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Acclaimed biographer Smith combines contemporary scholarship and a broad range of primary source material to narrate the epic life of the president who, more than any other individual, changed the relationship between the American people and their government. We see how Roosevelt's energy, intellect, and personal magnetism permitted him to master countless challenges. Smith recounts FDR's battles with polio and physical disability, and how they helped forge the resolve to surmount the turmoil of the Great Depression and the wartime threats. FDR's private life is also depicted, with close attention paid to the four women who molded his personality and helped to inform his worldview: His mother; his wife, Eleanor; Lucy Mercer, the great love of his life; and Missy LeHand, his secretary, companion, and confidante. Smith also tackles the failures and miscues of Roosevelt's public career. Smith gives us a clear picture of how this Knickerbocker aristocrat, a man who never had to depend on a paycheck, became the common man's president.--From publisher description.… (more)
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FDR came from a family that could trace its beginnings in the New World back to the early Dutch settlers of New York, making him a member of the "Knickerbocker aristocracy".
Yet in their time, many of these programs were predicted to be the end of democracy, the end of society, the beginning of dictatorship and worse. Roosevelt was a controversial president particularly in his second term. Crippled by a major error in attempting to change the composition of the Supreme Court, he faced serious opposition to his social agenda at that time. The outbreak of World War 2 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor united the country behind him. He was the most effective leader in time of war since Lincoln. When he died on April 12, 1945, the world mourned.
Roosevelt's life was so rich, so complex that this is but a bare bones synopsis of the book's coverage of just his public life. His private life was no less involved. According to Smith (and others), Roosevelt's life was shaped and influence by four women: his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt; his wife Eleanor (ER); Lucy Mercer (probably the great love of his life); and Missy LeHand--secretary, devoted companion, and one of the two people in FDR's life who was never afraid to confront him with what they saw as reality.
Smith is not an exciting writer, but he presents his material well and shows flashes of sardonic humor at times. Given the thorough scholarship and the material itself, that's all that's needed; particularly in the early phases of FDR's political career, including hiis time in albany as state senator and later governor, the book reads like a page-turning thriller, as you race along, marveling at the details of the life of a man who has passed almost into myth. Smith obviously has great affection for Roosevelt; this shows, but does not prevent him from thoroughly exploring Roosevelt's mistakes as well as his successes. Given FDR, those mistakes were not trivial. Some have had negative consequences almost to this day.
The names associated forever with FDR--Louis Howe, Harry Hopkins, Cordell Hull, Jim Farley, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Frances Perkins and others--come alive in Smith's treatment. The reader gets a real feel for who these people were and what their contributions were. Through it all, FDR himself stands as a self-confident leader of tremendous vision who had incredible intuitive insight into people, instinctively choosing those of talent and putting them to work in areas perfectly suited to their abilities. This was especially true in wartime--again, he had an uncanny ability to select the right men for the job. Marshall, Eisenhower, Nimitz all appear as they rose to influence and leadership under FDR.
This is a biography of FDR. Yet, Smith deals extensively with Sara Roosevelt and ER. Both played prominent roles in FDR's career. Smith goes into the affair with Lucy Mercer and shows how that influenced FDR's public and private life for over 40 years. ER's life is documented as appropriate, but Smith rightfully doesn't attempt her biography. Yet, he gives enough detail to give the reader more than a glimpse into an immensely complicated, productive, and influential life.
Basically, Smith presents FDR's family life as a remarkable political partnership between FDR and ER, but a dismal failure in both the marriage itself and as far as their 5 children were concerned. FDR ahd the interest in his children, but no time; ER is portrayed as having neither, just a sense of duty.
The run-up to World War 2 and American entry is breathtaking. The tension, as events unfold, is as good as any best-selling mystery thriller, probably better.
The pace of the book slows down somewhat after American entry into the war. Personally, I think that's due simply to the task of trying to select and condense the enormous amount of relevant material into what was meant to be a one-volume biography of FDR and not a detailed exploration of everything he did as Commander-in-Chief. I believe Smith has suceeded admirably.
The photos included in the book are excellent. Partiicularly striking are the ones taken in July and August, 1944. Comparing the two, the difference in Roosevelt's appearance is shocking, showing the rapid decline in his physical health. Roosevelt's death was probably preventable, and was due to a combination of medical ignorance and arrogance and incompetence on the part of his personal physician.
There is one flaw in the book as far as I'm concerned, although it's a very minor one. In the chapter "Heritage", Smith goes into the geneology on both sides of FDR's family. Given the number of ancestors involved, there are a LOT of names. Family trees would have been extremely helpful--can't tell the players without a score card--but unfortunatley there aren't any. However, I consider this lack a trivial annoyance.
One of the overwhelming impressions a reader takes from the book is Roosevelt's confidence in the American people. When I read possibly the most famous sentence among many he uttered during his career, given towards the end of his first Inaugural Address:
"So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
When I asked myself which of today's leading political figures in 2007 has the faith in the American people and the American system to make such a statement, I couldn't think of one.
There is almost no way to adequately convey the excitement of this book. Suffice it to say that there has to be something engrossing about it if the account of FDR's attempt to pack the Supreme Court and the political battle that followed is gripping enough to keep a reader up past 1 am!
Highly recommended.
Two things of which I was of course aware, are really put into stark relief in this book.
First, that FDR really did fundamentally, and forever,
Second, the monumental physical toll WWII took on him. I think many probably assume his bout with polio made him feeble to begin with, and that it was a natural progression from that disease that ultimately caused his death. In fact, other than not having the use of his legs, FDR was in excellent health at the beginning of his Presidency. He could have taken any number of measures to restore his health near the end (high blood pressure was the ultimate cause of his death). Instead he quite literally worked himself to death.
An excellent book about an amazing man!
There wasn't a lot in FDR's early life to suggest his extraordinary gift for leadership. In his early years he was intelligent and charming, full of life and vigor, but rather callow. Frances Perkins, for one, was not impressed by him as he was in his early political days, though she grew to very much admire the President he became.
Nothing prepared him more for the Presidency than his years as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson. It taught him about the military and about Washington politics.
Oddly enough, the polio that struck him in 1021, paralyzing his hips, may have been a source of his growth as a human being. He had always been confident, and remained so, but he was courageous and determined in his fight against the disability.
It was his confidence and courage that allowed him to face the deep crises of his Presidency, to be willing to try new ideas, knowing some might fail, in which case he would try something else. By the time he became President he had been to Warm Springs, Georgia, to help treat his polio, and he was much struck by the poverty of the area. His enthusiasm for rural electrification was informed in part by his time there.
By 1940, Roosevelt was tired and, were it not for the worsening international situation, may not have run again for President. He dd run, he won, and led an isolationist public opinion into supporting Britain and then into the absolutely incredible level of military and industrial mobilization required for WWII. He worked particularly well with Churchill and the two had a lot of similarities in their approach, and he was also able to work with Stalin once events forced them into alliance.
Joe Biden had, in my opinion, the best line of the 2008 campaign when he said we need not just a good soldier, but a wise leader. FDR was a wise leader. He was also human, and made mistakes, such as the attempt to pack the Supreme Court and to balance the federal budget in 1937, which caused a recession. Other times he was held back from doing better things by political realities, such as the need for the voes of the Southern Democrats, when otherwise he might have moved forward more on civil rights issues.
All of these things provide good lessons for President-elect Obama.
Jean Edward Smith is an experienced writer of biographies, and she handles this one well. It is long, with voluminous notes. At times reading it one feels bogged down by detail, and at other times sees only a glimpse of interesting material that can't be fully covered in this book.... most strikingly, there is surprisingly little of Eleanor's story during her most interesting and productive years for the simple reason that by that point she and Franklin had little to do with each other. Their lives had become quite separate, to the point that each had love affairs with other people, and worked in their own sphere of influence.
Overall, a long book but worth the read. Recommended.
In terms of policy, Smith again presents a balanced view. He rightly rejects the current argument that the New Deal did nothing to combat the Depression (unemployment in fact fell dramatically). He also shows how when FDR trimmed spending under some pressure from conservative critics, the economy tanked and caused the 1937 recession. Roosevelt's lack of interest in racial justice comes across as well - he was no segregationist, but he clearly didn't fight it either. There were too many Southerners in his coalition to make this an effective political strategy. For a man with as profound a political sense as Roosevelt, it just didn't make sense to him.
I think the later sections of the book -- those dealing with WWII -- are a bit flat. That may be because that particular topic is too well-covered to make any impact on my understanding of the period. Smith did, however, covey the sense that Roosevelt had little choice but to accommodate Stalin. The Cold War argument that he caved in at Yalta just doesn't match reality.
As FDR's legacy comes under increasing attack by conservative historians, politicians, and pundits, Jean Edward Smith's FDR serves as a balanced and scholarly corrective to some of the polemical screeds that serve as scholarship.
Chuck Wood
Mr. Smith aims to write not only history but also Plutarchian biography:
The "children's hour" every evening when the president mixed martinis for his guests, the poker games with cabinet cronies, the weekly sojourns on the presidential yacht Potomac, and his personal relations with family and friends warrant extended treatment. Roosevelt enjoyed life to the full, and his unquenchable optimism never faded.
The biographer builds such an intricate network of personal detail that toward the end of the war, when President Franklin Roosevelt asks Eleanor to mix the martinis, we know Roosevelt is about to die. Anecdotes in this biography unmask FDR the man, with his shrewd ability to size up subordinates.
When the preening Douglas MacArthur kept Roosevelt waiting during the President's trip to Pearl Harbor, FDR mildly asked the senior military advisers, "Where's Douglas?" MacArthur then arrived seated in a very long, open touring car with sirens screaming and a motorcycle phalanx. "Hello, Doug," Roosevelt said. "What are you doing with that leather jacket on? It's darn hot today."
Every Roosevelt biographer has to come to terms with how FDR's polio affected the man and his policies. As Mr. Smith notes, for the last 23 years of his life FDR could not stand unassisted, let alone walk even a brief distance without the aid of heavy leg braces. How is it that this "Hudson River aristocrat, a son of privilege who never depended on a paycheck, became the champion of the common man"? The conventional explanation, Mr. Smith notes, is that overcoming personal adversity gave Roosevelt "insight into the nature of suffering." True enough, but that analysis hardly explains the specific nature of FDR's politics. Mr. Smith contends that the decisive influence was FDR's exposure to the "brutal reality of rural poverty" in Warm Springs, GA., an experience that prompted him to help that third of the nation that was "ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," to quote one of his most famous speeches.
It seems to me after reading Mr. Smith's deeply moving biography that there is yet another reason for FDR's empathy for the less fortunate: Here was a man with a powerful physique (massive shoulders, arms, and chest) who could not propel himself upward or forward, and who risked falling as he stood to greet world figures such as Stalin and Churchill. He expended more energy getting up than most people did in an entire day. He had the money to disguise his disability, to create the illusion that he could walk. But what of most other people who did not have his resources? That was the question that dominated Roosevelt's politics and the reason he believed government had a role in providing equal opportunity for all.
Mr. Smith ranks Roosevelt with Presidents Washington and Lincoln as among this country's greatest leaders. FDR's creation of programs such as social security and the G.I. Bill have ensured his high position among presidents. But Roosevelt was also a great wartime leader. Mr. Smith credits FDR's eight years as second-in-command in the Navy Department during the Wilson administration for FDR's understanding of military organization, allowing him to make key decisions quickly and effectively. Better yet, he had taken the measure of figures such as George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, FDR knew that these three men were indispensable, even though many other commanders outranked Marshall and Eisenhower.
Although FDR's greatness is an indisputable theme in Mr. Smith's book, this is no hagiography. If FDR did not invite the attack on Pearl Harbor, he certainly neglected the Pacific theater and pursued policies that, in retrospect, made the Japanese attack all too feasible, Mr. Smith argues. And about FDR's court packing scheme — his attempt to add members to a recalcitrant Supreme Court that declared many New Deal measures unconstitutional — Mr. Smith is scathing. The issue was not a reactionary court, not a group of nine old men not up to the job, but a power-grab by a president who had overreached himself. Similarly, Mr. Smith is in no mood to exonerate FDR from the deplorable decision to intern Japanese residents during wartime.
FDR's flaws notwithstanding, the epigraph to Mr. Smith's biography, taken from Governor Cuomo's keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention, beautifully captures the greatness of the man and the leader: "He lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees."
I loved this book so much that I actually turned it in late at the library and paid the fine! -- this is unheard of for me. I just purchased his biography of Grant because I don't want to have the pressure of the library due date when I read it! Highly, highly recommended.
Recommended.
As impenetrable as FDR was and remains to his contemporaries and historians, Smith ads light touches of personal insights into the private life of a political master. Admired for his stoicism in the face of his personal trauma of paralysis, we see rare occasions where FDR lets his guard down such as upon the death of his doting mother Sara and his leaving a large portion of his estate in his will to his secretary Missy LeHand.
While Smith pulls no punches in looking at FDR's numerous errors, such as the court packing fiasco and the unconstitutional internment of Japanese Americans, he tells FDR's story in such a way that it is much easier to consider the whole instead of the errors isolated in and of themselves and to judge him accordingly. For example, his often criticized lack of response to the genocide of the Jews of Europe was clearly not a lack of response or concern on FDR's part but a real inability to do much about it with military means once the truth became known. We see FDR's health failing while he simultaneously runs international affairs in the midst of the worst conflict of the 20th Century as well as running for reelection and keeping an eye on domestic issues.
Smith does a tremendous service for FDR's legacy in helping us all to understand more thoroughly the great leadership and the great sacrifice that FDR made. In a fitting final tribute at the end of this fantastic biography, Smith quotes Senator Robert Taft who sums up best the life of FDR "He dies a hero of the war, for he literally worked himself to death in the service of the American people."
From the outset Smith makes the reader aware Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one of the most written about of Presidents thus giving an indication that he will not do anything new but give a new generation of readers a straightforward look into Roosevelt’s life. Three-quarters of the book is Smith’s text with the final quarter being notes and an index, but during the biography proper Smith’s footnotes are in-depth and as interesting as what is in the text proper. Smith devotes a little over a third of the biography to Roosevelt’s life before his run for the 1932 Democratic nomination thus transitioning to focusing on the final 13 years of Roosevelt’s life. During that first third, Smith not only covers Roosevelt’s life but also foreshadows how his early political career in New York would later affect his entrance to Washington politics as Assistant Secretary of State and his later New York career as Governor. While in Washington Smith shows how Roosevelt learned the ways of the city that would come in handing once he assumed the Presidency. Once on the national stage, Smith gives the political backstories to campaigns and later to battles for legislation as well as the overall atmosphere of the Great Depression of the time. Yet while Smith devotes most of the biography to Roosevelt in the White House there is no really in-depthness like some books that devote themselves entirely to an individual’s Presidency and this is telling once the U.S. enters World War II as Smith essentially says ‘FDR did not micromanage the military once he made decision to an objective and left the generals do their thing’ while barely covering his relationship with Churchill.
FDR gives a detailed—but not in-depth—look at the life of the longest-serving President in the history of the United States. Jean Edward Smith writes in an engaging style for a very readable book but with wonderful footnotes that adds to the text. For a general biography this is a must read, but those looking for political or military details this is not.
Well-written and very informative but maybe could have been edited better.