Franklin Roosevelt had to govern at a time of crisis. If you're going to make changes in the way a nation thinks, you have to have the ability to take the crisis of the moment and use it to shape an agenda.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Franklin Roosevelt was a great leader. He saw how to use the levers of power to affect change.
Roosevelt was the one who had the vision to change our policy from isolationism to world leadership. That was a terrific revolution. Our country's never been the same since.
George Washington sets the nation on its democratic path. Abraham Lincoln preserves it. Franklin Roosevelt sees the nation through depression and war.
Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.
But no one can praise Roosevelt for doing this and then insist that he restored our traditional political and economic systems to their former vitality.
If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society.
By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn't have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps - all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.
It's difficult when you're an appointee of any administration to publicly come out and say before a crisis occurs to say that we need to do X, Y and Z to avoid a crisis, because you probably wouldn't be around very long if you did that.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to find a way to help the American people. In 1933, he created a relief program known as the New Deal. Two years later, he expanded the New Deal by adding the Works Progress Administration, which was renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.