Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York in this day in 1882.
"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt in a speech (1935)
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt in a speech (1935)
Before Pearl Harbor, before polio and his entry into politics, FDR was a handsome, pampered, but strong-willed youth, the center of a rarefied world. In Before the Trumpet, the award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward transports the reader to that world—Hyde Park on the Hudson and Campobello Island, Groton and Harvard and the Continent—to recreate as never before the formative years of the man who would become the 20th century’s greatest president. Here, drawn from thousands of original documents (many never previously published), is a richly-detailed, intimate biography, its central figure surrounded by a colorful cast that includes an opium smuggler and a pious headmaster; Franklin's distant cousin, Theodore and his remarkable mother, Sara; and the still-more remarkable young woman he wooed and won, his cousin Eleanor. This is a tale that would grip the reader even if its central character had not grown up to be FDR. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/241153/before-the-trumpet/
H.W. Brands
Book details
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
By H.W. Brands
Doubleday; 896 pages; $35
By H.W. Brands
富蘭克林·德拉諾·羅斯福
拯救國家和世界的人
2008年10月30日
摘自《經濟學人》印刷版
如果美國下一任總統想要成功，他至少需要繼承羅斯福在任期間所展現的那種品格和才能。
「我的政策和憲法一樣激進，」羅斯福在1932年競選期間曾這樣說道，當時他被指責想要將公用事業國有化。在這部令人印象深刻的新傳記中，曾撰寫過安德魯·傑克遜和本傑明·富蘭克林傳記的H.W.布蘭茲著重強調了羅斯福的貴族出身與他激進政治理念之間的對比。
羅斯福的祖先菲利普·德·拉·諾耶加入了「財富號」的清教徒行列，這艘船是繼「五月花號」之後抵達普利茅斯的第二艘船。他出身於哈德遜河谷的鄉紳和紐約的百萬富翁商人家庭，先後就讀於格羅頓學院和哈佛大學。他成長於伊迪絲華頓的世界。他的遠房表兄西奧多·羅斯福是美國總統，他娶了西奧多的姪女埃莉諾。 （布蘭茲先生對埃莉諾的刻畫入木三分，對這對夫婦的婚外情也處理得十分巧妙。）
儘管羅斯福擁有貴族般的自信，但他身上卻絲毫沒有傲慢的氣息。布蘭茲先生引用羅斯福的朋友雷·莫利的話說，羅斯福的魅力絕非虛張聲勢：“一旦有人觸怒他，他就會變得強硬、固執、足智多謀、毫不妥協。”
羅斯福隨時準備採取激進的措施來應對危險的局面。然而，他的直覺以及許多政策的最終結果往往是保守的。作為一名激進派，他維護了舊秩序——並且比傑斐遜之後任何一位總統都更有效地提升了美國的實力。
簡而言之，他是一個極其複雜的人物，而作者巧妙地處理了他的複雜性。羅斯福31歲時成為海軍助理部長，但八年後不幸罹患小兒麻痺症。布蘭茲先生並不十分認同這種說法，即羅斯福的患病與他因官僚機構對水手同性戀誘拐醜聞負有責任而感到羞愧有關。
無論如何，他當時身體嚴重殘疾，甚至一度癱瘓失禁。但到了1924年，也就是他患病三年後，他再次成為民主黨的一位重量級人物。他的復出部分歸功於他成功地掩蓋了自己的殘疾，部分歸功於當時新聞媒體不像現在這樣具有侵入性。但最重要的是，這要歸功於他驚人的決心。 1928年，他被選為紐約州州長；1932年，正值美國經濟危機最嚴重之際，他當選為美國總統。
勇氣、魅力、足智多謀的謀略以及不為人知的堅韌使他得以拯救美國資本主義，儘管正如他自己所說，結束大蕭條的是“戰爭贏家博士”，而不是“新政博士”。布蘭茲先生精闢地描述了羅斯福如何以極大的耐心引導美國民眾認識到法西斯主義的危險。然而，他對國際政治的處理則略顯不足，他秉持著傳統的觀點，認為在第二戰場的戰略爭論中，美國將軍們是對的，而溫斯頓·邱吉爾則被帝國懷舊情結蔽了雙眼。他將約翰·梅納德·凱恩斯貶為“英國知識分子”，認為凱因斯無權向美國總統提供建議，顯然他並不知道凱因斯是巴黎和會的重要參與者。
羅斯福決心摧毀帝國主義。布蘭茲先生或許過度強調了羅斯福之子艾利奧特錄製的一段深夜談話，在談話中，羅斯福聲稱邱吉爾和戴高樂正在密謀維護英法帝國。羅斯福的懷疑或許不無道理，但他比兒子更清楚大聯盟的種種曖昧之處。
他擁有同時代人中最敏銳的政治頭腦。同時，他也是一位精於權謀的大師，行事並非按計劃，而是憑藉直覺，並輔以豐富的經驗。
羅斯福是林肯之後最偉大的美國總統，他卓越的才能經歷了個人疾病、經濟災難和世界大戰的考驗。他利用一切可用的工具來領導美國，無論和平時期或戰爭時期：政黨、官僚機構、國會以及當時的媒體。無論誰贏得2008年的總統大選，都會發現這些槓桿已經鏽蝕、衰弱或扭曲。他的任務將是重新將總統職位與國家和世界聯繫起來——這需要富蘭克林·羅斯福的才華和品格，而正是這些才華和品格，才使美國從經濟困境的低谷走向了權力的巔峰。
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The man who saved his country, and the world
Oct 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition
From The Economist print edition
If he is to succeed, America’s next president needs to inherit at least a modicum of the character and talent that FDR brought to his tasks
“MY POLICY is as radical…as the constitution,” said FDR during the 1932 election campaign when he was accused of wanting to nationalise the utilities. In this impressive new biography, H.W. Brands, who has written books about Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin, stresses the contrast between Roosevelt’s aristocratic origins and his radical politics. Roosevelt’s ancestor, Philippe De La Noye, joined the Pilgrim Fathers on the Fortune, the next ship to arrive in Plymouth after the Mayflower. He was descended from Hudson Valley landed gentry and millionaire New York merchants, and went to Groton and Harvard. He grew up in the world of Edith Wharton. His fifth cousin, Theodore, was president of the United States, and he married Theodore’s niece, Eleanor. (Mr Brands paints an understanding portrait of Eleanor and handles the couple’s infidelities with tact.)
Though he had patrician self-confidence, there was no snobbery in Roosevelt. Mr Brands quotes FDR’s friend, Ray Moley, as saying that there was nothing flabby about his charm: “When crossed he is hard, stubborn, resourceful, relentless.”
Roosevelt was prepared to be radical to meet dangerous circumstances. Yet his instincts and the outcomes of many of his policies were often conservative. As a radical, he saved the old order—and advanced American power more than any other president since Jefferson.
In short, he was an extraordinarily complicated man, and the author copes skilfully with his complexity. Roosevelt became assistant secretary of the navy at 31 but eight years later was struck by polio. Mr Brands does not give too much credence to the theory that its onset was somehow connected with the shame Roosevelt felt about his bureaucratic responsibility for a scandal involving the homosexual entrapment of sailors.
He was in any event severely crippled, even for a time paralysed and incontinent. But by 1924, three years after he became ill, he had emerged again as one of the big beasts of the Democratic Party. His resurgence owed something to the success with which he concealed his disability, something to an age when journalism was less intrusive than it has since become. But more than anything else, it was due to his titanic determination. In 1928 he was elected governor of New York and in 1932, at the height of America’s economic crisis, he was elected president.
Courage, charm, resourceful cunning and a hidden hardness enabled him to save American capitalism, though, as he said himself, it was Dr Win-the-War, not Dr New Deal, that ended the Depression. Mr Brands is masterly in describing the patience with which FDR brought the country to understand the danger of fascism. He is a bit less sure in his handling of international politics, adopting the traditional view that, in the strategic arguments over the second front, the American generals were right and Winston Churchill deluded by imperial nostalgia. He dismisses John Maynard Keynes as an “English intellectual”, in whom it was impertinence to offer advice to an American president, apparently unaware that Keynes was a player at the Paris peace conference.
Roosevelt was determined to destroy imperialism. Mr Brands gives perhaps too much weight to a late night conversation recorded by his son Elliott, in which FDR claimed that Churchill and De Gaulle were conspiring to preserve the British and French empires. There may have been some warrant for Roosevelt’s suspicions, but he was more aware than his son of the ambiguities of the Grand Alliance.
He possessed the subtlest political mind of his generation. At the same time he was a master of point-to-point navigation, moving not by plan but by instinct, tempered by experience.
Roosevelt was the greatest American president since Lincoln, his colossal abilities tested by personal illness, economic catastrophe and world war. He used every tool to hand to direct the United States in peace and war: party, bureaucracy, Congress and the media of the day. Whoever wins the presidential election of 2008 will find those levers rusted, weakened or twisted. His task will be to reconnect the presidency to the country and to the world—something that will take the talent and character Franklin Roosevelt brought to lead America from the nadir of economic distress to the zenith of power.
