FDR: A Biography
Morgan, Ted
proclaims. Nothing, she says, will ever make up for the loss of her son. She is particularly scornful of the Pope's forgiveness of Ali Agca. "If I had said to my son's murderers what Pope John Paul...
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...One bowl of The American Spectator has as much inorganic nutrition as eighteen bowls of Time, thirty-six bowls of the Washington Post, and nine-hundred and fifty-six bowls of the National Your mind is starving for stimulus...
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...with the Supreme Court and the federal bureaucracy, with Vice Presidents and cabinet members, congressional leaders and embittered former allies...
...It's a grand story and Mr...
...These assets are indispensable for any Roosevelt biographer...
...More important, his finished portrait of FDR has all the depth and texture weneed to make our own judgment as to what kind of man he was, personally as well as politically...
...That is the whole point of her book...
...Morgan as one of his clients, gave the majority decision: The processing tax was not properly a tax but the expropriation of money from one group for the benefit of another 'gas part of a plan to control agricultural production...
...Yet I wonder whether there isn't some of the post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacy in it...
...It was a scheme for imposing federal regulations in a matter reserved to the states...
...Our side got at least what appeared to be a firm promise of free elections in Poland...
...I'm hungry for more cerebral stimulation...
...But I do question the facile assumption, which Mr...
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...But hardly anyone, I suspect, will fail to see in him a leader as great in his virtues as in his flaws...
...But in 1928 he was nominated by acclamation for the New York governorship and was narrowly elected in the face of a Hoover presidential landslide in the state...
...The other is the attack of polio that crippled him at age 39...
...A year after that electoral debacle came the attack of polio which left himcrippled for the rest of his life...
...The Victim's Song will stand as a monument to his frail, brief, tragic life...
...Please bill me after my first feeding...
...No other monthly periodical contains these well-balanced ingredients: high fiber political and economic analysis, R. Emmett Tyrrell's musings, full course book, movie and saloon reviews, idiotic quotations culled from around the world, and more unregulated additives...
...Nathan Glazer "For those deeply interested in the politics of public policy pertaining to sexual equality, it will open radically new avenues of thought...
...On April 12, 1945, less than three months after his fourth inauguration and less than a month before the Allied victory in Europe, he died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia...
...Morgan that, despite his own obvious affection for his subject, many readers will come away from the book appalled by Roosevelt's arrogance, deceit, and ruthlessness...
...Calvin Coolidge, thehatchet-faced Vermonter who derived his philosophy from McGuffey's Reader...
...Listening to his rambling arguments, reporter Tom Stokes wondered in amazement how he could wander so many times around the barn, like a stray horse with a bad eye on the wrong side, before he could find the door...
...If I'm not completely satisfied, I either haven't read an issue, or I'm offended by the Tip O'Neill zingers...
...And not only the volume of it...
...month supply of The American Spectator today...
...Here again Mr...
...An invasion of the Balkans, they say, would have required fighting across the most rugged terrain in Europe—a repeat, only worse, of the slow, costly struggle up the boot of Italy...
...No doubt there remain among us some old conservatives who still curse the day FDR was born and celebrate his death each April 12 as a deliverance, but even President Reagan has nothing but praise for the man who fastened a centralized welfare state on America...
...Many analysts continue to believe that "A profound, provocative, and disturbing book...
...Roosevelt responded as courageously as he did because of what was already present in his character...
...Kaminsky has not quite forgiven the universe...
...Indeed, the bibliography contains almost nothing that could be said to represent a conservative critique of the New Deal...
...Who could tell what FDR [as President] was really thinking...
...Instead of meeting the Red Army at the Oder, we would have met it at the Rhine...
...Yes...
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...Unwilling or unable to give a fair hearing to the op-position, he relies for his "analysis" on a combination of ad hominem remarks and liberal journalism of the day, as in this description of the court's 1936 in-validation of the Agricultural Adjustment Act: Justice Owen Roberts, once a corporation lawyer with the Philadelphia affiliate of J.P...
...And in Roosevelt's case we are dealing with a man who, more than any other since Lincoln, exerted a decisive influence on the shaping of the American nation and therefore the world...
...So, for example, Henry Morgenthau recorded in his diaries a very different Franklin D. Roosevelt from the man portrayed by Frances Perkins, say, or Henry L. Stimson...
...For the benefit of readers to whom the nation's 32nd President is only a remote historical figure, here are the barebones facts of Roosevelt's life: Scion of a wealthy and aristocratic Hudson River family, distant cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt, he was born in Hyde Park i 1882, attended Groton, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School, married his cousin Eleanor in 1905, was elected to the State Senate in 1910, reelected in 1912, and the following year chosen by President Woodrow Wilson as assistant secretary of the Navy, a post he held until 1920 when he was nominated as James M. Cox's vice presidential running mate on the Democratic ticket...
...President Coolidge, too, gets the Schlesinger treatment...
...Morgan's breezy self-confidence just won't do in a serious historical work...
...of his battles with Tammany Hall and Robert Regular reading got you down...
...Morgan's puerile understanding of constitutional law and his contempt for those who opposed the economic and social policies of the New Deal...
...I should not end without saying what great fun the book offers in anecdote and gossip, and what a marvelous cast of characters...
...Perhaps your search has been in the wrong nooks and craniums...
...These disastrous blunders resulted, it is further alleged, from his arrogant (and wholly unwarranted) belief that he, and he alone, could handle "good old Uncle Joe...
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...This is light-years away from the "what's-the-use" attitude that masquerades as "forgiveness" in History's juries are always out...
...Enough of the story is set forth in the final 150 pages of Morgan's biography to enable the generalist to understand the terms of the controversy and form some judgment about it...
...But is it an accurate likeness...
...Morgan accepts the conventional view and builds a compelling psychological case for it...
...Feel less stimulated, queasy about current events, unable to evaluate the world as a whole...
...It is a tribute to Mr...
...This is a glorious portrait of a man called Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...He is also a senior research fellow at the Hudson Institute...
...Similarly, there is the matter of Mr...
...In addition to his novelist's feel for character, the author manages through more than 800 pages to keep the narrative moving, almost never getting bogged down in irrelevant detail...
...Mellon believed that laws were meant to be obeyed by the weak and not by the strong...
...His grasp of economics is particularly weak...
...Morgan we need to remain skeptical: not because we distrust this biographer but because all biographers are necessarily part fabulists...
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...But in epistemological terms, it is far closer to a novelist's "explanation" of a character's behavior than to the kind of causation that allows us to say with confidence that...
...How different he appeared to the members of his real family, at least three of whom have written extensively about him...
...In the presence of a writer as gifted as Mr...
...Kirkus Reviews $19.95 The University of Chicago Press 5801 Ellis Avenue, Chicago IL 60637 1 GENQJ Tl 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 Roosevelt botched this nation's relations with the Soviet Union...
...His flexible mind did cartwheels...
...And these three were only members of his "official family...
...It was this spiritual battle, this passage from despair to hope, this refusal to accept defeat, this ability to learn from adversity, that transformed him from a shallow, untested, selfishly ambitious and sometimes unscrupulous young Clear vinyl window for schedule, photo, etc...
...Morgan shares with practically all other Roosevelt biographers and friends, that he would have been a very different sort of President—if President at all—had he not been struck down by polio...
...One doesn't have to agree with the court's decision to insist that a serious biographer has an obligation either to set forth the facts of the case without editorial comment or to attempt to come to grips with the profound constitutional issues that lay at its heart...
...It is this political judgment that places so heavy a burden on Roosevelt scholars: If we distrust their political judgment we find it almost impossible to trust their assessment of character...
...This is true at least for domestic affairs, but FDR's leadership in international affairs is another matter...
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...All the more so with personages of our own time: not so much because of lack of crucial in-formation (though this was the case with President Eisenhower until very recently) but because of the sheer volume of it, allowing biographers to pick and choose according to their own predilections...
...this about one of the most literate Presidents of the century, a man who read ancient Greek and Latin for pleasure...
...Morgan's reckoning, this accounts for much if not all of FDR's legendary deviousness: "He learned that there was a part of himself he could not reveal to his mother, and acquired an opaque core, a sort of inner armor...
...He never rebelled openly but learned to be devious, to get around her...
...But as an inveterate reader of biographies, I sometimes find it useful to remind Karl O'Lessker is senior editor of this journal and professor of public and environmental affairs-at Indiana University...
...There are splendid stories, too, of FDR's all-thumbs effort as assistant secretary of the Navy to in-filtrate a homosexual ring in the Naval Training Center at Newport...
...myself of such Pirandellian truths: especially so when the biographer has, as Ted Morgan does, a novelist's gift for bringing his subject to life...
...Cerebral supplement...
...Selfishness, in his view, is merely the least sinister motive for the resistance movement that found its home in the pre-1937 Supreme Court...
...All this is obvious enough...
...I, of course, do not share Kaminsky's pain...
...As he demonstrated in his outstanding biography of Somerset Maugham a few years ago (I have not read his book on the young Winston Churchill), he is able to admire his subject's virtues without worshiping him and disdain his faults without loathing him...
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...In the - event, the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe and Stalin made some empty commitments at Yalta that he had no intention of keeping and no need to keep...
...He had learned as a child to mask his true intentions...
...The Pope was not petitioning to have Agca let out of jail...
...Re-elected two years later, he was the closest thing the Democrats had to a national leader...
...Your brain is crying out for The American Spectator...
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...All this is well told in Ted Morgan's biography...
...Surely, that's a tiny price for a big capacity smart-looking bag that will last for years to come...
...More-over, the Rooseveltians argue, Church-ill's diversionary schemes for invasions everywhere except across the Channel had a lot more to do with fear of a bloody replay of World War I than with grand strategy for the checking of Bolshevism in the East...
...The authors take the position that `equality' as such–men and women indistinguishable–is the wrong paradigm, for law and for policy...
...either way, I understand that I'll get a full refund on the unused portion of my subscription...
...All this seems to me misguided...
...It's a Remarkable Bargain .. . If you've shopped around for high-quality shoulder bags, briefcases, and purses, you're probably aware that most of these items cost at least $50...
...far more important, from Roosevelt's perspective, was a commitment on Stalin's part to enter the war against Japan, a war that, in early 1945, looked likely to drag on with fearful loss of American lives for another two years...
...There is much more in this vein and almost all of it makes good sense...
...I don't mean to suggest that polio had no effect on Roosevelt's character...
...One example: If anything is known with certainty about Roosevelt's family life it is that his mother, Sara, was suffocatingly protective of her only child—almost in a class with Douglas MacArthur's mother...
...Yugoslavia might have been saved, but not West Germany...
...Roosevelt's political career would very likely have followed the same path even if he hadn't been stricken by polio—campaigns for the governorship of New York in 1928 and 1930 and for the presidency in 1932...
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...He said he was "discontent with the world but content with the universe...
...Rosabeth Moss Kanter DAVID L. KIRP, MARK G. YUDOF and MARLENE STRONG FRANKS "One of the things that make Gender Justice unique as well as persuasive is the distinctive stance developed and carried through in the book...
...This doesn't solve every problem, but it is awfully enlightening on many issues, and gives their book a kind of muscular vigor in taking positions which can be consistent rather than simply representing biases, prejudices, tradition, or ideology...
...Even the most conscientious biographer has to cope with the fact that the memoirs, diaries, and oral histories by his subject's contemporaries are the products of different people, each with his own intellectual and psychological baggage...
...Just as, in a smaller way, the first Republican President since the New Deal—Dwight Eisenhower—conferred irrevocable legitimacy upon the Social Security system by not only accepting but expanding it, so Mr...
...Morgan's treatment of these matters is far more balanced than that of the domestic conflicts, perhaps because it rests on a broader base of sources...
...Moses ("Frank Roosevelt, you're a god-damned liar and this time I can prove it...
...Thousands of people who never knew Eric Kaminsky are going to be moved by his story...
...I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 39...
...Recommended and consumed by Drs...
...Morgan tells it with verve and panache...
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...Most of the enormous controversy the Roosevelt presidency generated in its own time has faded into history...
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...He was only forgiving his attacker in the sense that we forgive the universe for not making us immortal...
...The effort to construct a persuasive account of the shaping of Franklin Roosevelt's character rests on two great explanatory pillars in every biography...
...So, for example, we are treated to a caricature of the policy and motives of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon that would not be out of place in Pravda...
...By Mr...
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...If, instead, Roosevelt had followed Churchill's strategic lead and sent Allied armies into the Balkans rather than France, much of the East could have been salvaged...
...The Scandia is available in six colors: Gray, Black, Dark Blue, Khaki, Brown and Mauvetime ,political life seven years later, Morgan writes, "He was locked - in struggle with a powerful enemy, and although his legs remained withered, his spirit triumphed...
...Reagan's frequent references to Roosevelt as a national hero have confirmed his ascent into our American pantheon...
...377050 TOTAL THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 37 man into the mature figure we know as FDR...
...More valuable still is his ability to remain analytical while fully engaged with his subject...
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...The personal complexities of great political leaders result in public policies that shape history, and the biographer's attempt to portray the twists and turns of personality can hardly escape being colored by his response to those policies...
...It was a matter of survival...
...One is the influence of his mother...
...most of it comes straight out of that well-known morality play, Arthur Schlesinger's The Crisis of the Old Order...
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...The right paradigm is `liberty' and the authors demonstrate that even the `equal protection of the laws' clause does not aim at `equality' as a desired outcome but at the `liberty' of each person to be what he or she can be...
...The sturdy canvas Scandia measures 15 %1" across, ll" deep, and 4" wide, and has six inner and outer pockets, plus an inside zipper that lets it expand to a full 8" in width...
...and the greater their literary powers, the more we must be on our guard...
...Can we be sure that the normal maturing process, intensified by these hard campaigns and the even harder tasks of governance, would not have produced an FDR essentially similar to the one we knew...
...Reputations, even of major figures of centuries ago, totter and fall or swell and soar as new generations of historians unearth new material or, more commonly, reinterpret what had always been at hand...
...Morgan tells us all we'll ever need to know of Franklin's and Eleanor's sex lives, including the former's long affair (which may not have been consummated) with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd and the latter's alleged lesbian affair with Nancy Cook and alleged heterosexual affair with Joseph Lash...
...Thus, while I am tempted to call this the best one-volume biography of FDR we are likely to have, Mr...
...Morgan is nevertheless a grossly unreliable interpreter of domestic policy events of the 1920s and 1930s...
...This seems most insightful and I know of no evidence to suggest a different explanation...
...If I had said to my son's murderers what Pope John Paul II said to Agca . . . then this book could be placed on the shelf with all the `self-help' works that offer instant solutions to all problems," she writes...
...He formally became that in 1932 and went on to be elected President for four successive terms, leading the nation through the Great Depression and World War II and serving longer than any President in our history...
...today's American justice system...
...Only in the last few pages does she soften her tone...
...And as for the notorious Yalta'agreement, FDR gave away nothing to Stalin that Stalin didn't already have courtesy of the Red Army...
...But I could not read it without thinking of a distinction made by John Gunther's dying son in Death Be Not Proud...
...It Holds Everything .. . The Scandia is intelligently designed to hold all the books, paper, equipment, clothes, and sundries you could ever need to carry...
...its hand-some, casual look goes as well with a business suit as it does with jeans and a sweater...
...a President's policy views produced a certain line of action...
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...FDR's defenders regard this view as speculative at best...
...Friedman, Kissinger, Hayakawa, and Wattenberg...
...The essence of the charge against Roosevelt is that, by siding with Stalin against Churchill on key issues concerning wartime military strategy and the postwar settlement, he effectively handed over Eastern Europe to Soviet domination...
...It is well she does...
Vol. 19 • March 1986 • No. 3
