Sublime

At the age of twenty-eight, Roosevelt had found his calling.

After those telegrams, the White House had an accurate impression of Sam Rayburn as a Garner supporter, but it also had a false impression of Rayburn as Roosevelt’s enemy, as a leader not only of the Garner campaign but of the whole Stop Roosevelt movement, as the enemy of the man he not only idolized but whom he had, on a hundred occasions, loyall

Few leading politicians, in other words, actually participated in the settlement boom. Few, that is, except for Theodore Roosevelt.

The more precarious and the more perilous the position of a people becomes, the more absolute is the want of a fixed and consistent external policy, and the more dangerous does the elective system of the Chief Magistrate become.

Farley said FDR had an incredible capacity for making people feel at ease and convincing them their work was important.

But of the fourteen presidents since William Howard Taft who have played golf while in the White House,a Eisenhower was clearly the most dedicated.

Roosevelt relished the company of pretty, attentive women, and flirting with them was one of his favorite pastimes.

“Such tireless energy as Roosevelt’s I have never known,” said Captain Edward McCauley, Franklin’s naval aide, “except perhaps for his kinsman, Theodore Roosevelt. I thought I was fairly husky, but I couldn’t keep up with him.”

THREE PRESIDENTS DOMINATE American history: George Washington, who founded the country; Abraham Lincoln, who preserved it; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who rescued it from economic collapse and then led it to victory in the greatest war of all time.