Sublime

Blanche Wiesen Cook called it Eleanor’s revenge.

“the spectator could not fail to be impressed with the idea that a man who could have such a friend must be a noble man indeed.”

Eleanor quickly became the most popular girl in school. She excelled in French, German, and Italian, wrote superb essays, and made the first team in field hockey.

Roosevelt became the leading citizen of Merriweather County, thrilled at his exposure to the life of ordinary people in rural Georgia.

Becoming a part of the Democratic floor leadership would be a risk, a gamble—to this man who feared humiliation as well as defeat, a great risk, a great gamble—but he had taken great risks before; he had gotten to the Senate on the greatest gamble of all, running against the unbeatable Coke Stevenson. And the alternative was to wait, and keep “taki

In both of which he educated himself. He read voraciously, remembered pragmatically, and applied lessons ingeniously. Oratorical skills smoothed his path from law to politics: not being ponderous helped.

And there was a speech by another young senator, forty-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who also sat in the back row, a speech explaining why he had now—at last—decided to support the amendment. His explanation was based in part on pragmatism—one reason to give the southerners what they want, he said, is to avoid a filibuster. “After observing the

And then that remarkable close: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a New Deal for the American people.”120

government’s most important function: to help people “caught in the tentacles of circumstance,” to help them fight forces too big for them to fight alone.