In the Shadow of FDR BY THE SAME AUTHOR Flood Control Politics The Perils of Prosperity) I9I4-32 Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal) I9J2-I940 New Deal and Global War The Great .Age of Change Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Profile The New Deal: A Documentary History The Growth of the American Republic) with Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager A Troubled Feast The Supreme Court Reborn The FDR Years American Places The White House Looks South Herbert Hoover Int heS hadoowf FDR FROM HARRY TRUMAN TO BARACK OBAMA William E. Leuchtenbu1lJ Fourth Edition Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON Copyrig©h 1t9 8b3y C orneUlnli versPirteys s Reviseadn du pdataendd n ewt excto pyri©g h1t9 8159,8 199,9 92,0 0I20,0 9 byC ornelUln iversity Allr ighrtess ervEexdc.e pfto brr iqeufo tatiionan r se vietwh,ib so oko,r p arts theremoufs,tn otb er eproduicneany d formwi thoupte rmissiino n writifrnogm thep ublisFhoerri .n formataidodnr,e ss CorneUlnli versPirteysS sa,g Heo use5,1 E2a sStt atSet reet, IthacNae,w Y or1k4 850. Firpsutb lis1h9e8db3 y C orneUlnli versPirteys s Firpsritn tinfgo,u retdhi ti2o0n0,9 Printientd h eU niteSdt atoefsA merica Library of Congress Cataloging-in -Publication Data LeuchtenbWuirlgl,i Eadmw ard1,9 22- Int hes hadoowf FDR:f romH arrTyr umatno B aracOkb ama/ WilliEa.m Leuchtenb-ur4gt.he d.r,e va.n du pdated. p.c m. Includbeisb liographicala nrdie nfdeerxe.n ces ISBN9 78-0-8014(-c4l8o5:t5a h-l3kp .a per) ISBN9 78--800I-475-698( pbkalk.:. p aper) 1.U niteSdt ates-Poalnidtg iocvse rnment-1945-21.9U 8n9i.t eSdt ates­ Politaincdgs o vernment-19.8 39.-R ooseveFlrta,n kDli.(n F rankDleilna no), 1882-1945-Influ4e.Pn rcees.i dents-USntiatteeds -HistorcYe-n2t0utrhy . I.T itleI.I .T itlIent: h es hadoowf F rankDlienl anRoo osevelt. E743.L24090 9 973·9-dC22 2009037865 CorneUlnli versPirteyss st ritvoeu ss ee nvironmenrteaslployn ssiubplpel iaenrds materitaotl hsefu lleesxtt epnots siibnlt eh ep ublishoifin tgbs o oksS.u chm aterials incluvdeeg etable-lboaws-eVdO,iC n kasn da ci-frdeep apetrhsa atr er ecyclteodt,a lly chlorineo-rfrp eaer,tc loym poseodfn onwoofidb erFso.r fu rtheirn formation, visiotu rw ebsiattwe ww .comellpress.cornell.edu. I 3 5 C7l ot9ph r intiInOg8 6 4 2 I 3 5 P7a pe9 rbapcrki ntiInOg8 6 4 2 Contents Preface VB I Harry Truman I 2 First Republican Interlude: Dwight D. Eisenhower 41 3 John F. Kennedy 63 4 Lyndon B. Johnson 121 5 Second Republican Interlude: Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford 161 6 Jimmy Carter 177 7 Ronald Reagan 209 8 Waiting for Franklin D. 236 9 Twilight 277 10 Franklin Delano Obama 299 Epilogue 313 Sources 317 Notes 325 Index 417 [V] Preface In the summer of 1939 I was sixteen, just graduated from a mam­ moth high school in the borough of Queens in New York City, and, though I had my heart set on going to Cornell University, resigned to spending the next four years riding a subway to a municipal college while living at home in a claustrophobic apartment. Tuition at Cornell was $400 a year, a sum far beyond anything that my family, with all the goodwill in the world, could hope to provide. But early in August I returned from a brief vacation on my grandparents' farm in the Dela­ ware Valley to find the mailbox bulging with congratulatory letters from my high school teachers. Out of one envelope fell a newspaper clipping announcing that I had won a Regents scholarship of $100 a year for four years.O ut of another tumbled a clipping saying that I was also one of six students in Queens to win a Cornell scholarship of $200 a year for four years. Overnight I had $300 of the money I needed.B ut if! did not come up with the remaining $100, still a formidable amount, I would never get to see the campus above Cayuga's waters.S o, though itw asa lrealdayt seu mmera ndw orkw ash ardt og etI, founda job wheeling a Good Humor ice cream cart through the streets of Sunny­ side. Unhappily, a Good Humor cost a dime, twice as much as any other ice cream bar, and in this tenth year of the Great Depression, most peo­ ple felt they could not afford one.D ay after day I pedaled my cart from early morning until after dark, but came little nearer my goal. Often I returned with my ice cream compartment almost as full as when I had started out, and registration in Ithaca was only a few weeks away. Then one stifling day a middle-aged man who drove a Good Humor truck went out of his way to let me know that on the farthest reach of town there was a huge and hungry crowd-because Franklin D.R oose­ velt was expected to dedicate an extension of Queens Boulevard. I pedaled my bike many, many blocks, and when I got to the site I was able to sell every ice cream bar in my cart.T hat day's sales gave me just [ vii] In the Shadow of FDR enough money to pay the Cornell tuition, and on a memorable Sep­ tember morning I set off for Ithaca. Even with this problem solved, and with help from my generous and overextended family, I still needed to work my way through college and I had no idea how I was going to do it. But when I arrived on campus, I was told of the opportunities offered by one of the Roosevelt agen­ cies, the National Youth Administration, and on that first day at Cornell I was assigned to cleaning test tubes at thirty cents an hour. From that day on, the NYA sustained me throughout my years at Cornell. I never did get to see President Roosevelt, either on that summer day at Queens Boulevard, when I was on the outer edge of a milling throng, or on any other day. But, in September 1939, like millions of other Americans who never saw him, I was powerfully aware of his in­ fluence on us; in the very month that World War II began, the New Deal and his conduct of foreign affairs were transforming our lives. In the spring of 1980 I returned to Cornell to examine the shadow cast by FDR not on the nation but on the Democrats who followed him in the White House. I was honored to be invited to give the Beck­ er Lectures, named after the distinguished historian Carl Becker, who could still be seen about the Cornell campus in 1939. On successive days I spoke on the meaning of Franklin D. Roosevelt for Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Over the next two years I amplified these accounts by drawing on a wealth of manuscript sources, especiatlhloys aet t hep residenltiibarla riineH sy de ParkI,n depen­ dence, Boston, and Austin. In addition, after research trips to such ar­ chives as the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, I wrote chapters on FDR's influence on the presidents I had not discussed at Cornell, not least Ronald Reagan, who was still months away from the Oval Office when I delivered the Becker Lectures. For most of his successors Franklin Roosevelt was a fonnidable pres­ ence. Like the Pelew Island god described by Sir James George Frazer, FDR became a kind of deity only a short time after his death. Though he was not the victim of an assassin, Roosevelt was often perceived as Lincoln had been-as a deity who gave his life for his people. During the post-1945 era he was even regarded, in some respects, as still the president, much as French medieval kings were thought to continue to reign, however briefly, after death. At a ceremony of homage to FDR at Itamaraty, Brazil, in May, 1945, Ambassador Adolf Berle declared: Greamte n havet wol iveosn:ew hicohc curwsh ilteh ewyo rko n this eartah s;e conwdh icbhe giantst hed ayo ft heidre atahn dc ontinause s lonags t heiidre aasn dc onceptiroenmsa ipno werfuIln.t hisse conldi fe, [v iii] Preface thec onceptieoanrsld ieevre lopeexde ritn fluenocnem ena nde venftosr ani ndefinpietrei oodft imeN.o w,o nlay m ontha ftehri dse atwhe, a re seeitnhge b eginnoifnh gi sse conadn,dp erhagprse atleirfN,eo .n eo fu s canp rophewshya ti trse suwilltlsb e;b utf eww ildle ntyh atth eriesa c on­ tinuianngdb eneficesnpti rwihti cwhi lnlo tc easteos peatko a worlidn pain.' More than two decades later the Time-Life correspondent Hugh Sidey wrote of a White House gathering that drew a number of Wash­ ington dignitaries to honor FDR: "You could stand on this Tuesday afternoon in February of 1967 and look out over the faces in the East Room of the White House and suddenly understand that Franklin Roosevelt still owned Washington. His ideas prevailed. His men en­ dured. The government that functioned now was his creation perhaps more than that of any other single man." From the White House, Sidey recorded, "you looked out down the Mall and saw the gray Federal buildings that stood there and they were monuments to that amazing man. ...S o much had happened and yet so much was the same."2 Roosevelt left his mark on his successors in a great many ways.T hree of the first four presidents who came after him-Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson-were men whose careers he had advanced, and the oth­ er, Kennedy, had first gained familiarity with Washington when Roose­ velt named his father to high office. No one before Roosevelt had so dominated the political culture of his day, if for no better reason than that no one before him had been in the White House for so long, and in the process he created the expectation that the chief executive would be a primary shaper of his times-an expectation with which each of his successors has had to deal. He bequeathed them not only the legacy of the New Deal but that of a global foreign policy, as well as all those instrumentalities that emerged during the years when he was Dr.W in the War. The age of Roosevelt set the agenda for much of the postwar era, whose debates centered on such questions as whether price con­ trols should be maintained, how far social security was to be extended, to what level the minimum wage ought to be raised, and how large the domain of public power should be. Long after FDR was gone, New Deal agencies such as the TVA and the SEC continued to administer statutes drafted in his first term, and the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society all drew heavily on the Roosevelt experiments. "All contemporary national politics descend from Franklin Roosevelt," Theodore White has observed. The first Democrat in eighty years to enter the White House with a popular majority, Roosevelt helped bring about a fundamental realignment of American politics. He created an [ix] In the Shadow of FDR "FDR coalition" that combined traditional Democratic sources of strength in the Solid South with lower-income ethnic groups in the great cities and appealed, as one survey found, to those "cosmopoli­ tans and statists" who approved of the twentieth-century trend toward modernization. In no election after FDR's final victory in 1944 did the South remain solid, and the alliance became frayed in several other ways, too. Nonetheless, as late as 1980 an observer noted that two shrewd election experts had "likened the demise of the FDR coalition to the death of theater in New York City. There have been decades of rhetoric about its death, but if you venture into Manhattan's theater district the lights are bright. So it is with the FDR coalition. For 47 months we hear about how it is breaking up, yet, on Election Day, presto, there it is again." 3 Roosevelt's success as the architect of a new political era encouraged subsequent Democratic presidents, and even some Republicans, to identify with FDR. They fought off usurpers who claimed that they were the true heirs to the Roosevelt legacy, campaigned in the image of FDR, and year in, year out recited Roosevelt's sayings. They ap­ pointed to posts in their administrations men and women who had served under FDR, and made use of Roosevelt's approaches in coping with the problems of their own day. They did all of these things not only out of conviction but also out of necessity, for they had a vivid sensation of being watched. They knewth att heipre rformanwceersem onitorfeodr a nys igonf d eviation from the true faith by a corps of inspectors-by Mrs. Roosevelt, who sometimes behaved like a Chinese empress dowager; by the late presi­ dent's sons, who had their own notions of how far the FDR legacy might take them; by all those bright young men of the 1930S who still had advice to give in the 1980s; and by the large body of liberal activists for whom FDR was an idol. These critics asked not whether Roosevelt's successors dealt ade­ quately with contemporary problems but whether they equaled FDR. They were required not merely to quote Roosevelt and replicate his policies but to do so with conspicuous ardor, not only to put through a program of siInilar magnitude but to carry it off with the same flair. Each was expected to have a rubric-to be known by three initials like FDR, to be the progenitor of a catch phrase like New Deal. When they ran for office, it was asked why they fell so far short of the Great Cam­ paigner, and at the end of each successor's first hundred days, observ­ ers compared the score with FDR's. Even their wives had to bear the onus of contrast to Eleanor Roosevelt. [x]