Sublime

Elected for an unprecedented four terms, Roosevelt proved the most gifted American statesman of the twentieth century.

The riddle for a biographer is to explain how this Hudson River aristocrat, a son of privilege who never depended on a paycheck, became the champion of the common man.

FDR’s administrative style was a legendary mixture of straightforward delegation, flowchart responsibility, Machiavellian cunning, and crafty deception.

“THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in a political campaign is to make as few mistakes as possible,” wrote Ed Flynn, and the 1932 Democratic presidential campaign was nearly flawless.

Though Bates initially viewed Lincoln as a well-meaning but incompetent administrator, he eventually concluded that the president was an unmatched leader, “very near being a perfect man.”

“Abraham Lincoln seems to me the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century.”

when even great men like Lenin try to make over a whole society suddenly the end is almost sure to be bad, and that the right end, the natural one, will come from the efforts of innumerable people trying to do right.

Malcolm Cowley assisted me in three important ways: His New Yorker profile of Perkins, “Unshaken Friend,” published in 1944, was the most comprehensive account of Perkins’s life to date.