The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton

CHAPTER ONE
Inside the Oval Office
The White House Tapes from FDR to Clinton

By WILLIAM DOYLE
Kodansha International
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Franklin D. Roosevelt
The Creative Executive



"The country needs, and unless I mistake,
the country demands, bold persistent experimentation."

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, 1932



The Oval Office
September 27, 1940, 11:30 A.M.



A delegation of civil rights leaders was filing into the Oval Office to push Franklin Roosevelt to embrace a radical, explosive concept: integrate the armed forces of the United States. Privately, Roosevelt thought it might be a good idea some day in the future. Today it was the last thing he wanted to do. It was the dawn of World War II, a national election was weeks away, he had many other battles to wage, and he had to buy time.

What Roosevelt's guests did not know was that the president was secretly recording them through a microphone hidden in his desk lamp, which connected to an experimental sound machine hidden in a padlocked chamber right under their feet. Roosevelt had just recorded a press conference, and the machine was still running.

Taking their positions on one side of the Oval Office were the two most powerful black civil rights leaders of the day: A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the most orotund, forceful speakers of his time, and lawyer Walter White, secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and an anti-lynching crusader, whose fractional ethnic connection to African Americans—he was 1/64th black—only magnified his passion for equal justice. White's fair-skinned father died in excruciating pain when surgeons at the white wing of an Atlanta hospital, where he had been mistakenly taken for an emergency operation, refused to treat him.

On the other side of the office were Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, a former Rough Rider and a Republican appointed by FDR in a spirit of bipartisanship, and Robert Patterson, assistant secretary of war, both of whom flatly opposed the concept of integrating the military. Patterson's boss, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, thought the whole idea was ridiculous, and boycotted the meeting altogether. Stimson found any meeting with the president to be an ordeal of exasperation, and wrote in his diary: "His mind does not follow easily a consecutive chain of thought but he is full of stories and incidents and hops about in his discussions from suggestion to suggestion and it is very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room."

Between the two camps sat Roosevelt, a striking, blue-eyed man of fifty-eight with a huge chest and shoulders and thinning gray hair atop a large, fleshy head that projected an incandescent smile and a booming voice that were the essence of supreme confidence and command. The public believed he had largely conquered the polio that struck him in 1921, and he promoted the deception through an elaborate shell game of ramps, staged photos, black painted braces worn with dark shoes and socks, and concealed entrances and exits. The mass illusion was aided and abetted by a sympathetic White House press corps, who, at the 1936 Democratic Convention, physically blocked other photographers from snapping Roosevelt as he tumbled and nearly fell on his way to the podium just before his keynote address. Roosevelt said publicly he was a "recovered cripple" and just "a bit lame." The truth was that he was totally paralyzed from the waist down, a prisoner behind his desk all day, who went to the bathroom by calling for a valet and water bottle.

The desk he sat behind was usually cluttered with dispatches and reports spilling out of wire in-baskets and a forest of over 100 knickknacks: lighters, paperweights, stuffed elephants and toy donkeys, a "Snooty the Love Dog" doll, salt and pepper shakers, a can of Camel cigarettes, Uncle Sam hats, and during the war years, a matching pair of comic figurines, "Benito" and "Adolf." The clutter was so thick, some papers piled on the table behind his desk waited for President Roosevelt's signature for as long as six months.

The writer John Gunther, observing Roosevelt at close range in an Oval Office press conference, observed: "He has a big head, very tanned; he cocks the whole head continually, snapping his eyes this way and that as it finishes an arc; talks with a cigarette holder clenched between his teeth, at the extreme corner of the mouth; blinks to get smoke out of his eyes.... In twenty minutes Mr. Roosevelt's features had expressed amazement, curiosity, mock alarm, genuine interest, worry, rhetorical playing for suspense, sympathy, decision, playfulness, dignity, and surpassing charm. Yet he said almost nothing. Questions were deflected, diverted, diluted. Answers—when they did come—were concise and clear. But I never met anyone who showed greater capacity for avoiding a direct answer while giving the questioner a feeling he had been answered."

In a 1934 renovation, Roosevelt moved the Oval Office from the center rear of the West Wing to the sunnier southeast corner, which allowed him to be rolled in his special wheeled chair (not a conventional wheelchair, but an armless kitchen chair adapted with small wheels and an ashtray) from the mansion in comfort and privacy through Thomas Jefferson's covered colonnade, past the Cabinet Room windows, down the porch, and through a side door into the office. According to White House historian William Peale, the new office was "furnished somewhat more elaborately than its predecessor," and "had rather theatrical neocolonial trimmings, somewhat in the Moderne vein. The most important doors had heavy pediments, while doors of secondary status had shell-shaped niches over them." Earlier presidents had kept the Oval Office walls almost bare, but FDR blanketed them with prints of navy ships and Hudson River landscapes where he could look at them through the workday.

It was on the banks of the Hudson that FDR was born and bred on a diet of smothering love and attention, the pampered son of an elderly millionaire and his indomitable wife, who lived in a grand mansion overlooking vistas of sylvan beauty. "FDR was supremely confident," said historian Geoffrey C. Ward. "His mother taught him that he was the center of the universe and that he was the sun around which everything revolved. He never lost that attitude."

Roosevelt prepared for the presidency with a two-track career in business and government split between New York State and Washington, D.C. After starting out as a law clerk at a Wall Street firm (and occasional White House guest of his cousin and hero President Theodore Roosevelt), he became a state senator in Albany, then spent 1913 through 1920 as assistant secretary of the navy. World War I, wrote historian James MacGregor Burns, "had a maturing effect on Roosevelt. Long hours, tough decisions, endless conferences, exhausting trips, hard bargaining with powerful officials in Washington and abroad turned him into a seasoned politician-administrator." After running for vice president on Democrat Al Smith's failed 1920 ticket, he spent most of the next decade in multiple business ventures, as a lawyer, insurance man, and investor, all the while helping to manage his family's estate in Hyde Park.

Sharper outlines of Roosevelt's creative and improvisational executive style emerged during his career as a budding venture capitalist during the Roaring Twenties. He speculated in a dizzying portfolio of schemes: transatlantic dirigibles, Maine lobster futures, oil wildcatting in Wyoming, resort hotels, taxicab advertising, and vending machines. He was rarely successful. "As war administrator, as businessman, as president," wrote Burns, "he liked to try new things, to take a dare, to bring something off with a flourish." His 1921 attack of polio and years of attempted rehabilitation resulted in what his longtime aide Frances Perkins called "a spiritual transformation" that "purged the slightly arrogant attitude he had displayed on occasion before he was stricken. The man emerged completely warmhearted, with humility of spirit."

After two terms as a generally effective, progressive governor of New York, the second biggest job in the United States, Roosevelt entered the White House with a near mystical self-assurance. FDR's formula for effectiveness in the job was simple: "What is needed is a wide previous experience in government problems generally and a versatility of mind that can take up one subject after another during the day and find itself at home in all of them."

On September 27, 1940, Roosevelt was at a crossroads between the two great crises of his presidency: the Depression and the outbreak of World War II. For seven years he had navigated the country through the lingering misery of the Depression with a public leadership style of charisma and compassion, and a closed-door executive style of insouciant charm, creative tension, chaos, delay, and improvisation. Vice President Henry Wallace asserted that FDR "could keep all the balls in the air without losing his own."

Now, as the summer of 1940 turned to fall, the world was going up in flames.

In Berlin, Hitler was issuing plans for a cross-channel invasion of Britain, after incinerating London with raids by up to 1,500 aircraft per day since early August in the Battle of Britain. German troops had already surged into Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France. In Asia, Japanese forces were consolidating their conquests in China and Manchuria and were now invading Indochina—15,000 Japanese had just occupied Hanoi. In September, FDR had evaded Congress and granted fifty warships to Britain, but he was still performing a geopolitical high-wire act he hoped might keep the United States out of the war. He commanded a banana-republic military: his army ranked as only the eighteenth in the world, behind Germany, Japan, England, France, Spain, Switzerland—behind even Portugal, Holland, and Belgium.

At the same time, Roosevelt was in the midst of campaigning for an unprecedented third term, against the strongest contender the Republicans ever threw against him, businessman Wendell Willkie. In these final weeks, the campaign had descended into a bitter death struggle, as Willkie was dodging eggs, rotten vegetables, and lightbulbs thrown at him by panicking Democrats in cities across the United States, and pounding away at FDR as a war-mongering near-dictator. Willkie was pulling even with FDR in key states like New York as Democratic and labor bosses and even the New York Times deserted Roosevelt's crusade.

In this supercharged atmosphere, FDR worried that a single misquoted word—particularly in his twice-a-week, off-the-record press conferences—might trigger an unexpected disaster. The previous year, in fact, a controversy erupted when, after a closed-door White House meeting with a group of senators, he was misquoted as saying that America's defense frontier was the Rhine River in Europe, an error that could have committed the United States to going to war in the event that German troops crossed over their western border.

In the wake of this controversy, one of FDR's White House stenographers, Henry Kannee, came up with an idea—to create an exact record of FDR's comments, why not secretly rig the Oval Office for sound? Roosevelt approved, and after a failed experiment with a Dictaphone machine wired up to a microphone in Roosevelt's office, the stenographer took the problem to the RCA Corporation, which coincidentally was working on an experimental prototype of a three-and-a-half-foot-high contraption called a "Continuous-film Recording Machine," an ancestor of the tape recorder. The machine was also called a "Kiel Sound Recorder and Reporter," after J. Ripley Kiel, the Chicago inventor who invented it and licensed it to RCA. It used a recording needle to feed sound signals onto ribbons of motion-picture film. Kiel proudly described it as "the very first recording device that could record for as long as twenty-four hours unattended and could immediately have the recording played back without any time consuming processing."

RCA founder David Sarnoff donated the machine, one of only seven ever built, as a gift to FDR during a White House visit in June 1940, and the installation was performed by Kiel in August. The tall lamp on his desk was not suitable for hiding a microphone, so Kiel bought another one and hid the microphone in it. When switched on, the machine was noise activated, and began recording as soon as someone spoke or made a loud noise. Kannee, who held the key to the closet, could also activate the system by flipping a switch on the machine itself.

From August to November 1940, Roosevelt used the machine to record press conferences as a backup to his stenographer's notes. In addition to fourteen press conferences, some private Oval Office conversations and meetings were also recorded by the machine, probably absentmindedly when FDR or a staffer forgot to turn the machine off. The recordings were not found until 1978, when historian Robert J. C. Butow discovered them by accident while performing research at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York.

The FDR recordings reveal an intimate inside view of his patrician, gossipy, and supremely confident executive style, as he uses charm, vagueness, gossip, and occasional deviousness as tools for managing his presidency. After listening to the recordings, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, "With all their technical imperfections, the tapes add a fascinating dimension to our sense of the Roosevelt presidency. They offer the historian the excitement of immediacy: FDR in casual, unbuttoned exchange with his staff. One is struck by how little the private voice differs from the public voice we know so well from the speeches. The tone is a rich and resonant tenor. The enunciation is clear, the timing is impeccable. The voice's range is remarkable, from high to low in register and from insinuatingly soft to emphatically loud in decibel level."

In the fall of 1940, the last thing Roosevelt wanted was a fight over civil rights. He had transformed the government into an agent of social action and economic recovery, but he was not ready to commit the presidency to racial equality. His relationship with black America was complex: he was torn between his sense of decency and fair play, evidenced by his 1935 executive order banning discrimination in New Deal programs, and his pragmatic, political side, which feared those powerful Southern Democrats who prevented him even from supporting a federal anti-lynching campaign. By the mid-1930s, his juggling act was succeeding, as the party held together in the South while his wife spoke out for civil rights and convinced blacks moving onto voter rolls of northern cities that they had friends in the White House. A historic shift occurred in 1936, when blacks bolted from their traditional home in the Republican Party and joined the FDR coalition. By 1940, New Deal programs supported 1 million black families.

As America's military buildup accelerated that year, segregation in the armed forces became the "hot button" issue for African Americans, who were locked out of the military or relegated to service jobs in all branches of the service. There were only two black combat officers in the half-million-man army and none in the navy. There was not a single black soldier in the Marine Corps, Tank Corps, or Army Air Corps. Congress passed a draft law that summer pledging to increase Negro army enlistment to 10 percent, adding that "there shall be no discrimination against any person on account of race or color" anywhere in the military. The bill contained a major loophole, though, which seemed to make everything conditional on the availability of segregated military facilities, few of which existed.

A. Philip Randolph and Walter White, joined by T. Arnold Hill of the Urban League, asked for a meeting with the president to clarify his view of the bill. White House staffers ignored their request. The group then appealed to Mrs. Roosevelt, who booked the meeting directly with FDR.



The Oval Office
September 27, 1940, 11:30 A.M.



President Franklin Roosevelt with Civil Rights Leaders

RE: Integration of U.S. Military Forces audio recording on 35mm motion-picture film (RCA/Kiel machine)



On the eve of both World War II and a presidential election, a delegation of black leaders lobbied FDR to desegregate the U.S. military. On the other side of the Oval Office were FDR's own government officials, dead-set against integration. Roosevelt decided to skate down a middle path of charming, almost condescending ambiguity, leading both sides to feel he agreed with them.

The meeting is a case study in miscommunication, highlights the dangers of FDR's improvisational executive style, and provoked a wave of controversy that threatened FDR's grip on the black vote as the election approached.



RANDOLPH: Mr. President, it would mean a great deal to the morale of the Negro people if you could make some announcement on the role Negroes will play in the armed forces of the nation, in the whole national defense set-up.
FDR: I did the other day! We did it the other day, when my staff told me of this thing [meeting]!
RANDOLPH: If you did it yourself, if you were to make such an announcement, it would have a tremendous effect upon the morale of the Negro people all over the country.
FDR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah (interrupting and talking over Randolph). Now, I'm making a national defense speech around the twentieth of this month, about the draft as a whole, and the reserves, and so forth. I'll bring that in.
RANDOLPH: (politely but firmly cutting Roosevelt off to get his point across) It would have a tremendous effect, because I must say, it is an irritating spot for the Negro people. They feel that they are not wanted in the various armed forces of the country, and they feel they have earned their right to participate in every phase of the government by virtue of their record in past wars for the nation. And consequently, without regard to political complexion, without regard to any sort of idea whatever, the Negroes as a unit, they are feeling that they are being shunted aside, that they are being discriminated against, and that they are not wanted now.


"It was remarkable enough for anybody to interrupt FDR and to talk as much as Randolph did in a meeting," noted historian Geoffrey C. Ward, "but for a black man in that time, it's truly extraordinary." The recording soon caught FDR in a misstatement, when he claimed to be putting blacks "right in, proportionately, into the combat services," a policy that didn't begin to be implemented until late in World War II. "The trouble with the president," Harry Truman once charged, "is that he lies."



VOICE: The Negro is trying to get in the army!
FDR: Of course, the main point to get across in building up this draft army, the selective draft, is that we are notas we did before so much in the World War, confining the Negro in to the non-combat services. We're putting him right in, proportionately, into the combat services.
RANDOLPH: We feel that's something.
FDR: Which is, something. It's a step ahead. It's a step ahead.
WHITE: Mr. President, may I suggest another step ahead?
This has been commented on by many Negro Americans, and that is that we realize the practical reality that in Georgia and Mississippi (FDR: Yeah.) it would be impossible to have units where people's standard of admission would be ability....
I'd like to suggest this idea, even though it may sound fantastic at this time, that in the states where there isn't a tradition of segregation, that we might start to experiment with organizing a division or a regiment and let them be all Americans and not black Americans or white Americans—working together.
Now, there are a number of reasons why I think that would be sound, among them that I think it would be a practical work for democracy and I think it would be less expensive and less troublesome in the long run.
FDR: Well, you see now Walter, my general report on it is this.
The thing is, we've got to work into this. Now, for instance, you take the divisional organization—about 12,000 men. 12, 14,000 men. Now, suppose in there that you have, one, what do they call those gun units? What?
One battery, with Negro troops, and officers, in there in that battery, like for instance New York, and another regiment, or battalion, that's a half of a regiment, of Negro troops.
They go into a division, a whole division of 12,000. And you may have a Negro regiment at work here, and right over here on my right in line would be a white regiment, in the same division. Maintain the divisional organization, Now what happens? After a while, in case of war, those people get shifted from one to the other. The thing gets backed into. We'd have one battery out of a regiment of artillery that would be a Negro battery, with the white battery here and another Negro battery, and gradually working in the field, together, you may back into what you're talking about.
RANDOLPH: I think, Mr. President, to supplement, if I may, the position of Mr. White, that idea is working in the field of organized labor. Now, for instance, there are unions where you have Negro business agents (FDR: Sure!) whereas 90 percent of the members are white. And you also even have Negroes who are parts of unions in Birmingham, Alabama, in the same union with the whites. If it can work out on the basis of democracy in the trade unions, it can in the army.
FDR: Yes. You take up on the Hudson River where Judge Patterson and I come from, we have a lot of brickworks.
RANDOLPH: Oh, yes?
FDR: Up around Fishkill, the old brickworks. Heavens, they have the same union (Randolph: Exactly.) for all the white workers and the Negro workers in those brickworks. (Randolph: Quite so.) And they get along, no trouble at all!
RANDOLPH: Quite so, and when they come out of their union and into the army, well, now, there isn't much justification for separating them, don't you know.
Colonel Knox, as to the navy, what is the position of the navy on the integration of the Negro in the various parts?
KNOX: You have a factor in the navy that is not present in the army, and that is that these men live aboard ships. And if I said to you that I was going to take Negroes into a ship's company [several very faint unintelligible words] this sort of thing won't do. And you can't have separate ships with a Negro crew, because everything in the navy now has to be interchangeable.
FDR: If you could have a Northern ship and a Southern ship it'd be different! (laughs) But you can't do that.
KNOX: I agree with, however, with the President's suggestion on some way of providing, in the words of the message of the Negro patriotic leaders to serve the nation without raising the question that comes from putting white men and black men living together in the same ship.
FDR: I think the proportion is going up, and one very good reason is that in the old days, ah, up to a few years ago, up to the time of the Philippine independence, practically, oh, I'd say 75 or 80 percent of the mess people on board ship, ah, were Filipinos. And, of course, we've taken in no Filipinos now for the last, what is it, four years ago, two years ago, taken in no Filipinos whatsoever.
And what we're doing, we're replacing them with colored boys— mess captain, so forth and so on.
And in that field, they can get up to the highest rating of a chief petty officer. The head mess attendant on a cruiser or a battleship is a chief petty officer:
RANDOLPH: Is there at this time a single Negro in the navy of officer status?
KNOX: There are 4,007 Negroes out of a total force at the beginning of 1940 of 139,000. They are all messmen's rank. (chatter)
FDR: I think, another thing Frank [Knox], that I forgot to mention, I thought of it about a month ago, and that is this.
We are training a certain number of musicians on board ship. The ship's band. There's no reason why we shouldn't have a colored band on some of these ships, because they're darn good at it. That's something we should look into. You know, if it'll increase the opportunity, that's what we're after. They may develop a leader of the band ....


In the face of this unintentional insult, the civil rights leaders held their tongues. Walter White steered the discussion back to the reality of epidemic racism in the military.



WHITE: There is discrimination in the army and in the navy, and in the Air Corps, in labor in the navy yards, and particularly in industry which has contracts for the national defense program. I've just completed an article, I hope it's the last draft, for the Saturday Evening Post, which I gather you know about.
FDR: Yeah, yeah.
WHITE: But in Pensacola, for example, there is an apprentice school, which gives a very fine course, a four-year course, for free. But there are no Negroes allowed to go into it. And apprenticeship is tremendously important.
FDR: For flying? Ground work?
PATTERSON: Ground crews.
FDR: I think we can work on that. Get something done on that. (chatter)
WHITE: In Charleston, South Carolina, they practically ousted all skilled and semi-skilled Negroes.
FDR: In Charleston?
WHITE: In Charleston, yes.
FDR: Of course, on the development of this work, you've got to have somebody, for instance in the navy, you've got to have somebody [black] in the office who will look after it.
In the last Navy Department, in the old days, I had a boy who was out here by the name of Pryor. Do you know Pryor? He used to be my colored messenger in the Navy Department. He was only a kid. I gave him to Louis Howe, who was terribly fond of him. Then when he came back here in 1933, Louis Howe said to me, "The one man I want in the office is Pryor."
Well, Pryor now is one of the best fellas we've got in the office....
I think you can do that in the army and the navy. Get somebody, a boy who will act as the clearinghouse.
WHITE: An assistant, responsible to the Secretary. (To Knox) I want to see you about that.
FDR: (To White, after Knox apparently gives him a stone-faced non-reply)
He's giving you what you call the silent treatment! Ha, ha, ha!
WHITE: We took the liberty of putting this out. We finished that just in time to get one set (giving statement to FDR, apologizing for the lack of copies to give to Knox and Patterson, a likely waste of paper), in which we tried to give you the benefit of the comments which are most important you should be most aware about. These are—I'm not going to leave them there, you've got enough reading matter—petitions from eighty-five American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts from California to Maine protesting against discrimination.
FDR: Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup. (Meeting breaks up amid side conversations)
(one-on-one with White) Of course, what we're all after is to give some more opportunity. I used that boy as an example, Walter. I had entirely forgotten about the possibility of a Negro band, to increase the opportunity. The more of those we can get, a little opportunity here, a little opportunity there.
WHITE: Here we've been loyal in the last war—remember when they were worried about protecting Woodrow Wilson? They ordered Negroes to protect the White House. I've been trying to get— (FDR cuts him off)
FDR: I know it, I know it. Yeah. Well, of course, my letters are increased a bit from twenty threatening letters a day to nearly forty. But I feel all right! Ha! Ha! Goodbye!
RANDOLPH: You're looking fine, Mr. President, and I'm happy to see you again. Well, I'm proud to say that people don't like me, too. Even in Congress!
FDR: Bye!
VOICES: Goodbye, Mr. President.


Here was the president of the United States with the most influential black leaders of his time, referring to "colored" men as "boys," suggesting that mess attendant was a good career track, and that there ought to be more colored bands, "because they're darned good at it." Much of this can be explained by the fact that 1940 was a prehistoric time in race relations, and FDR had no special sensitivity to black issues beyond a patrician sense of fairness and noblesse oblige. Roosevelt treated many people with such easy, aristocratic familiarity. Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary of state, was repelled by it: "He could charm an individual or a nation. But he condescended ... it was patronizing and humiliating. To accord the president the greatest deference and respect should be a gratification to any citizen. It is not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one's forelock in return."

Like many of FDR's visitors, the civil rights delegation stepped out of the Oval Office thinking that FDR's nodding gestures and charming reassurances meant he agreed with them. But Roosevelt was not integrating combat forces and had no immediate intention of doing so. Days after the meeting, he approved a White House press release dated October 9, 1940, that announced that after the meeting with the black leaders, "the policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations. This policy has .proven satisfactory over a long period of years and to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparations for national defense ... no experiments should be tried with the organizational set-up of these units at this critical time."

Randolph and White were stunned when they read the release. The NAACP issued a furious press release on October 11: "White House Charged with Trickery in Announcing Jim Crow Policy of Army: We are inexpressibly shocked that a president of the United States at a time of national peril should surrender so completely to enemies of Democracy who would destroy national unity by advocating segregation. Official approval by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of such discrimination is a stab in the back of Democracy and a blow at the patriotism of twelve million Negro citizens." Randolph wrote angrily to FDR: "I was shocked and amazed when I saw the newspaper reports that the Negro committee had sanctioned segregation of Negroes in the armed forces of our country because I am sure that the committee made it definitely clear that it was opposed to segregation of the armed forces of the nation." The black press launched a chorus of outrage, thousands attended a protest meeting in Harlem, and black voters began flocking to Willkie.

FDR rushed to repair the damage by issuing a statement promising steps to "ensure fair treatment on a non-discriminatory basis," and appointed several blacks to senior positions in the military. The gestures worked. The African-American press applauded, and NAACP Chairman White sent FDR a note thanking him "for all you did to insure a square deal for Negroes in the defense of our country." In the election, FDR managed to hold on to 67 percent of the black vote. FDR never delivered on his promise. While thousands of blacks served heroically in combat and support roles during the war, most were relegated to inferior positions and segregated units. Widespread racial integration in the military would have to wait for President Truman's executive order of 104S.

"You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does," Roosevelt confessed in May 1942. "I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war." Roosevelt's performance in the civil rights meeting illustrated one of the central operating principles of his protean executive style, a style that transformed the presidency, and the nation: a willingness to delay decisions, change his mind, keep his options open, avoid commitments, or even deceive people in the relentless pursuit of noble objectives. George Elsey, who as a young naval lieutenant helped run Roosevelt's secret wartime White House intelligence center, the Map Room, said, "Roosevelt had the habit of saying he was in agreement with whoever he was with and making them feel they had his full support, and he might well go off in another direction an hour later." "Roosevelt had a fairly creative relationship with the truth," noted Geoffrey Ward. "He could convince himself that what he was saying was the truth for the moment. He was a master at pleasing the visitors to his office."

Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor, who functioned mainly as an executive political deputy to her husband, saw this characteristic not as a strategy but as a personality flaw: "His real weakness," she commented, was "he couldn't bear to be disagreeable to someone he liked." "Franklin had a way, when he did not want to hear what somebody had to say, of telling stories and talking about something quite different." When FDR refused to inform Vice President Henry Wallace that he was being dropped from the ticket in 1944, Eleanor noted, "he always hopes to get things settled pleasantly and he won't realize that there are times when you have got to do an unpleasant thing directly, and, perhaps, unpleasantly." FDR crony Jim Farley spoke of the way "he forever put off things distasteful." Political boss and close FDR friend Ed Flynn wrote that FDR "did not keep his word on many appointments," and once hung up the phone on him after a perceived double-cross. Raymond Moley, a New Deal adviser, remarked, "Perhaps in the long run, fewer friends would have been lost by bluntness than by the misunderstandings that arose from engaging ambiguity."

Roosevelt's secret recorder began its trial run during an uneventful press conference on August 22, 1940, barely a month before the civil rights meeting. As soon as the press filed out of the Oval Office, in walked former newspaperman Lowell Mellett, who had just been named Roosevelt's assistant. The two had recently learned that Republican campaign operatives were about to publicize a group of bizarre and potentially embarrassing "Dear Guru" letters written by FDR's vice presidential running mate Henry Wallace to a White Russian cult leader, letters that could injure Roosevelt's reelection campaign. In retaliation, FDR was now considering unleashing a whispering campaign to promote a sex scandal against Wendell Willkie, who was thought to be having a longtime affair with a prominent New York book reviewer. The affair was fairly common knowledge in New York, and Willkie was still married to his wife while he spent extended periods with "the gal."

FDR waited until the door was closed, and then began speaking in a soft, theatrically conspiratorial voice, almost swallowing his words. He didn't want anybody else to hear, but he clearly had forgotten, or didn't care, that his brand-new experimental recorder was still humming along underneath his feet in the basement. "Ah, Lowell, on this, uh, thing, I.... Now, I agree with you that there is, so far as the old man [presumably FDR] goes, we can't use it publicly ... You can't have any of our principal speakers refer to it, but people down the line can do it properly (raps desk). I mean the Congress speakers and state speakers, and so forth. They can use your material to determine the fact that Willkie left his old [several inaudible whispered words]. That's it. All right. So long as it's none of us people at the top. Now, all right, if people try to play dirty politics on me, I'm willing to try it on other people. Now, you'd be amazed at how this story about the gal is spreading around the country." Roosevelt compared the situation to that of former New York mayor Jimmy Walker, who, Roosevelt said, had an "extremely attractive little tart" for a mistress, and hired his estranged wife for $10,000 to appear publicly with him during a corruption trial. "Now, Mrs. Willkie may not have been hired," FDR speculated on the recording, "but in effect she's been hired to return to Wendell and smile and make this campaign with him."

In the end, the Republicans held their fire and did not publicize the "Guru letters," possibly because they were afraid of the type of counterstroke Roosevelt was considering on the recording, the first known electronic Oval Office recording in history. In turn, FDR never implemented the whispering campaign about Wendell Willkie's sex life. Roosevelt himself may also have feared triggering rumors about his own attachments to women other than his wife.

FDR's secret wiring of the Oval Office coincided with the dawn of the era of electronic surveillance by the U.S. government against its own citizens, a policy that began on FDR's order. A 1939 Supreme Court decision prohibited the use of wiretapping, but on May 21, 1940, three months before the Oval Office was wired, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover received an authorization from Roosevelt directing him to use "listening devices" against people suspected of espionage and subversion. Although FDR intended the order to apply only to matters of extreme and imminent danger to national security (such as sabotage or espionage), Hoover used this document as his authorization to use wiretaps against a broad spectrum of targets for the next three decades. In 1975, a Senate investigation found evidence that Roosevelt authorized Hoover to tap the home telephones of several of his closest advisers, including Harry Hopkins. (FDR feared that Hopkins's wife was leaking anti-administration information to the Washington Times-Herald.)

Although the "FDR Tapes" cover only a microscopic portion of Roosevelt's time in office, they do illustrate a supreme reality of Roosevelt's presidency: he is completely in love with his job. Geoffrey Ward marveled, "He is trapped behind his desk and what is astonishing to me is what a good time he's having." "He was a most unusual man, one of the finest gentlemen I've ever known," said Dorothy Jones Brady, FDR's personal secretary and stenographer, who went to work for him as a twenty-one-year-old White House assistant in March 1933 and was with him until the day he died. "Every day you were there you knew that your number one job was to help people in trouble. He had a compassion that was like a magnificent obsession."

Just after taking office, Roosevelt moved quickly to distinguish his presidency from the image of Hoover's cold indifference. In 1932, Hoover launched an army attack against protesting veterans camped out on the Mall and burned down their camps. Frances Perkins reported, "When the veterans came to Washington in March 1933, in a similar, if smaller, march on the capital followed by an encampment, Roosevelt drove out and showed himself, waving his hat at them." He then sent Mrs. Roosevelt and aide Louis Howe out to meet with the veterans. "Above all," FDR directed, "be sure there is plenty of good coffee. No questions asked. Just let free coffee flow all the time. There is nothing like it to make people feel better and feel welcome." The veterans gradually drifted away peacefully.

James Roosevelt recalled one of his father's first White House executive orders after becoming president: "He circulated word to his staff, from the top secretaries to the telephone operators, that, if persons in distress telephoned to appeal for help of any sort, they were not to be shut off but that someone was to talk with them. If a farmer in Iowa was about to have his mortgage foreclosed, if a homeowner in one of the big cities was about to lose his home, and they felt desperate enough about it to phone the White House, Father wanted help given them if a way possibly could be found; he was keenly cognizant of the suffering he had seen on his campaign trips. Many such calls were taken—sometimes by me, when I was in the White House, and occasionally by Mother. Often ways were found to cut red tape with some federal agency. After Father's death, Mother received letters from strangers, who told her how, in the dark Depression days, they telephoned their president and received aid."

The rhythms of FDR's work pattern would vary little over the next twelve years. He awoke around 8:30 A.M., alone in an old-fashioned mahogany bed, threw a cape around the shoulders of his weather-beaten pajamas, and then, more or less simultaneously, ate a breakfast in bed of soft-boiled eggs, read through government reports, scanned the Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, and New York newspapers, got a quick health check from his doctor, Admiral Ross T. McIntyre, received Eleanor for some emergency request, and huddled with presidential aides like Harry Hopkins, "Pa" Watson, and Press Secretary Steve Early, plus Cabinet members and other officials, all while his valet bathed, shaved, and dressed him. Every morning FDR and his top officials received a package of clippings from some 700 newspapers, many of them hostile to the administration. Before long Roosevelt was stuffing the first of his forty daily Camel cigarettes into a soft-tipped ivory cigarette holder he used to protect his tender gums. Throughout the day, he used the holder as a theatrical prop, waving it around like a magician's wand, royal scepter, and orchestra baton to emphasize points and illustrate anecdotes.

Around 10:00 A.M. FDR was man-hauled into the wheeled chair, pushed into the elevator, and rolled down into the West Wing, now joined by a team of Secret Service men carrying baskets full of presidential work, and flanked by hyperactive Scottish terrier "Fala" trotting and yapping alongside. Once behind his desk, FDR would swing himself into a regular chair, and remain there as prisoner for much of the day, "a spider at the center of his web," as Geoffrey C. Ward put it, "where the world came to him."



The Oval Office
Summer 1940



President Roosevelt with White House Staff

RE: Routine Oval Office Business audio recordings on 35mm motion-picture film (RCA/Kiel machine)



Roosevelt's recordings capture his breezy, stream-of-consciousness Oval Office atmosphere of informality. In the first few weeks of his recording experiment, Roosevelt's machine recorded him tackling random slices of Oval Office business, shifting from one task to another with dizzying speed, interacting with his staff with effervescent charm.



August 22, 1940, Morning



AIDE: The picture taken up at the park was fine. I saw it yesterday afternoon. It turned out fine.
FDR: Good. Fine. Fine. The sun came out, it was just right. I didn't need any paint on my face!
AIDE: That's the speech there, if you'd approve that. (FDR reads and signs papers)
FDR: Ask the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy if they would approve a meeting here on Monday, and would they telephone to the Canadians and ask them if Tuesday would be all right instead of Monday to meet in Ottawa. I think that's a good idea, too.
Oh, look, get hold of Dan and tell Dan I want some maps on the [Presidential yacht] Potomac if they're not there already, charts, showing the entire layout of Newfoundland.
I want large scale. No small scale stuff. Large scale stuff.
Move them along. The east coast of Nova Scotia....


Later, FDR reviewed lists of potential appointments to federal judgeships around the country, trying to steer clear of financial scandals allegedly connected to some of the candidates. In New Jersey, one candidate was supposed to be mixed up in illegal payoffs.



FDR: You been able to clear anything for Smathers? (signing papers)
AIDE: Well, now, I want to tell you about Smathers.
He nominated a man by the name of Shalick. The story is that Shalick has paid him $10,000, and there is more scandal about Shalick, the probabilities are we're going to have to remove him as soon as it's time for his retirement. Violation of the Hatch Act. It's in this report we want to show you.
Hague says he's unfit, but Hague says he's also got to write you a letter that he's all right (FDR laughs) but it doesn't mean anything. Says he shouldn't be appointed....
FDR: Right. I'll do this. It's very simple: send Boss Smathers a letter. "We cannot appoint Shalick. Give me another name."
AIDE: Well, we've told him that....
FDR: Appoint somebody else. I gave him three separate chances, every time. Number one man? No! Number two man? No! Number three man? No! Three strikes are out....


In Oklahoma, the problem was an alleged sexual assault, and FDR faced the dilemma of whether to appoint an accused rapist to the federal bench. A former secretary of an Oklahoma judge accused him of raping her in his office. The judge maintained his innocence, but paid her a $3,000 settlement. Oklahoma Democratic senator Elmer Thomas was pushing hard for the appointment of the judge, one of his financial contributors. The whole mess could expose the Democrats to blackmail.



AIDE: In Oklahoma, they're still wanting a fellow appointed who's in trouble with his secretary for rape. Thomas is very urgent about it, said he'd take the responsibility and I said, well, now, look here, if they ask for the files on this man in the midst of a campaign and make it a national issue, you can't cover the nation. Well, he admitted that he might get into trouble....
FDR: Oh. He's the fella that raped the girl in his office.
AIDE: And settled for three thousand dollars.
FDR: And settled for three thousand dollars, and he's led a clean life, so far as we know, ever since.
AIDE: Of course, the difficulty is everybody now wants to keep it very quiet, subject to blackmail now, the party is subject to blackmail.


Today, FDR passed over the accused judge, but changed his mind a few years later and appointed him to Federal District Court.



September 6, 1940, 11:05 A.M.



GRACE TULLY: Morning, Mr. President.
FDR: Morning, Grace!
TULLY: We're waiting for that update from the State Department as usual.
FDR: Yeah, they always send it at the last minute. (signs papers) I expected they would.
TULLY: Yeah, at the most inopportune time.
FDR: Now, is that all we've got? Got something for me to sign?
TULLY: Yessir, I'll bring it in.
FDR: Good, bring it in. (reads document) Now, what do we do about this? This is the damnedest thing I've ever read.


FDR now read aloud from a telegram sent by U.S. Minister Hugh G. Grant in Thailand to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The telegram reported on an Asian trip by former FDR backer Roy Howard, head of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, now a Wendell Willkie supporter. Howard was spreading rumors that FDR was deteriorating mentally and physically. FDR seemed eager to retaliate, but was firmly kept in check by his press secretary, Steve Early, who convinced him this would be counterproductive.



FDR: "Accompanied by the leading American businessman in Siam, Howard called to see me at the legation with his friend and launched into a bitter attack on the president, accusing him of bad faith in inviting him, Howard, to go on a mission to South America, alleging that he, the president, was down and out physically and mentally, that he had made a mess of our foreign affairs during the crisis, and that he is desirous of leading the country into war...."
Now, what do we do about a thing like that?
EARLY: Mr. President, I should think that the best thing to do with that would be to put it into the speech material file along with the other letters of record. I don't see that you can do anything else with it.
FDR: But it is interesting.
EARLY: Yes. Very much so, it ought to be made a part of that record ...
APPOINTMENTS SECRETARY MARVIN MCINTYRE: When people see you when you go around, that refutes that physical stuff.
FDR: Yeah. I'm willing to admit my mentality's slipping, but that's all right! (laughter in the room)
MCINTYRE: The attorney general wants to speak to you after the Cabinet for a few minutes. Bob says its a very important thing....
The Dutch Minister is sick, they say very seriously sick, and he says he has an urgent message for you, and he wanted to know if he could find some way, if he could phone you during the day.
FDR: Sure! Put him after lunch!


Roosevelt worked from two Oval Offices: the one in the West Wing, which he used for press conferences and formal, ceremonial meetings, and the Oval Room on the second floor of the White House mansion—also called the "Oval Study" or "the study." This was "the most important room of Roosevelt's presidency," according to White House historian William Seale. "There he worked, relaxed and there he conducted most of the important business of State." Frances Perkins watched the room quickly fill up "with everything that came his way—a Jefferson chair, another bookcase, another bench, another table, ship models and books and papers piled on the floor. Any room he used invariably got that lived-in and overcrowded look which indicated the complexity and variety of his interests and intentions."

FDR usually ate lunch at his desk with guests on card tables in front of sofas, some of which dated back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt. He regularly worked late into the evenings and weekends in the Oval Room, which was connected to his bedroom by a side door. From January 1942 to mid-1944 FDR went once or twice a day to the secret Map Room in the White House basement, a military and intelligence center inspired by Churchill's map room. Here Roosevelt could check the progress of troop movements and naval campaigns around the world on giant maps on the wall dotted with colored pins. He met every Monday with congressional leaders, held press conferences on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, and Cabinet meetings every Friday afternoon. Roosevelt returned to the Oval Study at about 5:30 in the evening and then held court as mix-master at the nightly cocktail hour, where he would relax and gossip with his staff. Before turning in around midnight, he went through a bedtime folder of letters from ordinary citizens and chatted with his wife, who slept in a nearby room.

As a chief executive Roosevelt functioned not at the top of a pyramid, but at the center of a self-propelled whirlwind, as he smashed bureaucratic procedure, instigated open conflict between people and ideas, and sucked blizzards of data into his Oval Offices. He transacted much presidential business through short, informal memos on White House notepads, often simply dashed off in his own handwriting. Political scientist Frank Kessler described Roosevelt's accessibility: "One hundred or so persons could get to him directly by telephone without being diverted by a secretary. He employed no chief of staff and permitted few of his staffers to become subject matter specialists. Except for Harry Hopkins, to whom he turned almost exclusively for foreign policy assignments, staffers were assigned problems in a variety of areas."

Roosevelt soaked up new ideas and information ravenously from all directions, and his in-boxes were often piled high with reports sent to him directly from all corners of government. He preferred his memos and letters short ("Two short sentences will generally answer any known letter," he asserted), and if someone submitted an oversized document, he would ask, "Boil it down to a single page." If he liked a memo, he might read it back to the person who wrote it. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., observed, "The first task of an executive, as he evidently saw it, was to guarantee himself an effective flow of information and ideas. An executive relying on a single information system became inevitably the prisoner of that system. Roosevelt's persistent effort therefore was to check and balance information acquired through official channels by information acquired through a myriad of private, informal and unorthodox channels and espionage networks."

The White House in FDR's early years was a remarkably modest operation: he had a primary staff of only around 100 and a $200,000 budget. To control costs, the offices were furnished with abandoned furniture from terminated federal agencies. When you walked into the West Wing lobby, if you looked closely you would see patches in the carpet. When you looked into Roosevelt's office, according to eyewitnesses, you could see him surrounded by assistants, signing a constant stream of papers and chatting on the phone. He would look up, see you, raise his huge hand into the air to wave while throwing his head back and shouting, "Come on in. We're doing a land-office business!" At the beginning of the war he bellowed to one visitor, "I can take anything these days!" An FDR friend observed: "This man functions smoothly because he has learned to function in chains." Washington attorney James Rowe, who became an FDR assistant at age twenty-eight, walked in to meet FDR for the first time in the Oval Office. Roosevelt smiled up at him and announced, "Jim, I want your advice," instantly creating a lifelong admirer.

Roosevelt was not afraid to admit when he didn't know something, an asset for any executive, especially crucial for a president. In one meeting he confessed, "I am still perfectly foggy about the whole thing. Can you differentiate between old mortgages and new mortgages?" After an aide phoned in a briefing from a meeting of economists, FDR hung up, then called back, "I don't understand it yet. Put it in a telegram." Roosevelt's tendency to hijack conversations led some officials to resort to a desperate strategy: they insisted on luncheon meetings, then waited for the exact moment when FDR stuffed his mouth with food to begin talking. When he wanted to end a conversation, FDR would say: "Well, I'm sorry, I have to run now!" FDR aide Samuel Rosenman mused, "I am sure it never struck him as a strange thing to say, even though he had not been able to walk since 1921."

FDR's Cabinet meetings were fairly useless, except as platforms for presidential pep talks. "You go into Cabinet meetings tired and discouraged," said one official, "and the president puts new life into you. You come out like a fighting cock." Afraid of leaks and scornful of committees, Roosevelt preferred to deal with department chiefs one-on-one. A Cabinet member asserted, "A Roosevelt Cabinet was a delightful social occasion, where nothing was ever settled." Labor Secretary Perkins, relishing her role as the first female Cabinet member, remembered things differently, at least early on. "Those early meetings were full of excitement, and always there was an easy give and take," she wrote. "He did not expect yes-men around him. He wanted a free expression of opinion, and it took place, under his leadership, in a stimulating atmosphere." FDR's Cabinet members were seasoned, heavyweight veterans of titanic turf wars. Management expert Peter Drucker considered the group a model: "Nine of its ten members were what we now would call technocrats—competent specialists in one area. That the exceptional team delivered an exceptional performance—not one financial scandal, for instance, despite unprecedented government spending—explains in large measure Roosevelt's own unprecedented hold on power and office."

FDR surrounded himself with many tough, strong, often cantankerous players like military Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy, Cabinet Secretaries Stimson and Morgenthau, Press Secretary Early, and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Admiral Ernest King was reported to "raise holy hell" with FDR. During a group meeting at the White House, General George Marshall shot down a Roosevelt idea by announcing, "I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don't agree with you at all," startling FDR as well as Marshall's colleagues, who predicted career disaster for him. Instead, Roosevelt promoted Marshall over thirty-four more senior officers to be army chief of staff.

"There is nothing I love as much as a good fight," Roosevelt once declared, and the hallmark of his executive style was creative tension and controlled chaos. He thrived on managing through interpersonal competition and interdepartmental combat, and he delighted in pitting aggressive personalities against each other in open conflict. He apparently believed that the clash of people and ideas produced shocks to the bureaucracy necessary for creative solutions to cope with the emergencies of the Depression. "A little rivalry is stimulating," he explained. "It keeps everybody going to prove he is a better fellow than the next man. It keeps them honest too." "His favorite technique was to keep grants of authority incomplete, jurisdictions uncertain," wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. "The result of this competitive theory of administration was often confusion and exasperation on the operating level; but no other method could reliably insure that in a large bureaucracy filled with ambitious men eager for power the decisions, and the power to make them, would remain with the president."

FDR's White House was a spectacle of gladiatorial warfare, a Roman coliseum of bloody showdowns. Roosevelt pitted Assistant Secretary of State Raymond Moley against Secretary of State Cordell Hull at the 1933 London Monetary and Economic Conference in a clash over tariff policy. Moley quit in disgust. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles was in perpetual revolt against his boss Cordell Hull, with the apparent approval of Roosevelt. Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones and Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace grappled in a debilitating wartime feud, as did many other agency and department chiefs.

The fighting got so intense at times that FDR was forced to intervene. At a Cabinet meeting in February 1935, Morgenthau blew up at Ickes over a secret investigation conducted by Interior into Treasury's handling of bids for the Post Office Annex building in New York City, also the turf of Postmaster General Jim Farley—a three-way shoot-out. During the meeting FDR wrote out a note and held it up to Morgenthau: "You must not talk in such a tone of voice to another Cabinet officer." He then pounded the table and told the three to get along. "I cannot have three Cabinet members disagreeing." Another three-way battle broke out in 1943, this time over tax policy. "Who is in charge?" one of the officials asked bitterly. Roosevelt smacked the table. "I am the boss. I am the one who gets the rap if we get licked in Congress... I am the boss, I am giving the orders."

In the heat of combat, FDR used his officials as surrogate combatants for himself, and he reserved the right to disassociate himself from the fray and withhold his support if the deputy was losing the battle. Frances Perkins recalled, "If you Wanted to go out on a limb for some hobby or theory, he would never say no. He kept an open mind as to whether it was wise or unwise, but he reserved the right not to go out and rescue you if you got into trouble. He wanted you to understand that. Many, too timid to defend their own position, resented this." FDR told Cabinet members going on political missions during a campaign: "Say what you please. Use your own judgment. But if it turns out wrong, the blood be on your own head."

"He liked to have Harry Ickes and Harry Hopkins out there fighting in public, or Jesse Jones and Henry Wallace," said James Rowe, "because he could make a pretty good judgment on the reaction of the people or the newspapers or politicians." His tactics were often a mystery to his men. "You are a wonderful person but you are one of the most difficult men to work with that I have ever known," Ickes declared to his boss. "Because I get too hard at times?" Roosevelt asked. "No, you never get too hard but you won't talk frankly even with people who are loyal to you and of whose loyalty you are fully convinced. You keep your cards close up against your belly."

FDR once explained his philosophy to Morgenthau: "Never let your left hand know what your right is doing." Morgenthau asked: "Which hand am I, Mr. President?" FDR: "My right hand. But I keep my left hand under the table." In his diary, Morgenthau concluded: "This is the most frank expression of the real FDR that I ever listened to and that is the real way that he works—but thank God I understand him." Dean Acheson, as usual, was disgusted by Roosevelt's method: "One often reads of Franklin Roosevelt that he liked organizational confusion which permitted him to keep power in his own hands by playing off his colleagues one against the other. This, I think, is nonsense. Such is a policy of weakness, and Roosevelt was not a weak man. Furthermore, it did not keep power in his own hands, it merely hindered the creation of effective power by anyone."

To tackle the intractable problems of the Depression, FDR conjured up a blizzard of boards, agencies, and committees, many of them overlapping with existing departments. "The country needs, and unless I mistake, the country demands, bold persistent experimentation," he declared as the New Deal began. "We have new and complex problems," he said another time. "Why not establish a new agency to take over the new duty rather than saddle it on an old institution?" To provide some coordination to the proliferation of New Deal programs, FDR set up the National Emergency Council, a domestic super-cabinet that included Cabinet and agency chiefs that met regularly in the Cabinet Room. The meetings helped Roosevelt collect information, "knock heads together" and settle disputes on the spot.

FDR's New Deal executive style helped him collect multiple streams of opinions and information that had been "pre-tested" for debates in Congress, resulting in legislative triumphs like the Social Security Act of 1935. The Tennessee Valley Authority was a success, and the Public Works Administration and Works Progress Administration took 4 million people off relief rolls by 1936 and laid much of the physical plant for the country. By early 1936, stock prices and industrial production and payrolls doubled versus 1932. Overall though, much of the New Deal was a failure: the mammoth Agricultural Adjustment Act and National Recovery Administration projects were disappointments and were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. By 1939, unemployment persisted at 9 million, and the unemployment rate stayed over 10 percent until the war.

"I wish you could be here for a week sitting invisibly at my side," Roosevelt once wrote to a friend. "It would not be a pleasant experience for you because you would get a shock every ten minutes." By early October 1940, inside Roosevelt's Oval Offices, the shocks were coming even faster. The presidential election was a month away, and Willkie was pulling even with Roosevelt in some polls, as the European war was threatening to turn global and pull in the United States.

(Continues...)

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