REVIEWS

...Following his example, presidential contenders as diverse as Gary Hart, George Wallace, and Jimmy Carter have tried, with varying success, to personify cool vigor...

...Neither shifting campaign styles nor skeptical scholars are likely to alter the basic contours of Roosevelt's popular image...

...Richard M. Nixon escapes psychoanalysis to face the author's wrath...

...Overall, Leuchtenburg is better at telling stories than finding meaning...

...Roosevelt and Nixon stand out as the most complicated—and perhaps the smartest—presidents of the past half-century...

...Many members of his generation, also buoyed by prosperity, frightened by the cold war, and discomfited by the civil rights movement (which had never been a Roosevelt priority), joined Reagan in belatedly deciding that liberal Democrats were too soft abroad and too generous at home...

...Before the 1930s, it was hard to tell conservatives from self-proclaimed progressives...

...Watergate was "not at all the same" as Roosevelt's harassment of opponents...

...Millions of Americans too young to remember Roosevelt firsthand have heard tales of his benevolence from parents or grandparents (many of whom were Popular Front radicals...

...Nevertheless, John befriended Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., who helped him win a Senate seat in 1952 and the presidential nomination in 1960...

...The Kennedy administration, whose generosity to big business Leuchtenburg considers a lapse from grace, probably made fewer concessions than the Roosevelt administration during 1933-34 and•in World War H. 129 Jimmy Carter was no anomaly living largely "outside the history of the [Democratic] party...

...Although Dwight D. Eisenhower had been chosen with Roosevelt's customary nonchalance to command the invasion of Europe, Leuchtenburg concludes that he never fell under FDR's shadow to the extent Truman did...

...The normative Roosevelt who emerges piecemeal over 329 pages is a cagey yet charming fellow who champions social justice and leads the United States from isolationism to world power...

...Leuchtenburg offers a suggestion, too fleeting to be helpful, that FDR was a "father figure" who evoked ambivalent feelings in his successors...

...This version of events routinely appears in Democratic campaign speeches, but a historian should know better and, at some level, Leuchtenburg undoubtedly does...

...On the one hand, Democrats stand in Roosevelt's shadow when they expand programs started during the New Deal, hire his former advisers, or win votes from the same sort of people who made up the Roosevelt coalition...

...perhaps he senses that these minority opinions are more easily ignored than refuted...

...Leuchtenburg documents this "baffling, labyrinthine relationship" without explaining it...

...These allusions served, moreover, to distance Nixon from his presidential father figure, Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...During his 12 years in office, moreover, Democrats and Republicans sorted themselves into the ideological pattern that still survives today...

...less cynically, politicians seeking to expand the welfare state still claim him as their mentor...

...And Ronald Reagan's route rightward from Hyde Park was no labyrinthine detour but a well-traveled thoroughfare...

...Conversely, Ronald Reagan never got over the "adulation" that accompanied his support for Roosevelt in four elections...

...on the verge of breaking with FDR in 1934, Huey Long aptly complained, "Maybe he says 'Fine!' to everybody...

...Much as an earlier generation wondered whether the New Deal represented the fulfillment or the degradation of progressivism, now conservatives, neoconservatives, liberals, and neoliberals debate whether the Great Society merely enlarged the New Deal or made basic changes in the means and ends of reform...

...After briefly discussing "how little Roosevelt mattered" to Gerald R. Ford, Leuchtenburg tries to make sense of Jimmy Carter...

...Nixon repeatedly emphasized his intellectual debts to Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt...

...but soon he alienated liberal Democrats who better understood the New Deal heritage...

...One of Leuchtenburg's analogies points to the basic problem...

...Leuchtenburg ultimately falls back on psychoanalytic language to explain LBJ's failure to match Roosevelt's record: an "obsessive" identification with his political patriarch masked resent127 ment...

...Rather, we must take seriously Carter's identification with the Southern "tradition" of Richard Russell, a Roosevelt loyalist until the late 1930s whose growing hostility to bureaucracy and presidential power moved him to join, then lead, the Senate's conservative bloc...

...What is remarkable, however, is that Leuchtenburg's own interpretation of the 1930s has grown less sophisticated...

...The best chapter in the book, on John E Kennedy, begins with his father, Joseph, who first held high office under FDR and then repudiated that "crippled son of a bitch...

...If a revisionist diplomatic historian had written in similar fashion about the "shadow" cast on foreign policy by the quest for foreign markets, he would be chided, perhaps by Leuchtenburg himself, for imprecision and failure to prove the connection between talk and action...

...Yet he saw "no validity" in the frequent comparisons of Roosevelt's administration and his own...

...holding Truman responsible for an unnecessary cold war, some left liberals supported Henry A. Wallace on the Progressive party ticket...

...On the other hand, Republicans also stand in that shadow because they try so hard to escape it by curtailing programs begun during the New Deal, shunning his advisers as traitors or fools, and seeking to smash the Roosevelt coalition...

...Rarely, however, do insights build to a convincing case...

...Almost by definition, therefore, conservatives who reach the White House must be anomalies or apostates...

...Thus, contrary to seekers after a usable liberal past, there were many plausible paths from the New Deal coalition...

...In his judgment, President Carter was a technocrat who appreciated FDR primarily as a war leader and sponsor of a technological marvel, rural electrification...

...In both substance and style Johnson borrowed from FDR and the New Deal...

...Much as Lincoln lives on pedestals, mountain tops, and in television "docudramas" as the Great Emancipator, FDR will be recalled as founding father of the welfare state...

...For the most part, however, his metaphor means that Roosevelt overshadowed all subsequent presidents...

...Carter's failure to see "how strong a shadow FDR cast" contributed significantly to his defeat in 1980, Leuchtenburg concludes...

...Although this framework bolsters liberal morale, it drastically oversimplifies political history...

...Thereafter, Kennedy curried favor with Eleanor Roosevelt and often quoted her husband...

...Sometimes interesting insights interrupt the narrative...

...Those of us who are unencumbered by Roosevelt legends should heed three lessons to be learned from his administration, particularly when welfarestate liberals return to power: reform enthusiasms pass quickly, leaving basic problems unsolved...

...How much did rank-and-file participation influence the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s and the Office of Economic Opportunity in the 1960s...

...Disdain for Nixon should not prevent scholars from exploring such parallels...

...Journalists, trained to spurn serious commitment and long paragraphs, look askance at those politicians—Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondalewhose quips fall flat...

...19.95 Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, the worst crises any contemporary voter remembers...

...Rather, the prevailing style of political campaigning and commentary bears the mark of John F. Kennedy...

...In 1953, he had called Social Security "as dated as silent movies," and seven years later still rejected New Deal programs as a guide for his "new generation...

...the Great Society, a better New Deal, was his "means of revenge...

...All claimed to represent the true party of Lincoln and, considering his complex personality and masterful political juggling, most could cite some words or acts to sustain the claim...

...Respectful of FDR's wartime leadership, Eisenhower nevertheless disliked his "frivolous" manner and sponsorship of "creeping socialism...

...Rather, they show how participants in his coalition, an amalgam of former Whigs, Democrats, and Know Nothings united by antislavery sentiment, later became robber barons and mugwumps, white racists and black militants, expansionists and anti-imperialists...

...and no president deserves uncritical support...

...The warm reception this book has received shows what a traditional liberal historian can get away with...

...Unlike Kennedy, Johnson won a seat in Congress as a Roosevelt loyalist...

...Leuchtenburg says, for example, that Truman's strident declarations of cold war were intended partly to distance himself from Roosevelt, and he believes that Johnson exaggerated his connection with FDR to distance himself from the Kennedys...

...In the latter case, however, historians no longer contribute to the folklore by measuring all Gilded Age Republicans against a normative liberal Lincoln...

...LEUCHTENBURG'S FAVORITE METAPHOR covers SO much political landscape that no president can escape FDR's shadow...

...Like most interpreters of modern America, Leuchtenburg postulates a linear reform tradition stretching from the Progressive era through the New Deal and Great Society to the present, views charismatic presidents as anthropomorphic embodiments of the tradition, and considers liberalism the normal national mood...

...lacks...

...It means that the problem of corporate power, which worried Americans 40 years before the New Deal, remains unresolved 40 years afterward...

...IN THE IRREGULAR COURSE of American politics, substantive issues change less than campaign styles, which presidents can alter more easily than the economic system...

...Holding Truman responsible for Washington corruption and national boredom, prominent centrist liberals, including two of FDR's sons, tried to deny him the Democratic nomination in 1948...

...thereafter, though cultural differences sometimes shattered economic alliances and electoral appeals still tended to obfuscate, a coherent spectrum could be discerned: liberals have wanted to expand the welfare state begun during the Depression, while conservatives have tried to dismantle it or limit its growth...

...According to Leuchtenburg, only the Watergate scandal prevented Nixon from dismantling the "New Deal and its progeny...

...Nixon's curbs on public advocacy for the poor and frequent praise of rugged individualism coexisted with increased social spending...

...During the 1950s, liberals accused President Eisenhower of betraying Roosevelt's commitment to the needy, and conservatives charged him with creating a "dime-store New Deal...

...The current discussion of "industrial policy," for example, rephrases old debates about "planning," the comparable buzz word of the Great Depression...

...Instead of examining federal programs, Leuchtenburg quotes Johnson's hyperbolic homage to FDR and offers another unexplicated metaphor, that the New Deal was "midwife" to the Great Society...

...In similar fashion, Democrats drifting toward neoliberalism try to hold workingclass votes by continuing to invoke Roosevelt's name...

...Harry S Truman, FDR's casually chosen running mate in 1944, proposed extensions of the New Deal while distancing himself from "crackpot" New Dealers...

...For example, was the Johnson administration's stress on "maximum feasible participation" in poverty programs unprecedented, or was it the New Deal rhetoric of grass-roots democracy translated into social science jargon...

...Now, appalled by the recent conservative resurgence, he presents Roosevelt as an unambiguous patron of the welfare state...

...In the 20th century too, political bonds break as issues go in and out of fashion...

...After tacking rightward to survive in Texas politics, he entered the White House eager to expand the welfare state...

...Yet In the Shadow of FDR contains these methodological flaws, and few (if any) reviewers have interrupted their praise to comment...

...John F Kennedy was the first neoliberal...

...Analogous family folklore, shrewdly mobilized, kept most blacks loyal to the "party of Lincoln" long after his death and long after Republican presidents stopped protecting their civil rights...

...His classic, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, published in 1963 at a moment of liberal ascendancy, documented FDR's hesitancy to support unemployment relief and the National Labor Relations Act...

...Their personal relationship aside, impressive continuities linked the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations...

...Nor does Reagan's preference for one-liners derive solely from his television career...

...Leuchtenburg exhibits least precision in judging continuity and change...

...This problem is more difficult than most ideological combatants suppose...

...Roosevelt's constituency was broader than Lincoln's, his world view less consistent, and his manner less direct...

...Even after winning the presidency as a conservative Republican, Reagan quoted FDR, emulated his rhetorical style, and hailed him as an "American giant...

...Roosevelt, though guilty of "guile and deceit," is credited with a "measured" approach to foreign affairs that Johnson lacked...

...While stressing domestic similarities, Leuchtenburg strains to distinguish FDR's undeclared war in the Atlantic during 1941 from Johnson's undeclared war in Southeast Asia...

...Yet the debate about planning—like political discourse generally—is flashier than during the 1930s...

...progress depends on grass-roots pressure as well as on a receptive White House...

...FDR, who began his career on the stump and adapted brilliantly to radio, retained a talent for flourish and formality Reagan...

...Starting in the late 1950s, Nixon both exaggerated his intimacy with Eisenhower and pointedly asserted his own • independence...

...William E. Leuchtenburg shows how eight subsequent presidents, their allies, and adversaries viewed Roosevelt and invoked his name to win elections...

...If his obstruction of justice in a burglary case was unique, his wiretaps, bugs, and fears that foreign powers manipulated domestic dissent do recall FDR's campaign against the America First Committee and congressional noninterventionists...

...Leuchtenburg to the contrary, President Reagan's "cadences" are not the same as Roosevelt's...

...Both these Republicans expanded the welfare state in spite of themselves, eased the Soviet-American cold war while using the CIA to undermine Third World governments, and tried to sound statesmanlike while subordinates did their dirty work...

...Both assumptions are questionable...

...By and large, Leuchtenburg seems less concerned with assessing the Roosevelt administration's long-range consequences than with defending a version of liberalism he retrospectively attributes to it...

...Most important, Roosevelt's effect on his successors remains unexplained because Leuchtenburg substitutes weak metaphors for sustained argument and pays too much attention to what presidents (or other politicians) say but not enough to what they do...

...As he notes, ritual appeals to the mythic FDR resemble earlier invocations of Abraham Lincoln...

...Lyndon B. Johnson sensed as much when he complained that Kennedy was a "little too conservative to suit my taste...

...Furthermore, despite Leuchtenburg's lament that references to Roosevelt have become "largely ritualistic," the mythology retains political potency as well as good prospects for longevity...

...Both father and son came to associate New Deal liberalism with softness...

...Given these legacies, it is hardly surprising that historians, pundits, and politicians have used Roosevelt as a standard to measure presidential achievement...

...To be sure, he passes over—instead of rebutting—scholarship skeptical of Roosevelt's diplomatic skill and commitment to reform...

...Indeed, better than Democrats who mythologized FDR, Nixon understood that he was an "operator" who charmed senators at home and prime ministers abroad, as well as a showman who knew how to "lift people...

...This reprise does not mean that Felix Rohatyn and Robert Reich write in the shadow of Bernard Baruch and Stuart Chase, their unsung antecedents...

...Leuchtenburg's political light meter goes hay128 wire when it places Richard Nixon in the shadow of FDR...