Roosevelt & Hopkins: An Artist of Government

This set of excerpts from Roosevelt & Hopkins is for Mike--happy birthday!

These excerpts bear upon questions of presidential leadership.  The creative aspect of FDR's presidency is emphasized.  Unlike the norm today, FDR actually thought up important policies, together with how to couch them to appeal to political allies while disarming opponents, and especially how and when to present them for public approval.

Sometimes they didn't work, like the so-called packing of the Supreme Court.  But sometimes they were acts of genius that did work, like Lend- Lease, that allowed the US to help the UK and other allies fight off Hitler, even before America entered the war.

Here's author Robert Sherwood in the early pages of Roosevelt & Hopkins (with different paragraph breaks):

While preparing this book I interviewed Harold Smith, who was Director of the Budget from 1939 to 1946. Smith was a modest, methodical, precise man, temperamentally far removed from Roosevelt and Hopkins. But I know of no one whose judgment and integrity and downright common sense the President trusted more completely. 

In the course of a long conversation, Smith said to me, ‘ A few months ago, on the first anniversary of Roosevelt’s death, a magazine asked me to write an article on Roosevelt as an administrator. I thought it over and decided I was not ready to make such an appraisal. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. 

 When I worked with Roosevelt—for six years—I thought as did many others that he was a very erratic administrator. But now, when I look back, I can really begin to see the size of his programs. They were by far the largest and most complex programs that any President ever put through. 

 People like me who had the responsibility of watching the pennies could only see the fix or six or seven per cent of the programs that went wrong, through inefficient organization or direction. But now I can see in perspective, the ninety-three or –four or –five per cent that went right—including the winning of the biggest war in history—because of unbelievably skillful organization and direction.

 And if I were to write that article now, I think I’d say that Roosevelt must have been on of the greatest geniuses as an administrator that ever lived. What we couldn’t appreciate at the time was the fact that he was a real artist in government.’

That word ‘artist’ was happily chosen, for it suggests the quality of Roosevelt’s extraordinary creative imagination. I think that he would have resented the application of the word as implying that he was an impractical dreamer; he loved to represent himself as a prestidigitator who could amaze and amuse the audience by ‘pulling another rabbit out of a hat.’ But he was an artist and no canvas was too big for him.

He was also, of course, a master politician, and most artists are certainly not that; but, by the same token, you rarely find a professional politician who would make the mistake of being caught in the act of creating an original idea. The combination of the two qualities in Roosevelt can be demonstrated by the fact that it required a soaring imaginator to conceive Lend Lease and it required the shrewdest kind of manipulation to get it passed by the Congress.

It was often said by businessmen during the Roosevelt Administration that “What we need in the White House is a good businessman.” But in the years of the Second World War there were a great many patriotic, public-spirited businessmen who went to Washington to render important service to their country and they learned that government is a weird world bearing little resemblance to anything they had previously known...

The more analytical of these businessmen came to the conclusion that it was no accident that not one of the great or even above-average Presidents in American history had been trained in business.”