Rendezvous with Destiny

• Share

(4 of 5)

Leaving his office late (often at 6 instead of the peacetime 5 p.m.), the President rarely stops now for a swim. His personal wants are attended by Prettyman, a retired Negro sergeant who combines the courtesy of his race with the discipline of an old Army man, and Caesar, a strapping Filipino. After dinner (a few friends), the President may have a movie shown (Army and Navy films have priority), read reports or an occasional mystery story, or dictate to handsome Grace Tully or pretty Dorothy Jones Brady until bedtime. He usually gets to bed—except when Churchill is visiting—at 11:30. Very often, still, he ends the day with his beloved stamp collection, shoving the album under his bed when he grows sleepy. Solitaire, especially on train trips, and quick unpublicized visits to his trees and almost equally numerous relatives at Hyde Park are the President's other diversions.

Museum of Presidents. One day early in 1942 nervous Henry Morgenthau decided that the White House should have a bomb shelter. The President agreed, but added a revealing addendum. New offices were also needed. While the construction work was going on, he proposed, why not look ahead and prepare the East Wing of the White House to be a museum? He made sketches, blueprints were drawn, carpenters carried them out. Now, in the wing where Byrnes, Hopkins, Leahy and Lubin have their offices, all is ready for carpenters to come again after the war, knock down old partitions, put up new ones to make a series of at least 31 rooms.

Each room—if Franklin Roosevelt's plan is carried out—will contain the relics and mementos of a President of the U.S:

The President, thus architecting a room in history for each of the past Presidents, is designing his own place beside his 31 predecessors. As future visitors to that Presidential museum gaze at the mementos of Franklin Roosevelt, they will be well aware that he was an extraordinary man, with an extraordinary consciousness of history and of his part in it. But those future visitors may be able to answer with more assurance than the citizens of 1943 the question: How well and truly did President Roosevelt and the American people carry on the great heritage of the Republic?

That heritage has been variously expressed: it was expressed (though that statement was later repudiated) in the terms of Wilsonian idealism.

Roosevelt and Realism. When President Roosevelt was asked recently by the New York Times's Anne O'Hare McCormick what he would say to Stalin, he replied that "to begin with he would announce that he was a realist and intended to discuss the problems that had to be dealt with in common on the basis of realism."

That realism—as in its day Wilson's wartime idealism—may reflect the mood of the American people.

In 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt said:

"This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with Destiny," Destiny looked to the U.S. like such things as slum clearance and wider highways. Last week, abroad, Destiny appeared to be wearing, for the moment, the hard, square face of Joseph Stalin. At home, Destiny looked like "realism," the 1943 American word of the moment.