On Jan. 15, President Joseph R. Biden gave his Farewell Address in the Oval Office—the same venue used during his recent interview with USA Today, where he gazed upon the massive portrait of his self-proclaimed “presidential hero,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Heralding the Statue of Liberty as “an enduring symbol of the soul of our nation,” Biden’s speech warned about a supposed and incoming “oligarchy.” The speech was authored by the famous presidential historian Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America—which soul Meacham thinks is exemplified by FDR, the lodestar for Democratic presidents. But how close have subsequent presidents come to emulating this paragon of Democratic presidential virtue?
Judging by the title of the last chapter of William Leuchtenburg’s In the Shadow of FDR, “Franklin Delano Obama,” and the cover of TIME magazine depicting him in a Homburg, upthrust chin, and clenching the famous cigarette holder, we can safely say that liberal historians view the 44th president as the closest to FDR. Among the reasons why this designation is supposed to be a great honor is that FDR had a “rich tenor voice” with a “musical quality,” which—at least according to presidential scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin—made him a great leader. In fact, FDR’s “tenor” voice is very important to historians, I learned. In discussing FDR’s 1924 “Happy Warrior” speech, both Robert Dallek and Geoffrey Ward praised FDR’s “rich tenor,” and Jean Edward Smith effused over FDR’s “resonant tenor.” The “tenor voice rang out boldly,” James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn wrote.
FDR’s “rich tenor voice” also inspired Americans at his first inaugural, wrote David M. Kennedy. For H.W. Brands, the words of FDR’s “signature line,” of having nothing to fear “but fear itself,” would, from other mortals, have been just an “empty effort to calm the country at the most dangerous moment of its worst financial crisis.” But when they came from FDR in a “steady, confident tenor” the words “flashed across the radio waves” and “magically acquired a substance that soothed the worst of the fears.”
Biden’s voice, in contrast, can segue quickly from a whisper to a loud growl, like when he challenged a man to a push-up contest and called a college student a “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” Biden, rather than assuaging fears, may instead have inspired them—for example, of blacks supposedly being put back “in chains.”
Worse for his legacy has been Biden’s infamous treatment of reporters. He dictated to a reporter that he should write that his economic policies were working, told another that he could “take” him, and screeched that Peter Doocy of Fox News could not even “ask the right question.”
FDR, in contrast, knew how to deal with skeptical reporters: He would write their editors and suggest that his critics, like John T. Flynn, be banned from all “presentable” publications. He got publishers to reassign troublesome reporters to Uruguay. FDR also utilized the IRS to investigate publishers like William Randolph Hearst and columnists like Westbrook Pegler (a representative of the “America First” movement of his time). Obama and Lois Lerner had that down.
Biden, in his farewell speech, merely bemoaned the elimination of “fact-checkers” on social media.
Both Roosevelt and Biden liked to describe their prowess in lawfare and fisticuffs. Biden famously tells the story of winning a case for a construction company against a welder whose private parts were injured in an on-the-job accident, and then of being so overwhelmed with guilt over his victory that he decided to work for a public defender and ultimately go into public service.
Young Wall Street attorney-at-law Franklin Roosevelt had set aright an impoverished lawyer working on the split-fee basis and trying to bilk $300 out of the credit company Roosevelt was representing. The company really owed $18 and FDR had offered to settle for $35. But upon visiting the lawyer’s lower East Side tenement FDR loaned him $150, inspiring the lawyer to apologize, vow never to take another split-fee case, and turn his life around. The story, written by speechwriter Earle Looker, must be true! (It appears in history books written by liberal historians, after all).
FDR, like Biden, presented himself as someone who could “take” his adversaries. When the New York State Senate president asked Senator James J. Frawley, a former amateur boxing champion, to escort then-Senator Roosevelt out of the room, Frawley joked to reporters that he would take on the obnoxious freshman senator “in a pulpit or a rat pit.” FDR responded by informing reporters that he had been “quite a boxer” at Groton preparatory school (although, in truth, he had been beaten by a smaller and younger opponent). FDR also liked to talk about knocking down a Prussian officer for being rude to his mother’s friend on a train. Biden’s own exploits, we have been told, included getting arrested while trying to see Nelson Mandela and facing down the fearsome gang leader Corn Pop at the swimming pool.
Biden and FDR were both proud of their family backgrounds. Biden said his family (just like Neil Kinnock’s) were coal miners. FDR liked to talk about his maternal grandfather’s success in the “China trade.” Westbrook Pegler, after doing research, called Warren Delano an “old buccaneer” who sold opium in China. Biden too was engaged in a kind of “China trade.”
FDR was said to have identified with the American “common man” and Obama famously understood those who “cling” to their “guns or religion.” But Scranton Joe told a factory worker he was “full of sh*t” and “fat.”
How can Biden ever save his “legacy”?
One way might have been to die in office—though that’s exceedingly unlikely now that he is down to mere hours before becoming a former president. Had Biden thought it through and taken such an exit, historians like Phillips Payson O’Brien might have written that he died in service to his country. In his new book, O’Brien states that “being a grand strategist in a war is a dangerous job—certainly more dangerous than being a front-line soldier in many branches of the armed services. By the end of [World War II], three of the five were dead: Hitler by suicide, Mussolini gunned down on a street corner and Roosevelt whose body failed after all his exertions.” (Churchill and Stalin “aged” after strenuous negotiations over vodka and caviar.)
Part of FDR’s exertions and “grand strategy” in World War II was the reassignment of Admiral Richardson after Richardson, correctly, warned about leaving the fleet at Pearl Harbor. Like FDR, Biden also exerted himself in overruling military advisors regarding his withdrawal from Afghanistan. But as they do for FDR, historians can always point out that while 13 American service members and thousands of Afghani allies died and billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment was left to the Taliban, it really could have been worse.
Biden’s historians, led by Meacham in an early briefing, charted the strategy of making parallels between our time and the 1930s, a period of the rise of fascism and figures in America that, they said, foreshadowed MAGA—like Reverend Charles Coughlin and Huey Long.
Consequently, in 2022, in front of Independence Hall, bathed in red light, Biden spoke of the “threat to democracy” from “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans,” with uniformed Marines behind him. The theme was the “Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation.” So what if the “largest economic recovery package since Franklin Delano Roosevelt” did not stimulate the economy and Biden did not “end cancer”? It could have been worse.
With a historian like Meacham, Biden can rescue his legacy. In the manner of Earle Looker, Meacham can present Biden’s valorous deeds as lifeguard, lawyer, and public servant as inspiration for future presidents.
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