who knew FDR personally at the timenwould have agreed. How could such anman have proven to have within him thenstuff of unusual leadership?nPart of the answer may be found innanother’s brief assessment of him, madenshortly after he entered the WhitenHouse in 1933- Breaking with tradition,nRoosevelt called on the 92-year-oldnOliver Wendell Holmes to seek his advicenin handling the problems he confronted.nAfterwards Holmes commented:n”A second class intellect—but a firstnclass temperament.”nTo be sure, Lippmann was correct innpointing to Roosevelt’s ambitioti to benPresident: his family, in effect, laid claimnto that office, and his early memories includednrecollections of visiting his UnclenTheodore in the White House (althoughnFranklin quickly cracked the mold ofnfamily tradition by becoming a Democratnwhen he set out on his politicalncareer). He always found iiis greatestnchallenge in politics, rather than in thenpractice of law, for which he was trained.nHe early acquired an important politicalnadviser in Louis Howe, who perceivednRoosevelt’s potential and, with an acutensense of political timing, helped FDRnthread his way through the 1920’s, a difficultndecade for Democrats (much ofnRoosevelt’s political deftness seemed tondesert him after Howe’s death in 1936).nRoosevelt loyally served as his losingnparty’s vice-presidential nominee inn1920, then began promoting Al Smith asnearly as 1924, and of course was behindnhim when he obtained the nominationnin 1928. Most important, FDR movedni»« InChronicles of Culturenpromptly in 1932, when it was obviousnthat the era of Republican ascendancynhad ended.nOtiil, although Roosevelt sought politicalnpower, mere ambition is not sufficient.nTemperament—the ability to inspirenconfidence in others—must accompanynit Here Lippmann was blind to anreality that Holmes perceived Rooseveltnhad the kind of buoyant self-confidencenthat a political leader needs at any time,nbut especially during a period of economicndistress. His private batde with polio,nwhich began in 1922, revealed unsuspectednreserves of determination withinnhim: his spirit proved unbreakable thennas it would later, when Americans lookednto him in their darkest hours. His buoyancyncomes through in the book’s epigraph,na sentence from a campaignnspeech of 1936, when an end to the Depressionnwas still nowhere certainly innsight: “I still hold to the faith that a betterncivilization than any we have known isnin store for America.” Miller speaks ofnRoosevelt’s “confident optimism” duringnthe most terrible days of the war, whennhe saw it as his task to ensure that “thenAmerican people never wavered in theirndetermination to fight through to victory.”nHe was, as Frances Perkins put it,n”a creative and energizing agent,” onenwho imbued others with his temperament.nHe was always ready for bold experiments,nthough he knew not all couldnsucceed, and dramatic gestures, as whennhe became the first presidential candidatento fly when he went to Chicago in 1932nto accept the Democratic nomination, ornnnwhen he saw to it that his first Cabinet wasnconfirmed by the Senate en bloc and metnwith him on the day of his inauguration.nBut even those who seek chiefly tonvkield power—the overwhelming majoritynof officeholders—are compelled tondo something with it if they acquire it.nRoosevelt was independendy wealthy,nand he had little understanding of how anfree-market economy works. To be sure,nhe displayed certain prejudices of a conservativensort, including a bias againstnexcessive deficit ^Dendii^ and confklencenin the institution of the military. But onnthe level of political philosophy, in thencreative tension between liberty and securitynin Western civilization, his sympathiesnlay consistently with collectivism.nIn a political speech of 1912 settingnforth some of his political views, one innwhich even Miller finds “totalitariannovertones,” Roosevelt fecilely equatednliberty with “happiness and prosperity,”nand through this sleight of hand justifiednstate intervention in every area of theneconomy, including the conservation ofnnatural resources and food production:nhe foresaw, he said on that occasion, antime when “the state will compel everynfarmer to till his land or raise beef ornhorses,” depending on the requirementsnof society as a whole.nWhen he accepted the presidentialnnomination in 1932, Roosevelt declarednthat the people wanted “work” and “security,”nand that these were, moreover,n”spirimal values.” When the Social Securitynsystem was being designed in 1934,nRoosevelt mused to Frances Perkins thatnhe didn’t see why people should not bencovered by social insurance “from thencradle to the grave.” Social Security fellnfar short of that coUectivist ideal, ofncourse, but 50 years later we are beginningnto comprehend the economicnreasons why that relatively modestnsocial-insurance scheme will not work,nthe sorts of economic reasons whichnRoosevelt could not £athom. That samenlack of understanding led him to viewnthe Tennessee Valley Authority, when itnwas launched, as a sort of competitivenyardstick for private power producers.n