care what others thought about his work habits. Where Coolidge and Hoover would arrive in the Oval Office before 8:00 a.m., FDR would be wheeled in closer to 10:00 or even 10:30 a.m. Because he had often conducted business past midnight the night before, he usually awoke around 8:30, put the first of thirty or forty Camels a day in his cigarette holder (necessitated by sensitive gums) and ripped through five newspapers while eating a big breakfast in bed.* Then he was briefed in his bedroom by a constantly rotating pair of favored aides (Moley and Lew Douglas in the Hundred Days), who were expected to inform him about everything in the world of politics and government. If they didn’t know all manner of scuttlebutt, they didn’t last long in that role. Finally, Marvin McIntyre and Steve Early would appear to tell him about appointments and possible questions from the press. Some days, when his sinuses bothered him or he simply didn’t feel like keeping his official appointments, he spent the whole day in bed talking to aides, transmitting and receiving information.
Gunther applied an electrical theory to FDR, describing him as a “switchboard,” or “transformer” with a receptivity and energy that channeled ideas into action almost instantaneously. Just about any notion was worth receiving and at least exploring. “If one put to him such a stock question as, ‘Do you believe that a purple elephant is flying at this minute around the top of the Empire State Building?’ ” Gunther wrote, “His reply would probably have been, ‘It might be true—let’s go out and see.’ ”
Beneath the loud motor of his energy lay a sensitive gauge, hand-crafted by his own suffering. Like many disabled people, he developed a strong sense of how others reacted to him. Hofstadter argued that this fine instrument was put to no better use than a weathervane, that FDR was fundamentally directionless. But the historian mistook Roosevelt’s feigns and stuttersteps and miscues for irresolution. He was always at least vaguely focused on bold, progressive, responsive government. The hesitations were usually the product of what his instincts were telling him about how far other politicians—and the American people—were willing to go. “He had to know, to a centimeter, the line that divides pity from compassion, condescension from cooperation, mere sympathy from real support,” writes Garry Wills, arguing that FDR’s polio-induced sensitivity to public opinion was his greatest asset—the very thing that allowed him to combine strong leadership with a commitment to democracy.
On a personal level, FDR’s cheerful temperament proved deceptive time after time. His laugh—“as joyous, hearty, rolling, thunderous laughter as ever was heard on this sorrowful globe,” the writer Fulton Oursler called it—could be unnerving. If meeting Roosevelt was “like opening a bottle of champagne,” as Winston Churchill famously remarked, the taste was subtle.
Consider the case of Huey Long, who had already experienced FDR saying, “Fine! Fine! Fine!” to him and every other visitor during the transition—and called him on it publicly. By the spring of 1933, he saw Roosevelt take the technique to the next level. One afternoon during the Hundred Days, FDR told Farley to summon Long to the White House. It was going to be a showdown meeting, the president said. Long, playing his usual irreverent game, wouldn’t remove his straw hat in front of the president, which enraged Farley. But Roosevelt didn’t seem to mind. He had decided to place control of the growing federal patronage in Louisiana under Farley (his patronage chief) instead of giving it to the de facto dictator of the state, Long.
For Long, who had taken to calling FDR “Prince Franklin, Knight of the Nourmahal,” this was a severe blow. Patronage was central to his control; without it, he was merely a populist rogue. FDR delivered the news by blandly telling Long that he was just interested in seeing good men in office. Because the maneuver was couched in a nonconfrontational platitude, it was hard for Long to react. The normally irrepressible Kingfish—watching his power base recede before his eyes—was reduced to his own platitude. “I understand the rules of war in politics,” he murmured after leaving.
Long made no secret of his frustration. “What the hell’s the use of coming down to see this fellow?” he complained to Farley on the way out. “I can’t win a decision over him. He’s hard to talk to.” As Joe Kennedy had discovered during the struggle over Argentine destroyers (and would discover again in World War II) and as Al Smith and Herbert Hoover knew from their own bitter experience, Roosevelt was the wrong man to tangle with.
Senator Claude Pepper of Florida enjoyed telling a story about meeting with FDR in later years on a matter the president preferred not to discuss. Roosevelt talked the whole time about a man named Livingston. Pepper later reported that he had not had a chance to bring up the difficult topic, but he was now the second-best informed man in the world on the subject of Mr. Livingston.*
Vice President Garner noted privately that FDR “utters 500 words for every one he listens to.” But FDR was a good listener when it suited him (“every pore in his body was an ear,” said the journalist Dorothy Thompson) and there was almost always a method to his chat. By telling a long story of dubious relevance—like the one about buried treasure in Nova Scotia—or jumping from topic to topic without much transition, the president could make sure the allotted time elapsed before his visitor got around to asking him for something. That allowed him to seem accessible and accommodating while relinquishing nothing. Because his schedule was rigidly divided into fifteen- and thirty-minute blocks, he could calculate exactly how long to prattle on before Marvin McIntyre arrived to usher the visitor out.
When he wasn’t running out the clock, FDR employed his patented deceptive nod. Even after Long issued his public warning about this technique, most visitors still didn’t get it. They assumed FDR’s nod and “yes, yes, yes” meant he agreed with what they were saying, when, in fact, he just meant that he had heard and absorbed the information. It was a processing gesture that was of great manipulative use to Roosevelt and left everyone from aides to foreign heads of state confused about where they stood. Over time it became clear that Roosevelt’s private meetings were often as much of a performance as his public speeches. The sentences he spoke were more like monologues or naturally delivered lines in a play than anything real. Even his friends knew they could not take his word to the bank. Moley noticed that whenever Franklin said “frankly” or “in all frankness,” it was usually a tip-off that he was hiding something, just as when he used another favorite word, “definitely,” it was a good bet that the decision was indefinite.
In his day-to-day interactions, Roosevelt seemed to take pride in his sense of timing. “I am like a cat,” he once said. “I make a quick stroke and then I relax.” Senator Alben Barkley once told him, “Mr. President, you play with men like a cat plays with a mouse.” This feline quality may be what some friends found feminine in his temperament. If Bill Clinton was sometimes known as the first black president, FDR may have been the first woman president, not because he did so much for women’s rights (though his respect for Eleanor’s work helped) but as a result of an intuition rarely found in male leaders. Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, who studied FDR closely during World War II, recalled him as “a rather feminine figure with visible prima donna traits of jealousy” (presumably toward Randolph’s father). “But his voice—a great voice—instinct with courage.”
“There was in the man a kind of narcissism,” remembered Marquis Childs, an important syndicated columnist of the era. “I don’t know if it was a feminine narcissism, but it was the quality of the actor.” Childs remembered that FDR had the actor’s ability to always be photographed from the perfect camera angle. On board a cruiser one day, he had his picture taken in his naval cape with the wind in his face: “He’s standing with his head thrown back—now, don’t tell me that’s unconscious.”
But Childs may have underappreciated FDR’s talents. He was more of what in later years was called a “Method” actor—intuitive, improvisational, and once committed to a role, always in full character. In public and private, he consistently had one of his “faces” on, though it was often hard to tell which one. He certainly had the ego for show business: for years as president, he wore a Phi Beta Kappa key in his lapel even though he was only an honorary member.
Roosevelt believed in “acting” in both commonly accepted definitions of the word. He was, as Ronald Reagan often pointed out, a consummate actor, not just on the radio but in every dimension of his persona. And well beyond the Hundred Days, he possessed a strong bias for action. The acting and the action worked in combination to help FDR inhabit the role of president like no one before him or since. “You know, Orson,” he once said to Orson Welles, “You and I are the two best actors in America.” He understood the power of mystery in public life: “That was the Garbo in me,” he said with a smile after seeing a newsreel one day. And his glow came to illuminate the glamour of the age. From the start, he seemed, in the words of the silent screen star Lillian Gish, “to have been dipped in phosphorus.”
It was hardly a coincidence that Roosevelt adored all things Hollywood. When the actress and future California senator, Helen Gahagan Douglas, told him gossip about the actress Paulette Goddard making love under the table at Ciro’s nightclub with the Russian-born director, Anatole Litvak, he roared: “I love it! I love it!!” He devoured movies—on cruises he would sometimes see one every day—and he wasn’t choosy, though he preferred them to be cheerful. Anything starring Myrna Loy was not to be missed. He was an unabashed fan of Walt Disney, especially Mickey Mouse.
His own stage presence was enormous. “God, how I’d love to see that man play Hamlet!” Edwin “Pa” Watson, later his military aide, once exclaimed. He was a president of many parts, but everyone knew his favorite. The actor Melvyn Douglas went barnstorming with him in Arkansas one day and found him “playing the role I think he liked best: leading man in a drama featuring People, Crowds, Speeches and the Spirit of Pioneering.”*
Frank Capra, at the height of his power as a film director, visited the president in the Oval Office: He was “not the largest man in the world, nor even the largest president. Taft was. But FDR made you feel he was. At least he loomed large to me as I shook hands with all the aplomb of a man standing on his first pair of ice skates. His head was the biggest, his face the widest, and his smile the most expansive I had ever seen. By every measure he was a big man.”
Size mattered to him. Displacement, to use a nautical term. “The president is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can,” wrote Woodrow Wilson, whom FDR continued to admire. But he also knew that weight of this kind is partly an illusion—an impression of strength and character no larger than the abilities of the person projecting it. To Dorothy Schiff, owner of the New York Post and one of what she called FDR’s “back-door wives,” his warmth and confidence were that of a “sun god.” The same infatuation could also afflict men, though they tended to recover from it more easily. “My God!” Henry Luce said as he left the White House after a courtesy call during the Hundred Days. “What a man!”
Beyond cat and actor, FDR’s other metaphor for himself was that of magician. “I am a juggler and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does,” Roosevelt once said. Henry Wallace, not usually known for his wit, added that he “could keep all the balls in the air without losing his own.” This could strike others as feckless. The British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, later saw him as “a conjurer, skillfully juggling with balls of dynamite, whose nature he failed to understand.”
More likely, he understood but did not explain. “His was an innate kind of reticence,” Eleanor concluded. “It became part of his nature not to talk to anyone of intimate things.” Eleanor might not be the best source for this; she was, after all, the wife who did not share her husband’s bed for the last three decades of their marriage. But her impression is matched by others. One of the qualities he liked about the women he felt most comfortable with—like Missy LeHand and Daisy Suckley, the unmarried cousin with whom he spent countless hours from the mid-1930s on—is that they did not ask for intimacy, only company, which he was happy to provide, often on long picnics with FDR driving his hand-controlled car.
The president was endlessly convivial, from his sacred cocktail hour—when he would carelessly mix terrible martinis, then ask his guests, “How about a little sippy?”—to late-night poker, where he called himself “Pa,” always played the banker and favored seven-card stud with one-eyed jacks wild. But the bonhomie shielded a cold and cutting side. After a visit, Dr. Carl Jung described him as “of impenetrable mind, but perfectly ruthless.” FDR could be belittling, even—perhaps especially—to those in his own family. During the 1932 campaign, he developed a routine where he introduced various members of his family to the crowd and invariably ended with, “and this is my boy James. I have more hair than he does.” The crowd always roared, but it left James forlorn. Like his other children, Jimmy revered his father but felt he rarely got beyond the cheerful exterior he presented to everyone.
Dean Acheson, who was pushed out as deputy Treasury secretary in 1933, found the president’s indulgence in Damon Runyonesque nicknames condescending.* Acheson, who did not reveal FDR’s nickname for him, compared the “patronizing and humiliating” experience of being teased to life on the manor. “It is not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which ‘milord’ might give a promising stable boy and pull one’s forelock in return.” Sometimes the belittling went on behind the target’s back. Harold Ickes never learned that FDR enjoyed calling him “Donald Duck.”
Jim Farley felt there was bias behind it. After he broke with FDR in 1940, he famously complained that when talking politics with the president, he had never been invited to stay on for a social occasion. He quoted Eleanor saying, “Franklin finds it hard to relax with people who aren’t his social equals,” the suggestion being that FDR might have been anti-Irish. (Eleanor vehemently denied saying any such thing.) In fact, Ed Flynn, the Irish boss of the Bronx, whose interests were more broad-gauged than Farley’s and whom Roosevelt simply liked better, socialized with FDR regularly. Even so, it was not true that FDR, as some acolytes claimed, treated everyone the same. Dorothy Schiff reported that “he was a snob—horrible word, and I wish I could think of a better one—and he liked women who were well brought up and well bred.” Because she fit that category, it mattered nothing to FDR that Schiff was Jewish. The Morgenthaus and Rosenmans also fit this standard, and were part of the inner circle.
Roosevelt liked to think of himself as above snobbery. His only public remarks on the subject were in 1926, when he addressed schoolboys at Milton Academy. He told a story about an unnamed woman he had met. Referring to a mutual friend, she said, “I have not seen Jim for some time—you know he married a shop girl.” Roosevelt found this story appalling and instructed the prep school students that “Poor Jim” is “a very lucky fellow with a much better mate than that woman would have found for him.” He went on to ask the students: “How many of us lend a helping hand to people we do not like, people who do not ‘belong to our crowd’?” But when it came time for his own children to marry, Roosevelt seemed pleased that they frequently chose socialites, even when, almost inevitably, the matches were ill-fated. When Daisy Suckley asked the president to check discreetly into the background of a friend’s fiancé, he joyfully complied. Tommy Corcoran, who became an important White House aide and fixer, grew embittered with FDR because he believed that the president thought he was marrying down.
The experience of servants and other attendants suggests that if he liked someone, Roosevelt broke down the barrier between “the help” and “friends” more than many presidents. He always included Gus Gennerich, his bodyguard in the early years, in whatever party, dinner, or activity was planned, instead of making him stand outside with the drivers and other security men. The Secret Service agents who spent the most time with FDR agreed. “He is as cold and hard as steel with everyone and anyone when it comes to the things he wants done,” reported Ed Starling. “When it is a matter of ordinary relations with people he is the nicest, kindliest, friendliest person on earth. He is too easygoing, in fact. People take advantage of him.” Starling’s successor at the Secret Service, Michael Reilly, thought FDR sometimes tried too hard to mix it up. “He never was ‘one of the boys,’ although he frequently made a good try,” Reilly later wrote. “It was such a good try it never quite came off.”
But the try counted for something. Roosevelt’s fundamental openness to new ideas and people helped him separate his personal preferences from what the country needed. George Biddle, the painter, once noted that “Roosevelt has almost no taste or judgment about painting [his tastes ran to pictures of ships], and I don’t think he gets much enjoyment out of it; yet he has done more for painters in this country than anybody ever did—not only by feeding them when they were down and out but by establishing the idea that paintings are a good thing to have around and that artists are important.” The openness extended even to moral questions, where he favored tolerance. If the homosexuality of Eleanor’s circle ever disturbed Franklin, he showed no sign of it. He might well have been oblivious to it entirely.*
This seemingly easy and open approach to life co-existed with not just a cunning intelligence but a deep belief in God. Roosevelt had a simple faith, rarely expressed in a public forum, but one that he preferred as a label to the “isms” of the day. While he admitted to being “a little left of center” and helped popularize the word “liberal,” that was as far as he would go in categorizing his political philosophy.
A young reporter once asked him, “Are you a socialist?”
“No.”
“Are you a capitalist?”
“No.”
“Well, what is your philosophy?”
“Philosophy? I am a Christian and a Democrat—that’s all.”
Perhaps so, but superstition was a greater presence in his daily life than religion. With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, FDR was the most superstitious president in American history. He would never let the Secret Service set up a travel schedule that began on a Friday, even if it wasn’t the thirteenth of the month. (Special presidential sleeper trains left at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday—usually to Hyde Park, where he visited at least once a month—or 12:01 a.m. on Saturday.) He would never have thirteen guests for lunch or dinner, so an addition or cancelation that left the number at thirteen meant a last-minute invitation to Grace Tully to fill out the table and lift the hex.
One of the few occasions Tully ever saw him abandon his nonconfrontational style and dress down someone was when a tutor to his sons had the temerity to light three cigarettes on a single match. This recalled a superstition dating to the trench warfare of World War I, where it was thought that the enemy could target cigarette-smoking soldiers if the match light lasted that long. The first time the tutor did so, FDR coldly noted that he didn’t like the practice; the second time, the president exploded at the young man with uncharacteristic fury. When his “lucky hat,” a battered fedora that got him through some tough campaigns, was mistakenly sold at a charity auction, Roosevelt insisted that his staff track down the movie actor who had bought it and make him give it back.
But if FDR’s superstitions marked him as an eccentric, his collections better defined his temperament. Beyond rare books, Navy prints, ship models, donkeys, scrimshaw, and a whole desk covered with knickknacks, his famous stamp collection eventually came to 150 albums. His physician toted up that he spent an average of three to four hours a week during his presidency poring over the stamps, making sure that each was in its proper place. And so it was with the people and ideas of his time. He inspected, sorted, and pasted them—a collector at heart, determined to gather the world, then rearrange it.
*FDR liked to claim that as a young man his father had met Sam Houston, who, according to the president, received many visitors in his bedroom, dressed only in a nightgown and spitting tobacco into the fireplace.
*This might have been a carousing or travel adventure story involving Livingston Davis, FDR’s onetime best friend whom Roosevelt spent years trying to set up in business. Davis committed suicide in 1932.
*During the war, Winston Churchill’s presence accentuated the impression. They were “a pair of master showmen determined that no scenes would be stolen by the other,” remembered Mike Reilly of the Secret Service.
*Much as Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill did when President George W. Bush bestowed patronizing nicknames on subordinates two generations later.
*During World War II, Summer Welles, his undersecretary of state, was caught making a pass at a black porter on a train. The rumor was spread partly by William Bullitt, an old friend of FDR and the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. When Roosevelt learned that Bullitt was telling the story, he summoned him and began describing the parable of the two men on Judgment Day. One had a weakness that the other used to destroy him. At the Judgment Seat, FDR told Bullitt in a cold voice, the one with the weakness was forgiven, while the one who did him in was denied entrance through the Pearly Gates.