“Leadership” by Doris Kearns Goodwin Highlights How FDR’s Multiple Talents Rescued Fellow Polio Patients and Fellow Americans

“The leader must be ready and able to meet the challenges presented by the times. And no leader was more prepared to diagnose the national malady correctly and assert himself as ‘a vital human need’ than ‘old Doc Roosevelt,’ as he had been affectionally called at Warm Springs, where he had directly engaged with his fellow polio patients as architect, developer, program director, head counselor, therapy director, and spiritual adviser, ‘all rolled into one’…

    ‘Doc’ Roosevelt was ready to minister with frankness, near-mystical confidence, and an unshakable resolve to take whatever actions were necessary to transfuse the nation. He was prepared to administer a sustained, reanimating jolt of new leadership to his paralyzed and despondent nation. After all, in a searing and personal way, he had been through all this before.

   “One week before the March 4, 1933, inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the journalist Agnes Meyer had entered into her diary, ‘the world literally rocking beneath our feet.’ Following three years of precipitous decline, the ‘vital organs’ of the financial system, the nation’s banks, were shutting down. The economic system of the nation had entered a physical and spiritual state akin to death throes.” (1, p. 274).

Comment: I don’t know who became more aware of FDR’s multiple sides, FDR, his family and friends, the public, or historians.

1. Doris Kearns Goodwin. Leadership in Turbulent Times. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2019.