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100 Days of FortitudeIt's hard to imagine these days, but during the first months of 1933, when the Great Depression held the nation in a perilous grip, serious voices were urging the incoming president to consider an unprecedented and unconstitutional seizure of power. "The situation is critical," Walter Lippmann told Franklin Roosevelt privately. "You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers." Lippmann, the nation's most influential columnist, was hardly alone. In 1931, the esteemed president of Columbia University, Nicolas Murray Butler, told students that totalitarian systems produced "men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more courage than the system of elections." As Roosevelt approached office, even Eleanor spoke favorably of benign dictatorship. To show how a true leader would respond to the economic crisis, publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst decided to make a movie. He sent a script to FDR, who scribbled some suggestions, and, in 1933, "Gabriel Over the White House" was a hit. Its hero was a president who disbanded Congress, created an army from the unemployed, and sent his enemies before a firing squad. Apparently Roosevelt's aides thought FDR should consider a power grab. In his research for "The Defining Moment," Jonathan Alter discovered a draft of a speech to a convention of World War I veterans that Roosevelt was to deliver via radio the night after his inauguration. In it, the president would reserve the right to summon them for service on the home front, possibly to protect banks or quell rebellions. He would, in effect, create his own army. Yet Roosevelt firmly resisted totalitarian temptations. He rejected that version of the speech, and he spread word on Capitol Hill that he didn't believe in a dictatorship. As for Lippmann, FDR used back channels to tell him to pipe down. Within weeks, Roosevelt had squelched talk of dictatorship. And that, argues Alter in his persuasive and sparkling account, was a defining moment for the Republic. Over the course of his presidency, FDR not only steered the country out of depression and through a victorious war he saved democracy from forces of self-destruction. To be sure, Roosevelt pursued a dramatic expansion of presidential power, and more than once he was denied. A conservative Supreme Court struck down several of his early programs. Congress properly scuttled his brash Court Packing plan. As Alter points out, however, FDR made a practice of gaining approval from Congress before moving forward. That's a far cry from recent presidents, stretching from Richard Nixon to the current incumbent, who have expanded their power by skirting or ignoring Congress. How, then, did Roosevelt succeed as president? "Instead of coercion," writes Alter, "he chose persuasion; instead of drawing the sword, he would draw on his own character and political instincts." He drew as well on the "subconscious metaphor'` of his struggle with polio. Americans knew of his disease, though not the extent of his disability, "and it bound them to him in ways that were no less powerful for being unspoken: If he could rise from his paralysis, then so could they." Most historians believe that Roosevelt's first 100 days were the kick off to a dazzling display of leadership that lifted the nation out of despair. But to understand FDR's transforming effect on the country, Alter contends that those days should instead be seen as the climax to a series of events reaching back to the Democratic Convention in 1932. For years critics had ridiculed Roosevelt as a lightweight FDR, they said, stood for "Feather Duster Roosevelt." But he quickly showed a dramatic flair that marked him as a leader. Breaking the tradition that candidates stay home, FDR not only went to Chicago to accept the nomination but, at a time when few had been on an airplane, flew there through storms with millions of voters charting his path. At the convention, he famously declared that it was time for a "New Deal" in American life. FDR couldn't walk but he sure could run, and that November, he won by a landslide. In the months preceding his inauguration, Roosevelt shrewdly refused entreaties from the incumbent president, Herbert Hoover, to announce joint policies. A master of theatrics, FDR knew he would build suspense by staying off-stage. Only once did Americans see much of him: when an assassin tried to shoot him at close range in Miami but missed. Roosevelt handled the affair with such grace and courage that public confidence in him increased, just as it would for Ronald Reagan a half century later. With the nation on a knife's edge, awaiting a savior, Roosevelt was positioned to swoop into office and deliver a bravura performance. Alter tells the story well, taking the reader from the soaring rhetoric of the inaugural address to the blizzard of legislative successes, radio speeches, and personal appearances over 100 days that remain a legend of presidential leadership. As Alter understands, FDR did not succeed in those early years in beating back the forces of economic destruction. Sometimes a leader can't simply fix a problem. What a leader can do, however, is build a bridge of hope across the valley so that people can endure hardship and make it to the other side. In that, Roosevelt succeeded majestically. Alter, a columnist at Newsweek, makes no pretense of serving as a rival to the pantheon of Roosevelt historians. At times, the book is uneven. (Why look so closely at FDR's years at the Navy Department and so scantily at his years as governor?) But Alter's freshness and keen eye make this a joyful read, especially for a new generation. He also drives home an argument essential in these times: When democracy is threatened, our best leaders resist the temptation to run roughshod over Congress and the Constitution. They become heroes because they save us from that folly. BOOK REVIEW The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope By Jonathan Alter Simon & Schuster, 414 pp., illustrated, $29.95 David Gergen is a professor of public service and director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
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