Word: roosevelt
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...March 1933, A few days after his Inauguration as President, Franklin Roosevelt left the White House to pay his respects to 92-year-old former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The amiable Roosevelt and the dour Holmes chatted, and after F.D.R. left, Holmes supposedly remarked that the new President had a "second-class intellect but a first-class temperament." Many historians now believe that Holmes was talking about Teddy Roosevelt rather than Franklin, but the story is oft told because it suggests a larger truth: that the most important attribute of a President is not intellect but something...
...Franklin Roosevelt wondered frequently during the 1932 electoral campaign at what he saw as the surprising docility of the American people in the face of the Depression. "Repeatedly he spoke of this," his aide Rexford Tugwell recalled, "saying that it was enormously puzzling to him that the ordeal of the past three years had been endured so peaceably." That odd passivity has intrigued historians, who have noted that it forced Roosevelt to simultaneously invent the tools to combat the Depression and establish their very legitimacy in the eyes of the people...
...tell what he thought ideologically. And how he behaved in office, of course, was different in those terms ... I was just trying to think of examples of moments that have become kind of our iconic moments of ideal presidential temperament. The Cuban missile crisis seems to be one. [Franklin] Roosevelt's first 100 days, I would argue, particularly because so many people are making comparisons with the present day, is another one that I think [is] often held up as a moment in which temperament, personality, the ability to lead and remain calm in crisis really matters...
...Meeting Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill said, was like opening your first bottle of champagne. "Knowing him was like drinking it." Temperament is a special subcommittee of character: it is less intellect than instinct, more about music than lyrics - the quality voters sense when they watch a candidate improvise or when he thinks no one is looking. It's why newspapers run profiles quoting kindergarten teachers; temperament is formed early. "You can call it balance. You can call it a sense of proportion. You can call it maturity, good judgment," says historian David McCullough. "One of the clearest lessons of history...
...that consistent coolness has a cost. The most successful Presidents have had a gift for projecting warmth during the chilliest times: Teddy Roosevelt, famously coolheaded in a crisis, had his teddy bears; F.D.R. warmed the shivering nation with his fireside chats. When Obama sneered to Hillary that she was "likable enough," when he talks about feelings rather than feeling them, when a voter tells him about a tragedy and he pivots into policy, it can make you wonder where his real passions lie. "You have to have a fire inside," Gergen says, "an ambition for the nation, an internal, fierce...