1990 BOOK PRIZE WINNER: BIOGRAPHY : On Geoffrey Ward’s ‘A First Class Temperament’

It is a warm, sunny August day in 1933 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.--only a few miles from Franklin Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park. An amateur movie maker focuses his 16-mm camera on the new President as he prepares to walk 30 feet down a ramp to his car.

A secret-service agent hurries over to stop the filming, “but not before we have clearly seen F.D.R. take three unsteady steps, his head and torso rocking alarmingly from side to side. . . . It is suddenly, shockingly clear that nothing works below those hips.”

Then, after aides open the car door and unsnap the leg braces, F.D.R. swings safely into his seat, and the camera catches him “transformed: his head cocked companionably, the famous grin in place, he shouts greetings to old friends in the crowd. He is himself again.”

That story from Geoffrey Ward’s biography is a snapshot of Roosevelt’s life, capturing the combination of deceptiveness and determination, fraud and frivolity that characterized the President. In 1930, nine years after being stricken with incurable paralysis of the legs from polio, and with absolutely no improvement in his condition, Roosevelt wrote on an insurance form that his chances of “walking without braces (were) good--perhaps in a year or two.”

On that evidence it is tempting to label F.D.R. either liar or Pollyanna, but Ward’s sensitive biography avoids easy judgments. Politics, as always with Roosevelt, was part of it. No politician could aspire to the presidency without inspiring confidence--”pity was poison to his political future.” But there was more to it than that. His reaction to the fright, fear and frustration of poliomyelitis--the dreaded infantile paralysis--helped define the man he would become.

The young, vigorous, ambitious Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1905, married his very distant cousin, Eleanor, seemed an unlikely prospect for President of the United States. Vain, superficial and spoiled, he had little to recommend him beyond a famous name (his cousin Teddy had only just left the White House) and a reasonable expectation of financial security.

Bored with the details of schoolbooks, he was a mediocre student at Columbia Law School, unlikely to emerge from his comfortable cocoon of upper-class security and respectability. But that same boredom and, it seems, the role model provided by Teddy Roosevelt propelled him toward politics.

Until he was struck with polio, Franklin combined purpose with expediency during his political career. As a New York state senator, he challenged the Tammany Hall political machine, which ran New York City in the late 19th and early 20th Century, but the challenge was fundamentally over who should control it, not how it could be run more fairly. He became a Democrat for what an early girlfriend and confidante called “the most calculating, unprincipled” reasons--there were already too many Roosevelts in the Republican Party trying to capitalize on Theodore’s name.

F.D.R.’s natural cleverness, outward affability and political instincts--even his habit of recreating the past to place himself at the center of events--were evident by early adulthood and refined by his experience in New York State politics and as a sub-cabinet officer during Woodrow Wilson’s two administrations. But, while those characteristics brought him a long way by the l920s, maturity and a sense of purpose seems to have escaped him. Dilettante and opportunist are the operative words.

For eight years as assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt struggled to create a public political persona, in the process often undercutting his remarkably patient and forgiving superior, Navy secretary Josephus Daniels.

Shortly before leaving the Navy Department, F.D.R.’s ambition led to his lying in a transparent attempt to distance himself when Daniels came under investigation by a partisan Senate committee. Franklin’s selection as the Democrats’ candidate for Vice President in 1920 gave him a chance to develop a public image, and he made the most of the opportunity. Eight months after that election, however, Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio.

With an empathy heightened by a shared physical disability, Ward depicts, in extraordinary and moving detail, the ways a lifetime battle against polio affected Roosevelt. For nearly a decade, F.D.R.’s preoccupation was recovery, rehabilitation and a return to physical normalcy--or at least the appearance of normalcy.

During one remarkable two-year stretch (1926-28), he purchased, designed and developed a rehabilitation clinic at Warm Springs, Ga. For perhaps the first time in his life, he displayed intense concern for the problems of others. With the exception of a very few remarkably close friends, mostly women, the polio victims at that clinic seemed to be the only people with whom he could truly relax as a person.

It is a beautiful story, beautifully told. Roosevelt surely never qualified for sainthood, but like Saul on the road to Tarsus, conversion showed a new way without changing the fundamental nature of the man. What had often been weaknesses became strengths. Youthful selfishness became more purposeful and directed. He fulfilled his desire to be the life of the party (social and political) by inspiring other polio victims, then a generation weathering the Depression, and later a world at war.

His relationships with his wife, Eleanor, and with the other loves of his life--Lucy Mercer and “Missy” LeHand--are curious and enlightening, and Ward deals with them honestly and intelligently. But the importance of those relationships was more for the women involved than for F.D.R. His children make only cameo appearances, perhaps because they made only cameo appearances in his life. He never, at any time, let personal relationships deflect him from his course. Sadly, social critic George Steiner may be right--selfishness and immaturity often do seem prerequisites to greatness.

Ward is an expert tracker, finding the spoor of F.D.R.’s later character all along the way, avoiding rigid, structured (or deconstructed) historical psychoanalysis while creating a plausible pattern.

“A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament”--the 1933 judgment of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes fit Franklin Delano Roosevelt like a tailored shirt, but the President’s intellect nevertheless had an enormous impact on the world. Some of Roosevelt’s ideas and assumptions were shaped by his experiences with polio and with the Depression. But it remains for a future biography to examine the earlier roots of F.D.R.’s intellectual development, such as the influence of Woodrow Wilson and even Josephus Daniels.

Along with Roosevelt’s search for power and acceptance, which Ward describes so well, came a desire to accomplish things--good things. In the spring of 1945, a few weeks before he died, Franklin proposed to Eleanor that they spend a few years in the Middle East working on “reforestation and proper farming and conservation,” so as to “bring back some of their deserts.” It “really would be fun,” he mused.

Ward, already successful in new areas of research and writing, such as the recent PBS series on the Civil War, insists there will be no third volume carrying F.D.R.’s life to its conclusion. Too bad--he might have been the first biographer to win the Los Angeles Times book prize twice.

Nominees In Biography

A FIRST CLASS TEMPERAMENT; The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt by Geoffrey C. Ward (Harper & Row)

THE IRON LADY A; Biography of Margaret Thatcher (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

MEANS OF ASCENT; The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro (Alfred A. Knopf)

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR; A Biography by Deirdre Bair (Summit Books)

THE FIVE OF HEARTS; An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918 by Patricia O’Toole (Clarkson N. Potter/Crown)