If you want to know how a man could feel equipped to serve four terms as President of the United States, all you have to do is sit on a little bench that overlooks Bellefield, the back lawn and hay field of the Franklin Roosevelt Library, in Hyde Park, New York. Opening out before you will be one of those magnificent, gorgeously deceptive Hudson River vistas. There are the thick woods of the estate that mask any manmade additions, such as the railroad tracks and the River Road. The broad eddies of the Hudson itself, and the tranquil fields Read More

  What did Franklin D. Roosevelt accomplish? It is vital to understand it now, as we Americans consider making fundamental alterations in his legacy. Essentially, he preserved and enlarged the promise of human freedom in our time. Or, as Joseph Alsop put it, “On a very wide front and in the truest possible sense, Franklin Delano Roosevelt included the excluded.” It is difficult now to conceive of how different America and the world were when Roosevelt came to power – or how different they might have been had he not come to power. It was, in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s phrase, Read More