The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

Чтение книги онлайн.

      President Franklin D. Roosevelt

      Four times chief executive of United States.

      Service in freedom’s cause.

      12 April 1945

      The death of President Roosevelt from cerebral haemorrhage on Thursday afternoon at Warm Springs, Georgia, as announced in the later editions of The Times yesterday, robs the United States of its Chief Executive within less than six months of his election to serve a fourth term of office at the White House – a term without precedent in American history. Throughout yesterday the people of the United States, of the United Nations, and of all peace-loving States mourned the passing of a leader whose influence for good had extended far beyond his national boundaries.

      Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-first President of the United States, was, as his whole life attested, a man of destiny. From one fate to another he was called. Through two great and prolonged crises in his country’s history he set its course and steered it through. Each of them provided a searching test of character and statecraft, and each made its own demands upon the Chief Executive. In both of them, however, he retained the confidence and was upheld by the support of an immense majority of his fellow-countrymen. The place in history which he will fill in relation to the greatest of his predecessors has yet to be decided but one of the determining factors in regard to it will be that he alone of them was invested by his fellow-countrymen with a fourth term of office and at his elections secured more decisive votes than any Presidential candidate before him. It will be remembered also that his pre-eminence was by no means due to lack of opposition, for many of his policies were carried in the teeth of a resistance by powerful and vocal sections of the American public. He was in fact during his first three terms master of Congress for only one comparatively brief period, and after that was opposed as strongly by some important groups in his party as by the Republicans. He had often, therefore, to use outside opinion to force his own supporters to follow him. His ability to do so was one of the truest measures of his stature. His like can, indeed, only be sought among those whose idealism made a comparable appeal to his people, and whose actions were equally justified in the event.

      Rights of Democracy

      The world was first to hear of Franklin Roosevelt, the second of his blood and familiar name to occupy the White House, as a champion of the rights of democracy. In this he was a true heir to the traditions of his country. Sensitive as he always was to the feelings of those near him he seemed able to enlarge the range of his sympathy and understanding until it embraced a huge and diversified nation. To him, a man of generous though sometimes hasty instincts, distress, suffering, and insecurity were standing challenges. He had an aristocrat’s magnanimity and angry inability to see unnecessary pain inflicted, and the ‘New Deal’ was a supreme assertion of the claim of all mankind to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ‘Every man has the right to live; and this means that he has the right to a comfortable living’ was both the expression of a genuine belief and a continuing directive of policy. To many millions of Americans it became a sufficing and unquestioned gospel. Even if the Fates had had no more to ask of him than the mighty struggle against the depression of the early 1930s which it inspired, his place in the first rank of Presidents would be secure. At the end of four years of it faith in his leadership had actually increased, and even after four more survived in a remarkable degree.

      Roosevelt was required, however, not only to protect the fruits of his advanced Liberalism from internal enemies, but also against a far more formidable menace from without. His aims demanded that he should be a man of peace. Peace, however, was not to continue in his time. He did within the limitations of his position all he could to avert the calamity of war, and both before and after its outbreak displayed, in addition to an astonishing gift of judging his own people, almost as remarkable a one for seeing deep into the Axis leaders. Totalitarianism was the antithesis of all he stood for. He never concealed his personal hatred of it; but he determined with cautious statesmanship to move only as fast as his own countrymen could be led to travel with him. There were in the early stages of the war cross currents in American opinion, and it was not until Pearl Harbour that he had a united people behind him. In foresight he was from the first far ahead of most of them: but he understood the American temper much too well to force the pace, and in this way he succeeded in maintaining the position of a trusted interpreter of world events. When, therefore, Japan struck and he was free from the restrictions which had fettered him, he moved instantaneously into that not merely of a commander-in-chief in war, but of a national war-leader as well. He had, moreover, by this time not only armed his country, but had insured the capacity of Great Britain to hold Germany. It was, in fact, in the years immediately before Japan’s attack no less than in the years after it that his life’s battle for democracy was won.

      Atlantic Crossings

      It is true that, when pressed by his own party in 1940 to seek a third term and opposed by Mr Wendell Willkie, he failed to register as tremendous a victory as in 1936; but it is true also that it was a contest chiefly upon domestic issues, for Mr Willkie was broadly in agreement with him on the wider and more pressing ones of war. Thus during the years of America’s belligerency he was in fact the supreme head of an embattled people, and in authority the equal in vital matters of the great national figures with whom he cooperated. When, therefore, in the course of the long conflict he crossed the Atlantic to join in allied councils of war he went with all the prestige of his standing in the nation he represented as well as that of his own transcendent personality.

      Roosevelt was a statesman in virtually every direction open to a truly democratic leader. As President he had immense powers and exercised them freely. Thus at times he would initiate and act with daring, and at others hold and caution. Occasionally he would move ahead of his people: but, if he found he had gone too far he would fall quietly into step with them again. He thus displayed the resiliency of his fibrous strength. Sprung of long lines of American ancestors, he was so deep rooted in the American soil and so steeped СКАЧАТЬ