Roosevelt (84 page)

The result was a man of no fixed convictions about methods and policies, flexible as a broker because he had to mediate among conflicting worlds and experiences. To some, like Hoover, he seemed a “chameleon on plaid” because of this enormous flexibility. Indeed, even to some of his friends he seemed almost in a state of anomie, lacking any guideposts at all, because he rejected so many doctrines and dogmas. Quite naturally, because the mask often was almost impenetrable, they could not see the inner compass of certainty and rightness.

Caught between two worlds, Roosevelt compartmentalized his life. The results sometimes were ludicrous, as when he tried to force opposites to work together and could not understand why they failed. The results were at times unfortunate, for Roosevelt’s pseudointegration of his roles weakened his capacity to supply strong leadership and to make long-term strategic decisions or commitments when these were needed. It allowed the warring ideas and forces in American society not only to beat against him from outside but, because he
incorporated
as well as reflected these forces, to divide him from within.

Yet Roosevelt’s flexibility and opportunism had tremendous advantages too. In a time of whirling social change he could move fast to head off crisis at home and abroad. In a time when experimentation was vital, he could try one method, quickly drop it, and turn to another. In a time when Americans had to be educated in the meaning of events, he could act as an interpreter all the more
effectively because he spoke so many languages of social experience. Leading a people of sublime diversity, presiding over a nation of nations, he could say with Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well, then, I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Lincoln Steffens once remarked that Theodore Roosevelt thought with his hips. Franklin Roosevelt’s thinking was perhaps no more cerebral, but he thought with all five senses, perhaps with a sixth too. He had a radar set that could point in all directions, acute, sensitive, recording everything indiscriminately, and restoring the image in the responsive instrument that was Roosevelt’s mind.

Was there then no hard center, no core personality, no final commitment in this man? Watching his quicksilver mind run from idea to idea, visitors could hardly believe that stone or steel lay under the bright, smooth flow of talk. But something did. The more that mask and costume are stripped away from Roosevelt, the more the turn-of-century man of Hyde Park, Groton, and Harvard stands out.

Roosevelt, for all his deviousness, was basically a moral man in the sense that he felt so intensely the need to do right that he had to
think
he did right. He believed in doing good, in showing other people how to do good, and he assumed that ultimately people would do good. By “good” he meant the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, as interpreted by Endicott Peabody. He meant the “simple rules of human conduct to which we always go back,” as he said in 1932. He meant “old-fashioned standards of rectitude,” as he said in signing the truth-in-securities bill in 1933. Significantly, Roosevelt always looked back into the past for his moralities; he did not try to fashion them anew.

These rules were not very precise, and Roosevelt did not want them to be precise. It was enough that they were there. Once when Eleanor Roosevelt raised with him the question of their children’s religious upbringing, he said simply that they should go to church and learn what he had learned. “But are you sure that you believe in everything you learned?” his wife persisted. “I really never thought about it,” he said with a quizzical look. “I think it is just as well not to think about things like that.” But he expected others to understand his simple rules of conduct, and to understand his own allegiance to them. When Richard Whitney’s financial irresponsibilities were disclosed, Roosevelt’s wealthy friends wrote to compliment him on not using the unhappy incident as part of a political attack on Wall Street. The President was amazed at the letters. “I wonder what sort of man they think I am,” he said.

Vague though it was, this set of moral rules embraced one idea in particular that was of cardinal importance to Roosevelt and to his country. This was the idea of man’s responsibility for the well-being of his fellow man. It was simply an extension of Sara Roosevelt’s notions of
noblesse oblige,
but it found enormous meaning in the new conditions of the twentieth century. For it underlay Roosevelt’s most important single idea—the idea that government had a positive responsibility for the general welfare. Not that government itself must do everything, but that everything practicable must be done. Whether government does it, or private enterprise, is an operating decision dependent on many factors—but government must insure that something
is
done.

Such was the essence of Roosevelt’s morality; such was the core of beliefs far below the surface.

Some politicians preach morality because it is safe to do so, because they prove thereby that they are on the right side between Good and Evil, because they reach the largest common denominator among their audience, not because they take their own preachments too seriously. Not so Roosevelt. Probably no American politician has given so many speeches that were essentially sermons rather than statements of policy. Like a preacher, he wanted and expected his sermons to serve as practical moral guides to his people. Roosevelt was so theatrical that his moral preachments were often dismissed with a smile. Actually he was deadly serious.

Only a man deadly serious and supremely confident could have spent the time Roosevelt did trying to educate and elevate not only his own people but foreign leaders who seemed to others to be beyond redemption. There was something pathetic and yet almost sublime in the way that Roosevelt sent message after message to Hitler and other dictators. Partly, of course, it was for the record; but even more it was an expression of Roosevelt’s faith in the ultimate goodness and reasonableness of all men. His eternal desire to talk directly with his enemies, whether congressmen or dictators, reflected his confidence in his own persuasiveness and, even more, in the essential ethical rightness of his own position.

To Theodore Roosevelt the presidency was a “bully pulpit.” To Franklin Roosevelt it was the same—“pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.…”

How explain, then, the “other side” of Roosevelt—his shiftiness, his compromises, his manipulations? Why did he so often act like a fox?

Roosevelt was not an absolute moralist about means because, whatever his hopes or illusions about man’s possible redemption and
ultimate
goodness and reasonableness, he had few illusions about man’s nature. He knew that some men were selfish, irrational,
vengeful, and mean. The practical statesman or man of affairs encounters ambitions and passions in his daily experience that put man in a strong, harsh light. Roosevelt got his education at the hands of tough labor leaders like Lewis, city bosses like Murphy and Hague, agrarian demogogues like Long, and—on the level of pure evil—Hitler and his camp followers. He learned the uses of power.

Roosevelt overcame these men because he liked and wanted power and, even more, because he wanted to defend the position of strength from which he could lead
and teach
the people. To seize and hold power, to defend that position, he got down into the dusty arena and grappled with rival leaders on their own terms. So sure was he of the rightness of his aims that he was willing to use Machiavellian means; and his moral certainties made him all the more effective in the struggle. To the idealists who cautioned him he responded again and again that gaining power—winning elections—was the first, indispensable task. He would use the tricks of the fox to serve the purposes of the lion.

During the war years Roosevelt became interested in Kierkegaard, and this was not surprising. The Danish theologian, with his emphasis on man’s natural sinfulness, helped explain to him, Roosevelt said, why the Nazis “are human, yet they behave like demons.” From Peabody’s homilies to Kierkegaard’s realities, from the world of Hyde Park to the world of Hitler, the way was long and tortuous; the fact that Roosevelt could traverse that road so surely, with so little impairment to his loftiest ideals, and with such courage and good humor, was the final and true test of the man.

Holmes had been right—a second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament. To examine closely single aspects of Roosevelt’s character—as thinker, as organizer, as manipulator, as strategist—is to see failings and deficiencies closely interwoven with the huge capacities. But to stand back and look at the man as a whole, against the backdrop of his people and his times, is to see the lineaments of greatness—courage, joyousness, responsiveness, vitality, faith, and, above all, concern for his fellow man. A democrat in manner and conviction, he was yet a member of that small aristocracy once described by E. M. Forster—sensitive but not weak, considerate but not fussy, plucky in his power to endure, capable of laughing and of taking a joke. He was the true happy warrior.

Warm Springs on Thursday, April 12, was sunny and pleasant. Roosevelt sat in his cottage looking over his stamps. He had put on a dark blue suit and a Harvard-red tie for a painter who was doing
his portrait. Sitting in his brown leather chair near the fireplace, he seemed unusually chipper and gay. For some reason he took his draft card out of his wallet and tossed it into a basket nearby. Then he looked at some reports with intense concentration.

Suddenly the President groaned. He pressed and rubbed his temple hard—then the great head fell back inert. Carried to his bed, he lived, breathing heavily but unconscious, for about four hours. He died at 4:35
P.M.;
it was fourscore years almost to the day since Lincoln’s death.

The news sped to Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington, to Harry Truman, summoned suddenly to the White House from Capitol Hill, to Winston Churchill, who felt as if he had been struck a physical blow, to soldiers, sailors, and marines on far-off battle fronts. To four of these fighting men went a message from their mother: “He did his job to the end as he would want you to do.” At the Capitol building a young congressman, groping for words, spoke for his generation: “He was the only person I ever knew—anywhere—who was never afraid. God, how he could take it for us all.” Everywhere men and women wept, openly and without shame.

“All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River,” Roosevelt had said nine months before, and now at last he would return. Through the dark Southern night the funeral train moved slowly back to Washington. Marines and infantrymen escorted the black, flag-draped caisson through the streets of Washington, while a huge crowd stood silent and unmoving. There was a brief, simple service in the East Room of the White House; then the body was placed again on the funeral train, and Roosevelt for the last time traveled the old, familiar route along the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line through Philadelphia and into Manhattan, then across Hell Gate bridge and up along the Hudson.

At the siding on the riverbank below the home, the coffin was moved from the train to a caisson drawn by six brown horses. There followed a lone horse, hooded, stirrups reversed and a sword hanging from the left stirrup—symbolic of a lost warrior. Marching in rigid columns of three at slow funeral cadence, the guard escorted the body up the steep winding road, through the dark woods, to the little plateau above. Behind the house, framed by the rose garden, were assembled the family and friends, old servants and retainers, and files of soldiers and sailors standing at rigid attention on the expanse of green grass.

A river breeze off the Hudson ruffled the trees above. A military band sounded the sad notes of its dirge. Muffled drums beat slowly and a bugler played the haunting notes of Taps as the coffin was slowly lowered into the grave. The warrior was home.

T
HE LAST FEW DECADES HAVE SEEN
two important strides in the study of political leadership. In the first place, students of the subject have become more cautious in their attempt to find leadership potentials in an individual’s heredity, and they have turned increasingly to environmental factors that selectively shape the nature of leadership. Secondly, they have de-emphasized the once common notion that leadership embraces a constellation of universal, innate traits and have substantially agreed that leadership involves a reciprocal relationship between personality and culture and is specific to a given situation. Both these developments have shifted emphasis from the leader as such and have directed more attention to the context in which the leader operates.
¹

This progress in the study of leadership is all the more welcome in an era when democratic peoples seek to understand the difficulties and possibilities of political leadership both in order to handle social and economic problems and to meet certain psychological needs of the people.
²
Unhappily, both the promising developments mentioned above have enormously increased the complexities involved in the study of leadership, especially in the political arena. This note seeks to describe some of those complexities and to suggest that facing up to them may nevertheless make possible better understanding of political leadership in a democratic society. The case of Franklin D. Roosevelt will be used to illustrate certain aspects of the matter.

Geneticists who have studied the matter agree that personality traits are not inherited in any simple or absolute sense. An individual’s life cannot be seen as an automatic unfolding through time of the product of innate determinants of personality existing at birth. Certain potentials and certain restrictions are inherited, and the nature of these potentials and restrictions is determined by the interaction of many genes. The genetic constitution sets limits to the development of personality, but a tremendous range of possibilities exists between these limits. Different genetic structures provide varying potentialities for such vital processes as muscular responsiveness, glandular activity, reflexes, level of energy. “Biological inheritance,” conclude Kluckhohn and Murray, “provides the stuff from which personality is fashioned and, as manifested in the physique at a given time-point, determines trends and sets limits within which variation is constrained.”
³