Picture an annoying boss. The virtually invisible chief executive who can’t be bothered to meet with the little people. The dogmatic supervisor who clings to a crackpot idea that clearly isn’t working. The president who values loyalty over performance.
Then hunker down with “The Defining Moment,” Jonathan Alter’s insightful and highly entertaining profile of Franklin D. Roosevelt, for lessons in effective leadership that are as relevant today as ever.
Alter, a senior editor of Newsweek, admittedly has been an ardent admirer of the nation’s 32nd president since writing a school report about him when he was 11 years old. The portrait he crafts of FDR is more focused on personality than politics and policy. Alter deliberately avoids the nitty-gritty details of Depression-era programs that saved banks and put thousands of men to work to present Roosevelt as you likely didn’t see him in history class (Who knew that when one of Roosevelt’s aides was caught making a homosexual pass at another man, Roosevelt didn’t fire the gay aide? He instead used a biblical parable to sternly lecture an old friend he caught spreading the story around town).
Still, Alter, a dogged reporter, is fair. He doesn’t gloss over FDR’s mistakes. Much of the president’s work did little to ease the Depression and may have prolonged it. His legacies, including farm subsidies and Social Security, are the subject of heated debate today. His philandering deeply wounded his wife, Eleanor, and reduced their marriage to little more than a political partnership.
Roosevelt’s ability to lead during one of the nation’s darkest eras, however, was unmistakable – and surprising given that he was widely considered a rich and snobby mama’s boy who wasn’t all that bright but knew how to trade on his family’s name (Sound familiar?).
FDR’s critics lacked crucial perspective: His blue blood opened powerful doors, but it was his humbling and debilitating bout with polio from the age of 39 that gave him a window on everyday Americans’ souls. From his struggle with the disease and bonds with fellow “polios,” Roosevelt, Alter writes, honed “traits that would prove instrumental to the presidency.” FDR understood how to reflect hope to a nation in despair. He empathized with the broken and actively looked for cures to what ailed them. When those cures didn’t work, he wasn’t afraid to try something entirely new. Alter links doctors’ misdiagnosis and botched treatment of the president’s polio to his deep distrust of so-called “experts.” FDR was an independent thinker who never relied too heavily on any of his presidential aides for advice.
All the while, Roosevelt rewrote the nation’s social contract and reinvented the presidency. His bold policy experimentation hasn’t been matched since. The result, Alter writes, has “bound his successors to confront major domestic and international problems, rather than leave them entirely to the marketplace or to other nations.”
FDR accomplished all of this, and much more, by insisting on accountability. He delivered nearly 1,000 press conferences in 12 years and appealed to the country through weekly “Fireside Chats.” “Even at his worst,” Alter writes, “he would eventually submit his schemes for the approval of Congress.”
Though President George W. Bush hardly rates a mention in this book, even Alter acknowledges that comparisons between him and FDR are hard to ignore.
“When discipline hardens into dogma,” Alter recently said during an appearance at The Denver Press Club, “a president no longer has the flexibility and suppleness to respond to problems and adjust to new circumstances.”
That goes for annoying bosses, too.
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The Defining Moment
FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope
By Jonathan Alter
Simon & Schuster, 414 pages, $29.95
