Word: moley
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Died. Raymond Moley, 88, founding member of Franklin Roosevelt's Brain Trust; in Phoenix. So powerful was Moley as F.D.R.'s closest adviser that an early New Deal joke had a Senator asking the President for a favor-an appointment with Moley. The Brain Trust that he organized shaped Roosevelt's historic policies, but finding himself opposed to massive expansion of federal authority, Moley left the Administration in September 1933 and later broke with the Democratic Party. As author and Newsweek columnist, Moley backed Republicans Willkie, Goldwater and Nixon for President...
...Moley's reckoning, the death occurred in 1935, as the President set course for reelection. During his first years in office, Roosevelt had performed a remarkable patch job on a sick economy. But the closing of the banks, the departure of the gold standard, the proliferation of alphabetical emollient agencies - the AAA, the CCC, the SEC, the WPA, the NRA - had done more than restore public confidence. In Roosevelt's mind, Moley says, the relative success of these measures supported the conviction that he was a political messiah, the only man who could conduct the country...
...concluded," Moley writes, "that Roosevelt was determined to ask for a vote of confidence - not for something that he proposed to do in the future, but for himself." The New Deal's new direction appalled Moley. "Roosevelt substantially reversed the policies of the Democratic Party. The old Democratic affirmation of the constitutional integrity of state and local authority was abandoned. The Federal Government intervened, first slowly but later massively in areas hitherto reserved to the states and the communities. I could not remain a Democrat when the nature and objectives of that party had so completely departed from...
...been argued that what seemed like radical new policies to Moley were already implicit in the First New Deal. But for Moley the break was total. Not only did he turn Republican, but in a Newsweek magazine column, and in several books, he has continued to lick the wounds that his political philosophy suffered during that brief alliance. Much in this volume only echoes what Moley wrote in After Seven Years, an equally unhappy appraisal of the New Deal published...
Lives sometimes focus not on a major triumph, but on a major disappointment. Raymond Moley, now 80, has chosen to linger in a departed yesterday that let him down...