The Roosevelt Test

Damp, shadowy, worn Springwood House at Hyde Park on the Hudson is the birthplace of Franklin Roosevelt. It is also the last resting place — in his mother’s rose garden — of the most admired president of the 20th century, who was also the last leader of the republic from the Empire State.It is easy to predict that 2007 will bring a river of words that contrast the legacy of Roosevelt with the prospects of New York’s four new handsome presidential contenders: Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, and Michael Bloomberg. Here at winter’s soft beginning, I traveled to Springwood to walk in Roosevelt’s house — to measure his steps, his fireplaces, his sense of proportion, and to prepare for the press storm ahead about Roosevelt and the wannabes.Senator Clinton is the most self-aware of Roosevelt protégés. She has enjoyed comparison with the heroic Eleanor Roosevelt for two decades while making the unprecedented transformation from first lady to hot potential candidate for Mrs. President. Smart, resilient, and purposeful, Mrs. Clinton satisfies her quarrelsome party in the critical challenges of fund raising and faction-uniting.At Springwood, you see a nearly life-sized photograph of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt seated on opposite sides of the baronial fire in the Great Room. The president, buttoned up with crippled legs folded neatly, is half-smiling at the camera. Across from him sits a coatless and toothy Eleanor with her hands folded, observing her husband with a hint of reservation. Seated behind Mrs. Roosevelt’s left shoulder is her relentless mother-in-law, Sara, who watches Eleanor looking at her beloved son.It is fun to stand today in the Great Room and imagine the same scene with roles scrambled: Mrs. Clinton in Franklin Roosevelt’s chair with a prim, sartorial Bill Clinton in Eleanor’s pivotal position. Sara Roosevelt would remain in the picture, guarding her son’s reputation in the hands of these wonky pretenders.It is the good luck of the Republican Party to have three New York candidates who not only represent the kind of resolute civil servant that can appeal to the party’s entrepreneur factions but also who compare favorably to Franklin Roosevelt’s skill to win the moderate undecided vote, which back then meant converting Republicans who were moderately undecided about the Hoover administration. Mr. Giuliani enjoys name recognition and a virile campaign theme, “Proven Leadership,” that will do as well today as it did for Roosevelt in the summer of 1932 when he outlasted party rivals such as the popular “happy warrior” Al Smith. “A marked characteristic of this candidate has always been his ability to get things done,” the Dutchess County district attorney, John Mack, announced in his nominating speech for Roosevelt at the Chicago convention, a strength that attaches to Mr. Giuliani as well.Due to his limited name recognition and financing, Mr. Pataki is the slightest of the Republican trio, yet he most closely represents the assertive Hudson Valley GOP that reigned in Washington from President Grant to President Hoover and that Roosevelt carried with him to the White House. Roosevelt spent his whole life on the banks of the same river where Mr. Pataki has grown and prospered in the same roles — state senator and governor. Roosevelt was foremost a New York chauvinist who used the skills he had learned in a Depression-scarred Albany to wrestle with the depredations of the nation. Mr. Pataki can point to a comparable Albany achievement today with the renascent New York City after September 11.Mr. Bloomberg is the first dollar-a-year man to attract serious attention for the Republican nomination since Nelson Rockefeller. Like Rockefeller, Mr. Bloomberg enhances his self-financing advantage with a blazing ardor for public service and philanthropy. The Roosevelt comparison is more telling, however, because both Roosevelt and Mr. Bloomberg represent, at the time of their potential as nominees, no recognized ideology. Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism came much later.At the governor’s mansion in Albany, Roosevelt’s eyes sparkled while he listened to Mack’s words of praise on the radio: “he still remains natural and unspoiled, frank and open but with all that persistent determination which is his heritage to carry on and carry through for the good of his State and his country.” That same praise comfortably suits Messrs. Bloomberg, Giuliani, and Pataki.The most telling details for me at Springwood House were the old-fashioned communication appliances and the manual man-sized dumb-waiter. Roosevelt conducted affairs of state with only three telephones connected to the White House. And there was only one small early TV tucked away in Sara Roosevelt’s “Snuggery.” Also, every day of his polio disability after 1921, Roosevelt took himself to and from bed. Paralyzed from the waist down, he rolled his rudimentary wheelchair through the slender connecting hall to the elevator-scaled dumbwaiter and then raised his weight by rope hand over hand to the second floor. Then he pulled on a rail to get up a ramp over four steps to the hallway to roll past his childhood room, past the bedroom he’d been born in, to his corner bedroom, which adjoined Eleanor’s, as Eleanor’s room adjoined Sara’s.A visitor today can pull at the same dark wood rail that Roosevelt used. As you do, imagine each of the New York presidential contenders showing the heart and humility to pull or lower himor herself by hand up the ramp every morning and night. It is a rugged test, and I can picture Sara Roosevelt watching and judging with a thin smile.Mr. Batchelor is host of “The John Batchelor Show,” now on hiatus.

The Roosevelt Test

The Roosevelt Test

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