Master of His Fate James Tobin (free e books to read online .txt) 📖

John Roosevelt watched four men carry his father down the stairs on a stretcher, then cross the lawn to the bay, where a boat was waiting to take him to the train station at Eastport, Maine.

“He managed to wave to me,” John remembered many years later, “and his whole face burst into a tremendous sunny smile. So I decided he couldn’t be so sick after all.”

The journey by train from coastal Maine to New York City was long and slow. There was plenty of time for FDR to reflect on the frightening turn his life had taken.

A trauma like sudden paralysis tears the foundation out from under every ambition and plan. But few people had ambitions and plans as large as Franklin Roosevelt’s.

For most of his life, he had pictured himself as a leader-in-the-making. Even his earliest memory, or so he claimed, was of a torchlight parade that trundled past his family’s home on the night that Governor Grover Cleveland of New York, a friend of his father’s, was elected president of the United States. Before long he imagined that he himself might become the sort of man who could inspire that sort of celebration.

But he was not a born leader. When he was thirteen, the age when many boys of his social class went away to boarding school, his mother kept him at home for an extra year. So when she finally sent him off to Groton, a school near Boston, he got a late start in making friends and never quite caught up. Franklin was sometimes invited to visit the home of Theodore Roosevelt and play with his five children. But that exuberant crew whispered that Franklin was a bit of a sissy. He was good at sailing and golf, but in the top-tier sports of football and baseball, he never made the team. He was the kind of kid who always seemed to be trying a little too hard to be popular. At Harvard College he was chosen to be president of the school newspaper, the Crimson, but he failed to win an invitation to join the most prestigious social club, Porcellian, a slight that left him deeply disappointed.

At last, in college, he did make some close friends. They were the ones who heard him voice his great ambition. “I can remember so well sitting out with him at a party,” one said later, “and he was perfectly definite about so many things for the future, and he said, ‘I know I want to try for the presidency of the United States.’”

The example of his distant cousin Theodore towered in his mind. Franklin’s parents had always looked down on the common run of politicians as rough and corrupt men. But “Cousin Theodore” broke that mold. T.R., as he was known, had proven that a man of their own class—a true “gentleman”—could battle for good in the public arena without using dirty tactics. As Sara once put it, T.R. showed that a gentleman could “go into politics but not be a politician.” When FDR was about to leave for Harvard, his uncle Fred had suggested he read a speech by his “noble kinsman,” who urged well-to-do young Americans like Franklin to embrace “the strenuous life.” T.R. had declared, “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

Theodore had started as a crusading reformer in politics, cleaning up the police department in New York City and fighting corrupt political bosses in the state capital of Albany. At the same time he wrote popular books about American history and his own adventures as a hunter and cowboy in the Dakotas. Next, as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy, he took a hand in launching a war with Spain. Just a few months later, he led a cavalry squadron called the Rough Riders against the Spanish army in Cuba. Welcomed home as a war hero in 1898, he was promptly elected governor of New York. Two years later he became vice president of the United States. And when President William McKinley was shot dead by an assassin in 1901, Theodore assumed the presidency.

Until then, Franklin had admired his older cousin from a distance. They knew each other, but not very well. That changed in 1903, when Franklin proposed marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s favorite niece and Franklin’s own fifth cousin once removed. FDR loved Eleanor. There was no doubt of that. But it’s hard not to suspect that he also enjoyed the prospect of forging a closer tie through marriage to the president of the United States. In 1905—after a long engagement, which Franklin’s mother had insisted on, and two years in law school at Columbia University—the two young representatives of different branches of the extended Roosevelt clan were married in a big “society wedding” in New York City. Relatives and friends looked on as the president, up from Washington, escorted the bride down the aisle. Her name remained what it had always been—Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

As president, Theodore Roosevelt built the Panama Canal, fought the power of overgrown corporations, started the national park system, and hunted grizzly bears for fun. He was a Republican. Franklin’s branch of the family were Democrats. But Franklin hung a portrait of Theodore next to a portrait of his father. The difference in political parties didn’t matter. He wanted a life like that of the man he now called Uncle Ted.

Another friend remembered Franklin saying that he planned to follow T.R.’s example step-by-step. First he would run for the New York state legislature. Then, again like Uncle Ted, he would go to Washington as assistant secretary of the navy. Next: governor of New York—“and anyone who is governor of New York