Fdr Leadership Quotes

Success will require the studied lack of sophistication of a Ronald Reagan and the casual dishonesty of an FDR. The president must appear to be not very bright yet be able to lie convincingly.

Sometimes Roosevelt’s ambassadors and State Department advisers failed to grasp the significance of important events and sometimes they gave poor advice, but they often informed the president and helped shape his thinking. In the end, of course, Franklin Roosevelt, alone, made historic decisions about American engagement and leadership in a volatile world. As he told Wendell Willkie after the election in 1940, “Some day you may well be sitting here where I am now as president of the United States … you’ll learn what a lonely job this is.

title nor the institutional support that accompanies the position today, Harry Hopkins was America’s first national security adviser. Sometimes Roosevelt’s ambassadors and State Department advisers failed to grasp the significance of important events and sometimes they gave poor advice, but they often informed the president and helped shape his thinking. In the end, of course, Franklin Roosevelt, alone, made historic decisions about American engagement and leadership in a volatile world. As he told Wendell Willkie after the election in 1940, “Some day you may well be sitting here where I am now as president of the United States … you’ll learn what a lonely job this is.

It is conceivable that some of those named by MacGuire as under consideration for the role of dictator or subordinate positions of leadership had no knowledge of this fact, although Van Zandt reported that he, for one, had been approached. It is unlikely that Douglas MacArthur, as Chief of Staff and a stiff-necked hero with patriotic credentials as unchallengeable as Butler’s, would have had any unsavory dealings with the plotters, however patrician his outlook.

Leave it to the Republican leadership, far more skilled in that art, to break promises.

This brief family history obviously does not demonstrate frank insanity, such as psychosis, mania, or severe depression. But it does suggest that FDR’s relatives had personalities abnormal enough to arouse the attention of average people.

White House aides Lucy Mercer and Missy LeHand), although, unlike John Kennedy, as we will see, FDR’s relations were fewer and of longer standing (one to two decades with each of the women mentioned). That FDR was highly attractive to women, especially before polio, is without doubt. But another source of his energetic libido may have been his hyperthymic personality.