Sublime

FRANKLIN WAS LITTLE LIKED in Albany. Most of his colleagues found him insufferable. Al Smith wrote him off as a dilettante—“a damn fool” who thought more about political appearances than substantive legislation.

What Donovan meant was that after Groton and Harvard, Franklin had enormous confidence in himself—perhaps overconfidence—and he never let law school interfere with his personal life.

But he was about to become—beginning in that summer of 1957—the greatest champion that the liberal senators, and Margaret Frost and the millions of other black Americans, had had since, almost a century before, there had been a President named Lincoln.

The death of Charles Murphy had allowed FDR to reenter public life as chairman of the Smith campaign. And it was the death of a second Tammany stalwart that catapulted Franklin to the center of the political stage.

In the spring of 1941 Lucy and Franklin began to see each another again. She was given the code name “Mrs. Johnson” by the Secret Service, and her name appears frequently on the White House register.

Kittson became his close friend, mentor, and longtime business associate. Jim would name his firstborn son James Norman in the older man’s honor.

He was college president until 1973; he ran for the Senate in 1976, aged seventy, becoming a Republican for the first time.

In his role as elder statesman, he buttressed Kennedy at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and refrained from criticizing Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam.

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