FDR
One of today’s premier biographers has written a modern, comprehensive, indeed ultimate book on the epic life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this superlative volume, Jean Edward Smith combines contemporary scholarship and a broad range of primary source material to provide an engrossing narrative of one of America’s greatest presidents.This is a portrait painted in broad strokes and fine details. We see how Roosevelt’s restless energy, fierce intellect, personal magnetism, and ability to project effortless grace permitted him to master countless challenges throughout his life. Smith recounts FDR’s battles with polio and physical disability, and how these experiences helped forge the resolve that FDR used to surmount the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and the wartime threat of totalitarianism. Here also is FDR’s private life depicted with unprecedented candor and nuance, with close attention paid to the four women who molded his personality and helped to inform his worldview: His mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, formidable yet ever supportive and tender; his wife, Eleanor, whose counsel and affection were instrumental to FDR’s public and individual achievements; Lucy Mercer, the great romantic love of FDR’s life; and Missy LeHand, FDR’s longtime secretary, companion, and confidante, whose adoration of her boss was practically limitless.
Smith also tackles head-on and in-depth the numerous failures and miscues of Roosevelt’s public career, including his disastrous attempt to reconstruct the Judiciary; the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans; and Roosevelt’s occasionally self-defeating Executive overreach. Additionally, Smith offers a sensitive and balanced assessment of Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust, noting its breakthroughs and shortcomings.
Summing up Roosevelt’s legacy, Jean Smith declares that FDR, more than any other individual, changed the relationship between the American people and their government. It was Roosevelt who revolutionized the art of campaigning and used the burgeoning mass media to garner public support and allay fears. But more important, Smith gives us the clearest picture yet of how this quintessential Knickerbocker aristocrat, a man who never had to depend on a paycheck, became the common man’s president. The result is a powerful account that adds fresh perspectives and draws profound conclusions about a man whose story is widely known but far less well understood. Written for the general reader and scholars alike, FDR is a stunning biography in every way worthy of its subject.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Independent biographer Smith (1996's John Marshall: Definer of a Nation and 2001's Grant) crafts a magisterial biography of our most important modern president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Scores of books have been written about Roosevelt, exploring every nook and cranny of his experience, so Smith breaks no "news" and offers no previously undisclosed revelations concerning the man from Hyde Park. But the author's eloquent synthesis of FDR's complex and compelling life is remarkably executed and a joy to read. Drawing on the papers of the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library as well as Columbia University's oral history collection and other repositories, Smith minutely explores the arc of FDR's intertwined political and private lives. With regard to the political, the biographer seamlessly traces Roosevelt's evolution from gawky, aristocratic, political newcomer nibbling at the edges of the rough-and-tumble Dutchess County, N.Y., Democratic machine to the consummate though physically crippled political insider—a man without pretensions who acquired and performed the jobs of New York governor and then United States president with shrewd, and always joyous, efficiency. As is appropriate, more than half of Smith's narrative deals with FDR as president: the four terms (from 1933 until his death in 1945) during which he waged war, in turn, on the Depression and the Axis powers. As for the private Roosevelt, Smith reveals him as a devoted son; an unhappy husband who eventually settled into an uneasy peace and working partnership with his wife and cousin Eleanor; an emotionally absent father; and a man who for years devotedly loved two women other than his wife—Lucy Mercer Rutherford and Missy LeHand, the latter his secretary. This erudite but graceful volume illuminates FDR's life for scholars, history buffs and casual readers alike. Photos not seen by PW. (May)
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From The New Yorker
As Franklin Roosevelt approached the stage at the 1936 Democratic Convention, the steel braces on his useless legs and the support of his son’s arm allowing him, in great pain, to simulate walking, he was jostled, and he crashed to the ground, scattering the pages of his speech. "Clean me up," he said, "and keep your feet off those damned sheets." Minutes later, utterly poised, he told an audience and a nation ravaged by the Depression that they had "a rendezvous with destiny." Smith, in this remarkable, sympathetic biography, doesn’t flinch at Roosevelt’s mistakes; the sections on the court-packing scheme and the internment of Japanese-Americans are painful to read. Smith also does a fine job with a complex marriage, avoiding the F.D.R. biographer’s trap of being either annoyed or enraptured by Eleanor. The Roosevelt who emerges here—neither a stranger nor a painted icon—is flawed and magnificent.
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From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
In January 1943, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met at Casablanca to discuss Allied strategy in the European theater. By then, as Jean Edward Smith writes, "Hitler's defeat in Africa was a matter of time" and the tide was turning against him in Europe, but a long, costly struggle lay ahead. Smith continues: "When the conference ended, Churchill went to the airport to see Roosevelt off. He helped the president onto the plane and returned to his limousine. 'Let's go,' he told an aide. 'I don't like to see them take off. It makes me far too nervous. If anything happened to that man, I couldn't stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I have ever known.' "
Hyperbole? Perhaps. There are many who will argue that the greatest man Churchill had ever known was Churchill himself. Yet of Roosevelt's greatness there can be no question. Twentieth-century America was blessed with greatness in many quarters, but none stood taller than Roosevelt, though of course for the last two decades of his life he could stand only with the aid of braces and crutches. He was a giant, immense in his flaws as well as his gifts, but a giant all the same. He led the nation out of the Depression that could well have destroyed it, and then he led it to total victory in the most terrible war the world has known. He gave hope to millions who had lost it, and he changed forever the relationship between the citizens of the United States and their government.
For a quarter-century or more, that new relationship has come under challenge, primarily because of the conservative revolution engendered by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and in the process Roosevelt has retreated somewhat into the shadows. Though the fruits of his legacy certainly warrant reconsideration, the relative neglect into which he has fallen is an injustice. So it is good indeed to have Smith's new biography of him. That he has managed to compress the whole sweep of Roosevelt's life into a bit more than 600 pages may seem in and of itself miraculous, but his achievement is far larger than that. His FDR is at once a careful, intelligent synopsis of the existing Roosevelt scholarship (the sheer bulk of which is huge) and a meticulous re-interpretation of the man and his record. Smith pays more attention to Roosevelt's personal life than have most previous biographers. He is openly sympathetic yet ready to criticize when that is warranted, and to do so in sharp terms; he conveys the full flavor and import of Roosevelt's career without ever bogging down in detail.
In sum, Smith's FDR is a model presidential biography. Roosevelt's previous biographers sometimes had a hard time of it. Two eminent historians, Frank Freidel and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., set out to write multivolume lives of Roosevelt, but neither project was completed. Freidel's four volumes get only to 1933 (he did eventually write a somewhat anticlimactic one-volume complete life), and Schlesinger's three volumes get only to 1936. Among the one-volume studies, three stand out: James McGregor Burns's Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956), Nathan Miller's FDR: An Intimate History (1983) and Ted Morgan's FDR: A Biography (1985). Each has its merits, but none matches the commanding authority of this one.
Smith, who is in his mid-70s, has had a distinguished career. A native of the District of Columbia, he served for three and a half decades as professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and is now at Marshall University. A veteran of several years of military service, he has written frequently about military matters. His best known books include biographies of Chief Justice John Marshall, Gen. Lucius Clay and Ulysses S. Grant. He is that rarest and most welcome of historians, one who addresses a serious popular readership without sacrificing high scholarly standards.
At the outset Smith establishes one of his central themes: "The riddle for a biographer is to explain how this Hudson River aristocrat, a son of privilege who never depended on a paycheck, became the champion of the common man. The answer most frequently suggested is that the misfortune of polio changed Roosevelt," but though this is "undoubtedly true," it "does not go far enough." Roosevelt was deeply touched by the poverty he saw in Georgia while treating his polio at Warm Springs, and some who knew him believed that his aborted love affair with Lucy Mercer had an "equally profound effect" by deepening his emotional response to other people. Smith believes, though, that Roosevelt simply "was too talented to be confined by the circumstances of his birth," and that he was probably the most preternaturally gifted politician the nation has ever known.
Not that he was an easy man to know. He was gregarious and "relished informality," yet possessed "an unspoken dignity, an impenetrable reserve that protected him against undue familiarity." He had "an incredible capacity for making people feel at ease and convincing them their work was important," but he kept his distance and others instinctively respected it. Through crises of every sort he remained "serene and confident, unruffled and unafraid," and if he felt any emotions he kept them to himself. He also "had a vindictive streak" and could be merciless to those who crossed him, especially in politics.
He seems to have loved no more than half-a-dozen people, and his wife was not one of them. Precisely why he and Eleanor Roosevelt married never has been clear; they were cousins, she from the Theodore Roosevelt side of the family, and there may have been something dynastic about the marriage. They seem to have enjoyed a measure of happiness and affection after their marriage in March 1905, and they did manage to produce six children, but Lucy Mercer came along a decade later; she and FDR had a "long, tender love affair [that] remained shrouded in secrecy until well after the president's death." Roosevelt chose to end the affair rather than his marriage, but he remained surreptitiously in touch with Lucy for the rest of his life (she was with him in Warm Springs on the day of his death), and he almost certainly was closer to her than to anyone else.
As to the marriage -- the most famous marriage of the 20th century -- Smith gets it exactly right when he says, "Eleanor and Franklin were strong-willed people who cared greatly for each other's happiness but realized their own inability to provide for it." In the White House "the Roosevelts lived entirely apart," seeing each other rarely except for rather formal encounters in which they discussed her interest "in racial matters and equal rights for women." Occasionally, FDR asked Eleanor to make political appearances, though he does not seem to have regarded her political instincts and abilities very highly. It was not until after his death in 1945 that she came fully into her own.
In any case, Roosevelt had the only political adviser he really needed: himself. He received invaluable assistance from many others, most notably Louis Howe, Harry Hopkins and James Farley, but he was the reigning master. His understanding of public opinion -- how to interpret it, how to shape it, how to lead it -- was unmatched, and it is telling that two of his most damaging mistakes came when he allowed it to be overcome by vindictiveness. The first and most famous occurred in 1937, when his anger over unfavorable Supreme Court decisions on New Deal programs led him to try to "pack" the court with additional judges who would be in his pocket; the defeat he suffered was humiliating, and he did not really recover from it until late in his second term. The other took place the following year, when he tried -- with a notable lack of success -- "to purge the Democratic party of dissident members of Congress."
There were other failures and disappointments, but mostly the record is astonishingly positive. Though his critics have generally contended that it was World War II, not the New Deal, that pulled the nation out of the Depression, the truth is that within six weeks of his taking office, "the banking crisis had been ameliorated, the government's budget pruned, and the heavy hand of mandatory temperance overturned." Subsequent programs -- Social Security, the Civil Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Authority -- were powerful and lasting forces for renewal and betterment.
Roosevelt was a fiscal conservative who believed that "modern society, acting through its government, owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or the dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot," and who was willing to set aside (at least temporarily) his economic conservatism in order to serve this higher obligation. He established this as government policy and it has remained so ever since, at all levels of government; the conservative revolution of recent years has chipped a bit away from it, but not much, so deeply embedded has it become in Americans' sense of what they can expect from government.
As to Roosevelt's leadership before and during World War II, it matched and perhaps even exceeded Lincoln's during the Civil War. Roosevelt had far better taste in generals than Lincoln did -- he moved George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower way up in the ranks in order to put them in the positions in which they served so brilliantly -- and his understanding of public opinion never served him, or the country, better. Long before almost anyone else, he understood that this was a war in which the United States eventually would have to fight, but he also understood America's reluctance to enter another overseas conflict so soon after World War I. He was determined "not to get too far in front of public opinion," which sometimes angered his more hawkish friends, but "a more understanding assessment was offered by King George VI, who watched Roosevelt's helmsmanship with undisguised admiration. 'I have been so struck' he wrote the president, 'by the way you have led public opinion by allowing it to get ahead of you.' "
No, not for a moment does Smith believe the canard that FDR welcomed Pearl Harbor as a way to draw the country in to the war, but he understands that FDR maneuvered the country along the unmarked road to war with intelligence and respect for his fellow citizens. He presided over the war with incomparable subtlety and skill. Among other things, "FDR did not second-guess or micromanage the military. More than any president before or since, he was uniquely able to select outstanding military leaders and give them sufficient discretion to do their jobs." His sympathy for ordinary soldiers was bottomless; during one visit to a military hospital, he insisted on being wheeled into a ward for soldiers who had lost one or both legs, so they could see his own withered and useless limbs.
Whether Roosevelt should have run for a fourth term will be argued into eternity, but in doing so he did his nation one final service: He jettisoned the unreliable Henry Wallace as vice president and replaced him with the doughty Harry Truman. Given the desperate state of Roosevelt's health at the time, it is almost certain that he knew he was choosing the country's next president. Rising above himself yet one more time, he secured his high and unique place in American history by choosing the right man for the job. Now, at last, we have the biography that is right for the man.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Customer Reviews
A good solid, fact based, biography.
This is a well-written, solid biography, focusing on facts over hyperbole. It eschews any particular theme, such as FDR's impact on the fabric of American society or on his interactions with Churchill and Stalin, for a general and well-balanced approach. The book covers FDR's whole life, including both its personal and professional aspects. Professor Smith does not avoid the marital and extramarital aspect of FDR and ER's lives, as was the case in the biographies written in the 1950's. These aspects are not dwelled on, but neither are they omitted. The early NY politics, the campaigns and the presidencies are all covered, as is FDR's childhood. The book is well researched and generally tries to be factual and informative, rather than being overly laudatory or critical. It covers both FDR at his best (campaigning, instilling the confidence necessary to defeat the depression and win WWII and developing the facets of American life, such as Social Security and the FDIC, that we tend to take for granted) and at his worst (for instance, allowing the internment of Japanese Americans at the start of WWII, in spite of clear evidence that this was illegal, immoral and done more in the name of racial bigotry than American security). While written for the general reader, the book has a lot for the more serious student of history. The book contains over 150 pages of end-notes and has footnotes on most pages. (I liked this combination as the most important notes are provided on the page that you are reading, with others at the end, so as not to clutter then flow of the book.) There are also about 1000 bibliographic references for further study.
Not being an FDR expert I cannot determine how much new material has been unearthed, but to a large extent this is unimportant. This is not a specialized work, where new findings are to be expected. Rather, it is a work written for a general audience, one who desires an overview of FDR's life and on this basis the book delivers handsomely. Professor Smith has done a great job of filtering the material from about 1000 sources and making it into a coherent and readable whole. My only criticism (and this was not enough to prevent the 5 star rating that I think that the book disserves) is that the book contains only 636 pages of text. I am sure that the size was an editorial decision, based on a desire to keep the book within the size range desired by readers who only want an overview. Keeping the book to this size meant that most of the events covered could only be given a cursory examination. Given the impact of FDR's life and the fact that he served as president for a little more than 12 years, I would have liked a little more, perhaps an additional 3-400 pages.
I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about FDR. As stated, my only reservation is that I would have liked it to be somewhat longer, but, then again, any good book should leave you wanting more.
2007 Francis Parkman Prize winner
By far the best one-volume biography of Franklin Roosevelt, and attempting to cover the public and private lives of this greatest 20th century president in a single volume is an accomplishment in itself. There is not much I can add to the many fine reviews, except to point out that Smith's FDR was awarded the 2007 Francis Parkman Prize as the Best Book in American History by the Society of American Historians.
Additionally, calling Professor Smith an "independent historian" is rather misleading as he currently he is the John Marshall Professor of Political Science at Marshall University and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto after having served as professor of political economy there for thirty-five years. Professor Smith also served as visiting professor at several universities during his tenure at the University of Toronto and after his retirement including the Freie Universität in Berlin, Georgetown University, the University of Virginia's Woodrow Wilson Department of Government and Foreign Affairs, and the University of California at San Diego.
On a lighter note, when Roosevelt son Elliott died in 1990, he left a trunk of manuscripts for a mystery series featuring First Lady Eleanor as the sleuth! Peopled with staff and political supporters as well as opponents, they are delightful!
Probably the finest one-volume biography of FDR
I have a large shelf of books on FDR, both biographies and studies of particular aspects of his administration. Because I have read so many books on FDR in the past, I'm not sure that I learned all that much in this biography by Jean Edward Smith. In part this is because he engaged in very little original research. In part this is because most of the books that I have read go into far greater detail on particular aspects of his life or career. But I'm not sure there has ever been a book better at striking a proper balance in presenting all the aspects of his life. He both appreciates the staggering achievements as president -- he unquestionably did more to transform American life than any other president, always for the better -- and his shortcomings, like the Roosevelt recession, caused when he dramatically cut federal expenditures in his second term, his disastrous attempt to expand the supreme court, and the horrific injustice done to Japanese Americans in forcing them to relocate in WW II. Yet Smith also acknowledges the role FDR played not only in transforming the United States, but also in perhaps saving Europe from a Nazi victory. Has any single individual -- excluding founders of major religions -- done so much unqualified good for the world? Both Churchill and Stalin credited FDR as the crucial person in WW II. And what he achieved in his first term wrought changes in American life that has benefited hundreds of millions of Americans.
If you have read many other books on Roosevelt, there are sections of this book that will seem lacking in detail. There is, for instance, no way that Smith can match Doris Kearns Goodwin's marvelous account of the White House in the war years in NO ORDINARY TIME. And Smith can't in a hundred or so pages match what Arthur M. Schlesinger writes about the New Deal in 1,800. But what Smith can do and has done is present a marvelous overview of everything FDR stood far and accomplished. And it is clearly the finest one-volume biography ever written as such (the one competitor would be Frank Freidel's FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: A RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY, except that it was a rewriting of his earlier multi-volume biography into single-volume form). In a way, Smith's book is even preferable to John MacGregor Burns's and Kenneth Davis's multi-volume biographies simply because Smith does not feel compelled to write circumspectly about the complicated nature of Franklin and Eleanor's marriage and their emotional and/or sexual involvement with other individuals. Most Roosevelt biographers from the sixties and earlier were reticent to even mention Lucy Mercer's name and Earl Miller is mentioned only in the vaguest possible terms.
I especially liked how fairly and openly Smith wrote about the four extremely important women in his life: his mother Sara, his wife Eleanor, the love of his life Lucy Mercer, and his constant companion and secretary Missy Lehand (which evidence we have indicates was intimate without being sexual). I personally like Roosevelt more for his capacity to be great friends with women as well as men. Having recently read Schlesinger's three-volume THE AGE OF ROOSEVELT, it was mildly irritating how diligently Schlesinger avoided talking about Roosevelt's deep attachment to these women, even if (except for Lucy Mercer in the teens) these relationships were platonic. It helps, however, to understand FDR is you know that for twenty years Missy Lehand was far more intimate with and overwhelming more of a presence in FDR's life than his wife Eleanor.
Whatever the eccentricities in Franklin and Eleanor's marriage, it was a partnership that resulted in the most productive presidency in American history. No other president comes even remotely close to the degree of actual changes brought about than the first three Roosevelt administrations (he died early in his fourth). The wide range of changes in American life during the heyday of the New Deal has irreparably altered for good American life. When George W. Bush attempted to begin dismantling the New Deal by substituting individual retirement accounts for Social Security, he was stonewalled not just by the vast majority of the American people and the entirety of the Democratic party, but by key members of his own party like Kansas hyper conservative senator Sam Brownback, who stated bluntly that Social Security was not a negotiable. Even Americans who vaguely carp about the age of big government brought about by Roosevelt support virtually everything enacted in the New Deal. And the recent economic crisis affected individual Americans far less than it would because their money in banks was protected by federal insurance.
If you have not read a book on FDR before, this cannot be surpassed as a first book. I would, however, strongly recommend a couple of others as well. I mentioned above Doris Kearns Goodwin's NO ORDINARY TIME, about the Roosevelts during WW II. This is just an outstanding book in everyway. John MacGregor Burns wrote two outstanding books on Roosevelt, ROOSEVELT: THE LION AND THE FOX and ROOSEVELT: SOLDIER OF FORTUNE. If you want a book on the New Deal, William E. Leuchentenburg has written a very fine single-volume work, FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT AND THE NEW DEAL 1932-1940. It isn't as entertaining as Goodwin's book, but the focus is obvious only the prior decade. Schlesinger's THE AGE OF ROOSEVELT is entertaining and deeply informative, but it is quite long, its three volumes coming in just under 2,000 pages. I have not yet read (but intend to shortly) Jonathan Alter's DEFINING MOMENT: FDR'S HUNDRED DAYS AND THE TRIUMPH OF HOPE. It has gotten a lot of attention due to Barack Obama's saying on 60 MINUTES that he was reading two books to prepare for becoming president, Alter's and the book being reviewed here, Smith's FDR. One book that I probably won't read right now but hope to someday is H. W. Brands's A TRAITOR TO HIS CLASS: THE PRIVILEGED LIFE AND RADICAL PRESIDENCY OF FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT. I've read other books by Brands, including his biography of Benjamin Franklin. He is an outstanding biographer, but having read four books on Franklin in the past couple of months and intending to read one more in the next couple of weeks, it is hard to justify reading yet another. But I suspect that it is a very good book.
Actually, because of the parallels between what Barack Obama hopes to accomplish in the first few months of his first term and what Roosevelt did early in his first term, there has been a great deal of attention on FDR lately. This is a very good thing. Though a whipping boy of conservatives the past three decades, the fact is that by any conceivable standard he is one of the greatest presidents in American history, if not the best. In the various rankings of American presidents he is always placed in the 'Great" class with Lincoln and Washington. But for actual accomplishments, he and Lincoln are in a class of their own. Lincoln dealt with the greatest crisis in American history, Roosevelt with the second and third greatest. But Roosevelt also put into place a vast array of governmental agencies that have created an incalculable amount of good. Most Americans own homes because of changes brought about Roosevelt. Bank failures have been both far rarer since Roosevelt and infinitely less destructive. The GI Bill, which he created, has resulted in the college education of millions of veterans. Unemployment insurance, oversight organizations like the SEC, and social security all derive from Roosevelt. On the other hand, all of Roosevelt's critics combined have failed to add a single governmental institution that has made our lives better. I think it is essential to know as much as possible about Roosevelt as we enter Obama's first term to understand better precisely what the power of government can achieve in improving the lives of individuals. Tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the very wealthy (the sole achievement of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush years) have been great for increasing economic inequality and making America rife with millionaires, but unlike the Roosevelt years the Middle Class and the poor have suffered. I hope that Obama truly does intend to take a page from Roosevelt's book. I would love to live under a new Roosevelt.
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