Roosevelt's Road to Leadership
BURNS, JAMES MACGREGOR
Roosevelt's Road to Leadership By James MacGregor Burns Associate Professor of Political Science, Williams College; author, "Leadership in a Democracy," "Congress on Trial" How does a nation find...
...The most important of these until early in Roosevelt's Presidential years was Louis McHenry Howe, who is the subject of a chatty, sparkling biography by his assistant for many years, Lela Stiles.1 The author tells us of Howe's early days as a newspaperman and of the momentous occasion??for Howe??when he watched admiringly in Albany as young Senator Roosevelt took on Tammany in a bitter fight over the election of a Tammany Senator...
...he provides the reader with notes on the voluminous sources and lets him evaluate their worth...
...At Groton, he studied the dead languages and other "cultural" subjects...
...But more important than any of these seems to have been an enormous ambition for political success combined with a wily, tenacious, patient playing of the political game, an activity in which Howe had a major role...
...Generations of British leaders were educated for political authority at Eton and Harrow, Cambridge and Oxford...
...author, "Leadership in a Democracy," "Congress on Trial" How does a nation find its leaders...
...By Frank Freidel...
...One theory is that he was lucky enough to surround himself with a group of bright advisers and assistants, and that they made all the difference...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt is a case in point...
...With an unusual combination of impeccable scholarship and easy writing style, he shows us the many facets of the late President's life...
...Howe was innately suspicious of almost everyone he dealt with??a valuable trait in the rough-and-tumble of politics...
...6.00...
...Little, Brown...
...311 pp...
...They couldn't make a bigger mistake...
...And, as he played this game, Roosevelt learned from his mistakes and mastered such political arts as when to wait and when to move fast, how to deal with friend and foe, how to play the patronage game, how to serve Al Smith and at the same time gain strength for himself in that service, how to use the radio, how to win friends in the Democratic party throughout the country, how to straddle thorny issues like Prohibition, when to speak out and when to stay silent...
...Greece carefully tested young men to see which of them had the essential qualities of leadership...
...All through his life, Roosevelt had a knack of using??indeed exploiting??his assistants...
...During this period, Howe performed an incredible variety of services for Roosevelt, from setting grand political strategy to going to auctions and bidding on Navy prints...
...Roosevelt tended to ride on ahead regardless of obstacles...
...At Harvard, he got a legalistic, academic treatment of American government...
...But he loved his boss, and perhaps Roosevelt's greatest tribute from Howe came shortly before the little man died: "I have been as close to Franklin Roosevelt as a valet, and he is still a hero to me...
...Roosevelt tended to trust people...
...The author is not one to pass general judgments, at least in his early volumes...
...As far back as 1912, he wrote him a letter with the salutation, "Beloved and Revered Future President...
...By Lela Stiles...
...As in so many things, the United States leaves the political education of its youth largely to chance...
...1 The Man Behind Roosevelt...
...World...
...2 Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal...
...In neither place did he learn the tough, mean facts of political life that he would have to master later on...
...Howe was a restraining force...
...What light does Freidel throw on the question of how Roosevelt came to be what he was...
...4.75...
...The jacket blurb implies that "Howe made Roosevelt President," but Miss Stiles does not fall into this error...
...The Ordeal2 is the second volume of Freidel's projected six-volume biography of Roosevelt...
...Almost every great country has faced this question in one fashion or another...
...Roosevelt had the advantage of a great political name, a wife who was a decided political asset, and enough money to let him give full time to politics when he wished...
...In the Middle Ages, books on how princes should be educated for ruling their peoples were best-sellers...
...He was Roosevelt's eyes, ears and legs, endlessly conferring with people who might be useful to "Franklin," rapidly dispensing with those who could not be...
...320 pp...
...Roosevelt, in short, learned to be a politician from the experience of being a politician...
...George Washington Plunkett, the Tammany pundit, knew what he was talking about when he derided the young men who thought they could "learn how to be successful in politics from books, and they cram their heads with all sorts of college rot...
...From then on, the essential meaning of Howe's life lay in Roosevelt's career...
...Howe's real relationship to Roosevelt can be understood only in the context of a full picture of Roosevelt's life itself, and this is the job that Professor Frank Freidel of Stanford University has set for himself...
...How, then, did Roosevelt become one of the three or four most masterful politicians of his time...
...And in one of Roosevelt's most crucial decisions??to run for Governor in 1928??Howe was not with his chief at the time and, in fact, opposed his decision...
...Howe was important to Roosevelt, but he was not indispensable...
...The exchanges between the men, now available to scholars at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, reveal that Howe was the adviser and prodder, Roosevelt the master...
...And a complex, many-sided person he was...
...Despite his occasional appearance of softness, he was too strong and determined a man to be dominated by any assistant...
...Cabinet councils often seemed like reunions of Old Harrovians...
...He was not born that way...
...Howe helped Roosevelt win re-election to the State Senate in the same year, when Roosevelt was ill and unable to campaign, assisted the latter during his seven-and-a-half years as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and played his most crucial role when his chief was crippled by polio in the years after 1921...
...His dwarfish body and hollow, seamed face invariably won him the description of "gnomelike" (an adjective he didn't like), and he could turn a baleful glare on visitor and assistant alike, including Miss Stiles...
...Whether his early political experience and ability to win votes helped later on in the far more exacting task of ruling a nation in crisis??this is a crucial question that Freidel's later books will help to answer...
...But certain conclusions emerge from the facts themselves...
...Perhaps his greatest value lay in his caution and cynicism...
...The fact that Freidel could write a book of this length on the period between 1918 and Roosevelt's Gubernatorial years indicates how full a life the latter led even during his less active years...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 19
