A delegation of civil rights leaders was filing into the Oval Office to push Franklin Roosevelt to embrace a radical, explosive concept: integrate the armed forces of the United States. Privately, Roosevelt thought it might be a good idea some day in the future. Today it was the last thing he wanted to do. It was the dawn of World War II, a national election was weeks away, he had many other battles to wage, and he had to buy time.

What Roosevelt's guests did not know was that the president was secretly recording them through a microphone hidden in his desk lamp, which connected to an experimental sound machine hidden in a padlocked chamber right under their feet. Roosevelt had just recorded a press conference, and the machine was still running.

Taking their positions on one side of the Oval Office were the two most powerful black civil rights leaders of the day: A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the most orotund, forceful speakers of his time, and lawyer Walter White, secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and an anti-lynching crusader, whose fractional ethnic connection to African Americans-he was 1/64th black-only magnified his passion for equal justice. White's fair-skinned father died in excruciating pain when surgeons at the white wing of an Atlanta hospital, where he had been mistakenly taken for an emergency operation, refused to treat him.

On the other side of the office were Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, a former Rough Rider and a Republican appointed by FDR in a spirit of bipartisanship, and Robert Patterson, assistant secretary of war, both of whom flatly opposed the concept of integrating the military. Patterson's boss, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, thought the whole idea was ridiculous, and boycotted the meeting altogether. Stimson found any meeting with the president to be an ordeal of exasperation, and wrote in his diary: "His mind does not follow easily a consecutive chain of thought but he is full of stories and incidents and hops about in his discussions from suggestion to suggestion and it is very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room."

Between the two camps sat Roosevelt, a striking, blue-eyed man of fifty-eight with a huge chest and shoulders and thinning gray hair atop a large, fleshy head that projected an incandescent smile and a booming voice that were the essence of supreme confidence and command. The public believed he had largely conquered the polio that struck him in 1921, and he promoted the deception through an elaborate shell game of ramps, staged photos, black painted braces worn with dark shoes and socks, and concealed entrances and exits. The mass illusion was aided and abetted by a sympathetic White House press corps, who, at the 1936 Democratic Convention, physically blocked other photographers from snapping Roosevelt as he tumbled and nearly fell on his way to the podium just before his keynote address. Roosevelt said publicly he was a "recovered cripple" and just "a bit lame." The truth was that he was totally paralyzed from the waist down, a prisoner behind his desk all day, who went to the bathroom by calling for a valet and water bottle.

The desk he sat behind was usually cluttered with dispatches and reports spilling out of wire in-baskets and a forest of over 100 knickknacks: lighters, paperweights, stuffed elephants and toy donkeys, a "Snooty the Love Dog" doll, salt and pepper shakers, a can of Camel cigarettes, Uncle Sam hats, and during the war years, a matching pair of comic figurines, "Benito" and "Adolf." The clutter was so thick, some papers piled on the table behind his desk waited for President Roosevelt's signature for as long as six months.

The writer John Gunther, observing Roosevelt at close range in an Oval Office press conference, observed: "He has a big head, very tanned; he cocks the whole head continually, snapping his eyes this way and that as it finishes an arc; talks with a cigarette holder clenched between his teeth, at the extreme corner of the mouth; blinks to get smoke out of his eyes.... In twenty minutes Mr. Roosevelt's features had expressed amazement, curiosity, mock alarm, genuine interest, worry, rhetorical playing for suspense, sympathy, decision, playfulness, dignity, and surpassing charm. Yet he said almost nothing. Questions were deflected, diverted, diluted. Answers-when they did come-were concise and clear. But I never met anyone who showed greater capacity for avoiding a direct answer while giving the questioner a feeling he had been answered."

In a 1934 renovation, Roosevelt moved the Oval Office from the center rear of the West Wing to the sunnier southeast corner, which allowed him to be rolled in his special wheeled chair (not a conventional wheelchair, but an armless kitchen chair adapted with small wheels and an ashtray) from the mansion in comfort and privacy through Thomas Jefferson's covered colonnade, past the Cabinet Room windows, down the porch, and through a side door into the office. According to White House historian William Peale, the new office was "furnished somewhat more elaborately than its predecessor," and "had rather theatrical neocolonial trimmings, somewhat in the Moderne vein. The most important doors had heavy pediments, while doors of secondary status had shell-shaped niches over them." Earlier presidents had kept the Oval Office walls almost bare, but FDR blanketed them with prints of navy ships and Hudson River landscapes where he could look at them through the workday.

It was on the banks of the Hudson that FDR was born and bred on a diet of smothering love and attention, the pampered son of an elderly millionaire and his indomitable wife, who lived in a grand mansion overlooking vistas of sylvan beauty. "FDR was supremely confident," said historian Geoffrey C. Ward. "His mother taught him that he was the center of the universe and that he was the sun around which everything revolved. He never lost that attitude."

Roosevelt prepared for the presidency with a two-track career in business and government split between New York State and Washington, D.C. After starting out as a law clerk at a Wall Street firm (and occasional White House guest of his cousin and hero President Theodore Roosevelt), he became a state senator in Albany, then spent 1913 through 1920 as assistant secretary of the navy. World War I, wrote historian James MacGregor Burns, "had a maturing effect on Roosevelt. Long hours, tough decisions, endless conferences, exhausting trips, hard bargaining with powerful officials in Washington and abroad turned him into a seasoned politician-administrator." After running for vice president on Democrat Al Smith's failed 1920 ticket, he spent most of the next decade in multiple business ventures, as a lawyer, insurance man, and investor, all the while helping to manage his family's estate in Hyde Park.

Sharper outlines of Roosevelt's creative and improvisational executive style emerged during his career as a budding venture capitalist during the Roaring Twenties. He speculated in a dizzying portfolio of schemes: transatlantic dirigibles, Maine lobster futures, oil wildcatting in Wyoming, resort hotels, taxicab advertising, and vending machines. He was rarely successful. "As war administrator, as businessman, as president," wrote Burns, "he liked to try new things, to take a dare, to bring something off with a flourish." His 1921 attack of polio and years of attempted rehabilitation resulted in what his longtime aide Frances Perkins called "a spiritual transformation" that "purged the slightly arrogant attitude he had displayed on occasion before he was stricken. The man emerged completely warmhearted, with humility of spirit."

After two terms as a generally effective, progressive governor of New York, the second biggest job in the United States, Roosevelt entered the White House with a near mystical self-assurance. FDR's formula for effectiveness in the job was simple: "What is needed is a wide previous experience in government problems generally and a versatility of mind that can take up one subject after another during the day and find itself at home in all of them."

On September 27, 1940, Roosevelt was at a crossroads between the two great crises of his presidency: the Depression and the outbreak of World War II. For seven years he had navigated the country through the lingering misery of the Depression with a public leadership style of charisma and compassion, and a closed-door executive style of insouciant charm, creative tension, chaos, delay, and improvisation. Vice President Henry Wallace asserted that FDR "could keep all the balls in the air without losing his own."

Now, as the summer of 1940 turned to fall, the world was going up in flames.

In Berlin, Hitler was issuing plans for a cross-channel invasion of Britain, after incinerating London with raids by up to 1,500 aircraft per day since early August in the Battle of Britain. German troops had already surged into Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France. In Asia, Japanese forces were consolidating their conquests in China and Manchuria and were now invading Indochina-15,000 Japanese had just occupied Hanoi. In September, FDR had evaded Congress and granted fifty warships to Britain, but he was still performing a geopolitical high-wire act he hoped might keep the United States out of the war. He commanded a banana-republic military: his army ranked as only the eighteenth in the world, behind Germany, Japan, England, France, Spain, Switzerland-behind even Portugal, Holland, and Belgium.

At the same time, Roosevelt was in the midst of campaigning for an unprecedented third term, against the strongest contender the Republicans ever threw against him, businessman Wendell Willkie. In these final weeks, the campaign had descended into a bitter death struggle, as Willkie was dodging eggs, rotten vegetables, and lightbulbs thrown at him by panicking Democrats in cities across the United States, and pounding away at FDR as a war-mongering near-dictator. Willkie was pulling even with FDR in key states like New York as Democratic and labor bosses and even the New York Times deserted Roosevelt's crusade.

In this supercharged atmosphere, FDR worried that a single misquoted word-particularly in his twice-a-week, off-the-record press conferences-might trigger an unexpected disaster. The previous year, in fact, a controversy erupted when, after a closed-door White House meeting with a group of senators, he was misquoted as saying that America's defense frontier was the Rhine River in Europe, an error that could have committed the United States to going to war in the event that German troops crossed over their western border.

In the wake of this controversy, one of FDR's White House stenographers, Henry Kannee, came up with an idea-to create an exact record of FDR's comments, why not secretly rig the Oval Office for sound? Roosevelt approved, and after a failed experiment with a Dictaphone machine wired up to a microphone in Roosevelt's office, the stenographer took the problem to the RCA Corporation, which coincidentally was working on an experimental prototype of a three-and-a-half-foot-high contraption called a "Continuous-film Recording Machine," an ancestor of the tape recorder. The machine was also called a "Kiel Sound Recorder and Reporter," after J. Ripley Kiel, the Chicago inventor who invented it and licensed it to RCA. It used a recording needle to feed sound signals onto ribbons of motion-picture film. Kiel proudly described it as "the very first recording device that could record for as long as twenty-four hours unattended and could immediately have the recording played back without any time consuming processing."

RCA founder David Sarnoff donated the machine, one of only seven ever built, as a gift to FDR during a White House visit in June 1940, and the installation was performed by Kiel in August. The tall lamp on his desk was not suitable for hiding a microphone, so Kiel bought another one and hid the microphone in it. When switched on, the machine was noise activated, and began recording as soon as someone spoke or made a loud noise. Kannee, who held the key to the closet, could also activate the system by flipping a switch on the machine itself.

From August to November 1940, Roosevelt used the machine to record press conferences as a backup to his stenographer's notes. In addition to fourteen press conferences, some private Oval Office conversations and meetings were also recorded by the machine, probably absentmindedly when FDR or a staffer forgot to turn the machine off. The recordings were not found until 1978, when historian Robert J. C. Butow discovered them by accident while performing research at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York.

The FDR recordings reveal an intimate inside view of his patrician, gossipy, and supremely confident executive style, as he uses charm, vagueness, gossip, and occasional deviousness as tools for managing his presidency. After listening to the recordings, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, "With all their technical imperfections, the tapes add a fascinating dimension to our sense of the Roosevelt presidency. They offer the historian the excitement of immediacy: FDR in casual, unbuttoned exchange with his staff. One is struck by how little the private voice differs from the public voice we know so well from the speeches. The tone is a rich and resonant tenor. The enunciation is clear, the timing is impeccable. The voice's range is remarkable, from high to low in register and from insinuatingly soft to emphatically loud in decibel level."

In the fall of 1940, the last thing Roosevelt wanted was a fight over civil rights. He had transformed the government into an agent of social action and economic recovery, but he was not ready to commit the presidency to racial equality. His relationship with black America was complex: he was torn between his sense of decency and fair play, evidenced by his 1935 executive order banning discrimination in New Deal programs, and his pragmatic, political side, which feared those powerful Southern Democrats who prevented him even from supporting a federal anti-lynching campaign. By the mid-1930s, his juggling act was succeeding, as the party held together in the South while his wife spoke out for civil rights and convinced blacks moving onto voter rolls of northern cities that they had friends in the White House. A historic shift occurred in 1936, when blacks bolted from their traditional home in the Republican Party and joined the FDR coalition. By 1940, New Deal programs supported 1 million black families.

As America's military buildup accelerated that year, segregation in the armed forces became the "hot button" issue for African Americans, who were locked out of the military or relegated to service jobs in all branches of the service. There were only two black combat officers in the half-million-man army and none in the navy. There was not a single black soldier in the Marine Corps, Tank Corps, or Army Air Corps. Congress passed a draft law that summer pledging to increase Negro army enlistment to 10 percent, adding that "there shall be no discrimination against any person on account of race or color" anywhere in the military. The bill contained a major loophole, though, which seemed to make everything conditional on the availability of segregated military facilities, few of which existed.

A. Philip Randolph and Walter White, joined by T. Arnold Hill of the Urban League, asked for a meeting with the president to clarify his view of the bill. White House staffers ignored their request. The group then appealed to Mrs. Roosevelt, who booked the meeting directly with FDR.

The Oval Office
September 27, 1940, 11:30 A.M.

President Franklin Roosevelt with Civil Rights Leaders

RE: Integration of U.S. Military Forces audio recording on 35mm motion-picture film (RCA/Kiel machine)

On the eve of both World War II and a presidential election, a delegation of black leaders lobbied FDR to desegregate the U.S. military. On the other side of the Oval Office were FDR's own government officials, dead-set against integration. Roosevelt decided to skate down a middle path of charming, almost condescending ambiguity, leading both sides to feel he agreed with them.

The meeting is a case study in miscommunication, highlights the dangers of FDR's improvisational executive style, and provoked a wave of controversy that threatened FDR's grip on the black vote as the election approached.

RANDOLPH: Mr. President, it would mean a great deal to the morale of the Negro people if you could make some announcement on the role Negroes will play in the armed forces of the nation, in the whole national defense set-up.

FDR: I did the other day! We did it the other day, when my staff told me of this thing [meeting]!

RANDOLPH: If you did it yourself, if you were to make such an announcement, it would have a tremendous effect upon the morale of the Negro people all over the country.

FDR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah (interrupting and talking over Randolph). Now, I'm making a national defense speech around the twentieth of this month, about the draft as a whole, and the reserves, and so forth. I'll bring that in.

RANDOLPH: (politely but firmly cutting Roosevelt off to get his point across) It would have a tremendous effect, because I must say, it is an irritating spot for the Negro people. They feel that they are not wanted in the various armed forces of the country, and they feel they have earned their right to participate in every phase of the government by virtue of their record in past wars for the nation. And consequently, without regard to political complexion, without regard to any sort of idea whatever, the Negroes as a unit, they are feeling that they are being shunted aside, that they are being discriminated against, and that they are not wanted now.

"It was remarkable enough for anybody to interrupt FDR and to talk as much as Randolph did in a meeting," noted historian Geoffrey C. Ward, "but for a black man in that time, it's truly extraordinary." The recording soon caught FDR in a misstatement, when he claimed to be putting blacks "right in, proportionately, into the combat services," a policy that didn't begin to be implemented until late in World War II. "The trouble with the president," Harry Truman once charged, "is that he lies."

VOICE: The Negro is trying to get in the army!

FDR: Of course, the main point to get across in building up this draft army, the selective draft, is that we are notas we did before so much in the World War, confining the Negro in to the non-combat services. We're putting him right in, proportionately, into the combat services.

RANDOLPH: We feel that's something.

FDR: Which is, something. It's a step ahead. It's a step ahead.

WHITE: Mr. President, may I suggest another step ahead?

This has been commented on by many Negro Americans, and that is that we realize the practical reality that in Georgia and Mississippi (FDR: Yeah.) it would be impossible to have units where people's standard of admission would be ability....

I'd like to suggest this idea, even though it may sound fantastic at this time, that in the states where there isn't a tradition of segregation, that we might start to experiment with organizing a division or a regiment and let them be all Americans and not black Americans or white Americans-working together.

Now, there are a number of reasons why I think that would be sound, among them that I think it would be a practical work for democracy and I think it would be less expensive and less troublesome in the long run.

FDR: Well, you see now Walter, my general report on it is this.

The thing is, we've got to work into this. Now, for instance, you take the divisional organization-about 12,000 men. 12, 14,000 men. Now, suppose in there that you have, one, what do they call those gun units? What?

One battery, with Negro troops, and officers, in there in that battery, like for instance New York, and another regiment, or battalion, that's a half of a regiment, of Negro troops.

They go into a division, a whole division of 12,000. And you may have a Negro regiment at work here, and right over here on my right in line would be a white regiment, in the same division. Maintain the divisional organization, Now what happens? After a while, in case of war, those people get shifted from one to the other. The thing gets backed into. We'd have one battery out of a regiment of artillery that would be a Negro battery, with the white battery here and another Negro battery, and gradually working in the field, together, you may back into what you're talking about.

RANDOLPH: I think, Mr. President, to supplement, if I may, the position of Mr. White, that idea is working in the field of organized labor. Now, for instance, there are unions where you have Negro business agents (FDR: Sure!) whereas 90 percent of the members are white. And you also even have Negroes who are parts of unions in Birmingham, Alabama, in the same union with the whites. If it can work out on the basis of democracy in the trade unions, it can in the army.

FDR: Yes. You take up on the Hudson River where Judge Patterson and I come from, we have a lot of brickworks.

RANDOLPH: Oh, yes?

FDR: Up around Fishkill, the old brickworks. Heavens, they have the same union (Randolph: Exactly.) for all the white workers and the Negro workers in those brickworks. (Randolph: Quite so.) And they get along, no trouble at all!

RANDOLPH: Quite so, and when they come out of their union and into the army, well, now, there isn't much justification for separating them, don't you know.

Colonel Knox, as to the navy, what is the position of the navy on the integration of the Negro in the various parts?

KNOX: You have a factor in the navy that is not present in the army, and that is that these men live aboard ships. And if I said to you that I was going to take Negroes into a ship's company [several very faint unintelligible words] this sort of thing won't do. And you can't have separate ships with a Negro crew, because everything in the navy now has to be interchangeable.

FDR: If you could have a Northern ship and a Southern ship it'd be different! (laughs) But you can't do that.

KNOX: I agree with, however, with the President's suggestion on some way of providing, in the words of the message of the Negro patriotic leaders to serve the nation without raising the question that comes from putting white men and black men living together in the same ship.

FDR: I think the proportion is going up, and one very good reason is that in the old days, ah, up to a few years ago, up to the time of the Philippine independence, practically, oh, I'd say 75 or 80 percent of the mess people on board ship, ah, were Filipinos. And, of course, we've taken in no Filipinos now for the last, what is it, four years ago, two years ago, taken in no Filipinos whatsoever.

And what we're doing, we're replacing them with colored boys- mess captain, so forth and so on.

And in that field, they can get up to the highest rating of a chief petty officer. The head mess attendant on a cruiser or a battleship is a chief petty officer:

RANDOLPH: Is there at this time a single Negro in the navy of officer status?

KNOX: There are 4,007 Negroes out of a total force at the beginning of 1940 of 139,000. They are all messmen's rank. (chatter)

FDR: I think, another thing Frank [Knox], that I forgot to mention, I thought of it about a month ago, and that is this.

We are training a certain number of musicians on board ship. The ship's band. There's no reason why we shouldn't have a colored band on some of these ships, because they're darn good at it. That's something we should look into. You know, if it'll increase the opportunity, that's what we're after. They may develop a leader of the band ....

In the face of this unintentional insult, the civil rights leaders held their tongues. Walter White steered the discussion back to the reality of epidemic racism in the military.

WHITE: There is discrimination in the army and in the navy, and in the Air Corps, in labor in the navy yards, and particularly in industry which has contracts for the national defense program. I've just completed an article, I hope it's the last draft, for the Saturday Evening Post, which I gather you know about.

FDR: Yeah, yeah.

WHITE: But in Pensacola, for example, there is an apprentice school, which gives a very fine course, a four-year course, for free. But there are no Negroes allowed to go into it. And apprenticeship is tremendously important.

FDR: For flying? Ground work?

PATTERSON: Ground crews.

FDR: I think we can work on that. Get something done on that. (chatter)

WHITE: In Charleston, South Carolina, they practically ousted all skilled and semi-skilled Negroes.

FDR: In Charleston?

WHITE: In Charleston, yes.

FDR: Of course, on the development of this work, you've got to have somebody, for instance in the navy, you've got to have somebody [black] in the office who will look after it.

In the last Navy Department, in the old days, I had a boy who was out here by the name of Pryor. Do you know Pryor? He used to be my colored messenger in the Navy Department. He was only a kid. I gave him to Louis Howe, who was terribly fond of him. Then when he came back here in 1933, Louis Howe said to me, "The one man I want in the office is Pryor."

Well, Pryor now is one of the best fellas we've got in the office....

I think you can do that in the army and the navy. Get somebody, a boy who will act as the clearinghouse.

WHITE: An assistant, responsible to the Secretary. (To Knox) I want to see you about that.

FDR: (To White, after Knox apparently gives him a stone-faced non-reply)

He's giving you what you call the silent treatment! Ha, ha, ha!

WHITE: We took the liberty of putting this out. We finished that just in time to get one set (giving statement to FDR, apologizing for the lack of copies to give to Knox and Patterson, a likely waste of paper), in which we tried to give you the benefit of the comments which are most important you should be most aware about. These are-I'm not going to leave them there, you've got enough reading matter-petitions from eighty-five American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts from California to Maine protesting against discrimination.
FDR: Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup. (Meeting breaks up amid side conversations)

(one-on-one with White) Of course, what we're all after is to give some more opportunity. I used that boy as an example, Walter. I had entirely forgotten about the possibility of a Negro band, to increase the opportunity. The more of those we can get, a little opportunity here, a little opportunity there.

WHITE: Here we've been loyal in the last war-remember when they were worried about protecting Woodrow Wilson? They ordered Negroes to protect the White House. I've been trying to get- (FDR cuts him off)

FDR: I know it, I know it. Yeah. Well, of course, my letters are increased a bit from twenty threatening letters a day to nearly forty. But I feel all right! Ha! Ha! Goodbye!

RANDOLPH: You're looking fine, Mr. President, and I'm happy to see you again. Well, I'm proud to say that people don't like me, too. Even in Congress!

FDR: Bye!

VOICES: Goodbye, Mr. President.

Here was the president of the United States with the most influential black leaders of his time, referring to "colored" men as "boys," suggesting that mess attendant was a good career track, and that there ought to be more colored bands, "because they're darned good at it." Much of this can be explained by the fact that 1940 was a prehistoric time in race relations, and FDR had no special sensitivity to black issues beyond a patrician sense of fairness and noblesse oblige. Roosevelt treated many people with such easy, aristocratic familiarity. Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary of state, was repelled by it: "He could charm an individual or a nation. But he condescended ... it was patronizing and humiliating. To accord the president the greatest deference and respect should be a gratification to any citizen. It is not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one's forelock in return."

Like many of FDR's visitors, the civil rights delegation stepped out of the Oval Office thinking that FDR's nodding gestures and charming reassurances meant he agreed with them. But Roosevelt was not integrating combat forces and had no immediate intention of doing so. Days after the meeting, he approved a White House press release dated October 9, 1940, that announced that after the meeting with the black leaders, "the policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations. This policy has .proven satisfactory over a long period of years and to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparations for national defense ... no experiments should be tried with the organizational set-up of these units at this critical time."

Randolph and White were stunned when they read the release. The NAACP issued a furious press release on October 11: "White House Charged with Trickery in Announcing Jim Crow Policy of Army: We are inexpressibly shocked that a president of the United States at a time of national peril should surrender so completely to enemies of Democracy who would destroy national unity by advocating segregation. Official approval by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of such discrimination is a stab in the back of Democracy and a blow at the patriotism of twelve million Negro citizens." Randolph wrote angrily to FDR: "I was shocked and amazed when I saw the newspaper reports that the Negro committee had sanctioned segregation of Negroes in the armed forces of our country because I am sure that the committee made it definitely clear that it was opposed to segregation of the armed forces of the nation." The black press launched a chorus of outrage, thousands attended a protest meeting in Harlem, and black voters began flocking to Willkie.

FDR rushed to repair the damage by issuing a statement promising steps to "ensure fair treatment on a non-discriminatory basis," and appointed several blacks to senior positions in the military. The gestures worked. The African-American press applauded, and NAACP Chairman White sent FDR a note thanking him "for all you did to insure a square deal for Negroes in the defense of our country." In the election, FDR managed to hold on to 67 percent of the black vote. FDR never delivered on his promise. While thousands of blacks served heroically in combat and support roles during the war, most were relegated to inferior positions and segregated units. Widespread racial integration in the military would have to wait for President Truman's executive order of 104S.

"You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does," Roosevelt confessed in May 1942. "I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war." Roosevelt's performance in the civil rights meeting illustrated one of the central operating principles of his protean executive style, a style that transformed the presidency, and the nation: a willingness to delay decisions, change his mind, keep his options open, avoid commitments, or even deceive people in the relentless pursuit of noble objectives. George Elsey, who as a young naval lieutenant helped run Roosevelt's secret wartime White House intelligence center, the Map Room, said, "Roosevelt had the habit of saying he was in agreement with whoever he was with and making them feel they had his full support, and he might well go off in another direction an hour later." "Roosevelt had a fairly creative relationship with the truth," noted Geoffrey Ward. "He could convince himself that what he was saying was the truth for the moment. He was a master at pleasing the visitors to his office."

Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor, who functioned mainly as an executive political deputy to her husband, saw this characteristic not as a strategy but as a personality flaw: "His real weakness," she commented, was "he couldn't bear to be disagreeable to someone he liked." "Franklin had a way, when he did not want to hear what somebody had to say, of telling stories and talking about something quite different." When FDR refused to inform Vice President Henry Wallace that he was being dropped from the ticket in 1944, Eleanor noted, "he always hopes to get things settled pleasantly and he won't realize that there are times when you have got to do an unpleasant thing directly, and, perhaps, unpleasantly." FDR crony Jim Farley spoke of the way "he forever put off things distasteful." Political boss and close FDR friend Ed Flynn wrote that FDR "did not keep his word on many appointments," and once hung up the phone on him after a perceived double-cross. Raymond Moley, a New Deal adviser, remarked, "Perhaps in the long run, fewer friends would have been lost by bluntness than by the misunderstandings that arose from engaging ambiguity."

Roosevelt's secret recorder began its trial run during an uneventful press conference on August 22, 1940, barely a month before the civil rights meeting. As soon as the press filed out of the Oval Office, in walked former newspaperman Lowell Mellett, who had just been named Roosevelt's assistant. The two had recently learned that Republican campaign operatives were about to publicize a group of bizarre and potentially embarrassing "Dear Guru" letters written by FDR's vice presidential running mate Henry Wallace to a White Russian cult leader, letters that could injure Roosevelt's reelection campaign. In retaliation, FDR was now considering unleashing a whispering campaign to promote a sex scandal against Wendell Willkie, who was thought to be having a longtime affair with a prominent New York book reviewer. The affair was fairly common knowledge in New York, and Willkie was still married to his wife while he spent extended periods with "the gal."

FDR waited until the door was closed, and then began speaking in a soft, theatrically conspiratorial voice, almost swallowing his words. He didn't want anybody else to hear, but he clearly had forgotten, or didn't care, that his brand-new experimental recorder was still humming along underneath his feet in the basement. "Ah, Lowell, on this, uh, thing, I.... Now, I agree with you that there is, so far as the old man [presumably FDR] goes, we can't use it publicly ... You can't have any of our principal speakers refer to it, but people down the line can do it properly (raps desk). I mean the Congress speakers and state speakers, and so forth. They can use your material to determine the fact that Willkie left his old [several inaudible whispered words]. That's it. All right. So long as it's none of us people at the top. Now, all right, if people try to play dirty politics on me, I'm willing to try it on other people. Now, you'd be amazed at how this story about the gal is spreading around the country." Roosevelt compared the situation to that of former New York mayor Jimmy Walker, who, Roosevelt said, had an "extremely attractive little tart" for a mistress, and hired his estranged wife for $10,000 to appear publicly with him during a corruption trial. "Now, Mrs. Willkie may not have been hired," FDR speculated on the recording, "but in effect she's been hired to return to Wendell and smile and make this campaign with him."

In the end, the Republicans held their fire and did not publicize the "Guru letters," possibly because they were afraid of the type of counterstroke Roosevelt was considering on the recording, the first known electronic Oval Office recording in history. In turn, FDR never implemented the whispering campaign about Wendell Willkie's sex life. Roosevelt himself may also have feared triggering rumors about his own attachments to women other than his wife.

FDR's secret wiring of the Oval Office coincided with the dawn of the era of electronic surveillance by the U.S. government against its own citizens, a policy that began on FDR's order. A 1939 Supreme Court decision prohibited the use of wiretapping, but on May 21, 1940, three months before the Oval Office was wired, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover received an authorization from Roosevelt directing him to use "listening devices" against people suspected of espionage and subversion. Although FDR intended the order to apply only to matters of extreme and imminent danger to national security (such as sabotage or espionage), Hoover used this document as hisauthorization to use wiretaps against a broad spectrum of targets for the next three decades. In 1975, a Senate investigation found evidence that Roosevelt authorized Hoover to tap the home telephones of several of his closest advisers, including Harry Hopkins. (FDR feared that Hopkins's wife was leaking anti-administration information to the Washington Times-Herald.)

Although the "FDR Tapes" cover only a microscopic portion of Roosevelt's time in office, they do illustrate a supreme reality of Roosevelt's presidency: he is completely in love with his job. Geoffrey Ward marveled, "He is trapped behind his desk and what is astonishing to me is what a good time he's having." "He was a most unusual man, one of the finest gentlemen I've ever known," said Dorothy Jones Brady, FDR's personal secretary and stenographer, who went to work for him as a twenty-one-year-old White House assistant in March 1933 and was with him until the day he died. "Every day you were there you knew that your number one job was to help people in trouble. He had a compassion that was like a magnificent obsession."

Just after taking office, Roosevelt moved quickly to distinguish his presidency from the image of Hoover's cold indifference. In 1932, Hoover launched an army attack against protesting veterans camped out on the Mall and burned down their camps. Frances Perkins reported, "When the veterans came to Washington in March 1933, in a similar, if smaller, march on the capital followed by an encampment, Roosevelt drove out and showed himself, waving his hat at them." He then sent Mrs. Roosevelt and aide Louis Howe out to meet with the veterans. "Above all," FDR directed, "be sure there is plenty of good coffee. No questions asked. Just let free coffee flow all the time. There is nothing like it to make people feel better and feel welcome." The veterans gradually drifted away peacefully.

James Roosevelt recalled one of his father's first White House executive orders after becoming president: "He circulated word to his staff, from the top secretaries to the telephone operators, that, if persons in distress telephoned to appeal for help of any sort, they were not to be shut off but that someone was to talk with them. If a farmer in Iowa was about to have his mortgage foreclosed, if a homeowner in one of the big cities was about to lose his home, and they felt desperate enough about it to phone the White House, Father wanted help given them if a way possibly could be found; he was keenly cognizant of the suffering he had seen on his campaign trips. Many such calls were taken-sometimes by me, when I was in the White House, and occasionally by Mother. Often ways were found to cut red tape with some federal agency. After Father's death, Mother received letters from strangers, who told her how, in the dark Depression days, they telephoned their president and received aid."

The rhythms of FDR's work pattern would vary little over the next twelve years. He awoke around 8:30 A.M., alone in an old-fashioned mahogany bed, threw a cape around the shoulders of his weather-beaten pajamas, and then, more or less simultaneously, ate a breakfast in bed of soft-boiled eggs, read through government reports, scanned the Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, and New York newspapers, got a quick health check from his doctor, Admiral Ross T. McIntyre, received Eleanor for some emergency request, and huddled with presidential aides like Harry Hopkins, "Pa" Watson, and Press Secretary Steve Early, plus Cabinet members and other officials, all while his valet bathed, shaved, and dressed him. Every morning FDR and his top officials received a package of clippings from some 700 newspapers, many of them hostile to the administration. Before long Roosevelt was stuffing the first of his forty daily Camel cigarettes into a soft-tipped ivory cigarette holder he used to protect his tender gums. Throughout the day, he used the holder as a theatrical prop, waving it around like a magician's wand, royal scepter, and orchestra baton to emphasize points and illustrate anecdotes.

Around 10:00 A.M. FDR was man-hauled into the wheeled chair, pushed into the elevator, and rolled down into the West Wing, now joined by a team of Secret Service men carrying baskets full of presidential work, and flanked by hyperactive Scottish terrier "Fala" trotting and yapping alongside. Once behind his desk, FDR would swing himself into a regular chair, and remain there as prisoner for much of the day, "a spider at the center of his web," as Geoffrey C. Ward put it, "where the world came to him."