Book Review: The Roosevelt Presence – by Patrick J. Maney

The Roosevelt Presence – the Life and Legacy of FDR

About a year ago, or possibly more, I caught a biography of FDR on the History Channel, which ended before he was elected to the presidency. Having read the biography of his older namesake, Teddy Roosevelt before, I was interested in his life.

There was a large selection of books on the shelf. Some were three inches thick. I opted for Maney’s book, only about 200 pages plus references, a bibliography and appendices, which I thought I’d read within a few days or a couple of weeks.

Wrong. It sat on my nightstand as the current book being read for so long, it became a decorative item there, a fixture, so much that now that I get to remove it, the bedroom will not look right with a book of a different color there. I would read a couple of pages before going to sleep, and not even that consistently, since there were many other books that needed to be read in the interim.

Not that it was boring. In many respects it was a fascinating book about a fascinating life. It’s just not what I am excited about taking on airplane trips with me and read in a hurry.

FDR was a decisive character in our country’s history. He was widely emulated, sometimes not entirely successfully, by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Clinton and even Reagan. Now in the Obama years, the pundits are drawing comparisons between Roosevelt and Obama.

Roosevelt was responsible for many government programs and for larger government overall by implementing what he coined the New Deal. Concepts and programs like Social Security, unemployment compensation, minimum wage, public housing, bank deposit insurance, farm subsidies, regulation of the stock market and the GI Bill of Rights were introduced by Roosevelt and became fixtures in the political and social fabric of our nation. The Security and Exchange Commission was set up in 1934 after the Great Depression to regulate the stock exchange. Deeply reviled by Wall Street when introduced, it has become an icon of our economy. Ironically, when the Reagan Administration suggested abolishing it as part of deregulation, a howl of protest went up from Wall Street, of all places. Our financial system had come to depend on it.

No matter what the detailed policies were, FDR created big government, revitalized the presidency as an institution and gave it numerous additional powers and led the nation out of the great depression and through WW II, a very challenging period of our nation’s history. He was a great leader through sheer force of his personality and temperament, even if he was not regarded as intellectually brilliant, like Herbert Hoover was, for instance. Today he is widely ranked as one of our great presidents. Most lists have im at number three, after Lincoln and Washington. Some list him at number two, edging out Washington. Interestingly, Lincoln is at the top of every list.

I wonder what it is that makes us name presidents using their initials.  We don’t call Reagan RR, or Obama BHO, or Clinton WJC, but there are the ever recognizable and iconic JFK, LBJ and of course FDR.

It is impossible to discuss FDR without talking about his disability. After an attack of polio at the age of 39, all his efforts to rehabilitate his body and regain the use of his legs were unsuccessful.He was elected an unprecedented four times without having the use of his legs.  He had to be carried up stairs for the rest of his life. He was bound to a wheelchair, and this was before there were ramps and handicapped facilities and access was universally available as it is today. He wore steel braces that allowed him to stand at the podium or at a platform on a train when giving speeches. He was led to speeches by aides, shuffling one leg after the other, under extreme pain.

But the news media cooperated and there were no pictures of Roosevelt in a wheel chair, or being carried out of a car or on stairs. The media neither published pictures or discussed the disabilities of the president so in the end most people in America had no idea that their president was a cripple. This could not happen in the age of television.

He was the first president to use radio as a tool not only to get elected, but also to communicate with the nation. His 27 fireside chats (radio-shows) were famous and have become models of communication for future administrations.  The advantage of radio was that you could not see the speaker. All you heard was his voice and his words and FDR was a master at controlling those.

Roosevelt died in office shortly before WW II ended. During the last few years his health declined rapidly, so much that his staff doubted he could make it through the last campaign. He did it, though, against all odds and through sheer force of personality and indefatigable optimism.

Rating: ***

Reagan’s Dress Code in the Oval Office

When George W. Bush first became president, there was talk about how he was going to bring decorum and dignity back to the Oval Office. Word was that they didn’t like Clinton being there in jeans at T-shirt at times. Bush stated that Reagan never was in the Oval Office without wearing a coat and tie.

When I visited the Reagan Library a couple of months ago I was in the replica of Reagan’s Oval Office. The tour guide talked about how Reagan never entered the Oval Office without a coat and tie. I remembered the Bush story.

Then I walked back out into the exhibit area. There was a large wall of photographs, hundreds of them, chronicling Reagan’s years as president. And there was a photograph of Reagan, sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, surrounded by aides, reading and signing something, dressed in a light blue jogging suit.

Movie Review: Charlie Wilson’s War

Occasionally I watch a movie that opens my eyes to well-known events and shows me an angle that I had not considered before.

Charlie Wilson’s War is presumably based on true events, and I have no evidence of  this being true or false, so let’s say it’s true. In the late 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was getting all the credit for ending the Cold War, the Russians were fighting a cruel and bloody war in Afghanistan. They had absolute superiority in terms of numbers and military equipment. The Afghan freedom fighters were resisting with rifles on the ground. The Soviets came in with helicopter gunships and blew away villages, men, women and children indiscriminately. They actually created mines that looked like toys, so the children would pick them up to play, and their hands and sometimes arms were blown away, if they survived. The Russians had figured out that it takes much more time and effort to take care of maimed children than healthy ones, and parents taking care of children had to time or resources to take up arms against the Russians. By 1990, half of the entire population of Afghanistan was under 14 years old, and many of the children were maimed.

In comes a U.S. Congressman from Texas, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks). He travels to Afghanistan and sees the refugee camps, observes the sorry state of the resistance, and is truly moved to do the right thing. That’s a stretch for a hard-drinking, cocaine-using and womanizing congressman from Texas, but he seems like just the right guy for the job. With the help of a Houston Socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and a cunning and courageous CIA veteran Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour), he raises money from the U.S. government for the Afghans. Five million dollars a year gradually turns into one billion dollars a year for Russian weapons that, through a complex set of maneuvers, comes from Israel through Pakistan into Afghanistan. Helicopters get shot down, tanks get blown up, and the Afghans start getting the upper hand and drive out the mightiest army in the world. The cold war ends, and Charlie Wilson does not get any credit. Really, did you know who Charlie Wilson even was before seeing this movie?

This is where the movie review ends and the social criticism starts: Fast forward a few years. The lost, abused and maimed children grow up. What will their worldview be? They need to survive, without much of a country, with no parents, no industry, no love and no hope. The very freedom fighters that we trained and supplied with arms in 1988 slowly morph into – yes – the Taliban. The poverty, despair, physical pain, hunger and lack of love and security drives them to Muslim fundamentalism. Soon they blow up schools, libraries, art, treasures of antiquity and anything foreign. They brutalize their own women, take away their rights to an education, and start turning against the West. Terrorist camps arise, and soon 9/11 happens. We don’t remember that we helped create this in Afghanistan. Do the research! Just like we armed Saddam Hussein in those days. Oh, how quickly nations forget.

All that and much more buzzed through my head as I was watching Charlie Wilson’s War.

Rating: ***

Movie Review: John Adams – the HBO Miniseries

I purposely waited until I had finished reading the book by David McCullough before I watched the movie. And it was worth the wait. After writing much about the book and adding a number of history vignettes in posts in the last couple of weeks, I won’t spend much time retelling the story and my impressions here. Let’s focus on the impact of the movie after I have read the book.

First I noticed that there were thousands of details missing. The movie had about 5% of the depth of the book, even though it was a 7 hour miniseries. So many things were skipped over, glossed over or omitted, but of course, that’s necessary to make it all fit.

Then I noticed that time just went by faster, and the viewer had no idea of the actual ordeals the people went through. In the beginning, when John Adams would travel to the continental Congress in Philadelphia, he would one day ride away from his house, and in the next scene he would be in Philadelphia. The viewer does not get the impression that there were four weeks of arduous travel between the two scenes. The same thing happens when Adams first leaves for Paris. He boards a ship, we see him seasick, and then he disembarks a coach and meets Franklin in Paris. The viewer does not realize that months of challenging travels occurred between the two scenes. I got the impression the characters traveled back and forth like we do today, in Boston one day, in Philadelphia the next.

I loved seeing how the costumes and living conditions came to life. You don’t realize how bad everyone’s teeth were, given that there was no dentistry, until you see all the gaps and black rotted teeth in people’s mouths. That was well depicted.

I enjoyed seeing the White House built in the middle of the bush, down a few hills from the Capitol. The entire area was surrounded by woods, hills, barren fields, and rough wagon trails. If only the first occupants could see it now.

The movie does a great job helping out the imagination and filling in details that would not have come out by reading. But watching only the movie, without reading the book first, would deprive the viewer of a tremendous wealth of detail. Overall, I am enriched by watching the movie, by fortifying my knowledge of the historical details. They did a fantastic job showing the characters age, with Adams starting out in his thirties at the beginning of the movie, and ending up 90 when he died. They represented this very realistically.

A tour de force. HBO did a remarkable job.

Rating: ****

American Revolution Vignette – Letters and Communications

We are now completely used to instant communications, yet not very long ago we didn’t have the Internet, and the only way to communicate “instantly” was by telephone or fax, before that teletypes, before that only letters.

When I was a foreign exchange student in 1974 in New York, communicating back to Germany had to be by hardcopy letter. I still remember that the postage for an airmail letter overseas was 21 cents, and a regular domestic letter was 10 cents. Talking on the telephone overseas was still forbiddingly expensive, so the only time I talked with my family back home was at Christmas time in a short phone call that was actually donated by the telephone company and there was a newspaper article about the phone call in the local paper: “Foreign Exchange Student Calls Home!” – I kid you not.

That was only 35 years ago. An airmail letter home took about a week. So I could expect a response as fast as two weeks after mailing my letter.

Now roll back to 1780, when Franklin, Adams and Jefferson were all in Europe, spread out over England, Holland and France, conducting the ambassadorial business of the fledgling United States. A letter then had to be  carried by coach to the nearest harbor, where it boarded a ship that took at best a month, sometimes 3 or 4 months, to cross the Atlantic, depending on time of year, weather, luck, and avoidance of capture by a warring nation. At the destination harbor, the letter was then carried by coach again to the destination city, and there by horseback rider to the addressee. It was not unheard of that a letter would take 6 months to arrive at its destination.

This made sensible communications difficult. Adams wrote to his wife fairly frequently, and there could be dozens of letters on the way before one response would arrive. Simply coordinating the letters and responses must have been a challenge.

But think about the complexity of conducting the business of a nation. The President of the United States would send instructions to the ambassador in France about how to approach a negotiation. Back home the President would then need to make a decision based on the outcome of that negotiation, so he would need a response letter back. That exchange could easily take half a year. Imagine there is the threat of a naval attack from an enemy that we were trying to negotiate peace with. The peace could already have been agreed to in Europe months before, but both parties in their ships didn’t know about it and proceeded to shoot at each other. News of such unexpected battles would then upset the peace again months later.

Today, and just within the last 10 years, we think nothing of instant messaging or emails for immediate responses. Business of the speed of light. How much easier we have it now, and how few people in history have ever had that luxury.

American Revolution Vignette – Finances

It was difficult for the founding fathers to make ends meet in revolutionary times.

Adams was a lawyer and a farmer, with very limited means and no great wealth to draw on. Living in Europe was exceedingly expensive, particularly if your status was measured by how many “servants” you had. He only had eight as embassador in France. The Spanish ambassador had 75. Congress’ salaries for their envoys was not enough for their day-to-day living expenses, let along lavish entertaining and travels.

Washington and Jefferson were in a somewhat different position. They were some of the richest men in the country. While Adams never owned slaves, both Washington and Jefferson had vast plantations and both owned over 200 slaves.

Jefferson always spent more than he made. He was constantly in debt, and when he died still left an estate of debt of over $100,000. Adams, in contrast, due to being of  modest means, lived comparatively frugally and left an estate of about $100,000 in value when he died. Jefferson was in such financial straights that he had the Commonwealth of Virginia put up a lottery with the proceeds going to pay off his debts. The lottery was a failure, however.

One way Jefferson raised money late in his life was by selling his library to Congress to re-start the Library of Congress. The British, when burning the Capitol and White House in the war had ended up ruining the fledgling Library of Congress. Jefferson sold 6700 books for $23,000. They were carted from Monticello to Washington and were the seed of the new library. This was only a drop in the bucket of Jefferson’s debt.

Living expenses, paying for travel, having their families make ends meet at home, and paying for the war, were constant sources of agony for all three of the men.

Washington couldn’t even afford shoes for thousands of men of his army even in winter, let alone pay them adequately, feed them and equip them. The tiny and shaky United States of America had to repeatedly borrow from the Dutch financiers to just stay solvent, paying off old debts and interest with the proceeds of new loans.

American Revolution Vignette – American and European Cities in 1790

The American founding fathers, for the most part, had never left America. John Adams had never been to a city larger than New York when he first went to Paris and then London. The culture shock must have been enormous. Here are the sizes of the largest American Cities in 1790, compared to Paris and London:

• Baltimore – 14,000
• Boston – 18,000
• Philadelphia – 29,000
• New York – 33,000
• Paris – 600,000
• London – 1,100,000

You can now see that the society in Paris and London looked at Americans as country bumpkins.

American Revolution Vignette – Outlook on History

When I was a youth and I had to study history, I always found it amazingly boring. I never understood how anyone could make a career out of history. My grades in history were bad, and I spent as little time on it as I could get away with.

Yet, I was exposed to it at an early age, and studied history about the ancient Greeks and Romans, through the middle ages into the modern European times. Then finally American History in high school. I read Roman history in Latin, German history in German, and American History in English. I remember very, very little, but I do suspect all those classes contributed to make me the person I am today.

In those days I always thought that I’d have the rest of my life available to read anything I want.

Now, as I just finished reading Seldon Edwards’ The Little Book, I was inspired about Austrian/Hungarian history, all the way up to Hitler. I actually spent some time at Border’s poking around on the shelf for books about Hitler and saw Mein Kampf, and I thought I should read it some time.

After reading John Adams, I am inspired to read up more about the revolutionary period as well as about biographies of all the other presidents.

And now I realize that all the days I have left in this world are not enough just to read the history books I still want to read. That does not leave time for the 100 greatest books of all time, all the science fiction I still want to read, and the day to day current events stuff I want to keep up with. Too much knowledge to gain, too little time left. Why didn’t my teachers get that through to me when I was a kid? I was not listening.

Another striking fact regarding outlook on history has to do with perspective and scale. The story of John Adams starts in 1776, but really flashes back to the Boston Massacre in 1770. Let’s say 1775 for round numbers. Then the years of the Revolutionary War and the formation of our country brings us to 1789 and the beginning of George Washington’s  presidency of eight years. We go on to the four years of Adams, then the eight years of Jefferson, and twenty years go by. It all seems like the same time from our current vantage point, namely long ago and far away. But those years of the first three presidents are analogous to the years starting 1988 with Bush Sr. (four years), then Clinton (eight years), and finally Bush Jr. (eight years). That’s a long time, thinking back now to Bush Sr.

So while, to me, 1775 and 1825 look really close together, it was a full 50 years, and the difference between Adams as a man in his thirties, and Adams as a man in his eighties, an enormous stretch of time.

One more interesting fact about the first 7 presidencies is that the two Adamses were the only ones with four year terms and were defeated by their opponents. All others had eight year terms.

1. Washington (8)
2. John Adams (4)
3. Jefferson (8)
4. Madison (8)
5. Monroe (8)
6. John Q. Adams (4)
7. Jackson (8)

Aren’t you glad you know that now?

American Revolution Vignette – Separation from Family

When John Adams boarded the frigate Boston in 1778 to go to France to assume an appointment as commissioner to the Court of King Louis XVI, it was the dead of winter, one of the most treacherous and dangerous times of the year to embark on a voyage across the Atlantic. It was also at a time when the country was at war with the British whose ships were everywhere trying to capture Americans making contact with France. On that trip, Adams took his 10 year old son John Quincy with him.

Leaving like that meant that Adams and his son would be away from their family, Adam’s wife and three other children, for periods lasting years. At one time John and Abigail were apart for more than four years. With trips by ship taking months, the only way to be in contact were letters.

But think about it, a letter from France to Boston would also have to wait for a ship and then travel by ship, then by coach, until it finally reached its destination. There were many letters that never arrived, when ships were captured and plundered, when they sank, or when the mail was stolen outright. Even letters that got through in record time, say two or three months, could expect answers in six or seven months. By that time, dozens of letters could be en route and just matching up letters and their answers must have been a real challenge.

Adams was gone during most of the time his children grew up, with the exception of John Quincy, his oldest son, who was with him in Europe. But then, he was away from his mother and siblings for most of his youth.

In an agrarian country, most citizens lived and worked on farms and never left a radius of about 20 miles around their homes. But being in Congress of a country as geographically large as the United States at the time, ranging from Massachusetts to Georgia, the congressional delegates from the north and south had to travel far to meet in the middle, which was Philadelphia at the time. You could only make the trip to a session of Congress once per season. Congress stayed in session over the winter for about half a year, and then in the spring, for recess, everyone traveled home.

The sacrifices that the people that created our government and founded our country made at the time, in the service of their country, was enormous, considering that their pay was inadequate to compensate them even for the immense expenses associated with that style of living.

And not only they had to sacrifice. Their families and children grew up mostly without them. They most likely paid the highest price of all.

American Revolution Vignette – Travels

I had never realized in such vivid detail the challenges of  travels two hundred years ago. In the paragraph above, Adams leaves for the meeting of the Congress in Philadelphia, then the largest city in America, with about 30,000 inhabitants. It was the middle of winter in New England. I have been in Boston in winter, and just going from the hotel door to the rental car is brutal. For him and his companion rider to travel to Philadelphia, there were only three ways to go: walking, on horseback or in a coach. The middle class traveled on horseback. Philadelphia is 400 miles from Boston. If you can travel ten miles a day on horseback, and you travel every day, the trip will take 40 days. You also have the expense of staying in lodges, hotels, taverns and boarding houses every night, the food, feeding and boarding the horses and all the incidentals. I flew home from Baltimore to San Diego nonstop on a Southwest flight. It took 5 hours and 40 minutes, and I complained about having to sit still in a cramped airline seat, being served drinks, being warm and sheltered, on comfortable leather seats, eating the snack I brought along and reading McCullough’s book.

So folks in those days didn’t travel very often, and if they did, they stayed away months, sometimes years.

In America, traveling on the road was supposedly pretty safe. By comparison, in England, one had to constantly worry about being assaulted by robbers. The term “highway robbery” comes to mind. So not only was a long trip treacherous from an endurance standpoint, expensive since living expenses were incurred, but also dangerous. In a world without electronic payments and credit cards, you needed to carry cash with you to stay in taverns, and robbers knew that. 

So far, we have talked about travels within the country. To travel to Europe, which John Adams did several times between 1776 and 1785, he had to board a ship, of course. Ships didn’t leave on a schedule. You might show up at the dock on the first of May, to find that inclement weather delayed departure, and you again had to find a boarding house to wait, days, sometimes weeks, before you could be underway. Once at sea, the trip to Europe took at the very best about a month, very often, if there were storms, or calms, much, much longer. A passage to Europe by ship could take three or four months, and you didn’t always end up at the destination you expected, but some other city or country and then you still had to connect to where you actually needed to go.

Leaving for Europe meant leaving your family and loved ones for years at a time.