Volume 16, Number 9 · May 20, 1971
The Confidence of FDR
By Alfred Kazin
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom
by James MacGregor Burns
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 722 pp., $10.00
To those liberal intellectuals who grew up with their eyes on his always assuring public face—'private faces in public places are nicer than public faces in private places,' but nowadays the public faces reveal all their private places—the 'real personality' of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is as close and fascinating a subject as that of their own parents. We who came of age in the Thirties knowing we were part of its revolution somehow tended to take the New Deal for granted while of course complaining that it did not go far enough. We filled in, with hypnotized concentration on FDR himself, a certain space in our minds created by our lack of everything in politics except 'ideas.'
Review, 2792 words
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