FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882-1928: A History

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BOOK ONE A Guided Drift Toward War Overture: Themes, Issues, Recapitulations "We are facing difficult days in this country, but I think you will find me in the future just the same Franklin Roosevelt you have known a great many years." Roosevelt had spoken these words at midnight of the night before (it was now Wednesday morning, November 6, 1940) to a jubilant crowd of Hyde Park neighbors gathered on the wide Big House lawna crowd that had come in torchlight parade to celebrate with him his election to an unprecedented third term as President of the United States, defeating Republican challenger Wendell Willkieand the promise thus made, despite being rendered strangely tentative and even dubious by the prefatory "I think," was evidently intended by him to soothe, to reassure. It failed to do so, however, for everyone who listened to it or read it in the papers. There were critical and well-informed minds in which the promise raised questions of identity that, viewed in terms of the future now rising as black clouds out of Europe, out of Asia, to cast gloom over the Republic, were both difficult to answer and profoundly disturbing. Was this "Franklin Roosevelt" whom his listeners had "known a great many years" actually and wholly the Roosevelt upon whom now depended so much of the fate of America and, indeed, the world? Or was the "real" Franklin Roosevelt a man different in important ways, and perhaps contradictory ways, from his Hyde Park friends' perception of him? In either case, but especially in the latter, to what extent and in what ways would his remaining "just the same" be a boon for mankind, to what extent and in what ways a misfortune, in the "difficult days" to come? II The man popularly perceived, the man whose face at midnight had been cooled by a mild springlike breeze as it was imbued by ruddy torchlight, was a big, warm, friendly, compassionate man with an acute sense of justice and a strong commitment to it. Through all the fifty-seven years of his life (he would be fifty-eight this coming January 30) he had been a lover of simple country living. He disliked cities, though his most solid political support came from urban areas, and had in the past, in public speech, more than hinted a belief that virtue, discouraged by the frenetic artificiality of crowded streets, could come to its full flowering only amid green growing things in such landscapes as the one he saw this morning out his bedroom window. For though the green growth was now in autumn retreat at Hyde Park, the hardwoods leafless, the evergreens nearly black, the fields and meadows gray and brown and swept by chill winds under a darkly lowering sky (the weather, he noted, had greatly changed since midnight)though this was so, and though the present melancholy of it was felt, the window-framed landscape of wide fields and wild-wooded hills was yet seen through memory's eyes as a greenly living one. Through it, nourishing and ordering it, flowed the great theme-river of his life, the mighty Hudson, upon whose wide bosom he had spent many of his happiest youthful hours in sailboat and iceboat and from whose bank he and his devoted friend Louis Howe had launched the model sailboats they designed and built together during his long convalescence, as a middle-aged man, from near fatal illness. It now presented itself to his vision, beyond a fringe of treetop, as more lake than stream. A small inland sea. And it was in fact both an active arm of the sea and an active contributor of water to the sea, for it was one of the longest estuaries on earth, as Roosevelt had learned as a boy. Already, as it made its slow curve around Crum Elbow, it sometimes tasted faintly of the salt of the sea that flowed into it, if meagerly, at high tide, and into which soon it must die. Such facts