Lawyers From New York State

"We shall not soon see his like again. May Almighty God, who has watched over this Republic as it grew from weakness to strength, give us the wisdom to carry on in the way of Franklin D. Roosevelt."

"Tell him to go to hell; I'm for Jimmy Byrnes."

"I must admit Roosevelt's leadership has been very effective and has been responsible for the Americans' advantageous position today."

"There had been little in his background to prepare him for running a war. He had never worn a uniform or received any military education. True, he had served with much enthusiasm in the Navy Department during the first war; but his profession had always been strictly politics. It was a line of work few men were better at, and perhaps because of that, he recognized from the first that victory would depend on unity among the Allies. "The United Nations" was his phrase, and he used it often with great effect. But he also knew that real unity would take some tall doing. Stalin wanted a second front right away; Churchill did not, and there was strong feeling at home for punishing the Japanese first. Roosevelt decided that Stalin would get something close to what he wanted in 1942. It was a second front in Africa instead of Europe, but American soldiers were fighting Germans in less than a year after Pearl Harbor, and there was going to be no American straying from the beat-Germany-first strategy. Furthermore, Franklin Roosevelt seemed to know how to judge men. Whatever he may have lacked for the job of Commander in Chief was more than made up for by the group of men he called on to help him."

"In contrast to the ultimate realization that he was dealing with a formidable enemy in the east, Hitler clung to the end to his preconceived opinion that the troops of the Western countries were poor fighting material. Even the Allied successes in Africa and Italy could not shake his belief that these soldiers would run away at the first serious onslaught. He was convinced that these soldiers would run away from the first serious onslaught. He was convinced that democracy enfeebled a nation. As late as the summer of 1944 he held to his theory that all the ground that had been lost in the West would be quickly reconquered. His opinions on the Western statesmen had a similar bias. He considered Churchill, as he often stated during the situation conferences, an incompetent, alcoholic demagogue. And he asserted in all seriousness that Roosevelt was not a victim of infantile paralysis but of syphilitic paralysis and was therefore mentally unsound. These opinions, too, were indications, of his flight from reality in the last years of his life."

"In their native countries, Roosevelt and Churchill are regarded as examples of wise statesmen. But we, during our jail conversations, were astonished by their constant shortsightedness and even stupidity. How could they, retreating gradually from 1941 to 1945, leave Eastern Europe without any guarantees of independence? How could they abandon the large territories of Saxony and Thuringia in return for such a ridiculous toy as the four-zoned Berlin that, moreover, was later to become their Achille’s heel? And what kind of military or political purpose did they see in giving away hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens (who were unwilling to surrender, whatever the terms) for Stalin to have them killed? It is said that by doing this, that they secured the imminent participation of Stalin in the war against Japan. Already armed with the Atomic bomb, they did pay for Stalin so that he wouldn’t refuse to occupy Manchuria to help Mao Zedong to gain power in China and Kim Il Sung, to get half of Korea!… Oh, misery of political calculation! When later Mikolajczyk was expelled, when the end of Beneš and Masaryk came, Berlin was blocked, Budapest was in flames and turned silent, when ruins fumed in Korea and when the conservatives fled from Suez – didn’t really some of those who had a better memory, recall for instance the episode of giving away the Cossacks?"

"Besides giving me the most interesting job I could possibly imagine, the Women's Trade League brought many wonderful friends into my life. Among them were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt...No words of mine can praise Franklin D. Roosevelt enough. When he was inaugurated, not only were we in the midst of the great depression with unemployment running into the millions, but we were lagging behind every important European country in providing for unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. In spite of cries of creeping socialism, he moved ahead fearlessly and imaginatively, creating the W.P.A. and establishing Social Security for millions of citizens. Without him it would have taken the country at least fifty years to accomplish the social gains he brought about in his first administration."

"Roosevelt had no illusions about revolution. Mussolini and Stalin seemed to him ‘not mere distant relatives’ but ‘blood brothers.’"

"The model democratic leader of the 20th century was of course Franklin D. Roosevelt. He led the republic successfully through the worst depression of our history and the greatest war of our history."

"As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminded us: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.""

"In 1944, in his second-to-last State of the Union speech, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated, "We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." He talked about the need to establish a second Bill of Rights, an economic bill of rights for the American people, a set of principles as important as the political freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. The very first right that Roosevelt listed was: "the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation." That profound principle was true in 1944. It is true today. We must create a full-employment economy."

"Einstein, Picasso, Joyce, gave us our keys; the nature of motion reached us from Proust as from the second-run movie; the Hippodrome girls went down into the eternal lake, Lindbergh had conquered time, Roosevelt had at last spoken openly to us of the demon of our house, and he had named it: fear."

"To compensate for their intrinsically weak hand over Poland, both hoped that Stalin would offer cosmetic concessions because he wanted to maintain the alliance. They were right on the latter point but wrong on the former. Poland was a fundamental, even visceral, issue for Stalin and his expectations of a free hand had been fostered by Churchill’s blatant spheres-of-influence approach in Moscow the previous autumn. He could not begin to comprehend the limiting conditions that his democratic partners wished to set on his influence in key countries in Eastern Europe. Their need for some degree of political pluralism and openness in order to persuade domestic opinion made no sense to this ruthless dictator. The misapprehensions at Yalta occurred on both sides, not just in the West. But the failures of implementation were equally important. Both Churchill and Roosevelt oversold the agreements and especially the “spirit” of Yalta when they got home. This would create grave credibility problems for them in the weeks that followed. Churchill’s desperate public hyperbole about trusting Stalin over Poland is particularly remarkable, given his trenchant critique of Chamberlain in 1938. Many were appalled by it at the time, but Churchill repackaged himself as a fierce Cold Warrior with his “Iron Curtain” speech in March 1946, whereas Roosevelt, being dead, could not retrieve his reputation. Yet Stalin overreacted as well. As the Western Allies surged into Germany in March 1945, his fears revived that they were negotiating a separate peace with the Nazis. This would threaten his position in Germany on which—portentously, it now seemed—Churchill had been so uncooperative at Yalta. Stalin knew much more about his Allies than they did about him—thanks to well-placed agents—but, as with the intelligence failures of 1938, interpretation matters as much as information. If Churchill and FDR were seduced by their hopes, Stalin was the victim of his own paranoia."

"The real problems lay not in negotiation but in assumptions. Churchill and Roosevelt—who were right about Hitler from afar—were both captivated by Stalin when they met him in the flesh. Hopeful that the Soviet Union was gradually shedding its revolutionary skin, they saw a man of business with whom they could conduct meaningful negotiation. Both hoped and, to a large extent, believed that he could be trusted. Whenever doubts welled up, particularly for Churchill, he looked into the abyss, recognized that confrontation, let alone war, was “unthinkable,” and pushed on with the search for cooperation. Contrary to French mythology, Yalta was not the moment when the big powers crudely divided Europe. Churchill and FDR were still resisting a stark separate-spheres deal of the sort advocated by George Kennan. Nor was Yalta a sellout of Eastern Europe to the Soviets, as claimed by the Republican right: it was already clear that the Soviet Union would be the predominant influence in Eastern Europe. That had been decided on the battlefields of Russia in 1942–3, by the Allied failure to mount a second front until June 1944, and by the understandings already reached at Teheran in November 1943 and Moscow in October 1944. When they went to Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt sought only to “ameliorate” Soviet influence."

"Where then should be the verdict today on Yalta? Unlike the summits of September 1938, these were multifaceted negotiations from which each party came away with something. Roosevelt secured his priorities—agreement on the UN and a Soviet pledge to enter the war against Japan. Churchill managed to avoid firm commitments about Poland’s western border, German dismemberment and reparations—the latter to Stalin’s undisguised irritation. The British also secured a larger role for France in postwar Europe than either of their partners wanted. Stalin, for his part, gained acceptance of his main territorial goals in Asia and agreements that seemed to recognize his predominance in Poland. Each of the Big Three left with the belief that the wartime alliance would continue after the war. That indeed had been their major goal for the conference. Building on Teheran in 1943, they hoped to turn summitry into a process. Unlike Chamberlain’s summits, the leaders came to Yalta with detailed briefing books and a body of specialist advisors, including all three foreign ministers, and in many cases they acted on policies already laid down. The deals on prisoners of war, for instance, or Soviet territorial demands in Asia had already been established in outline, while Maisky’s presentation on reparations followed the lines of a report he had drawn up over the winter."

"The greatest thing he accomplished was to make people all over the world feel that he, and therefore our country, actually was concerned about them and was interested in their problems."

"May I say the greatest boon which has come to me in this life was my friendship with this great man, whose interest in the 'forgotten man' was not an empty gesture but the very obsession of his heart and life."

"Franklin Roosevelt was the first President I ever voted for, the first to serve in my lifetime that I regarded as a hero, and the first I ever actually saw; that was in 1936, a campaign parade in Des Moines, where I was working as a radio announcer. What a wave of affection and pride swept through that crowd, as he passed by in an open car—a familiar smile on his lips, jaunty and confident, drawing from us a reservoir of confidence and enthusiasm some of us had forgotten we had in those days, those hard years. He really did convince us that the only thing we had to fear was, as Senator Mitchell has told us, fear itself."

"On the morning of the 11th, Admirals Leahy, King, and Nimitz went to the White House to get the President's approval for the Joint Chiefs' strategic plan and for the command arrangements in the Southwest Pacific. Roosevelt received them in the Oval Office. He was obviously not well. His face was ashen and his hands trembled. Yet he smiled and turned on the Roosevelt charm for his visitors. He listened with attention to the briefing and approved the strategy. He said he was glad to see that the drives were directed toward the China coast, for he was determined to keep China in the war. Roosevelt noted that the plan did not carry through to the actual overthrow of the enemy and reminded his callers that in the Pacific war his objective was the defeat of Japan as soon as the Allies had enough forces. With regard to Manus, Roosevelt said he did not know exactly where it was and it was a matter for the Joint Chiefs to handle. Lunch was served in the office, and afterward Roosevelt brought out a packet of enormous cigars, very dark in color, that Prime Minister Churchill had accidentally left in the White House. The President offered them around, but all his guests, like himself, were cigarette-smokers. Admiral Nimitz said, however, that he'd like to take one to his housemate, Dr. Anderson, who smoke cigars. He'd have the doctor keep it for some special occasion. The President began asking irrelevant questions and making random comments. He was probably getting tired. He asked Nimitz why, after the daring raid on Truk, he had sent his carriers to raid the Marianas. Since Roosevelt prided himself on keeping abreast of the progress of the war, he obviously knew the answer. The question provided an opportunity for Nimitz to end the visit on a light note. Grinning, he said the question reminded him of the case of the elderly, fat hypochondriac who wanted to have his appendix removed. Because of his age and obesity, no local surgeon was willing to perform the operation. At last the hypochondriac obtained the services of an eminent surgeon from out of town, and the appendectomy took place. When he regained consciousness, the patient, anxious about the operation, sent for the surgeon and asked about his condition. "You're doing fine," said the surgeon. "But, doctor," the patient said, "there's something I don't understand, I have a terrible sore throat which I didn't have when I entered the hospital. What causes that?" "Well," said the doctor, "I'll tell you. In view of the circumstances, your case was a very special one, as you know. A big group of my colleagues came to watch the operation. When it was over they gave me such a round of applause that I removed your tonsils as an encore." "So you see, Mr. President," said Nimitz, "that was the way it was. We just hit Tinian and Saipan for an encore." Roosevelt threw back his head and laughed, and the visit was at an end."

"The American Social Hygiene Association fought hard to prohibit condom use in the early part of this century. Social hygienists believed that anyone who risked getting “venereal” diseases should suffer the consequences, including American doughboys ⎯ U.S. soldiers who fought in World War I. The American Expeditionary Forces, as our army was called, were denied the use of condoms, so it is not surprising that by the end of the war our troops had very high rates of sexually transmitted infections. Like most people throughout history, our “boys” were just unable to “just say ‘no’” (Brandt, 1985). The Secretary of the Navy at that time was only one of many military leaders who believed that condom use and other infection prevention methods were immoral and “unchristian.” It was a young Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, when his boss was away from the office, decided to help sailors treat infections that they could have otherwise prevented with condoms. FDR ordered the distribution of prophylactic kits that contained chemicals to wash and insert into the penis to treat gonorrhea and syphilis (Brandt, 1985)."

"President Roosevelt was indorsed for a third term, and the delegates paraded around the hall, cheering wildly."

"Franklin Roosevelt was then a member of the state Senate. No one who saw him in those years would have been likely to think of him as a potential President of the U.S.A. I believe that at that time [he] had little, if any, concern about specific social reforms. ...[A]rtificially serious of face, rarely smiling, with an unfortunate habit... of throwing his head up... combined with his prince-nez and great height, gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people. ...[T]his habit ...which when he was young and unchastened gave him a slightly supercilious appearance, later had a completely different effect. By 1933, and for the rest of his life, it was a gesture of courage and hope..."

"The main Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, praised Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies, and "foresaw the United States as developing "toward an authoritarian state" ... By the mid-1930's, however, Nazi views of the New Deal and FDR began to change. As FDR grew increasingly alarmed by Hitler's rearmament and Mussolini's expansionism, his public speeches reflected more open disapproval of fascism, as in his speech in Chicago on October 5, 1937, when he called for an international "quarantine of the aggressor nations." Moreover, in response to the pogroms of Kristallnacht in November 1938, Roosevelt publicly stated his outrage to the German government about the manifest mistreatment of German Jews. In response, Nazi propaganda began to label the New Deal a "Jew Deal," and by 1939 the Völkischer Beobachter condemned the United States as a "Jewish Dictatorship"."

"Scholars consistently rank Franklin D. Roosevelt among the greatest presidents in American history and the greatest president of the twentieth century. ... His ranking is based, no doubt, on his successful leadership of the United States during the nation's two great, back-to-back crises of the twentieth century" the Great Depression and World War II."

"Hitler didn't snub me; it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram."

"When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn't ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn't live where I wanted. I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the president, either."

"Roosevelt the shrewd tactician and Roosevelt the idealist were difficult to reconcile. This was particularly so in time of war. Though his public stance in the 1930s against violence- 'I hate war'- helped to maintain domestic support among a largely isolationist population, it was difficult for him to hide his hatred of fascism and his expectation that America at some point would become involved with keeping the peace abroad. The ambiguities in this position were sufficiently pronounced to make it almost impossible for the American public to decide just where their president stood on the issue of war, yet to make it just as difficult for Roosevelt to seize the initiative and side openly with the democracies in 1940 and 1941. When Japan attacked in December 1941 everything was simplified for people and President alike: isolationism was dead as a political force and Roosevelt could lead his people in war unfettered by hostile opinion. He brought to the role of war leader some admirably suitable qualities. His was a big personality, made larger by years of publicity and the calculated wooing of popular approval. He had unrivalled experience in politics, having spent eight years in the highest office in the land. When it came to a job of work he was not hostage to party prejudice but hired Republican and Democrat alike. He was adept at managing Congress, and at building bridges between many constituencies- ethnic, political, religious- that made up American society."

"Roosevelt was certainly an ambitious President, who disliked the obstruction of his policies. He devoted most of his energy to short-term political tactics, and was never choosy about the allies he found. He was obsessed with public opinion and his own popularity. He was an unsophisticated idealist, who once confessed that his political outlook could be summed up in two words: Democrat and Christian. Though the idealism was genuine enough, friends and colleagues found his views on most issues ill-defined and pragmatic. Roosevelt's instinct for political survival created in him a distrust of ideological conviction. Charles Bohlen, who interpreted for him at Teheran, thought the President 'preferred to work by improvisation than by plan'. He disliked putting anything down on paper, and instead did much of his work in informal conversations, throwing round ideas, exploring options, testing the water. He could be disarming, flattering, cheerful, supportive, but was, by general agreement of those around him, difficult to pin down. 'Not a tidy mind,' wrote an otherwise sympathetic British observer."

"In 1920 he was chosen by James Cox, the Democrat candidate, to run as Vice-President. It was his first setback. He campaigned on support for the League of Nations, which America had not yet joined, but found the tide of opinion isolationist. In the Republican landslide he failed to win even his home state of New York. The following year, at age 39, he was struck by polio and paralysed from the waist down. He withdrew from politics to fight his affliction. Those who knew him well found him transformed by the struggle. The young politician had an arrogance, an intolerance of weakness, a hint of superficiality, that marred his energy and charm. During the seven years it took him to recover he became a more humble and more sympathetic personality. 'He was serious,' Roosevelt's Secretary for Labour Frances Perkins later wrote, 'not playing now.'"

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt was everything Stalin was not. He was born in 1882 into a wealthy New York family, on a 100-acre estate beside the Hudson river. He had every social advantage. Excessively pampered by his mother, Roosevelt was first sent to the exclusive school at Groton, Connecticut, modeled on the English public school, then on to Harvard and to law school. He was not outstanding academically, but the tall, distinguished, sociable patrician, a member of America's untitled aristocracy, needed little more than his name and background when he launched himself into politics in 1910. He had no particular scruples about which party to join; his cousin, Theodore, was the Republican President, but he adopted the Democrat ticket because they asked him to stand first. He soon became a political high-flyer. In 1913 he was appointed Assistant Secretary for the Navy. He was a solid administrator, and also an arch politician, utterly absorbed by the art of politics. A college friend remembered a man "extremely ambitious to be popular and powerful." He had many Republican friends, whose social world he shared, but made his name fighting on issues for the common man."

"Freedom is not an abstract idea; freedom is the very thing that makes human progress possible — not just at the ballot box, but in our daily lives. One of our greatest Presidents in the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, understood this truth. He defined America's cause as more than the right to cast a ballot. He understood democracy was not just voting. He called upon the world to embrace four fundamental freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These four freedoms reinforce one another, and you cannot fully realize one without realizing them all."

"We really ought to do some celebrating because Franklin's demise is the biggest public improvement that America has experienced since the passage of the Bill of Rights."

"On our return from the Brenner Pass, we learned that President Roosevelt had died. We were all depressed and saddened by the loss of our Commander in Chief. None of us had heard much about Harry S. Truman, our new president and Commander in Chief. As in his choices of Generals George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower, FDR picked the best man in choosing Truman as his successor."

"By the end of the 1940s, most Greek Americans were voting for the Democratic Party. During the Depression, the New Deal recovery measures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt appealed to the large majority of both working class and small businessmen alike. In sharing well in the general prosperity following World War II, Greek Americans strengthened their Democratic Party loyalties...If Franklin Roosevelt was venerated by most Greek Americans, Harry Truman was much more an object of genuine affection."

"Above all these sailors was the Commander in Chief, Franklin D. Roosevelt- a remarkable leader indeed. Unlike Winston Churchill, Roosevelt never imagined himself to be a strategist. In general he followed the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which included King, Marshall, and his own chief of staff, wise old Admiral Leahy. Thrice at least he went over their heads- refusing to redeploy American forces into the Pacific in 1942, insisting that Guadalcanal must be reinforced and held at all costs, and inviting a British fleet to participate in the Okinawa campaign. He also threw his influence in favor of MacArthur's desire to liberate Leyte and Luzon against the Navy's wish to bypass them. He was a tower of strength to Marshall, King and Eisenhower against insistent British pressure to postpone OVERLORD and shift DRAGOON from Marseilles to Trieste. The Navy was his favorite service- I heard him once, in his true regal style refer to it as "my Navy"- and he did his utmost to build it up and improve its efficiency both before and during the war."

"I believe it was on Friday that we raised the price [of gold] 21¢, and the President [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] said, "It is a lucky number because it is three times seven." If anybody ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think that they really would be frightened."

"The greatest fraud this country has ever known. An amusing and charming fellow but a man entirely without a conscience.... Roosevelt was the perfect politician."

"Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President."

"Today, science has brought all the different quarters of the globe so close together that it is impossible to isolate them one from another," Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote the night before he died, in an address which was to be his last message. "Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships-the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace."

"I did not see the President again until July 18. That morning he informed me that he had directed the Secretary of the Navy to recall me to active duty as "Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States." That same day I submitted my resignation as Ambassador to France. The President announced my new appointment on July 21. I was not present. There was a barrage of questions from the newsmen as to the scope of my authority and activities. The President was cagey, as he always was in dealing with the newsmen, and did not tell them very much. He said that I would be a sort of "leg man" who would help him digest, analyze, and summarize a mass of material with which he had been trying to cope singlehandedly. There was considerable pressure at that time for the naming of a supreme commander of all the American forces. Asked if I was to be that commander, the President replied that he still was the Commander-in-Chief. And he was. Asked what kind of staff his military adviser would assemble, he replied that he did not have "the foggiest idea." Actually, at no time did my staff number more than two aides and two or three civilian secretaries. Someone suggested I should have a public relations man. To me such an officer could only have been a nuisance! Since I was representing the President at all times, I felt that any talking should be done by Mr. Roosevelt. He was much better at that than I was, anyway."

"On Monday, July 6, 1942, the President telephoned to my little office in the State Department Building and asked that I come over at noon for a conference. We talked for a half hour. He had made up his mind. He wanted me to serve on his staff as a military and naval adviser to the Commander-in-Chief. He did most of the talking- he always did."

"Of Roosevelt's cultivation of bureaucratic disorder too much has probably been said. The observation was once made that it undeniably had a negative impact, in that succeeding generations of Washington power-managers were so shaken by exposure to it that they studiously tried to inculcate the opposite as soon as they had the chance, tried to eliminate the very possibility of a President with such debonair disregard for the organizational niceties. A standard of tidiness was later set against which Roosevelt is measured and found wanting. But we are permitted to inquire whether in terms of national policy-making the replacements for Roosevelt's "poor" administration have been all that satisfactory. The years since have witnessed catastrophic failures of coordination between politics and the military that his years in office did not. Perhaps there was more method to his maneuverings than appeared. Yet a price was paid. His determination to go his own way, his insistence on informing himself through his own idiosyncratic avenues of communication, his deliberate short-circuiting of the proper channels of responsibility- all these had defects of their virtues that now and then led him and the country astray. His two great failures were France and China. These historic civilizations of depth and pungent flavor, to which he was instinctively and without reluctance attracted, defeated his best efforts to incorporate them in an all-embracing view of the postwar world. In each instance he was badly advised, and there is no great artfulness needed to see where the bad advice came from and why he listened to it. But evidence was also available to him that de Gaulle was a far more powerful personage than he had imagined and Chiang Kai-shek was a far weaker one: he chose not to act on it. He wanted a revived but malleable France that would be willing to give up its empire and a united but nationalist China that would be a "great nation," able to fill the vacuum left by Japanese defeat. He got neither."

"Mr. Hoover's presidency was drawing to a close and Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most dynamic grave diggers of the Western world, succeeded on a platform not dissimilar to that of his predecessor. Though Mr. Roosevelt belonged to the Democratic party, his social background indisposed him for a time to leftist policies, both national and international. But his wife (from another branch of the Roosevelt family) was more in tune with leftist ideas, undoubtedly the aftereffect of higher feminine education in the United States. Whereas Mr. Roosevelt played his politics by ear, his wife, who wielded considerable influence, was ideologically far more consistent. Mr. Roosevelt, moreover, had but the scantiest education for his task; he hardly knew Europe, and his knowledge of foreign languages was as modest as his acquaintance with the mentality of other nations. Largely ignorant himself, and profoundly anti-intellectual, he had no way of judging, evaluating, and coordinating expert opinion. Even worse, perhaps, his sense of objective truth was gravely impaired. His handicap was by no means primarily of a physical nature."

"During the fighting on Okinawa, and while Eisenhower's armies were pressing across Germany in the final assault against the European enemy, President Roosevelt died, on 12 April, at Warm Springs, Georgia. The news of the President's death struck his political and military staff with the same consternation that it caused in the country at large. Although the President had seemed an ill man at Yalta, it had not been anticipated that he would not be alive when the final victory came against the Axis powers. Marshall and King were at the Union Station in Washington on Friday morning, 14 April, when the train bearing the President's body arrived. They took part in the procession from the station to the White House, and the next day they went with the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to attend the burial at Hyde Park. They flew from Washington to Stewart Field, some ten miles north of West Point, in an Army Air Corps plane, and were driven to the United States Military Academy, where they were put up by the Superintendent, Major General Wilby. The next morning they were driven across the river to the President's house at Hyde Park for the burial in the flower garden. There was such a press of mourners that the Joint Chiefs could not even see the grave."

"The President and his party were on deck after luncheon watching the antiaircraft battery conduct practice fire at large black aerological balloons. Suddenly the battleship listed from the effect of full rudder, pulsed with flank speed, and the general alarm clanked loudly. All hands rushed to their battle stations, and there was considerable excitement until the cause of all this could be determined. King, on the bridge, turned to the commanding officer, and inquired: "Captain McCrea, what is the interlude?" It developed that the screening destroyer on the starboard bow, engaged at drill, had accidentally discharged a live torpedo directly at Iowa, which had, unfortunately but quite naturally, been used as the drill target. The torpedo missed, but exploded in the disturbed wake of Iowa with such a thud that many people thought the ship had been hit. That it did not run hot and straight saved the United States Navy the embarrassment of having torpedoed their Commander in Chief and the Joint Chiefs of Staff! King wished to relieve the commanding officer of the destroyer at once, but, to his great amazement, the President told him to forget it. Consequently no steps were taken."

"In the course of the Casablanca Conference, General de Gaulle, who was in London, had been invited by the Prime Minister to come to North Africa. De Gaulle was offended that he had not been invited further in advance, and in one way and another proved to be his usual difficult self. Mr. Eden, the Foreign Secretary, had to exert great pressure to induce him to leave London for Casablanca. When he arrived there the firmest treatment by Mr. Churchill was required to persuade him to call upon Giraud. Finally in the interests of at least good public feeling a "shot-gun marriage" was arranged. At a press conference on 24 January, De Gaulle and Giraud were made to sit in a row of chairs, alternating with Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill, and to be photographed shaking hands. As the newsreel cameras finished their work, each French general dropped the other's hand as though it were red hot. At the press conference following this remarkable photograph, the President first made publicly the often-quoted statement concerning "unconditional surrender." As the war continued, King became more and more convinced that this favorite slogan was a mistaken one. Slogans are popular in the United States; they are terse and sometimes they fit the situation. Like newspaper headlines, however, they are unduly rigid, and always discourage thought. King would have preferred to have had this one left unsaid."

"On the afternoon of 28 February 1939 King and Halsey went together on board Houston where some twenty or more flag officers of the United States Fleet had been summoned to pay their respects to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. President Roosevelt was in high spirits, for he loved the Navy and always visibly expanded when at sea. As the admirals greeted him, he would have some pleasant, half-teasing personal message for each. King, when his turn came, shook hands and said that he hoped the President liked the manner in which naval aviation was improving month by month, if not day by day. Mr. Roosevelt seemed pleased by this, and, after a brief chat, admonished King, in his bantering way, to watch out for the Japanese and the Germans. King made no attempt to hold further conversation with the President, even though Admiral Bloch urged him to do so. He had never "greased" anyone during his forty-two years of service and did not propose to begin, particularly at a moment when many of the admirals were trying so hard to please Mr. Roosevelt that it was obvious. He had paid his respects civilly; he was in plain sight, and felt that the President could easily summon him if there were anything more to say. He believed that his record would speak for itself, and that it was not likely to be improved by anything that he might say at this moment. It seemed that the die was already cast, although the President's decision would not be made known for some weeks."

"Franklin Roosevelt knew who had been omitted and ignored, and he knew who had omitted and ignored them, and he set about to help the forgotten man, to light the farms, to help the aged, to protect the worker, to open new doors to the Negroes, to care for the needs of millions of Americans in thousands of different ways. He was challenged on every front by those who said he was destroying the country, by those who said he would bankrupt it those who fought the New Deal as they fight progress in 1960. But can anyone in this country who now lives, whatever party they may be a member of, can they imagine America without the accomplishments of the New Deal, of social security, of care for the aged, of protection for bank deposits, protection for investments, of help for the farmers, development of our natural resources? Can they image an America without all these things being done, not easily but over opposition, reluctantly, but moving this country steadily forward? That was his great accomplishment and that was the spirit which he breathed into our party as Thomas Jefferson did when he founded it."

"Franklin Roosevelt was the champion of the aged and of children and of the handicapped and of the farmer, of those who had been forgotten, of those who had not been remembered, of those who needed a helping hand, of those who needed a good neighbor. The basic force in all of this was not his party or his intellect, but it was his spirit, a spirit which he breathed into our party, a spirit which we carry on today. [Applause.] It was not the spirit of condescension; it was the spirit of compassion. It was the compassion of a man who had suffered deeply himself, and through his own suffering had identified himself with the needs of his fellow men and women in this country. It was the compassion of a man who was never poor but who held a helping hand out to his needy Americans."

"I have just come from America, where I saw Roosevelt. Make no mistake, he is a force — a man of superior and impenetrable mind, but perfectly ruthless — a highly versatile mind which you cannot foresee. He has the most amazing power complex, the Mussolini substance, the stuff of a dictator absolutely."