A President in the Making

...And Davis' approach to biography through social and political history is convincingly vindicated...

...In the last analysis, therefore, the "beckoning of destiny" hinged on FDR's inability to resist the overtures of the bosses...

...the rejection of psychologizing...

...Thus FDR easily made his peace in the disillusioned postwar atmosphere, continuing his climb up politics' greasy pole...

...Kenneth S. Davis has given us the Roosevelt we know well: a confident happy being, leading an unruffled, almost old-fashioned existence (yet never the prisoner of the past...

...FDR managed to avoid running for the U.S...

...Sara Roosevelt said that she merely wanted him "to grow to be like his father," not an especially high standard considering James Roosevelt's conventionality among the Dutchess County gentry...

...During the Harvard years, though, three events which may be more closely interrelated than we are led to believe tested Franklin's reserve: His father died (now, more than ever, his mother would try to manipulate him...

...a serene unexamined confidence in the beneficent ongoingness of the universe . . . [and] a rare physical courage . . . he had already raised a wall of reserves around his essential self where dwelled his anxieties, his instinct for power, his driving need to excel and command...

...Howe, convinced that Hoover would swamp the Democratic ticket headed by Smith, strongly opposed Roosevelt's bid for the governorship...

...Their budding love was "an unlikelihood that bred surprise" (indignation on Sara's part), and Davis renders an excellent portrait of Eleanor without speculating on the nature of Franklin's attraction-a notable but perhaps necessary omission...

...The Franklin of Dutchess County moved on to Groton, where he displayed "a veritable passion for conformity...

...The War destroyed the world young Franklin had known, but his old-fashioned confidence remained intact as he forged ahead...

...However, FDR did not don a uniform, possibly because of the affair he was having with Lucy Mercer...

...As he moved from Cambridge into a life of politics, FDR demonstrated energy and an ability to learn rather than deep intelligence...

...Senate in 1926, but he could not resist a draft to run for Governor of New York in 1928...

...He remained a Grotonian, garnered a gentlemanly "C" average and, as editor of the Crimson, advised freshmen that their responsibility was to "be always active...

...The problem could be that most historians are favorably disposed to FDR (although this does not preclude their mentioning such qualities as opportunism or vacillation...

...at fourscore plus he is able to relate them with ageless vigor...

...What he had in lieu of a philosophy was a certain kind of faith...

...Roosevelt was constantly under pressure to reenter the political fray, something he intended to do at the propitious moment...

...Davis' explicit anti-Freudian prejudice, announced early in the book, does have drawbacks...

...Still, young Franklin was supervised closely-Sara's pampering leading James to encourage the boy's masculine tendencies wherever possible...

...Certainly the facade changed little when Roosevelt matriculated at Harvard...

...Despite an abundance of literature on Roosevelt's career, no psychobiographer has ever put him on the couch, there to find a child starved for affection or a young man tortured by an identity crisis resolved only by the pursuit of power...

...Their efforts were rewarded by the mid-'20s...

...Davis assures us that behind this conventional facade were "reserves that would widen and deepen with the years," but the statement must be taken on faith...

...the New Deal fits their liberal principles...

...My Uncle Warren has fully a hundred stories to illustrate the fact that Roosevelt's guide was expediency...

...It is clear that FDR's parents had no ambitions for him, other than his fitting into the style of living they knew...

...His subsequent crippling illness, of course, was never part of the script...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, California State University, San Francisco At dinner with Burton K. Wheeler on the eve of his 91st birthday, I asked the former Democratic Senator from Montana about his initial encounter with Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

...His defeat for the Vice Presidency in 1920 was not deemed serious, and was followed by a temporary plunge into private business that was in keeping with the temper of the times...

...We can never go back," he said soon after the Armistice...

...But even self-interest must have an explanation, and I have so far failed to discover the man or the book that can tell me exactly why Franklin Roosevelt sought the office of the Presidency...

...Eleanor, for her part, had been terribly hurt by the Mercer affair, and had decided that once Franklin's recovery was assured, she was going "her own way, living her own life, having only such relations with her husband as one law partner might have with another on matters affecting the firm...

...In addition to his internal resources, Roosevelt could draw on the support of Eleanor and Howe during this crucial period...

...we have no regrets...

...But their motives for aiding Roosevelt were very different: Howe had his raison d'etre in politics...

...he was rejected by the secret society Porcellian...

...The 'good old days' are gone past forever...

...It was in 1924," he recalled, "and I said to myself, 'That man hasn't one deep-seated principle.'" Much as Wheeler's opposition to FDR on the issues of enlarging the Supreme Court and entering World War II may have colored his recollections, the judgment he rendered was and is common...

...Uncharacteristically, Davis adds that whereas young Theodore was dominated by a father whom he feared, loved and always measured himself against, young Franklin was influenced by a mother whom he loved yet sought to be independent of...

...and Eleanor entered his life...

...While at college FDR began to model his career on that of Eleanor's Uncle Theodore, a process Davis carefully traces, observing that the principal difference between the two men was TR's "hardness, bold ruthlessness, joy in killing, and love of physical combat," compared to FDR's "sensitivity, empathy, in-tuitiveness, and involuted guile...

...Yet polio did not permanently affect his character...

...He was, to be sure, still following the TR model, and his attitude toward the European war mirrored Teddy's bellicosity, not the pacifism of Daniels, to whom he was almost insubordinate...

...Fortunately, at this point he met the gnomish newspaperman Louis Howe (undoubtedly the most sympathetically sketched character in Davis' book), and formed an association of enduring importance...

...the very length of the work...

...His sole distinction seems to have been membership in the Democratic party...

...Instead, the absence of any tragic sense in his personality enabled him to face his illness with an optimistic faith, a cheerfulness that was constant and infectious...

...Nevertheless, these traits, as well as a lively and pointed prose, do allow Davis to approach the thorny problem of Roosevelt's motivation obliquely...

...What is missing from this otherwise credible analysis is an attempt to plumb the sources of these anxieties, instincts and needs...

...When FDR joined the Wilson Administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and chafed under the command of Josephus Daniels, he "could not have functioned anywhere near as well as he did without Howe at his side...

...Davis suggests that this event presented FDR with a crisis of the soul, a moment when he felt that God had abandoned him...

...Each character (several of whom are delineated with more precision and sympathy than Roosevelt himself) yields some insight into the protagonist by way of his personal relations with the future President...

...Although idealists like Wheeler saw in him a person devoid of deep-seated principles, the pragmatists found him immensely attractive...

...What mattered most was a political career...

...Together they defeated his mother's plans for his retirement (thereby helping him to achieve a necessary independence from her) and moved him back into political life...

...Indeed, by current biographical standards, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, with its eloquent title, suggesting the bygone view of a God-guided nation, has a faintly Victorian air-the concern with setting...

...According to Davis, the result, at age 14, was "a mind extraordinarily facile, able to acquire and retain factual information with far more ease than most can do . . . he was among the least introspective of boys, with no natural bent toward self-examination...

...Each setting presents the world FDR could have reacted to at different points in his life: family, school, New York politics, Washington, the world scene...