SOURCE: "FDR as a Biographer's Problem," in The American Scholar, Vol. 52, Winter, 1983/84, pp. 100-08.

When, more years ago than I like to count, a publisher approached me with the proposal that I do a book about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, only the accompanying offer of what was for those days a quite large advance against royalties was tempting to me. It was a temptation I resisted. The flood of Rooseveltiana already in print, including several established classics, was overwhelming; I saw no need to add to it. The risks and difficulties of the proposed project were formidable. There was the danger, for instance, of becoming bogged down in interminable research (it crushed my spirit to learn that there were forty-five tons of documents in the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park). Finally, conclusively, as I thought at the time, FDR, though I'd read with much interest a great many books about him and his administration, was devoid of interest to me as a writing subject of my own.

Earlier I had dealt with three very different biographical subjects. With each of these I had felt a considerable measure of personal rapport.

Long ago I did a biography of Dwight Eisenhower. I liked him personally when I was in contact with him in England and France. I understood his background, for I was a friend and colleague of his brother Milton, who was then president of Kansas State University, and I had been born and raised just forty miles or so from Ike's hometown of Abilene. It was only after he became president that I found it possible to dislike Ike—and my book about him was completed some years before he (mistakenly, I think) entered politics.

Adlai Stevenson, with whom I also had personal contact and of whom I wrote my second biography, I actually loved as a human being. He had great sweetness and warmth and wit, and it seemed to me we had many of the same priorities, the same basic values, the same unfashionable view of history as essentially a moral drama. I often felt, when I was writing about him, that I understood Stevenson from the inside out, better than most who were much more intimately associated with him; and though he'd not be likely to say so to anyone else (with the possible exception of his sister Buffie), he gave me oral and documentary reason to believe he thought I understood him too.

I never met Charles Lindbergh. It wasn't necessary for the kind of book I wrote about him, whose essential subject was heroism and hero worship in twentieth century America. But with Lindbergh, too, I had a certain empathy. His small-town midwestern background had similarities to my own; he was half-Swedish, as I am; I share some of the "gloomy Swede" withdrawal tendencies that were his and his father's; I could understand his kind of courage, a precisely calculated risk taking, a cold-nerved willingness to bet one's life on an estimate of odds; and I could certainly empathize with his profound aversion to the incredible mass adulation of which he became the victim.

Toward Franklin Roosevelt, however, I had initially no personal sympathetic attraction: indeed, as a biographical subject, and quite apart from the bristling difficulties he presented in that aspect, he repelled me.

How and why was this so?

For one thing—despite all I'd read of his warm heart and concern for the welfare of common folk, and despite the impression he conveyed of these things when he talked on the radio or appeared in newsreels—I could never quite have for him a genuinely human feeling. He was to me more a symbolic movement than a person, and a movement about whose meaning and direction I had frequent grave doubts. I cast my first presidential ballot for him. My first professional employment was a lowly post in a New Deal agency, from which vantage point he often appeared a radiant godlike figure who was not only America's saviour from the glooms and despairs of the Great Depression but my own personal saviour as well. On many an occasion he also appeared the one indispensable barrier to a flood of reaction into some form of American fascism, and for that reason I was forever defending him in argument, always vehement and often acrimonious, with my otherwise beloved father and with other Roosevelt-hating Republicans. Awesome was his manifest genius (evidently a unique blend of intuition, calculation, confidence, charm, and personal force) for locating, seizing, then actively holding the focal points of countervailing political power, a genius whereby he achieved and maintained through a dozen years of crisis a decisive centrality in the historical process of America, of the world as a whole. He was central to everything! Wherever he was seemed the capital of the universe simply because he was there! But by all this I was not encouraged to believe I had any understanding of, or could ever empathetically understand, Franklin Roosevelt as a living, breathing, feeling, thinking man. He was in all respects remote. His background as a member of the Hudson River aristocracy, his Groton-Harvard schooling, his polio crippling, his subsequent and consequent environmental experience, these were all so alien to anything I myself had experienced that I might never be able to depict them accurately, however hard I tried, much less comprehend and accurately describe their shaping influence on him. As for his basic motives, his ultimate aims, his actual feeling about himself and the world, his sense of reality—these things, I was sure, lay forever beyond my ken.

Nor were these the sum—they were not even the most important—of my initial objections to the publisher's proposal.

Just suppose I was mistaken about the impossibility of my ever finding and depicting the real Roosevelt. Suppose, after the arduous search that would evidently be required, I did find him. Would he prove to be a man in whose company I could live comfortably through the years required for a serious biography of him? I doubted it. About the FDR whom I observed across a vast social distance, but with a close attention, all through the years of my young manhood—about the FDR who later emerged for me out of the published works of people who had had contact with him—there was a great deal that was to me personally antipathetic. I happen to be an idealist in philosophy (my great teacher was Alexander Meiklejohn): I'm convinced that ideas are determinants of history and that long-term consistency, not immediate practical efficacy, is the test of the truth of ideas. With pragmatism and pragmatists, therefore, I have littleimaginative sympathy—and FDR in action seemed almost wholly, purely pragmatic. He who was only too aware of the separateness of things had apparently little or no awareness of the connections and connectedness whereby organization (organismic wholeness) is created. His concern for consistency, if any, appeared minimal, which meant from my point of view that his concern for truth, for truthfulness, must also be nonexistent or minimal. And such a conclusion seemed justified by a good deal of evidence. Out of what I observed and read about him there emanated, along with a wonderfully animating life-affirming radiance, a faint (sometimes not so faint) odor of the sly, the slippery, the excessively clever.

Consider the published testimony: "Franklin Roosevelt was not a simple man," writes Frances Perkins. "That quality of simplicity which we delight to think [which I myself do think] marks the great and noble was not his. He was the most complicated human being I ever knew." Walter Lippmann, disgusted by the "intricate game" that FDR as New York governor and presidential candidate "elected . . . to play . . . with Tammany," suggested on several occasions that the "complicatedness" descried by Perkins was not unrelated to the arts and morality of an opportunistic confidence man. "The trouble with Franklin D. Roosevelt is that his mind is not very clear, his purposes are not simple, and his methods are not direct," concluded a famous Lippmann column. "A clear-headed, simple and direct man would not have landed himself in the confusion [Lippmann elsewhere calls it a "squalid mess"] which now prevails between Albany and City Hall." Much of the poignancy of Eleanor Roosevelt's memoirs derives from her expressed yearning to reach out and touch the essential self of the man she had married; her second volume aches with the frustration of her effort to reach him—a frustration leading to the bleak conclusion, after he had died, that she had been merely one of those whom he found "useful." Roosevelt "loved secrecy," writes Sam Rosenman, yet he "was often the one guilty of letting facts get out about which he had sworn others to secrecy." And both Rosenman and Ray Moley, also Rex Tugwell and Jim Farley, record instances of Rooseveltian mendacity, often employed merely to embellish a good story but sometimes with regard to major issues, and of his preference for the devious over the frankly straightforward, even on occasions (notably at the outset of his 1937 Supreme Court battle) when plain speaking and dealing would have far better served his ends.

At the very time I was considering the publisher's offer, Rosenman and James MacGregor Burns suffered acute public embarrassment for having accepted at face value FDR's claim (found in a memorandum in the Roosevelt Library) to have composed the first draft of his first inaugural address between the hours of 9:00 P.M. and 1:30 A.M., at Hyde Park, on the night of February 27, 1933. Moley's just-published First New Deal made scornful comment upon Rosenman's failure to check with him the account, in Rosenman's Working with Roosevelt, of the inaugural's making, since Rosenman well knew that Moley was at that time involved in the preparation of every Roosevelt speech. And Moley proved up to the hilt, with incontrovertible documentary evidence, that he himself wrote the first draft, which meant that not a word was true of Burns's vividly circumstantial story of this drafting, in Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox—a book I continue greatly to admire. Moreover, reading The First New Deal, I could not but conclude that FDR's copying in his own hand of Moley's typed draft, in Moley's presence, on the night of February 27, was probably done with deliberate intent to deceive posterity. Obviously any historian ran grave risks who accepted as literally true, without further checking, anything FDR said about his own experience. The most primary source of information, in the case of FDR, was by that very token the most suspect.

Consistent with this was the fact that it was FDR who introduced the Big Smile to presidential politics, where it has since stuck (note the difference of standard facial expressions of photographed presidential politicians before and after 1932) and who institutionalized ghostwriting in presidential politics (Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson, and the presidents before them wrote most or all of their own speeches), thereby increasing the difficulty of knowing for whom or what one is voting in the polling booth.

In the face of all this, I'm reasonably sure I would never have signed that publishing contract had the idea not occurred to me, one day, of giving the proposed project a working title of "Franklin D. Roosevelt: A History" rather than "Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Biography" and then assigning to "history" the same weight I gave "Roosevelt" in my overall conception.

Every biographical work is of necessity, to greater or less degree, a "life-and-times." In most biographies, however, even those written about major political figures whose, lives are absorbed in public affairs, the "times" are presented as a background or temporal setting for the "life." Insofar as history moves through such books, it is only as changing circumstance, which is to say that it remains essentially passive and static, environmental, scenic in the stage-metaphorical sense. But must the proposed work, if I agreed to do it, be done in this usual way? I saw no iron necessity. Instead of dealing with history as mere occasion or necessary condition for a story of Roosevelt's life, why not make it the very substance of the book—make it the story, having FDR as the central character or hero? This opened exciting possibilities. I might be enabled, if I chose, to shape a kind of "nonfiction novel" (Capote's phrase was not then overused), which, though scrupulously accurate in every biographical-historical detail, made use of a novelist's sense of drama, a novelist's feeling for character and place, a novelist's narrative and descriptive techniques. My aim and attempt could be to achieve an actual fusion of history and person in a single flowing process—a process, moreover, having a clear central theme, so that it became the development of a basic pattern of significance, or the working out of a definite program of meaning. Just possibly (against painful hazard one drugs oneself with impossible dreams) a work of art might be created having a Tolstoyan sweep and force—a work of necessarily vast scope, with great crowds of people and events, yet with the tightness, the essential unity of a short story.

And what would be the unifying theme? It must of course be no grand a priori concept arbitrarily imposed upon objectively existent data; it must instead logically derive from these data. But in point of fact I found it already derived in my mind as part and parcel of a long-perceived central theme of Western history—found it there as a general thematic conclusion that must be (has been) reached, I suppose, by every mind that has tried seriously to understand what has been basically happening in Western civilization since the Renaissance.

For obviously the most basic causal force operating in Western, and thence world, history, from the early seventeenth century till today, has been the accelerating advance of science and technology and its increasingly strong impact on social, cultural, economic, and political institutions and on the lives of individual men and women. Every major decisive historical event of the last two centuries has had at its heart the dynamic relationship (that of challenge and response) between man's personal and institutional life on the one hand and the growing power of his technology on the other. But since the latter has increasingly become the prime mover of the whole process, the question arises as to whether man's technology is truly his in the sense of ownership and control. Does he possess it, control it—or does it possess and control him? The question was no by means wholly fanciful when Mary Shelley published her Frankenstein. It had become wholly realistic by the time Henry Adams published his Education. And it was one of Adams's striking metaphors that set me thinking about all this, that day, in terms of FDR. Adams tells how, in November 1904, sailing up New York harbor at the end of a crossing from Cherbourg, he saw the "outline of the city" as "frantic." It was as if "power . . . [had] outgrown its servitude" and "asserted its freedom." It was as if "the cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky." And when Adams had debarked and was again upon the streets of New York, the city seemed to him to have "the air and movement of hysteria"; its citizens "were crying, with every accent of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control."

But they were not brought under control. Instead, they continued to grow out of control, distorted into monstrous shapes by the political and economic arrangements of a preindustrial age. They imposed intolerable strains on social walls and vastly overflowed economic channels that had never been designed to contain them. They created global interdependencies that were increasingly frustrated by the prevailing system (or anarchy) of national sovereignties. Blind responses to them increasingly submerged individual lives and liberties in vast collectives, essentially mindless in their direction—giant organizations of which the nominal administrator was more puppet than master and in which human lives and purposes were more and more subordinate to the machine's laws of operation, the machine's convenience. In sum, a gap was opened and widened between power and intelligence (out of it came World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the atom bomb) as the former advanced by leaps and bounds while the latter, whose firm grasp alone could make technology the servant of humane ends, limped farther and farther behind.

Here, then, was my central unifying theme. The struggle to close the power-intelligence gap, which was a struggle for emergence of a new kind of American community out of individualistic chaos and of at least minimal world government out of international anarchy, was for me the essential dramatic conflict, the plot, of the story having FDR as central character. By this perceived story line I would be provided with a selective principle (one was absolutely necessary) for choice and emphasis among the myriad items and possibilities anyone must consider who writes of Roosevelt and his years.

There remained the problem of FDR himself—that multifaceted, mercurial, enigmatic man. How was I ever to penetrate his thick and evidently swiftly changing disguises to reach any understanding of his essential being—of his basic attitudes and motives? I'd have to do that if I were to present him as other than a symbolic person or cardboard figure, all brilliant smiling surface. And I remember that, on the day of my final decision to sign the publishing contract, I made a list of published facts and surmises about him out of which I might possibly draw clues to a solution of this problem, clues possibly pointing the way toward a valid theory of personality.

Thus:

FDR was the only child of highly privileged parents, and his formidable mother, in a strange little book entitled My Boy Franklin, reports that he as a child, playing with other children, was always the one who gave orders. When she remonstrated with him one day, saying he should let others run things sometimes, he replied, "Mummie, if I didn't give the orders, nothing would happen!" And, surprisingly, significantly, his playmates seemed not often to resent his bossiness; they generally obeyed with willing alacrity. His mother also tells of the day when he came up to the Hyde Park house from woods along the river, which is quite a long walk uphill, to get his collector's gun. He'd seen a winter wren in "one of the big trees down there" and wanted it for his bird collection. She laughed at him. Surely he didn't expect that wren to sit there waiting for his return! 'Oh, yes," he replied confidently, "he'll wait." The dead bird was in his hand when he came back to the house sometime later.

He was from early boyhood an inveterate collector, not just of birds but of stamps (this became his major lifelong hobby), naval prints, historical documents, and rare books (he specialized in Americana). He lived amid a clutter of ship models, figurines, and mementos of all kinds.

He was mildly but genuinely superstitious. He was superstitious about the number thirteen and would go to considerable trouble to avoid eating at a table of thirteen or beginning a journey on the thirteenth day of a month. "Occasionally this meant pulling a train out at 11:50 P.M. on the twelfth or 12:10 A.M. on the fourteenth," writes Grace Tully, who also reports that "one of the few occasions I know of when the President actually reprimanded someone brusquely in public involved the superstition of lighting three cigarettes on a match." On the evening when he waited at Hyde Park for a phone call from Chicago that would tell him whether or not he would win presidential nomination on the fourth ballot of the 1932 Democratic convention, he had the dining table moved so that the telephone cord would reach him at his accustomed place at the table's head, though it would have been less trouble for him to move to a side of the table that the cord would easily reach: to change chairs at table would be bad luck. He became addicted to certain articles of clothing as lucky—an old felt hat, an old sweater—and averse to others as unlucky.

He was notably ear-minded rather than eye-minded; he learned by listening, not by reading. Ed Flynn, who was as intimate an associate of his between 1928 and 1945 as any man, with the exception of Louis Howe and Harry Hopkins, writes that he "never saw him read a book" or even "read a magazine unless a particular portion was called to his attention." Moley, Tugwell, and many others who were for periods close to him testify that he seldom, if ever, read a serious book all the way through during the time they were associated with him. At Harvard, where his academic record was undistinguished, all his classes were in history, political science (only thoroughly orthodox economic theory was taught to him), and English, save for single courses in geology, general paleontology, Latin literature, and French literature. He had no exposure to mathematics, physics, chemistry, or philosophy (the philosophy faculty at Harvard, with James and Santayana as members, was exceptionally brilliant during his undergraduate years). He did enroll in a general introduction to philosophy, taught by Josiah Royce, but dropped it after three weeks. At the close of his last college year he complained to his roommate that his Harvard studies had been "like an electric light that hasn't any wire. You need the lamp for light but it's useless if you can't switch it on."

He was fond of gambling, but for small stakes. He played poker with more enthusiasm than skill, losing more than he won. He bet impulsively, was overinclined to bluff and, when dealer, was likely to raise howls of protest around the table by calling a game in which so many cards were wild that no one could estimate the odds. His business speculations during the 1920s were of the same "wild card" variety. He was attracted to the novel, the daring, and though he seldom invested much in any one such venture, he lost most or all of what he did put in when, as almost always happened, the venture quickly failed. Yet in elective politics, though he often seemed daring to the point of recklessness, he was, in reality and in general, shrewd and cautious. It is true that his very first campaign (for the New York legislature in 1910), his immediately following legislative battle over "Blue-eyed Billy" Sheehan, and his 1914 primary bid for the United States Senate were all extremely hazardous ventures. The latter was actually foolish: he suffered a predictable defeat of humiliating proportions. But thereafter he planned his political moves with care (and with Louis Howe), estimated the risks as precisely as possible, did what he could to minimize them, and paid close attention to relations between his immediate tactical objectives and his long-term strategic goal. Sometimes he miscalculated badly—he did so repeatedly in 1937, a year of disaster for him and the New Deal—but almost never did he proceed with no calculation at all.

He was constantly described, in public prints, as a "consummate actor"—and the published letters of his boyhood and youth do reveal a strong element of the histrionic in him. (This is often characteristic of unusually shy, sensitive people who learn to hide or overcome their insecurities through role playing; and his mother insists, as photographs of him suggest, that he was as a young boy very shy.) No letters he wrote home from Groton were more heavily underlined, more studded with exclamation points, than those he wrote in the spring of his VI Form year (he was then eighteen) about the part assigned him in W. S. Gilbert's The Wedding March, which was that year's school play; and from all accounts he was a hit in the part. A shared love for things theatrical was one of the bonds between him and Howe. He loved to mimic (he could take off Cal Coolidge hilariously), loved to act parts (presiding parts) in the costume skits that Howe composed for the Cuff-links Club dinners held annually on FDR's birthday. The histrionic in him greatly aided his delivery of speeches, which he made with maximum effectiveness. His physical presence at the lectern—leonine head tossed back or from side to side, strong jaw outthrust, an extraordinarily mobile countenance registering a great range and subtlety of emotion—was of itself alone powerfully communicative to his immediate audience; and he had a superb speaking voice, a vibrant tenor that could at his will become hard or soft in tone, cold or warm, harsh with scornful anger or gentle with affectionate intimacy. Often he rendered eloquent to the radiolistening ear, and sometimes soaringly so, lines that to the normal reading eye lay flat and dull upon the page.

He proclaimed himself a "snap-judgment man." Interviewed by Marquis Childs in early April 1944, he asserted that the "burden of responsibility" about which Childs questioned him was not really a burden for him because he made decisions so easily. ("You mean, sir, it is . . . not ever difficult?" asked, a somewhat incredulous Childs. Replied FDR, "No, I should say, no.") Yet the evidence is abundant that he had a profound aversion to clear-cut irrevocable decisions and went to great lengths to avoid them, in his private as in his public life.

His wife and his mother were essentially antipathetic personalities. Eleanor was primarily animated by generous instincts, Sara by selfish ones, and between the two was a constant tension that broke, now and then, into open quarrel. When this happened, FDR seems seldom if ever to have taken sides. Generally he pretended unawareness that anything had gone wrong. And certainly he never made any sharp distinction between the loyalties he owed his mother and those he owed his wife, much less any clear-cut decision as to which set of loyalties had priority. In the case of his love affair with Lucy Mercer, about which I had been told one evening in Raleigh by Jonathan and Mrs. Daniels (the story was not yet generally known), he was forced by Eleanor to make a flat choice between divorce and a total renunciation of Lucy. He chose the latter (a divorce would end his political career; his outraged mother threatened to disown him), but he evidently did so with secret reservations, for he kept close track of her, may even have been in touch with her through the following years, and certainly renewed relations with her in the closing years of his life. When the issue facing him was whether or not to fire an unfit subordinate, he almost always postponed the decision unconscionably or avoided it altogether through falsecompromise arrangements—a procedure doubtless dictated by his wish to avoid giving pain but which had the frequent effect of prolonging and increasing it. When the issue was between antagonistic public policy proposals, his initial effort was generally to try to weave them together, as in the famous case of the two tariff-policy speech drafts during the 1932 campaign. He was a Whitmanesque yea-sayer who could speak a firm no with only the greatest difficulty. Hence his natural tendency toward omnibus statutes and administrative agencies wherein sharp differences between ideas and men would (he hoped) be dissolved by a common bureaucratic label and goal statement, the latter so broad as to be practically meaningless.

One would expect such avoidance of sharp definition, such preference of "both/and" over "either/or" (as Kierkegaard put it), to be a manifestation of cowardice—and indeed the accusation of moral cowardice, of mental timidity, was leveled against him on occasion. But consider the indisputable evidence, the numerous crucial instances, of this man's magnificent courage!

His capacity to bear physical pain, hiding it from others behind a calm, cheerful demeanor, was almost incredible. He did so as a boy when an accident broke off one of his teeth, leaving the nerve nakedly exposed: only the sight of his pale drawn face, joined with his inability to speak in other than monosyllables, revealed to his mother that an accident had occurred and he was in agony. He did so as a man, over "and over again, during his polio ordeal and the subsequent long, arduous struggle to walk again. Rare is the man who demonstrates such fortitude, such tenacious hold on long-term purpose through thick and thin, as he did during the 1920s. Even more rare is the crippled man who in his dealings with the world manages, as he did, to give no impression of lameness, physical or psychological, but radiates instead the zestful good cheer of a supremely healthy man. Nor was stoic courage the only kind he possessed. He was utterly fearless in the face of sudden, unexpected mortal danger. When a madman fired five revolver shots at him from barely twenty feet away, in Miami on the night of February 15, 1933, he, who perfectly realized that his enforced physical immobility made him an unusually easy target, seemed scarcely to have flinched. Certainly he remained calmly, precisely observant, almost as if the whole episode were witnessed by him from a safe distance—an episode he found intensely interesting but from which he was personally detached—as the remarkably clear, detailed, chronological account he gave newsmen a few hours later reveals. He gave no sign of letdown after the immediate excitement had passed either. Writes Moley: "I never in my life saw anything more magnificent."

In his talk about crises and their resolutions, he almost always referred to God, or God's beneficence. In his account to newsmen of the shooting, he said it was "providential" that the car in which he was riding had moved immediately after the shooting, since it would otherwise have been hemmed in by the excited crowd. When he later sent a telegram of thanks to the woman who had saved his life by grabbing the gunman's shooting arm, he spoke of the "Divine Providence" whereby (as it then appeared) "the lives of all the victims . . . will be spared." To Frances Perkins he once said that, in the ultimate crisis-hours of his polio attack, he felt that God had abandoned him—which suggests that, when he recovered, he felt that God had spared him after testing him for some divine purpose. On the night of March 2, 1933, when he rode a B&O train down from New York to Washington for his first inaugural, he summoned Jim Farley to his stateroom and there talked to him, a devout Catholic, not of the multitudinous problems whose solutions would be his responsibility in two days' time, but of faith in God. More important than any planned operation for the solution of the present crisis was a great people's religious faith, he said; ultimately the salvation of America depended upon the American people's active belief in divine providence, their seeking and acceptance of divine guidance. He himself proposed, had made the arrangements, to launch the New Deal with a prayer: his first public act on inauguration day would be his attendance at a worship service conducted at Saint John's Episcopal Church by the Reverend Endicott Peabody, rector of Groton, headmaster of Groton School.

It was this last of my listed items—the fact that Franklin Roosevelt was a man of great and evidently remarkably simple religious faith—that seemed and still seems to me the most potent of clues to the innermost workings of his psyche. His kind of superstitiousness, his kind of decision making (a feel for the relative weights of opposing external pressures), his kind of gambling—his opportunism, his optimistic courage under extreme pressures, his otherwise incredible manifestations on crucial occasions of a personal irresponsibility—all these were explicable in terms of what appeared to be his kind of plain, simple, matter-of-fact Christianity. "He felt that human beings were given tasks to perform and with these tasks the ability and strength to put them through," Eleanor Roosevelt has written. "He could pray for help and guidance and have faith in his own judgment [thereby informed by divine will] as a result."

My own summation, on that day of my own decision making, was somewhat as follows: Born an only child into a highly privileged position, bearer of a name made immensely famous by a distant relative, Franklin Roosevelt had early inculcated within himself a sense of his own importance in the total scheme of things. Innately abnormally sensitive to other people (therefore originally shy of strangers), eager to please, anxious to serve, yet with an innate instinct for power, he was early encouraged into role playing, for which he had a natural talent, by his need for defense against the demands of a strong-willed, thoroughly selfish, domineering mother whom he loved. Possessed of an intellect that was broad but shallow, he collected facts and ideas as he did stamps and naval prints, letting them lie flat, distinct, separate in his mind, never attempting to combine them into any holistic truth. Indeed, he shied away from generalized thinking and abstract ideas. If never openly contemptuous of pure thought (certainly he was never assertively so), he had nothing to do with it personally, feeling it to be not merely irrelevant to his vital concerns but even hazardous to them insofar as it might distract his attention from small but important signs or cues presented him by and through his immediate environmental situation. For at the root and core of his conception of self and world was the inward certainty that he was a chosen one of the Almighty, his career a role assigned him by the Author of the Universe, and that the part he must act or play to the best of his ability, feeling himself into it, even identifying with it (up to a point), was a very great one.

Believing absolutely in God the Father and Jesus Christ as the Son of God; believing that God, caring for each individual human being, was infinitely kind and good as well as all-wise and all-powerful; believing or feeling that history was a working out of divine purpose, that every truly fundamental historical force was a manifestation of divine will—believing all this, he must and did believe that history, though it had at any given extended period of time a tidal ebb and flow, had, in the long run, a surging flow in one direction. It was away from polar evil toward polar good. This was the essential progress, from worse to better, a progress that was inevitable because it was God's will. As a chosen one, he himself was an instrument of progress, a special agent on earth of divine beneficence. But only an instrument. Only an agent. The notion of attempting a mystical union with God, becoming one with him, had it ever occurred to FDR, would have been rejected as an absurd, outrageous presumption—and similarly with regard to efforts to understand God in any deep metaphysical sense. What his heart accepted should not be questioned or even examined by his mind. "I never really thought much about it," he said to his wife when she pressed him (too hard) to say whether or not he was really convinced, intellectually convinced, that Christian doctrine was true. "I think it is just as well not to think about things like that too much."

Thus, Roosevelt's attitude toward power, his attraction to it and exercise of it, was characterized by a humility, a selflessness wholly foreign to a Napoleon, a Mussolini, a Hitler, or a Stalin. By his religious faith and his selfconception in terms of it (his sense of his role in history), he was required actively to seek great power—the greatest earthly power. But he never did so with the feeling that he himself would become the power he exercised, or even that it would become his personal property, to be used in service of his purely personal will. It was assigned, imposed from on high. It remained God's. And the ultimate responsibility for his use of it was therefore also God's. This conviction enabled him to act, often, as if he were possessed of what Spengler called a "dreamlike certainty" of decision. Often he moved swiftly, boldly, with a seemingly fully informed decisiveness, as if he knew exactly what he was doing and what the results would be (though in reality he did not and could not know), when others in posts of decision—more cerebral than he, more weighed down by a sense of personal responsibility for large-scale consequences—were paralyzed by doubt and fear. His inward experience of such moments, however, was very different from a Napoleon's or a Mussolini's in that his act was not at all the exercise of an iron and conquering will. It was almost the opposite of it. Role and game playing fused: his experience became that of a pious gambler whose risk taking, teleologically motivated, is a form of prayer and an act of faith.