class will practice on the help, and of the governmentâs duty to do something real and personal for the assistance of those who are so far down that they canât help themselvesâ¦. He needs to be fought all the time ⦠but if the country doesnât go absolutely broke in his time, it will be a more intelligent and a better country after him.â
Not long after I settled in here as a foreign correspondent, I came, like the Americans I lived and mingled with, to forget all about Rooseveltâs affliction. Only from time to time did the memory float up as a question: by what miraculous inner drive could this cripple undertake the prodigious business of pulling American up by its shoddy shoes from the depths of despair and misery? (I had seen lots of both in two long drives across the country in 1933 and 1934, and was constantly amazed and relieved that there had been no outbreak of the threatened revolution.) And often in the Oval Office, I admired the marvelously assumed ease and casualness after some stunning blow, as at his press conference on the Tuesday, two days after Pearl Harbor, when he alone knew the shattering damage to the Pacific fleet (five battleships sunk or disabled, fourteen other ships, a hundred and twenty aircraft destroyed, two thousand seamen and four hundred civilians killed).
We did not know until Roosevelt had died, in April 1945, how distraught and disoriented he had been, how mortally sick, for the last year of his life. We never knew for twenty more years until Churchillâs doctor published a diary that during the three and a half years when Roosevelt and Churchill were companions in arms, and during which Churchill had borne responsibility for the daily operations of every theater of the war, that Churchill had suffered one serious heart attack, three pneumonias, two strokes, an abdominal operation, hernia, deafness, an intractable skin disease, eye trouble and innumerable minor ailments.
That these two great men and chronic invalids should, more than any other two humans, have run and won the war for us is a mystery that, as Dr. Buechner might say, âsome people call luck, some coincidence, and some call the grace of God.â
6
Maker of a President:
Eleanor Roosevelt
(1962)
M rs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the widow of the thirty-second president of the United States, died last week in New York City where she was born seventy-eight years ago. Except for increasing deafness in old age, she had never been troubled with anything much more bothersome than a cold or a broken ankle until she took to a hospital bed a few weeks ago with a pestiferous condition that was eventually diagnosed as anemia complicated by a lung infection. âEleanor,â Franklin Roosevelt used to say, watching her and her notebook whirl continuously around the United States to check on soil erosion, unemployment, sick leave among nurses, or silicosis among miners, âhas time for everybodyâs troubles but her own.â
It was a proud complaint which, in the missionary days of the New Deal, the newspaper cartoonists turned into a national joke. Until Mrs. Roosevelt, First Ladies were supposed to be the most gracious furnishing of the White House. They kept the silver polished and the fires burning against the unpredictable return of the great man from the crushing appointments of his office. It is a tradition honored up to 1933 and since 1945. The twelve intervening years turned the White House into a sort of national hotel operation under emergency conditions. Protocol was packed off with the bags of Mr. and Mrs. Hoover. The presidentâs bedroom was invaded at breakfast by the Brain Trust. Lunch was a sandwich on a tray dispensed to visiting governors, labor leaders, national committeemen. Birthdays, national holidays, and most Sunday evenings were the occasion of the famous and inedible Roosevelt buffets.
This genial chaos was the logical extension, on a national scale, of
Not long after I settled in here as a foreign correspondent, I came, like the Americans I lived and mingled with, to forget all about Rooseveltâs affliction. Only from time to time did the memory float up as a question: by what miraculous inner drive could this cripple undertake the prodigious business of pulling American up by its shoddy shoes from the depths of despair and misery? (I had seen lots of both in two long drives across the country in 1933 and 1934, and was constantly amazed and relieved that there had been no outbreak of the threatened revolution.) And often in the Oval Office, I admired the marvelously assumed ease and casualness after some stunning blow, as at his press conference on the Tuesday, two days after Pearl Harbor, when he alone knew the shattering damage to the Pacific fleet (five battleships sunk or disabled, fourteen other ships, a hundred and twenty aircraft destroyed, two thousand seamen and four hundred civilians killed).
We did not know until Roosevelt had died, in April 1945, how distraught and disoriented he had been, how mortally sick, for the last year of his life. We never knew for twenty more years until Churchillâs doctor published a diary that during the three and a half years when Roosevelt and Churchill were companions in arms, and during which Churchill had borne responsibility for the daily operations of every theater of the war, that Churchill had suffered one serious heart attack, three pneumonias, two strokes, an abdominal operation, hernia, deafness, an intractable skin disease, eye trouble and innumerable minor ailments.
That these two great men and chronic invalids should, more than any other two humans, have run and won the war for us is a mystery that, as Dr. Buechner might say, âsome people call luck, some coincidence, and some call the grace of God.â
6
Maker of a President:
Eleanor Roosevelt
(1962)
M rs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the widow of the thirty-second president of the United States, died last week in New York City where she was born seventy-eight years ago. Except for increasing deafness in old age, she had never been troubled with anything much more bothersome than a cold or a broken ankle until she took to a hospital bed a few weeks ago with a pestiferous condition that was eventually diagnosed as anemia complicated by a lung infection. âEleanor,â Franklin Roosevelt used to say, watching her and her notebook whirl continuously around the United States to check on soil erosion, unemployment, sick leave among nurses, or silicosis among miners, âhas time for everybodyâs troubles but her own.â
It was a proud complaint which, in the missionary days of the New Deal, the newspaper cartoonists turned into a national joke. Until Mrs. Roosevelt, First Ladies were supposed to be the most gracious furnishing of the White House. They kept the silver polished and the fires burning against the unpredictable return of the great man from the crushing appointments of his office. It is a tradition honored up to 1933 and since 1945. The twelve intervening years turned the White House into a sort of national hotel operation under emergency conditions. Protocol was packed off with the bags of Mr. and Mrs. Hoover. The presidentâs bedroom was invaded at breakfast by the Brain Trust. Lunch was a sandwich on a tray dispensed to visiting governors, labor leaders, national committeemen. Birthdays, national holidays, and most Sunday evenings were the occasion of the famous and inedible Roosevelt buffets.
This genial chaos was the logical extension, on a national scale, of
Similar Books
