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Hidden Assets: a new window into the FDR White House
Washington Monthly, Nov, 2003 by Matthew Dallek
That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt By Robert H. Jackson Oxford University Press, $30.00
In the late 1940s, Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court Justice, decided to write a book about FDR and recount his experiences in Washington during the New Deal and World War II. His former colleagues, he thought, had written their memoirs, and they had said their piece about Roosevelt; now Jackson wanted to weigh in with a balanced, honest recollection, a candid portrait of the man who had nominated him to the high court. He called the manuscript "That Man" as a rejoinder to Roosevelt's critics, who so hated FDR they couldn't bear to say his name.
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But in 1954,Jackson suffered a heart attack and died before he could finish this book. More than 40 years later, Robert Barrett, a law professor at St. John's University, working on a Jacksun biography, received a call from Jackson's family. They told him that Jackson's son, Bill, had died, and that the relatives had found a manuscript in a closet in Bill Jackson's Manhattan apartment.
Barrett read the pages and believed that he had struck historical gold. He decided that the book deserved to get published. In order to round out the portrait of FDR that Jackson was seeking to write, Barrett inserted excerpts from many other sources, including Jackson's oral history and his unpublished autobiography. At times, these insertions disrupt the book's flow. But on the whole, this is a winning memoir--the story of Jackson's life in the White House; a powerful portrait of our 32nd president; and, most of all, a tribute to the humanity and the vision that stood at the heart of the Roosevelt administration.
Robert Jackson had a unique vantage point on his times. When he arrived in Washington in 1934, he took a job as general counsel at the Bureau of Revenue, the IRS's predecessor. He rose rapidly through the ranks. He became the chief of the anti-trust division at the Department of Justice. He later served as solicitor general, then as assistant attorney general, and then as a Supreme Court justice followed by the capstone to his career--as the senior US. prosecutor at Nuremberg. One of Roosevelt's close friends, Jackson played various rules in FDR's White House: As presidential counselor and aide-de-camp, he served as an unofficial sounding hoard for Roosevelt's ideas and strategies.
Jackson had a hand in many of the most important debates of the 1930s and 1940s. He sent memos to the president, and he helped draft speeches and write messages to Congress. He took to the airwaves mad the committee hearing morns of Capitol Hill to defend Roosevelt's policies and articulate his own views on the nation's biggest issues. When he attacked the business tycoons who opposed the New Deal on the radio mad in the papers, some of Roosevelt's critics branded Jackson a socialist.
Jackson doesn't shy away from discussing FDR's shortcomings. He argues, for example, that FDR was weak when it crone to administration. Roosevelt didn't like in fire his aides, and he didn't like to settle disputes between staff members. He had a habit of changing his would depending on the views of the prison who had talked to him last, and had a "happy disregard of channels, ranks and priorities." While this often worked to his advantage, FDR occasionally infuriated bureaucrats with that stone disregard. Lower-level officials were sometimes asked to intervene in matters where only the president had the authority to make a decision.
FDR once asked Jackson to settle a dispute over foreign financial policy between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Jackson was shocked. " [It] would be impossible for me," wrote Jackson, "to arbitrate between two men, both my senior in years, both my senior in Cabinet rank, both my senior in service there ..." Jackson demurred. FDR "ultimately had to take up the task himself."
That Man, in the end, is a strong endorsement of Roosevelt. It contain s a trove of new information about Roosevelt's life--his interactions with staff and friends, his habits when he was on vacation, his temperament and style away from the spotlight. The book also has some charming vignettes such as the one about a sailing trip through the Florida Keys. FDR had been ill, but once at sea, he began to relax. He caught mackerel and ate cooked fish for breakfast. He played nightly games of low stakes poker and his luck, Jackson writes, was "phenomenal."
"... [FDR] had rested. Life had been most informal in dress and in conduct. He was of course treated respectfully by all, but with perfect informality. In fishing contest, playing cards, and conversation, he was and wanted to bc an equal. He asked no flavors and granted none. He played the game on its merits. He was able to avoid all pose. He was away from curious eyes. We were completely isolated ... It had been one of the delightful experiences of life."
