FDR - Jean Edward Smith [2]
FDR’s administrative style was a legendary mixture of straightforward delegation, flowchart responsibility, Machiavellian cunning, and crafty deception. James MacGregor Burns called him a lion and a fox. Frances Perkins, FDR’s long-serving secretary of labor, said Roosevelt was “the most complicated human being I have ever known.” He kept major decisions in his own hands, played his cards close to his chest, and enjoyed the consternation of opponents when his maneuvers were revealed. “I’m a juggler,” Roosevelt told Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. “I never let my right hand know what my left hand is doing.” Occasionally he overreached. His wrongheaded 1937 Court-packing scheme boomeranged badly, as did his ill-considered intervention in Democratic senatorial primaries in 1938. He made mistakes. Some were catastrophic, such as his 1937 decision to slash federal expenditures, precipitating the “Roosevelt recession” of 1938–39.
Roosevelt expected cabinet officers to run their own shows, but did not hesitate to enter the arena when an issue interested him. He handled the nation’s diplomacy largely through Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, a fellow Grotonian, and often ignored Secretary Hull. The Navy he ran through the chief of naval operations, Admiral William D. Leahy, who had skippered FDR’s yacht when Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy. When he decided to replace Douglas MacArthur as Army chief of staff in 1934, he sent the general on an inspection tour of Hawaii and then announced his successor while MacArthur was en route.
Roosevelt relished being president. His buoyant energy and unshakable optimism transmitted itself to everyone he met. After the lusterless Warren G. Harding, the dour Coolidge, and stuffy Herbert Hoover, FDR seemed like a breath of fresh air in the White House. His self-assurance was exactly what the country needed. With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan (who voted for FDR four times), no president has been more serene in the conviction that whatever happened, everything would turn out all right. “Take a method and try it,” he once said. “If it fails, admit it and try another. But above all, try something.” Social Security, unemployment compensation, stock market regulation, the federal guarantee of bank deposits, wages and hours legislation, labor’s right to bargain collectively, agricultural price supports, rural electrification—all of which we take for granted—did not exist before FDR.
As commander in chief, Roosevelt was better prepared than any president before him, save Washington and Grant. For eight years under Woodrow Wilson he had been the number two man in the Navy Department. He understood how the services operated and did not hesitate to assert presidential authority. When war clouds gathered in 1939, he passed over the Army’s senior leadership and named George C. Marshall chief of staff. As the situation grew tense in 1940, he reached out to the Republican party and named the redoubtable Henry L. Stimson secretary of war and Frank Knox of the Chicago Daily News, who had been Alf Landon’s running mate in 1936, secretary of the Navy. When war came, he turned to hard-bitten Admiral Ernest J. King to fight the fleet and recalled Admiral William