Man for All Seasons

...On the face of it, Roosevelt conducted the policy side of his national candidacy in a fashion so casual as to approximate the frivolous...

...There were as ever the sound money, business confidence types who persisted in recommending what had already failed Hoover: meager public spending, balanced budgets, liquidation of the weak, and final recovery of the strong...

...Something echoes over the years to our own situation...

...In it Roosevelt castigates Hoover for his profligacy: "I regard reduction in Federal spending as one of the most important issues of this campaign...

...Historians by the score have written in various notes of exasperation about Roosevelt's tendency once in office to follow several contradictory policies at the same time or, at best, in rapid succession, nra and aaa were experiments if not in collectivism at least in central direction...

...Tugwell's Roosevelt is many men...

...The modern candidate issues position papers at the flicker of an issue and reinterprets them at the tremor of a poll...

...In partial harmony with these Luddites were the rural lifers, eager to empty the vile cities and resettle slum dwellers happily upon the land...

...He listens at length to Tugwell's argument that the crying need of the hour is planning and coordination of all private activity by the Federal government, but he also turns an attentive ear to Henry Morgenthau's Cornell group of monetary tinkerers who know in their hearts that the single and simple remedy for current difficulty is an increase in the price of gold...

...One merit of this book is Tugwell's ability to make plain that the confusions and the cross-purposes of Roosevelt's Presidency accurately reflected the state of learned opinion in the '30s...

...John Kennedy, after all, was able to seek the counsel of economists who were in general agreement among themselves about the uses of monetary and fiscal policy...

...The wonder is not that the Ship of State navigated erratically but that it kept afloat at all...

...He is also a political pragmatist who refuses to be drawn into excessive specificity in a campaign already won...

...Eerily and sadly, the confusion of the '30s about economic remedy sounds like the tangled voices of the advocates of integration and those of Black Power, Black Capitalism and racial mobility, negative income taxes and family allowances, publicly sponsored manpower training and subsidized business training...

...If the budget was reluctantly further unbalanced in '33, '34, '35 and '36, it was catas-trophically nearly balanced in '37...

...He is an amiable charmer who gives every man the usually deceptive appearance of sympathy, support, and agreement...

...In addition to the funny money men and the collectivists of several modes, there were the Brandeis progressives whose sovereign remedy for all ailments was the dismemberment of large corporations and a return to the fancied atomism of the 19th century...

...During this same campaign, though, the thrifty Dutchman in his nature leads him to deliver the Pittsburgh speech that is to plague him for years afterward...

...Once he is safely elected, he is prone to fill the November-January interregnum before inauguration with the activities of a covey of commissions which generate detailed agenda for Congressional and executive action...

...Still, it is equally true that he cares deeply enough about human suffering to support expensive relief and forget about ruinous public spending and huge Federal deficits...

...It almost appeared that Roosevelt had resolved the arguments among his advisers by the device of enacting all their proposals at once...

...The Brandeis wing was appeased with the Temporary National Economic Committee...

...This man for all seasons is the confidant of Georgia farmers and of sophisticated New York lawyers and financiers...

...All that Roosevelt appeared to do was informally designate Raymond Moley as chief speechwriter, chief collector of advice, and chief manager of academic talent...

...Under his mask of charm, Roosevelt is a cold man who keeps his own counsel and covertly entertains himself with the rivalries and jealousies of his staff...

...It focuses on the Brains Trust (the "s" has over the years become vestigial) Raymond Moley organized and staffed with such other Columbia luminaries as Adolf Berle and Tugwell himself...

...Oddly, the contrast is not at all unfavorable to Roosevelt...

...And yet why on earth should anyone expect a politician to be the owner of a single, powerful, coherent doctrine about the nature of economic evil and the appropriate cure for it when the anointed wise men of the community were themselves united only in common detestation for each other's opinions...

...From memory and a very few notes made at the time, Tugwell presents a continuously interesting portrait of a Roosevelt in his essentials not substantially different from the hero of other memoirs...

...Unhappily for Roosevelt there was no single, opposing doctrine upon which he could build as Lloyd George in the 1920s was able to rely upon Keynes...

...The gold buying price was raised...

...Roosevelt's situation was spectacularly more complex than this...

...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN This is a discursive memoir of the eight months before and after the day the Democratic party nominated Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and was never the same again...

...So it went...

...The wise men are at odds once more over a major issue, racial relations...

...Under the circumstances, just a moment of retrospective sympathy is in order for a President upon whom similarly strong and similarly fickle winds of doctrine blew so steadily...

...The policy consensus was in turn based upon a general acceptance within the trade of a post-Keynesian analysis of economic events...

...No one, possibly including Roosevelt, knew before or after November which if any of the assorted nostrums propounded were to be actually considered for Presidential adoption...

...In my opinion, it is the most direct and effective contribution that Government can make to business...