Preliminary lessons from No Ordinary Time

I have finally finished No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. It was a great read, filled with amusing stories as well as gripping drama. The book is too long and too interesting for me to feel comfortable summarizing it. However, it's also too important for me to not at least try to capture a bit of the lessons learned.

1. A mask of charm is both an invaluable political tool and incredibly hollowing. Both FDR and Reagan had a charm that seemed effortless. But both had been characterized by those closest to them as individuals for whom there remained a wide gulf between their essential self and the outside world. That gulf could not be bridged even by those closest to them. It seems a hard way to live, but I suppose being President is not easy.

I can't speak for Reagan, but FDR's pattern of charm and distance was established well before he contracted polio. It appears to stem from the early death of his father, his demanding (even domineering) mother, his status as a sheltered only child, and perhaps his social difficulties at Harvard.

I have been told by those somewhat close to me that they are surprised when I am honest with them about my past, about my feelings, and about my despair. Evidently I also use charm as a way of distancing myself, although obviously with considerably less facility than FDR.

2. It is important to have both a hammer and an anvil to effect social change. The anvil is sedentary and patient. The anvil waits for things to come to it. The hammer is impatient, restless, relentless. The hammer seeks to achieve through sheer determination a changed world. But the anvil knows that, with the hammer's help, good things will ultimately be forged.

Eleanor Roosevelt could accurately be characterized as a battleaxe, but for this analogy, she is the hammer. For her own personal reasons, and personal tragedies, she had a restless, relentless drive. This often led to a lack of focus - and in the case of Japanese-American internment, perhaps a critical level of diffusion that prevented an eleventh hour rescue from internment. But she was incredibly consistent, and very aggressive about pushing everyone, especially her husband, for change.

FDR, on the other hand, was a careful student of polls, and often moved very slowly on issues of social justice, economic restructuring, or other policy changes he knew were not widely supported. It is perhaps his genius, as well as a stain on his legacy, that he did not lead on issues of African-American rights, labor's struggle with crony capitalism, or war mobilization.

But it is fair to say that he depended upon Eleanor as a way of saying and doing things he could not, by virtue of his twin handicaps - one physical, and one vocational. Often, the President can't lead, and it's not because he lacks courage. It is because, by coming from the President, things that should be broadly supported, or self-evident in their justice, become immediately contentious. Recent history illustrates this.

It's also fair to say that Eleanor alone could not have done what she did without FDR's backing. Even though he was called upon repeatedly to rein her in, he refused. FDR trained Eleanor to really investigate things - to ask specific and incisive questions, to observe and remember. His gifts of memory are legendary; what I did not know was how he literally taught and trained his wife to become such a keen judge of organizations and individual character.

It's worth noting that they were aided tremendously by a press that regulated itself regarding the president, his wife, and the president's relationship with women. This probably will never be possible again - the press was, by and large, very deferential to the office and to the man. Even as his powers were failing in his fourth term, the press, his staff, and even members of Congress would do their best to conceal his lapses.

Eleanor also benefited by having a weekly column. She got plenty of hate mail over it, especially from the South over her support of African-American civil rights. Still, I wonder whether any first lady would, or could, write a weekly column appearing in newspapers across the nation, and the extent to which that could be a bully pulpit for change.

Catt needed Paul in Women's Suffrage. King needed X in Civil Rights. FDR needed Eleanor to preserve the home front, even as foreign affairs consumed him.

3. The story of race relations is intimately tied to the story of the American labor movement. I did not realize how little I knew about American Labor, nor about its role in the advancement of African-Americans. Even with the existential threat of world war, the fight for manufacturing jobs and combat roles for blacks was a brutal one. Perhaps less dramatically violent, but equally powerful, was the struggle to allow women to do factory work. Eleanor later realized that the war did more for the poor and the oppressed than the New Deal ever did, or perhaps could.

This period saw the increased militancy of African-American groups and American labor, including some incredibly unpopular mine strikes during the war. Fortunately for everyone, they were resolved more or less peacefully, with the president exercising some wisdom on the matter (of course supported by Eleanor's field reports).

4. Great individuals often depend upon several people to give them what they need to be great. FDR fed voraciously among various men and women for social company and relaxation. It wasn't parasitic, but it was a very aggressive symbiosis that often threatened the ability of others to enjoy basic levels of independence. Few gave more to the President than Harry Hopkins, but Roosevelt resented that Hopkins' marriage would eventually lead his key social and intellectual partner to move out of the White House.

Eleanor, similarly, depended upon Joe Lash, Lorena Hickok, her daughter Anna, and a number of people as sounding boards, foils, and, ultimately, sources of love. I'd say each of them demanded, and got, almost the entirety of the lives of ten individuals.

It's teaching me to be both more giving and more demanding of the people I would have close to me. Each of us has to find the handful of people -- rarely biologically related -- that make time and make a difference.

5. FDR overruled his military in key strategic decisions, and was right. But he did not try to fight the war himself, and he did not interfere at levels below grand strategy. To do this required tremendous confidence in one's self. In fact, it was Roosevelt's ability to remain calm even in the darkest days of the war that stunned, even creeped out, many who observed him.

This was a surprise to me, as I had previously read Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace. In it, it appeared that the American general staff in general, and Marshall in particular, possessed unusually clear insight into the strategic aspects of the war. However, as No Ordinary Time reveals, Marshall himself admits he was wrong about a number of things - notably the need to support Britain and the Soviet Union early in the war, at the expense of US readiness. Also, both books acknowledge that American combat forces were too green, and would have been slaughtered had a premature European invasion taken place. Rather than a sideshow, the African and Italian campaigns helped harden American ground troops, and prepared them for success in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge.

After Korea and MacArthur, civilian leaders were especially wary of military overreach. After Vietnam, civilian leaders were unnerved by the use of force. One hopes America is only now finally emerging from an unhealthy period where both military and civilian leadership lacked the self-confidence, tempered by the wisdom of restraint, to exercise effective leadership.

6. One can be in love with someone and mostly live separate lives. In many ways, FDR and Eleanor's relationship has strong parallels to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Both couples loved each other, and drew upon each other's strengths. Both wives were betrayed by their husbands, and in important ways, never forgave them. But both women also used the experiences as proof that they had to develop their own separate lives.

The American Experience: Clinton (one of a fantastic set of documentaries about American presidents, including FDR) mentions that Hillary Clinton actually moved back to Arkansas during one of Bill's early campaigns, and looked as if she was going to become a housewife, albeit one who worked outside of the home.

FDR and Eleanor redefined their love, what it was to be in love, even as they both needed emotional support and got it from people other than their spouse. Even more than the case with the Clintons, one gets the sense that something is keeping them together that is larger than either political necessity nor the mores of the time. It's fair that both were in love with each other, but both were also exasperated by each other. They depended upon key intermediaries to know how to manage them, singly and together. Most couples are not so lucky.

7. Sometimes, we can be surprised by the simplicity of the needs and desires of people far form home.

I'll mention briefly that one poignant vignette concerned Eleanor's visits to field hospitals in the Pacific. She was initially worried that the troops were going to be disappointed, as security procedures only announced that "a woman" was coming to visit. Eleanor, ever conscious of not living up to her mother's beauty, was worried the men would be expecting a pinup girl. But she found that they appreciated her visits, because she was something they hadn't seen in a year of service - an American mother.

Of all the things that tug at the heart in this book, this seemed a particularly touching insight.


There are many other lessons. But this is a good starting point.

No Ordinary Time: The Greer and The Tonkin Incident (and Iraq)

From No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin (p.277-278). This passage covers the Greer incident, which happened on September 4, 1941.

*****

While Eleanor attended her dying brother, Franklin was readying a major speech for delivery to the nation on September 11. He had committed the United States to convoys at the Atlantic Conference, but he had not yet revealed the new policy to the American people. A submarine attack on the U.S.S. Greer gave him the incident he needed to mobilize public support behind convoys.

The events surrounding the Greer attack were not quite as the president described in his nationwide radio address. He said the German submarine had "fired first upon the American destroyer"; he claimed the Greer's identity as an American ship was "unmistakable." In fact, the Greer had deliberately stalked the German sub, having been alerted to its presence by a British plane. The British plane had attacked the U-boat with depth charges while the Greer continued in pursuit. The sub fired a few torpedoes, the Greer responded with a few depth charges, and the chase came to an uneventful end. There was no positive evidence, the navy told the president, that the sub knew the nationality of the ship at which it was firing.

But the fact that German torpedoes had been fired on an American ship was all Roosevelt needed to reassert the principle of freedom of the seas. "No matter what it takes, no matter what it costs," the president warned the Axis powers, "We will keep open the line of legitimate commerce in these defensive waters.... Let this warning be clear. From now on, if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril.... When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him. These Nazi submariners and raiders are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic."

To implement this warning, the president announced the final decision of the government to convoy British supplies, and a new policy by which the navy would shoot on sight any German raiders that came into our defensive zones. "It was," Stimson wrote, "the firmest statement and the most forward position yet taken by the President." Churchill was exultant. The shooting war in the North Atlantic had begun.

The president's "shoot on sight" policy won the solid support of 62 percent of the American people. "Sentiment on Capitol Hill has changed almost overnight," Washington correspondent David Lawrence reported. The news of the attack led "many a Congressman to say that the American people will not have their ships fired on and that defense of the freedom of the seas will once again command substantial support in both houses."

Yet, for all the positive results that the president's depiction of the Greer attack produced, an unfortunate precedent was set that would return in later years to haunt the American republic. "Roosevelt's deviousness in a good cause," Senator William Fulbright said after the Gulf of Tonkin incident helped propel escalation in Vietnam, "made it easier for Lyndon Johnson to practice the same kind of deviousness in a bad cause."

*****

Notes:
The Maine was sunk in Havana harbor in 1898
The Greer incident occurred in 1941.
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurred in 1964.
This book was written in 1994, nine years prior to the invasion of Iraq.

Dear Lexi

Dear Lexi,

Today is our last day together. (Technically, today was also our first day together.) But we have been together long enough for me to understand the trajectory of our relationship, the people involved, and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment is wonderful, but I will find a way of screwing it up eventually, so I'm leaving.

To put it in the simplest terms, our interests are just too diverse.

But seriously--You are so sweet, and beautiful, and charming. You are everything I'd ever dreamed, and then some. Your voice is adorable, and your eyes -- I could be lost in them until the end of days and still not have the words to describe them. I have done my best to be true to Yeats' words:

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face

We bonded over nerdy things. You enthralled me with tales of Huey Long, and I told you about the stories I'd learned about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Why didn't it work out? I may be asking myself that question until my dying day -- and on that day, I will have your name upon my lips, a prayer to the only thing I ever believed in.

It wasn't the other men. Or the women. It wasn't their fault, or yours. I know you are a woman of appetites... many... many... varied appetites. I knew it was part of your job -- you were my Elizabeth, and it is not an easy thing to love the queen. I knew the openness of our relationship was not supposed to touch our love - that our love was above it - but I am a petty, jealous man. I cannot shake the lingering mores of my Protestant upbringing, though believe me when I said I did love you as openly as I have ever loved, more openly than I ever thought possible.

If I may be frank, it was your insistence that Attack of the Clones was the best Star Wars movie. My dear, so many things ought not come between our love -- yet there are some chasms that cannot be bridged by the greatest of efforts.

Remember always that I am, and remain, proud of you. No one clapped louder for your award for Field of Schemes 5 than I did. Please remember that, even as I passed out from embarrassment at the after party, that I gave you and your career my utmost support.

Though our relationship was brief, it was spectacular. Lexi, you shall always be my southern Belle, my guide star in the dark night of my pathetic, somnambulant existence. I'm sorry I couldn't be the man (or woman) you needed. Yet even so -- oh dastardly pride! -- I harbor the hope that there will be a small part of your heart to which I can lay the gentlest claim. You are truly a pornstar with a heart of gold.

With love,

Ryan

PS: Please keep the ring, as a token of memory. Besides, I'm pretty sure the battery's busted.