Posted by Charlie (68.9.196.210) on June 28, 2003 at 00:50:18:
His features were utterly responsive to his will, finely molding themselves to his constantly shifting purposes of persuasion, negotiation, or obfuscation, never ceasing to charm but never opening fully to reveal the soul within. He could cast off one mood and assume another as easily as a mummer wiped off greasepaint. "There was another Roosevelt behind the one we saw and talked with," Tugwell later wrote; "I was baffled, unable to make out what he was like, that other man."
Roosevelt had an actor's manner, Moley replied to Tugwell, "and a professional actor's at that; how did I suppose he'd created and maintained the image of authority?...it was a lifetime part that he was playing."
His vibrant good cheer was contagious. He radiated warmth and exuberance that washed over others as soon as they entered the room. He greeted visitors with easy familiarity, his upper body vigorously animated. He gestured and spoke with good-natured,head-tossing brio. His hands incessantly flourished a quill-tipped cigarette holder that flashed from his uplifted, jut-jawed face with its irregular, preorthodontic teeth to the exclamation point of a sentence-one of his endless, cascading sentences--as if he were inscribing his words upon the air.
Talk was Roosevelt's passion and his weapon. None of his associates ever knew him to read a book. It was in conversation that he gained his prodigious if disorderly store of information about the world. As Tugwell recorded, Roosevelt "could see more in an hour's drive than anyone I had ever known. He noted crops, woodlands, streams and livestock. To ride with him was to be deluged with talk, half-practical, half fanciful. Moley was astonished at the amount of intellectual ransacking Roosevelt could crowd into an evening's discussion. Sitting with his advisers as a student, as a cross-examiner, as a judge, Roosevelt would listen attentively for a few minutes and then begin to break in with sharp, darting questions.
To all of his countless visitors, FDR gave attentive audience. As his visitors talked, FDR would nod in apparent approval, often interjecting, "Yes, yes, yes." Many who spoke with him took this to mean agreement when it merely signified that Roosevelt understood the point being made or, possibly, that he wanted to avoid the unpleasantness of open argument. Roosevelt would in time become notorious for his unwillingness to deal with disagreement face to face. From this unwillingness would come his maddening administrative habits of trying to avoid firing anyone and of putting several people of incompatible views to work on the same project, none of whom knew what the others were doing. "When I talk to him," sad the volatile demagogue Huey Long of Louisiana, "he says 'Fine! Fine! Fine!' But Joe Robinson [the somewhat plodding and thoroughly conventional Democratic majority leader in the Senate, and Long's implacable antagonist] goes to see him the next day and again he says 'Fine! Fine! Fine!' Maybe he says 'Fine!' to everybody."
More often, Roosevelt did the talking--all of it. His compulsive garulity may have originated as a calculated device to divert a listener's attention from his physical handicap. It may have been merely one more of his abundant techniques of personal and political mastery over others.
But whether listening or talking, in public or private, Roosevelt projected a sense of utter self-confidence and calm mastery. He was "all light and no darkness," one observer wrote; a man of "slightly unnatural sunniness," said the literary critic Edmund Wilson.
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I found this to be an intriguing look at Roosevelt. I left some things out from those four pages, either things that didn't pertain so much to Roosevelt, or things that repeated the basic idea. It seems to me, unlike popular belief that Roosevelt is an 8w7, he is more an 8w9. What do you think? How about as far as Oldham's style is concerned?
Charlie