God's Gift to the U.S.A.: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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There were other elements to Roosevelt's success: an immense charm, an instinctive feel for politics, a wide-ranging interest in people and ideas. Not least was sheer luck; all great leaders appear to be blessed with it. "Roosevelt weather" was the envious politician's term for the fact that the sun always seemed to come out when F.D.R. was scheduled to speak. Roosevelt was superstitious and avoided 13 at dinner, but he knew perfectly well that "luck" is mainly a matter of shrewd ness and timing. Characteristically, he was an expert at seven-card stud poker, with one-eyed face cards wild.

He had a ready smile and a sharp sense of the absurd. He learned that one of the White House servants, a robust woman of perhaps 190 lbs., believed in reincarnation, so he asked her what she wanted to be in her next life. A canary, she said wistfully. Roosevelt couldn't resist laughter. "I love it, I love it, I love it," he said. One of his most celebrated bits of clowning was his mock-solemn response to a Republican charge that he had accidentally left his Scotch terrier Fala behind on a trip to Alaska and then sent a destroyer to retrieve it. "Of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them," Roosevelt told a guffawing campaign audience. "You know, Fala is Scotch and . . . his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since."

Presiding over the White House, Roosevelt came to resemble what his father had been, a Hudson Valley squire. He relished sailing on the Potomac. He enjoyed puttering around in a tweed jacket that he had inherited from his father; he eventually bequeathed it to one of his four sons. He was squirishly indifferent to many of the conventional social graces; his wife even more so. He served martinis mixed with Argentine vermouth. They were, one visitor recalls, "about the color of spar varnish." The President liked wild game and carved it expertly, so admirers regularly sent him venison and antelope and partridges, but Eleanor squeamishly banished such things from the White House table. Her own specialty was to cook and serve Sunday-night scrambled eggs, which one survivor recalls as "undeniably discouraging."

Roosevelt was not, most certainly, a saint. Even so admiring an observer as John Gunther, drawing up a catalogue of Roosevelt's many virtues and achievements in Roosevelt in Retrospect, charged him with "dilatoriness, two-sidedness (some critics would say plain dishonesty), pettiness in some personal relationships, a cardinal lack of frankness . . . inability to say No, love of improvisation, garrulousness, amateurism, and what has been called 'cheerful vindictiveness.' " And, as Duke's James Barber bluntly puts it, "he cheated on his wife."