A First-Rate Madness (18 page)

 

 

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, Roosevelt's sociable charm also attracted women. Many have noted that FDR had numerous female friends and that he loved to flirt. Later researchers have shown, with reasonable documentation, that some of these relations were sexual and extramarital (such as those with White House aides Lucy Mercer and Missy LeHand), although, unlike John Kennedy, as we will see, FDR's relations were fewer and of longer standing (one to two decades with each of the women mentioned). That FDR was highly attractive to women, especially before polio, is without doubt. But another source of his energetic libido may have been his hyperthymic personality.

His renowned sense of humor, another hyperthymic trait, often proved useful at strategic moments. In the Tehran summit, for instance, Stalin said that after the war fifty thousand German officers and leaders should be shot without trial. Churchill objected: after a fair trial, a thousand or so might be proven innocent. Tempers flared. Then FDR had an idea: why not just shoot forty-nine thousand instead? Stalin laughed, and the subject was dropped. Another time, Roosevelt was scheduled to talk to the Daughters of the American Revolution—a speech he dreaded. After a long and staid introductory ceremony, FDR—whose Dutch ancestors had come to New York in the seventeenth century—struggled to the stage in his braces, clutched the podium, and, smiling broadly at the audience of stiff matronly DAR members, began, “My fellow immigrants . . .”

Roosevelt's addiction to press conferences represents the consummate blending of his hyperverbal and energetic temperament. Though no president other than Nixon faced such hostile media, no president engaged the press like FDR. In FDR's era, the media was largely conservative. It has been estimated that in the New Deal years, editorial pages of about 60 to 80 percent of newspapers opposed him. Regions now liberal, such as New England, were reliably Republican in those days; not a single Boston newspaper endorsed him in 1932. (Two decades later, little had changed; before John Kennedy became the first post–Civil War Democratic senator from Massachusetts, only one Boston daily, to which his father had recently given a large donation, endorsed him. As JFK commented, “You know, we had to buy that fucking paper.”)

Despite, or perhaps because of, such hostility, FDR launched a media charm offensive unrivaled until Kennedy, and never approximated since. He held casual, cordial press conferences, with around a hundred to two hundred reporters attending, about twice weekly throughout his presidency (excluding vacations and campaign months); over thirteen years, there were almost a thousand press conferences in all (about seventy-seven per year). (This was not new for him; as New York governor, he held press conferences twice
daily.
) Hearty laughter was common. For Roosevelt, reporters were potential friends to be won, rather than enemies to be avoided.

By the end of the 1930s, after this long and intensive campaign, FDR had won the media over. In the meantime, he had enjoyed himself immensely.

 

 

A KEY ASPECT of hyperthymic personality is “openness to experience” (one of the three major personality traits, along with neuroticism and extraversion). People with hyperthymic personality tend to score very high on openness to experience; they are curious, inventive, experimental souls. (They also tend to score low on neuroticism and high on extraversion.)

Roosevelt's high level of openness to experience is most visible intellectually. He was an omnivore and an innovator. Despite Holmes's verdict about a second-rate intelligence, Roosevelt's intellect was hardly inferior. He was open-minded and keen: “Innovations never frightened him, and he liked nothing better than a new idea. . . . The President's omniscience and erudition covered a very wide arc indeed; he knew a little about almost everything, from where to get a good beer in Georgetown to which wives of Cabinet ministers gossiped most. The three subjects about which he knew most were politics, American history, and geography in general.” He loved to read, as Gunther put it, in four basic areas: American history, nautical works, “trash,” and newspapers—all of six to eight papers daily. He spoke French fluently, could read German, and was semiliterate in Spanish.

An anecdote brings out both his broad, inventive intellect and his insatiable curiosity. After Yalta, FDR was headed to Saudi Arabia. Flying low over the sandy desert, he asked an aide why no one had ever irrigated that land to create farms. There is no water, the aide replied. None at all, Roosevelt asked? Just in oases and some wells. Wells mean there is a water table, the president surmised; how far down is it? About fifty feet, replied his aide. The president wondered: We can give them good pumps to bring it out, can't we? Yes, but the water would evaporate in the desert heat, said the aide. Why not irrigate at night, then, asked FDR? The questions never ended. A few days later, Roosevelt made the same inquiry with King Ibn Saud. “I am an old man,” the king protested. “Agriculture is not for me.” FDR was not satisfied; he later said privately that after his retirement he wanted to go to the Middle East and teach them to grow their own food (“an operation like the Tennessee Valley system”), the lack of which he saw as the main cause for the “explosiveness” of that region.

Roosevelt's intellectual openness was evident in his invention of the concept of a “brain trust” during the 1932 campaign, a reliance on academic expertise that has since become commonplace but at the time was quite unusual. Though he might or might not eventually agree with them, Roosevelt always sought out a wide range of ideas. He once said, “You sometimes find something pretty good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.” Roosevelt thought ahead, once writing a memorandum addressed to whoever would be president in 1956. “That fellow in the White House,” his 1944 presidential opponent, Wendell Willkie, once remarked, “is just too smart to live.”

FDR's intellect was not of the academic variety, as Justice Holmes perhaps realized. Roosevelt read hardly any philosophy or poetry, preferring history. When pressed to engage in intellectual discussion, he demurred. Once, a young reporter asked somewhat peremptorily, “Mr. President, are you a Communist?” “No.” “Are you a capitalist?” “No.” “Are you a Socialist?” “No,” [FDR] said with a look of surprise. “Well, what is your philosophy then?” “Philosophy?” asked the president, puzzled. “Philosophy? I am a Christian and a Democrat—that's all.”

Though not well versed in philosophy per se, Roosevelt was curious about human nature. In 1944, he invited a young Washington theologian to a private White House dinner. The conversation veered toward theology, and the visitor mentioned the nineteenth-century existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Roosevelt admitted that he'd never heard of that name. The theologian explained that Kierkegaard was becoming popular, especially for his insights about the inherent sinfulness of humanity. Faced with Nazism, Roosevelt was intrigued, read some of Kierkegaard's works, and thereafter recommended reading the philosopher as a way to understand the Nazi evil.

Roosevelt's special expertise was geography, a skill developed when, confined to bed by polio and no longer able to play his beloved golf, he became a philatelic fanatic. With each new country's stamp, FDR read books and articles about its geography, eventually acquiring expertise on even the remotest lands. Once, in a meeting about Japan's attacking China's coast, while advisers searched for a map, FDR scribbled on a piece of paper China's coastal contours, cities, and ports. When the advisers produced a map, it matched his depiction.

 

 

FAMILY HISTORY PROVIDES some evidence, though not definitive, for FDR's hyperthymic personality. Theodore, probably manic-depressive and famously superenergetic, was a fifth cousin. Closer relations also displayed unusual temperaments. One neighbor called FDR's grandfather, Isaac Roosevelt, who trained as a physician but never practiced, “a queer duck.” His father, James Roosevelt, was something of an adventurer: he left New York to fight alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi in the unification of nineteenth-century Italy. This brief family history obviously does not demonstrate frank insanity, such as psychosis, mania, or severe depression. But it does suggest that FDR's relatives had personalities abnormal enough to arouse the attention of average people. Hyperthymic personality is inherited not just in families where full-blown mania or depression occurs but also in those where there is a lot of hyperthymic personality. In fact, in some genetic studies of bipolar disorder, the most common condition seen in relatives is hyperthymic personality or low-level manic symptoms (hypomania). Full mania and severe depression, though present more than in the general population, are less common than hyperthymic personality.

We don't have much documentary evidence of others in Roosevelt's family who may have had full-blown severe mania or depression, but what limited evidence we have is consistent with hyperthymic personality. Even if this is not the case, the other sources of evidence (symptoms and course in particular) are consistent with hyperthymic personality. (In diagnosing mental illness,
all
four diagnostic validators don't have to be present; it is the preponderance of the evidence that counts. The more positive evidence there is, the more confident one can be in the diagnosis.)

Married at age fifty-two, James died in 1900 when FDR was eighteen, leaving Franklin alone with his famously imperious mother, Sara Delano. Sara, the strongest presence in FDR's life, later engaged in a long twilight struggle with his wife, Eleanor; as with most of his relationships, FDR refused to choose sides or let either one go.

Coming from such a prominent family, FDR grew up close to power. When he was four or five, his father took him to the White House, where President Grover Cleveland, beset by troubles, offered this advice: “I have one wish for you, little man, that you will never be President of the United States.” When he married Eleanor, Theodore's niece, in 1905, President Teddy gave the bride away amid much Manhattan society. Great things were expected of him.

 

 

UNTIL 1921, Franklin Roosevelt had led a charmed life. Thirty-nine years old, with five children, a recent vice presidential nominee, a member of the presidential cabinet only three years earlier, he seemed ready to follow his cousin Teddy to the White House. Then fate intervened. After a summer swim in a pond, he got a chill, then a high fever. His legs felt numb and tingly; then they stopped moving. His frantic family called the best doctors, who quickly recognized the terrible reality: he had contracted “infantile paralysis,” or polio.

Roosevelt and his family were devastated. All his political plans were put on hold. He just wanted to walk again, to play and run and swim with his children, to resume golfing with his college chums. For three years, he focused only on halting the advance of his disease and rehabilitating his legs. He spent many months at various mineral spas—his favorite being Hot Springs, Georgia—where he exercised his legs. Though he ultimately recovered some strength, he remained highly disabled, and struggled emotionally. “It's ridiculous to tell me that a grown man cannot conquer a child's disease,” he complained.

If his progress was to continue, he still needed to focus on physical rehabilitation, so he refused calls from old New York friends in 1924 to return to the political arena. But New York governor Al Smith, who was then running for president, could wait no longer; he intensified efforts to draft FDR for governor. Smith phoned Hot Springs over and over again; FDR kept avoiding the calls. The governor then lobbied Eleanor, the children, and Roosevelt's friends. Eleanor came around; so did FDR's daughter. Despite knowing that his physical recovery would stall, Roosevelt reluctantly agreed to run for the office Smith now held.

He returned to public life. But the man who came back was not the same one who swam in that pond in 1921.

 

 

ONE MAJOR CHANGE in FDR's life was that now almost all physical activity involved great effort. When he gave a speech, he was wheeled to the platform, then lifted on braces to the podium, on which he leaned his whole weight to avoid falling. His aides made certain that each podium was anchored securely to withstand his weight. Even so, he fell, or almost fell, about five times over twenty years of political speechmaking. Roosevelt was challenged and humbled by his paralysis. At one campaign event in New York in 1928, when no one had noticed that Roosevelt could only enter the crowded auditorium by way of a high fire escape, he had no choice but to accept, in Frances Perkins's words, the “ultimate humility which comes from being helped physically.” He had to allow himself to be carried in front of the crowd in the arms of other men. Then “he got up on his braces, adjusted them, straightened himself, smoothed his hair, linked his arm to his son Jim's, and walked out on the platform as if this were nothing unusual.”

The sheer physical effort of trying to live an active life despite his paralysis was immense. His daughter told a similar story that illustrates the courage and resilience that so endeared him to his supporters. Roosevelt was going to speak in a huge hall in Brooklyn, but the only way inside was through the main entrance, with many broad steps and no railing. Not wanting to make a labored entrance in front of the audience, FDR chose to go up a steep iron fire escape to the stage. He climbed slowly, using his arms and shoulders to swing each leg up. Recalled his daughter, “When he reached the top, his face was streaming with perspiration, and his white shirt was soaked. He paused just long enough to mop his face and catch his breath. Then he walked out on to the stage and faced the audience with a humorous remark about the fact that it was quite warm in the hall.”