Reformers Find That F.D.R. Is a Tough Act to Follow : Politics: Roosevelt’s persona, tactics led to many successes. Democrats and GOP can learn some lessons.

Half a century ago, on April 12, 1945, in a small cottage in Warm Springs, Ga., the 32nd President of the United States collapsed and died of a stroke after 13 years in office that permanently transformed the relationship of Americans to their government.

In the capital he dominated like few before and none since, the trend to government activism that Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched is now under unprecedented challenge. With Republicans in command on Capitol Hill and the GOP’s presidential candidates mobilizing support on the hustings, conservatives dream boldly of promulgating a counterrevolution as far-reaching as Roosevelt’s New Deal itself.

But by the time the clock ran out last Friday on Newt Gingrich’s First Hundred Days--a term itself inspired by memories of F.D.R.’s trailblazing reforms--the defeat of the balanced-budget amendment and term limits, two linchpins of the GOP’s “contract with America” campaign manifesto had taught Republicans a history lesson. It is extremely difficult, they learned, to build a new political order, let alone sustain it for anything like half a century, without the unique combination of guile and conviction that was the hallmark of Roosevelt’s genius as a leader.

Roosevelt did much more than steer the nation through the shoals of the Great Depression. He survived major defeats, such as his failed attempt to overhaul the Supreme Court, and went on to win unprecedented third and fourth terms during which he set the nation’s course for victory in World War II. To late 20th-Century America, he bequeathed a three-part legacy: an aggressive internationalism abroad, an expansionist federal government at home and, perhaps, most important, a political coalition capable of supporting both.

Today, the first two remain, but the last has crumbled. And none of his successors in either party have yet been able to fashion an alliance as broad or as durable as that implausible amalgam of Southern whites, Northern blacks, Midwestern farmers, trade unionists and small business operators who marched behind the New Deal banner.

Fifty years after his death, Roosevelt’s performance in the presidency still serves as a paradigm and a benchmark--both for the Republicans who seek to undo much of what he accomplished and his Democratic heirs who hope to build on the foundation he laid. President Clinton, the fifth of F.D.R.’s Democratic successors, plans to fly to Warm Springs today to join in a 50th anniversary memorial tribute.

Even Republicans implicitly have acknowledged that they continue to govern at least partly in Roosevelt’s shadow. “The fact is that it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who gave hope to a nation that was in despair and could have slid into dictatorship,” Gingrich acknowledged last January in a speech opening the new Congress’ first 100 days.

Some scholars have argued that the F.D.R. legend, 100 days and all, has become so overstated that it now causes problems for his successors--raising unrealistic expectations for what a government leader can accomplish. Roosevelt’s success, they note, stemmed in part from the historical moment in which he took power--a nation in the depths of the Depression was willing to embrace a leader who offered a bold departure from the past.

“His performance was so magisterial and so skillful and gifted it set up false standards,” said Princeton University’s Fred Greenstein, author of a forthcoming book on Roosevelt and the chief executives who followed him.

The latest victim of those standards could be Gingrich, who--though he does not occupy the White House--has proclaimed an agenda fit for a President.

“The history of the New Deal illustrates how rare and how brief it is that we have periods of dramatic and successful reform,” said Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley. He is author of the new book, “The End of Reform,” an account of how F.D.R.’s domestic reforms ran out of steam after his first term. Brinkley believes that the expectations Gingrich has raised exceed what he can accomplish given the murky temper of the times.

But timing is not everything. While Roosevelt had the national political climate on his side, he was perfectly cut out to exploit it. And while times today are different, scholars of the presidency argue that Roosevelt’s success also stemmed from personal characteristics and a leadership style that offer lessons for prospective leaders in both parties today.

“He had, in effect, been in training for the presidency,” said Princeton’s Greenstein, referring to the years Roosevelt spent out of office after the onset of polio, years during which he not only recovered much of his strength but also matured emotionally and intellectually.

“His years in the wilderness sharpened his skills,” said Greenstein. “When he took office in the midst of the Depression it was like dropping a match in a dry field.”

Roosevelt had an unsurpassed ability to harness his personality and his well-honed talents for manipulation and persuasion in the service of his ideological objectives. Just as important, Roosevelt found means to express his beliefs which, as radical as they might have seemed at the time, were deeply rooted in American mores and standards.

“America is a creedal nation founded on a package of ideas,” said Everett Carll Ladd, director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion.

As an example, Ladd cited Roosevelt’s momentous decision to finance the Social Security system, the major achievement of the early New Deal, with a pay-as-you-go payroll tax, thus taking into account the devotion to individualism etched into the American character.

“He was criticized by some for not using a progressive tax, drawn from general revenues,” Ladd recalled. “But Roosevelt told his critics: ‘You are missing the point. We are setting up Social Security so that each person has a piece of the action, a piece that he is paying for.’ And that was entirely consistent with American values.”

President Clinton’s unhappy experience with health care reform poses a classic example of the dangers of not following that lesson--proposing a plan that Americans found difficult to comprehend and which opponents could, therefore, define in ways that made it unpopular.

Roosevelt did not always prevail in the battles he entered. But, his admirers say, the President who likened the World War II Lend Lease program to letting your neighbor borrow your garden hose when his house was on fire would never have become entrapped in the Rube Goldberg mechanics of Clinton’s health reform plan.

“He always explained things in simple metaphors that resonated in people’s experience,” said Columbia’s Brinkley. “When he talked about banking reform he talked about it in terms of someone who had just a few hundred dollars on deposit.”

“Clinton was good at that in the 1992 campaign but not in the presidency,” said Brinkley. “Gingrich doesn’t convey that at all, though he is a great political tactician.”

Similarly, Roosevelt was keenly attuned to another fundamental trait, the confidence Americans share that their nation has a special mission in the world, which no matter what the odds, it is destined to fulfill.

More important than the details of the specific strategies that Roosevelt drafted to overcome the chaos of the Depression and bring the Axis powers to their knees was his contagious certitude that these perils could be overcome, most memorably expressed in his first inaugural assertion that Americans had “nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Roosevelt, said Brinkley, “had the ability to convey a sense of enormous self-confidence and assurance and optimism that is extremely important to a leader. He was able to create a sense of certainty about what he was doing and where he was going.

“That is one of Clinton’s problems,” said Brinkley. “People don’t really feel they know what he believes in.”

For all his brilliance as an orator and his skill at converting the radio into a prime instrument of political communication, F.D.R. was also careful to avoid the kind of overexposure that has marred the performances of both Clinton and Gingrich. “He didn’t do more than two fireside addresses a year,” said Princeton’s Greenstein, who contended that F.D.R.’s talks were better at framing and defining issues than are the often cluttered utterances of Gingrich and Clinton.

Roosevelt was also a master of indirection and misdirection, allowing him to escape the normal penalties for inconsistency and self-contradiction, to appease and assuage his friends and to befuddle and frustrate his foes. “I am a juggler,” he once boasted to an adviser. “And I never let my left hand know what my right hand does.”

Occasionally, F.D.R. was caught by one of his own contradictions. Preparing to speak in Pittsburgh, Pa., in his 1936 reelection campaign, Roosevelt recalled that when he visited that city in 1932 he had pledged to balance the federal budget, which four years later was awash in red ink. Asked for his advice, speech writer Sam Rosenman replied: “Deny you ever were in Pittsburgh.”

Yet while Roosevelt’s persona and tactics were the most conspicuous elements of his leadership, their deeper significance, scholars said, comes from Roosevelt’s use of them to advance his basic beliefs.

His convictions derived initially from respect for the values of fairness and service passed on by his parents and reinforced in his prep school days at Groton. There, exposure to such spokesmen for the downtrodden as reformer Jacob Riis gave him the beginnings of a social conscience. From his father, James, he inherited his allegiance to the Democrats.

Pursuing his early political ambitions, first in the New York state Legislature then in the Administration of Woodrow Wilson, he assumed as his own the tenets of his party’s progressive creed with its determination to use government to redress social and economic inequities.

“He had a very strong sense of the importance of government,” said University of North Carolina professor William E. Leuchtenburg, a Roosevelt biographer. “He had a deep belief in there being a national interest greater than private interest.”

Leuchtenburg cited Roosevelt’s second inaugural in which the President made his celebrated reference to “one-third of a nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” and added: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

But Roosevelt leavened his big-government rhetoric with a healthy dose of cultural conservatism, pointed out Ohio University historian Alonzo Hamby, author of “Beyond the New Deal,” who noted that Roosevelt’s speeches were replete with patriotic references and appeals to divine providence, which he often deftly blended with liberal ideology.

Thus, in a 1935 speech promoting Social Security, Roosevelt hailed what he described as the renewal of faith in the ability of government to improve the lives of its citizens.

Those skills, scholars believe, continue to set F.D.R. apart. “I show documentaries to my students and what is amazing to me is how strongly they still respond to Roosevelt,” said Tulane University’s Patrick J. Maney, who wrote “The Roosevelt Presence.” “The students watch those newsreel clips and they realize why he is a great President.”