11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Meeting FDR, September 6, 2005
I spent most of the summer reading this wonderful book. I only read it on the weekends relaxing on my porch and was always anxious to reacquaint with the young man who would become FDR. It is a testament to this biography that after reading almost 800 pages I was sorry to see it end.
With all this praise one might think that I understood FDR. I finished this book no less able to draw a conclusion about the man who would lead our country through two of its greatest crisis. Question abound in my mind that probably can never be answered. The first and most difficult question is what was so special about this man that he could lead. As this book points out he was not a giant intellect,nor a hard worker or even a visionary. Somewhat like our current President he muddled through his youth. Most of what he accomplished was a result of his family name. The easy answer is that polio changed him. That is not satisfying when it is recognized he is nominated for Vice President before he got sick.
I remain uncertain and Mr. Ward does not really help in answering the unanswerable other than possibly in his prologue. From reading this book one might come to the conclusion that FDR did not really relate to anyone. He lived a distant life from his wife and children. Possibly it was only Lucy Mercer who reached him. He was dominated by his mother but even there he was independent. LOuis Howe and Missy Le Hand were totally devoted to him but it does not appear he spent much time with Missy when she become ill.
His battle with polio is beautifully told. I take away from that his ability to be optimistic and positive against all odds. He showed perserverance but only really when his ambition was involved. Yet even in this case he chose to spend his time in Warms Springs somewhat removed from the other visitors and did not spend time with him family.
As the above review shows, a First Class Temperment is a wonderful book because it presents the subject in tremendous detail. It does not draw conclusions. Mr. Ward introduces us to FDR in transition. We meet him and see him grow. We see what kind of president he will be. I admire FDR. I am not sure that I like him much. I know I loved the journey and thank Mr. Ward for setting it out for us.
I hope that Mr. Ward will read the review and maybe indicate what he thought of his subject. Maybe he will even write the next volume.
For me I will continue my education by rereading No Ordinary Times, Conrad Black's biography and Arthur Schlesinger"s 3 volume set. I doubt it will answer any of my questions but I look forward to the experience.
Geoffrey Ward thanks for the experience.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tour de force of research-- eye-opening!, May 24, 2005
Since I was about nine years old back in the 1960s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been my favorite U.S. president. My mother, who grew up poor in the Great Depression, is probably responsible for this. She bought me a kiddie biography about FDR which I devoured many times over. She also encouraged my interest in Eleanor Roosevelt, whose life I relived through another kiddie biography. My mother made sure during one summer vacation that our family visited Hyde Park. Time did not abate my fascination with the thirty-second president. As a young teen, I borrowed from our local library all the books about FDR that I could find. I wanted to know everything about his life, his political views, his achievements, and his impact on Americans, America and the world. One of the more poignant works I read in those days was Bernard Asbell's "When FDR Died," which told of the sweeping affect his death in April 1945 had on Americans. When I was in high school, my family visited Hyde Park again. This time, I was so moved that, after I got home, I wrote an account of an imaginary encounter with FDR's ghost.
Then I went to college, got married, and found employment, and my youthful obsession with FDR took a back seat to everyday concerns. But my dormant interest awoke recently when I felt compelled to watch the Biography channel's two-part special, "FDR: A Presidency Revealed," and then the HBO drama, "Warm Springs." I suddenly remembered that I had a book sitting on my shelf that I'd never seemed to have time to read, one I'd purchased some 15 years ago- Geoffrey C. Ward's "A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt," first published in 1989. The day after the "Warm Springs" drama I took the book down and read it during every spare moment, creating some spare moments that wouldn't have otherwise existed. Now that I'm done, I feel the need to share my thoughts about Ward's hefty tome.
I'm giving this book five stars, although it is not quite a perfect work. I'll start with the positives. First, it's extremely well-written, and generally reads like a novel. I love the literary prologue, "The End of Algonac," a flash-forward (rather than a flashback) in which a measure of FDR's fortitude dies in 1941 with his very elderly mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who had been the one constant in his life. The end of the last chapter, "It is Time," concludes brilliantly in 1928 with Sara excitedly climbing up the front steps of her son's brownstone in the wee hours of election night to tell him that, despite the discouraging early returns, he'd won the New York Governor's race after all.
Ward has done a superhuman job of sifting through the gargantuan archives at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the collections of papers and oral histories housed at other institutions, the ridiculous number of biographies about all the Roosevelts that came before, and his records of interviews with numerous eyewitnesses to some aspect of the lives of FDR and Eleanor. I know from experience how hard it is to synthesize and express as a readable whole the varying and innumerable strands of factoids produced by voluminous research, and I stand in awe of Ward's accomplishment.
A chief result of this accomplishment is the opportunity afforded readers to learn about the less well-known part of FDR's life-his youth. One discovers in "A First-Class Temperament" the divergent personalities possessed by Franklin and Eleanor even as newlyweds in their early twenties. In 1905, Franklin was 23 and already larger-than-life, a tall, lanky man brimming with optimism but not introspective by nature, blessed with the chiseled good looks of a Greek or Roman bust, and bursting with a charming, self-confident, effusive personality. Eleanor was 21 then, and mostly the opposite of her new husband. Plain (but cruelly, and unfairly, labeled "ugly" by her dysfunctional family growing up), shy, deferential, pessimistic and exceedingly introspective by nature, and burdened by a self-esteem that had been stomped on by others, she typically gave herself wholly to Franklin's interests and preferences, as well as those of her new mother-in-law.
In a way, the real story of Ward's book is how Franklin and Eleanor slowly broke out of their early molds and refashioned themselves in a manner that would eventually make them the most formidable and effective husband-and-wife team ever to take up residence in the White House. Eleanor would later remark that Franklin strongly desired "broad human contact," something that had been missing from his privileged but sheltered upbringing. It seemed that he entered politics for this reason. Ward brings us to the starting point of Franklin's transformational journey when he was a naïvely brash, in-your-face, freshman New York State legislator. In first running for office, Franklin took steps toward satisfying his craving for "broad human contact" by energetically and enthusiastically courting the ordinary folk of Dutchess County, although it would later become clear that he didn't have a vision for how to serve them. Nearly 20 years later, by the end of the journey, at the time he was elected Governor of New York, he had become a more measured, thoughtful politician of remarkable oratorical gifts and a coveted elder statesman of the Democratic Party.
How did this transformation occur? Certainly, his experience during the Wilson Administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (which saw him embark on a constructive relationship with labor almost from the beginning) and his number two place on the doomed Democratic ticket with Presidential nominee James M. Cox in 1920 afforded him the knowledge and street smarts (many would say deviousness) that he would need to advance his name and master the ropes of government. But his horrific bout with polio in 1921 at age 39 was, as virtually all historians believe, the transformative event that took his people skills in a whole new direction. Desirous as a young man of emulating his distant cousin Teddy Roosevelt to the full, he eventually found his own political identity, divorced from Teddy's blustery American chauvinism.
Eleanor, on the other hand, went from a quintessential anti-feminist who initially opposed women's suffrage (and was shocked by Franklin's support of it) to someone who returned to her first love, social work, by World War One, and, battling her shyness and insecurity, struck out on her own during the 1920s as a political activist. Ward shows that her transformation was at least partly due to her discovery of Franklin's affair with her secretary, Lucy Mercer, which meant to her that she had to rely on herself rather than others for self-fulfillment. Franklin and Eleanor stayed together, but whatever romance had existed in their lives up to that time was replaced by a unique friendship.
A thrilling, and sometimes downright spooky, common thread in Ward's book is the foreshadowing of Franklin's future greatness-not through the use of literary artifice, but simply by Ward's relation of countless anecdotes that demonstrate the loyalty and awe FDR inspired in numerous people who encountered him or who signed on with him in one way or another. In fact, predictions of Franklin's greatness came from the diverse likes of Endicott Peabody, the headmaster of his prep school (Groton) and Louis Howe, the rumpled, gruff journalist who decided to devote his life and career to Franklin. Even Josephus Daniels, Franklin's beleaguered boss at the Navy Department, good-naturedly tolerated the younger man's behavior that often bordered on being, or actually was, insubordinate, treasuring Franklin like a dear son, and marveling at his classical attractiveness and charisma. It was as if Franklin, still boyish as a thirty-something Assistant Secretary of the Navy, were walking around with the Presidential Seal floating above his head.
But the best portion of the book is Ward's sensitive and dramatic recounting of FDR's contraction of polio and how hard he worked to overcome, or at least adapt to, the severe limitations posed by his useless legs. It is a gripping human interest story told with the knowing tone of an author who, as Ward reveals in the book's source notes, had had his own battle with polio.
"A First-Class Temperament" does have some faults, mainly in some of its analyses. Ward seems unsure whether Franklin's characteristically courteous treatment of all people, regardless of social class, religion or race, was innate or, as the author tends toward, simply a matter of a patrician upbringing that emphasized graciousness. Admittedly, one of the challenges faced by Ward, and all of FDR's other biographers, is the matter of divining Roosevelt's real feelings about things when he almost always kept his feelings under close counsel, even from friends and family. Nevertheless, a reasonable conclusion may be reached that Franklin's polite manner was so effortless and natural as to mean that, at some point, he had internalized the notion of respect for others rather than just exhibited this quality as a matter of habit.
The fact that, during the 1910s, Franklin sought the company of educated Jews, who were not his "social equals," not to mention, heaven forefend, also Jewish, was puzzling and disconcerting to his wife (whose pan-humanism hadn't yet manifested itself) and mother. Just as it is reasonable to conclude that FDR actually believed in respecting others, it is unduly cynical to question the sincerity of Franklin's friendship with Henry Morgenthau. Did it matter whether Franklin had established a profound bond with Morgenthau or was just friendly with his fellow Dutchess County resident? Either way, FDR's interest in Morgenthau's companionship was not necessarily any less genuine or significant than if Morgenthau had been a...
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