September 6, 1940, 11:05 A.M.

GRACE TULLY: Morning, Mr. President.

FDR: Morning, Grace!

TULLY: We're waiting for that update from the State Department as usual.

FDR: Yeah, they always send it at the last minute. (signs papers) I expected they would.

TULLY: Yeah, at the most inopportune time.

FDR: Now, is that all we've got? Got something for me to sign?

TULLY: Yessir, I'll bring it in.

FDR: Good, bring it in. (reads document) Now, what do we do about this? This is the damnedest thing I've ever read.

FDR now read aloud from a telegram sent by U.S. Minister Hugh G. Grant in Thailand to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The telegram reported on an Asian trip by former FDR backer Roy Howard, head of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, now a Wendell Willkie supporter. Howard was spreading rumors that FDR was deteriorating mentally and physically. FDR seemed eager to retaliate, but was firmly kept in check by his press secretary, Steve Early, who convinced him this would be counterproductive.

FDR: "Accompanied by the leading American businessman in Siam, Howard called to see me at the legation with his friend and launched into a bitter attack on the president, accusing him of bad faith in inviting him, Howard, to go on a mission to South America, alleging that he, the president, was down and out physically and mentally, that he had made a mess of our foreign affairs during the crisis, and that he is desirous of leading the country into war...."

Now, what do we do about a thing like that?

EARLY: Mr. President, I should think that the best thing to do with that would be to put it into the speech material file along with the other letters of record. I don't see that you can do anything else with it.

FDR: But it is interesting.

EARLY: Yes. Very much so, it ought to be made a part of that record…

APPOINTMENTS SECRETARY MARVIN MCINTYRE: When people see you when you go around, that refutes that physical stuff.

FDR: Yeah. I'm willing to admit my mentality's slipping, but that's all right! (laughter in the room)

MCINTYRE: The attorney general wants to speak to you after the Cabinet for a few minutes. Bob says its a very important thing....

The Dutch Minister is sick, they say very seriously sick, and he says he has an urgent message for you, and he wanted to know if he could find some way, if he could phone you during the day.

FDR: Sure! Put him after lunch!

Roosevelt worked from two Oval Offices: the one in the West Wing, which he used for press conferences and formal, ceremonial meetings, and the Oval Room on the second floor of the White House mansion-also called the "Oval Study" or "the study." This was "the most important room of Roosevelt's presidency," according to White House historian William Seale. "There he worked, relaxed and there he conducted most of the important business of State." Frances Perkins watched the room quickly fill up "with everything that came his way-a Jefferson chair, another bookcase, another bench, another table, ship models and books and papers piled on the floor. Any room he used invariably got that lived-in and overcrowded look which indicated the complexity and variety of his interests and intentions."

FDR usually ate lunch at his desk with guests on card tables in front of sofas, some of which dated back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt. He regularly worked late into the evenings and weekends in the Oval Room, which was connected to his bedroom by a side door. From January 1942 to mid-1944 FDR went once or twice a day to the secret Map Room in the White House basement, a military and intelligence center inspired by Churchill's map room. Here Roosevelt could check the progress of troop movements and naval campaigns around the world on giant maps on the wall dotted with colored pins. He met every Monday with congressional leaders, held press conferences on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, and Cabinet meetings every Friday afternoon. Roosevelt returned to the Oval Study at about 5:30 in the evening and then held court as mix-master at the nightly cocktail hour, where he would relax and gossip with his staff. Before turning in around midnight, he went through a bedtime folder of letters from ordinary citizens and chatted with his wife, who slept in a nearby room.

As a chief executive Roosevelt functioned not at the top of a pyramid, but at the center of a self-propelled whirlwind, as he smashed bureaucratic procedure, instigated open conflict between people and ideas, and sucked blizzards of data into his Oval Offices. He transacted much presidential business through short, informal memos on White House notepads, often simply dashed off in his own handwriting. Political scientist Frank Kessler described Roosevelt's accessibility: "One hundred or so persons could get to him directly by telephone without being diverted by a secretary. He employed no chief of staff and permitted few of his staffers to become subject matter specialists. Except for Harry Hopkins, to whom he turned almost exclusively for foreign policy assignments, staffers were assigned problems in a variety of areas."

Roosevelt soaked up new ideas and information ravenously from all directions, and his in-boxes were often piled high with reports sent to him directly from all corners of government. He preferred his memos and letters short ("Two short sentences will generally answer any known letter," he asserted), and if someone submitted an oversized document, he would ask, "Boil it down to a single page." If he liked a memo, he might read it back to the person who wrote it. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., observed, "The first task of an executive, as he evidently saw it, was to guarantee himself an effective flow of information and ideas. An executive relying on a single information system became inevitably the prisoner of that system. Roosevelt's persistent effort therefore was to check and balance information acquired through official channels by information acquired through a myriad of private, informal and unorthodox channels and espionage networks."

The White House in FDR's early years was a remarkably modest operation: he had a primary staff of only around 100 and a $200,000 budget. To control costs, the offices were furnished with abandoned furniture from terminated federal agencies. When you walked into the West Wing lobby, if you looked closely you would see patches in the carpet. When you looked into Roosevelt's office, according to eyewitnesses, you could see him surrounded by assistants, signing a constant stream of papers and chatting on the phone. He would look up, see you, raise his huge hand into the air to wave while throwing his head back and shouting, "Come on in. We're doing a land-office business!" At the beginning of the war he bellowed to one visitor, "I can take anything these days!" An FDR friend observed: "This man functions smoothly because he has learned to function in chains." Washington attorney James Rowe, who became an FDR assistant at age twenty-eight, walked in to meet FDR for the first time in the Oval Office. Roosevelt smiled up at him and announced, "Jim, I want your advice," instantly creating a lifelong admirer.

Roosevelt was not afraid to admit when he didn't know something, an asset for any executive, especially crucial for a president. In one meeting he confessed, "I am still perfectly foggy about the whole thing. Can you differentiate between old mortgages and new mortgages?" After an aide phoned in a briefing from a meeting of economists, FDR hung up, then called back, "I don't understand it yet. Put it in a telegram." Roosevelt's tendency to hijack conversations led some officials to resort to a desperate strategy: they insisted on luncheon meetings, then waited for the exact moment when FDR stuffed his mouth with food to begin talking. When he wanted to end a conversation, FDR would say: "Well, I'm sorry, I have to run now!" FDR aide Samuel Rosenman mused, "I am sure it never struck him as a strange thing to say, even though he had not been able to walk since 1921."

FDR's Cabinet meetings were fairly useless, except as platforms for presidential pep talks. "You go into Cabinet meetings tired and discouraged," said one official, "and the president puts new life into you. You come out like a fighting cock." Afraid of leaks and scornful of committees, Roosevelt preferred to deal with department chiefs one-on-one. A Cabinet member asserted, "A Roosevelt Cabinet was a delightful social occasion, where nothing was ever settled." Labor Secretary Perkins, relishing her role as the first female Cabinet member, remembered things differently, at least early on. "Those early meetings were full of excitement, and always there was an easy give and take," she wrote. "He did not expect yes-men around him. He wanted a free expression of opinion, and it took place, under his leadership, in a stimulating atmosphere." FDR's Cabinet members were seasoned, heavyweight veterans of titanic turf wars. Management expert Peter Drucker considered the group a model: "Nine of its ten members were what we now would call technocrats-competent specialists in one area. That the exceptional team delivered an exceptional performance-not one financial scandal, for instance, despite unprecedented government spending-explains in large measure Roosevelt's own unprecedented hold on power and office."

FDR surrounded himself with many tough, strong, often cantankerous players like military Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy, Cabinet Secretaries Stimson and Morgenthau, Press Secretary Early, and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Admiral Ernest King was reported to "raise holy hell" with FDR. During a group meeting at the White House, General George Marshall shot down a Roosevelt idea by announcing, "I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don't agree with you at all," startling FDR as well as Marshall's colleagues, who predicted career disaster for him. Instead, Roosevelt promoted Marshall over thirty-four more senior officers to be army chief of staff.

"There is nothing I love as much as a good fight," Roosevelt once declared, and the hallmark of his executive style was creative tension and controlled chaos. He thrived on managing through interpersonal competition and interdepartmental combat, and he delighted in pitting aggressive personalities against each other in open conflict. He apparently believed that the clash of people and ideas produced shocks to the bureaucracy necessary for creative solutions to cope with the emergencies of the Depression. "A little rivalry is stimulating," he explained. "It keeps everybody going to prove he is a better fellow than the next man. It keeps them honest too." "His favorite technique was to keep grants of authority incomplete, jurisdictions uncertain," wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. "The result of this competitive theory of administration was often confusion and exasperation on the operating level; but no other method could reliably insure that in a large bureaucracy filled with ambitious men eager for power the decisions, and the power to make them, would remain with the president."

FDR's White House was a spectacle of gladiatorial warfare, a Roman coliseum of bloody showdowns. Roosevelt pitted Assistant Secretary of State Raymond Moley against Secretary of State Cordell Hull at the 1933 London Monetary and Economic Conference in a clash over tariff policy. Moley quit in disgust. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles was in perpetual revolt against his boss Cordell Hull, with the apparent approval of Roosevelt. Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones and Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace grappled in a debilitating wartime feud, as did many other agency and department chiefs.

The fighting got so intense at times that FDR was forced to intervene. At a Cabinet meeting in February 1935, Morgenthau blew up at Ickes over a secret investigation conducted by Interior into Treasury's handling of bids for the Post Office Annex building in New York City, also the turf of Postmaster General Jim Farley-a three-way shoot-out. During the meeting FDR wrote out a note and held it up to Morgenthau: "You must not talk in such a tone of voice to another Cabinet officer." He then pounded the table and told the three to get along. "I cannot have three Cabinet members disagreeing." Another three-way battle broke out in 1943, this time over tax policy. "Who is in charge?" one of the officials asked bitterly. Roosevelt smacked the table. "I am the boss. I am the one who gets the rap if we get licked in Congress... I am the boss, I am giving the orders."

In the heat of combat, FDR used his officials as surrogate combatants for himself, and he reserved the right to disassociate himself from the fray and withhold his support if the deputy was losing the battle. Frances Perkins recalled, "If you Wanted to go out on a limb for some hobby or theory, he would never say no. He kept an open mind as to whether it was wise or unwise, but he reserved the right not to go out and rescue you if you got into trouble. He wanted you to understand that. Many, too timid to defend their own position, resented this." FDR told Cabinet members going on political missions during a campaign: "Say what you please. Use your own judgment. But if it turns out wrong, the blood be on your own head."

"He liked to have Harry Ickes and Harry Hopkins out there fighting in public, or Jesse Jones and Henry Wallace," said James Rowe, "because he could make a pretty good judgment on the reaction of the people or the newspapers or politicians." His tactics were often a mystery to his men. "You are a wonderful person but you are one of the most difficult men to work with that I have ever known," Ickes declared to his boss. "Because I get too hard at times?" Roosevelt asked. "No, you never get too hard but you won't talk frankly even with people who are loyal to you and of whose loyalty you are fully convinced. You keep your cards close up against your belly."

FDR once explained his philosophy to Morgenthau: "Never let your left hand know what your right is doing." Morgenthau asked: "Which hand am I, Mr. President?" FDR: "My right hand. But I keep my left hand under the table." In his diary, Morgenthau concluded: "This is the most frank expression of the real FDR that I ever listened to and that is the real way that he works-but thank God I understand him." Dean Acheson, as usual, was disgusted by Roosevelt's method: "One often reads of Franklin Roosevelt that he liked organizational confusion which permitted him to keep power in his own hands by playing off his colleagues one against the other. This, I think, is nonsense. Such is a policy of weakness, and Roosevelt was not a weak man. Furthermore, it did not keep power in his own hands, it merely hindered the creation of effective power by anyone."

To tackle the intractable problems of the Depression, FDR conjured up a blizzard of boards, agencies, and committees, many of them overlapping with existing departments. "The country needs, and unless I mistake, the country demands, bold persistent experimentation," he declared as the New Deal began. "We have new and complex problems," he said another time. "Why not establish a new agency to take over the new duty rather than saddle it on an old institution?" To provide some coordination to the proliferation of New Deal programs, FDR set up the National Emergency Council, a domestic super-cabinet that included Cabinet and agency chiefs that met regularly in the Cabinet Room. The meetings helped Roosevelt collect information, "knock heads together" and settle disputes on the spot.

FDR's New Deal executive style helped him collect multiple streams of opinions and information that had been "pre-tested" for debates in Congress, resulting in legislative triumphs like the Social Security Act of 1935. The Tennessee Valley Authority was a success, and the Public Works Administration and Works Progress Administration took 4 million people off relief rolls by 1936 and laid much of the physical plant for the country. By early 1936, stock prices and industrial production and payrolls doubled versus 1932. Overall though, much of the New Deal was a failure: the mammoth Agricultural Adjustment Act and National Recovery Administration projects were disappointments and were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. By 1939, unemployment persisted at 9 million, and the unemployment rate stayed over 10 percent until the war.

"I wish you could be here for a week sitting invisibly at my side," Roosevelt once wrote to a friend. "It would not be a pleasant experience for you because you would get a shock every ten minutes." By early October 1940, inside Roosevelt's Oval Offices, the shocks were coming even faster. The presidential election was a month away, and Willkie was pulling even with Roosevelt in some polls, as the European war was threatening to turn global and pull in the United States.

(Continues...)