A Critique of Leadership: FDR and the Inner Workings of Personality and Politics

A Critique of Leadership: FDR and the Inner Workings of Personality and Politics

James MacGregor Burns, The Lion and the Fox Critical Review

What makes a great leader? Numerous criteria have been established and applied to leaders throughout history in order to answer the question, yet a conclusive answer has never been given. It has been established that what makes a great man does not necessarily make a great leader, but if that is so, what measure of character worth makes a human a leader? Circumstance? Geography? The people they lead? A great amount of time has been devoted by scholars to answer these questions and a great amount of academia has been composed as a result. However, a common denominator found by scholars is personality, for even if the circumstances, the geographical setting, and the subjects surrounding a leader align perfectly, personality can ruin it all. In historian and presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns’s political biography, The Lion and the Fox, we are clearly shown the impact personality has on the office of leadership, particularly the presidency. From the beginning of his political career to the Oval Office, Burns details the distinctive mark Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) left on the White House and American politics. Sometimes a fox and other times a lion, Burns reveals how FDR learned to switch between the two personalities in order to maneuver, sometimes successfully and other times disastrously, through the politics surrounding the three branches of the American federal government. In doing so, Burns reveals how personality influences politics, and how a man with both makes a great leader.

Opening with a prologue, Burns distinguishes that his analysis is first and foremost a political biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (p. ix); his writing is also “a study in political leadership in the American democracy” (p.ix). The main focus of this book and its subsequent research is Roosevelt himself, however, it also considers the “political context in which he acted” (p. ix). Burns attempts to use this political biography as a way to explore current problems within political leadership by examining the “inner workings of personality and politics” (p. x). Unique from most biographies on American Presidents and leaders, Burns’ biography focuses on Roosevelt the politician rather than Roosevelt the man. It is a study of the life of FDR politically, and to an extent, socially.

As a prelude, Burns begins his analysis of the thirty-second president with his life prior to entering the White House and the American political field with his birth in Hyde Park, New York. Placing a particular emphasis on the unique circumstances of his family heritage and childhood, Burns lays the seeds for the sharp, political tactician we often see in other biographies and remember in history books. Roosevelt grew up about halfway from Albany along the Hudson River in a spacious mansion and was an only child. Burns writes, “it was a secure world. The nation was at peace and had… largely bound up the deep gash of the Civil War,” (p. 5). This tranquil atmosphere cultivated the intellectual Americans fondly remember, as Roosevelt took his childhood ideals nurtured at Hyde Park and plunged them into the fraught world of American politics. Frequent trips to Europe helped Roosevelt become conversant in German and French and established a sense of “worldliness upon him” (p. 6).

Homeschooled for much of his early education, Burns notes that despite contrary belief, Roosevelt was average in academics and extracurricular activities, but showed great ambition in life and politics. Greatly looking up to his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, FDR considered him a role model and hero for his vigorous leadership style and reforming zeal; traits that Burns says translated into his own political career. Roosevelt’s entry into politics was as dramatic as he was, with his stunning victory in the race for New York senator in a district primarily made up of Republicans who took “no notice of the Roosevelt name” (p. 29). Burns concludes, “the average American politician follows a well-tread path to elective office. He strikes deep roots in a likely community; he joins countless organizations where he can make useful contacts... He is active in his church… [and] quickly puts himself at the head of any movement that commands wide community backing… Roosevelt did virtually none of these things” (p. 29). In a trend Burns notes that would continue throughout his political career from state politics into the White House, Roosevelt had big dreams and ambitions but made little preparations to realize them.

Following his time as a New York senator, Roosevelt did a short stint as Assistant Secretary to the Navy during the active years of World War I. As much as he would have liked it, Roosevelt saw little to no combat and was shipped out to war a mere couple of days before the armistice was signed; however, Burns concludes that the war years had a maturing effect on Roosevelt that prepared him for his future political endeavors. This would include his bid for Vice President with running mate James M. Cox against Republican nominees Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Roosevelt accepted his loss in the 1920 Presidential election without issue, and Burns writes that the whole affair provided him with connections and relationships that proved to be major assets in his 1932 presidential campaign against Herbert Hoover. Burns dedicated two whole sections to Roosevelt’s early political career, concluding that it was through these experiences that Roosevelt cultivated the personality needed to run the White House.

Burns gives particular attention to Roosevelts’ first two terms in the White House and how he simultaneously adapted to and modified the political environment around him. When Roosevelt was elected, the United States was at the crux of the worst depression in its history, a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, farmers were in trouble, and the nation needed a leader, not just adept in political governance, but crisis management. Within his first hundred days in office, Bruns emphasizes Roosevelt’s political methods and techniques of leadership in enacting and implementing his New Deal through the murky waters of Congress and the federal bureaucracy. Burns explains that “during his first two years [of his first term] he used his veto powers to a far greater extent than the average of all the previous presidents.” Furthermore, “Roosevelt-- during his first years in the White House-- was a strong President who dominated Congress with a masterly show of leadership” (p. 186-187) This contrasts Burns’ analysis of his second term, where Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, “too clever and dependent on the efficiency of the courts” (p. 296- 297), failed disastrously and never made its way through the first levels of Congressional scrutiny. Roosevelt’s second term, lagging in leadership and filled with fire from both sides of the political spectrum, tested the man and his ability to be both a fox and a lion in the political sphere.

Burns’ book depicts Roosevelt as a grand tactician and courageous leader who marked his stay in the Oval Office through his distinctive personality and how that personality influenced the attendants around him. As Burns analyzes Roosevelt’s consistent failure to combine strategic planning with tactical skill, he assesses his success in reconditioning a system rooted in tradition and obstinance. Roosevelt, Burns writes, was “open to almost any idea and absolutely committed to almost none” (p. 238) and played the game of federal politics as if it were a chess game in the park. Welcoming the stress and anxiety that came with running a country, Roosevelt was a fighter ready for any struggle that laid ahead.

Ultimately, Burns concludes that given the big, decisive events surrounding the United States at the time (the Great Depression, economic panic, and aggression abroad,) Roosevelt could be and was a Machiavellian lion. However, when crises came that were less prominent but no less serious, Roosevelt became a fox. When the situation demanded a solution that combined Roosevelt’s intellectual maneuvering and bold strategic action, Roosevelt became both a lion and a fox with various amounts of success. All of this, Burns concludes, stems from his early experiences in politics and life. From having someone as determined and uninhibited as Theodore Roosevelt as a cousin to switching from hobby to hobby without finding something that fit his fancy during his academic years, Roosevelt was as loud as he was quiet, as bold as he was cunning. With a flair for theatrics and dramatics that compromised his ability to plan for the long-term strategically, Burns concludes that while Roosevelt lagged in leadership during parts of his terms, he became a national leader when the situation demanded it of him. All of these personality traits accumulated into a man who made mistakes but was ultimately a great leader.

Winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, Burns’ political biography on FDR and his leadership while President of the United States was the first political biography written about the man. Burns used the words “political biography” to establish his work as a concrete record and characterization of Roosevelt as a politician, office holder, and leader. Burns narrows the scope of his writing by cutting out the war years and Roosevelt’s leadership during World War II, placing them in a second volume of content. Instead of detracting from his analysis, readers and academics are given a full, uninterrupted view of Roosevelt as a crisis manager during the Great Depression and his troubled second term without the shadow of the war years dulling his domestic policies and administration.

It is through these parameters that Burns establishes a work that was never seen during its publishing in 1956. In it is the tale of FDR the politician, and how he was molded and cultivated by his surroundings, his experiences, and his personality. Unlike most academia that treats the subject of FDR as factual history, Burns takes an unusual approach to the subject of analyzing political leadership in democracy by factoring in Roosevelt’s temperament, his flair for the dramatics, and the nuances that made him Franklin Delano Roosevelt and how that impacted his leadership in the White House. Leaving out his marriage troubles and only briefly touching upon his crippling illness in the context of how it influenced his attitude towards politics and his campaign style, Burns has created a work that showcases the throne of leadership through the nuances of personality.

Several other works detailing the life and career of Roosevelt do not cover the scope of detail and analysis that Burns includes in his book. For example, in historian and first major biographer of FDR, Frank Freidel’s book Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Triumph, Roosevelt’s upbringing in Hyde Park and the influence his family had on his development are not mentioned or synthesized with FDR’s later political career. While this was the third volume in Freidel’s works on FDR, Burns notes that no matter how far Roosevelt went or how much he experimented or strategized, he never quite left Hyde Park, or in a sense, Hyde Park never quite left him (p.78). Freidel’s analysis never quite made the same distinction or important conclusion as to how these early years shaped Roosevelt’s personality, and later his political career in a distinctive way.

In contrast, journalist and Roosevelt critic John T. Flynn’s novel The Roosevelt Myth provides a critical account of FDR and his New Deal policies, claiming that the image projected by the President did not correspond to the man himself. In a sense, this is touched upon in Burns’ analysis of how Roosevelt played tactician and strategist in order to outmaneuver his political opponents and implement his policies. However, while Flynn attempts to “correct the lineaments of the synthetic figure created by highly intelligent propaganda” and “present Franklin D. Roosevelt in his normal dimensions, reduced in size to agree with reality” (p. 4), Burns analyzes and assesses Roosevelt’s personality in conjunction with his leadership. Integral to his scrutiny are the questions of how could one man, one politician be simultaneously direct and devious; so bold, yet so uncertain; committed, but simultaneously indifferent? While Flynn writes to debunk a theory, Burns writes to create one on why and how one man could be both a lion and a fox, and how that dual personality created a leader whose actions directly impacted Americans for generations to come.

Burns is also unique in his analysis by treating the time Roosevelt served as President during World War II synoptically and by presenting them in the Epilogue of the book’s contents. While a second volume was made on these war years, Burns provides a supplement to his conclusions with his addition of the epilogue. This was done because scholars “[did] not have the records, memoirs, and other data necessary for a full account and analysis of the war years, Roosevelt’s administration, and the United States during the time” (p. x).

The opinion on the subject during the time the book was written was mainly positive and warm towards Roosevelt the leader. Entering into a time of economic prosperity and a post-war boom, the majority of Americans held FDR in high regard despite initial disagreements with his liberal stance and actions during his second term. However, looking back on the era of his presidency, many claim that while Roosevelt and the New Deal accomplished much, they did not accomplish the main goal of lowering unemployment that occurred during the Great Depression. It is true that only American entry into World War II ended the large unemployment and propelled the economy back into action, but what Burns concludes is that Roosevelt’s policies under the New Deal and his personality as an administrative leader had a lasting effect that cannot be ignored.

Burns himself carried a great deal of weight in the academic and historic community in the United States with Lynn Bassanesse, the director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park, N.Y. saying that "James MacGregor Burns was the pre-eminent historian of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a dear friend to the Roosevelt library" (Dobrowolski, 2014). Many scholars reviewed and regarded his book as “a case study unmatched in American political writings” (Newsweek, 1957), and “a full, rich picture of the American scene… into which the activities and complexities of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personality were so intricately interwoven” (Ladies’ Home Journal). Scholar and professor William G. Carleton reviewed the book, claiming it was a classic addition to the academia published about the late president: “readers who prefer a less sharply-etched portrait will go to Freidel, those who prefer a more favorable one to Schlesinger” (Carelton, 1957).

However, while Burns creates and maintains his theses throughout the first half of his novel, he fails to make important distinctions in how Roosevelt’s personality shaped his later political career towards the latter half. What started as an analysis of the effects of Roosevelt’s personality on his political leadership as President of the United States, turns into a criticism of his inability to enact creative leadership. This is seen in his analysis of Roosevelt’s failed “Court-Packing Scheme” in whereupon being reelected, Roosevelt proposed the implementation of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 in order to obtain favorable rulings regarding New Deal legislation that the Court had ruled unconstitutional. While Burns concludes that the plan was a miscalculated risk on Roosevelt’s part, he fails to establish the effect Roosevelt’s personality had on the scheme and its ultimate failure, claiming that “the famous Roosevelt luck seemed to forsake the President … when he entered his second term” (p. 291).

Burns goes on to note that Roosevelt did not grasp or heed John Maynard Keynes’s advice on how to handle the ongoing recession of 1937 and made no efforts to reshape the Democratic party to garner and enhance support for his more liberal policies that were enacted during his second term. In both of these instances, Burns fails to support and synthesize these events to his larger theses and instead laments Roosevelt’s supposed inaction and poor political decision making. However, the standards Burns holds Roosevelt’s “disastrous” second term up to are very much unrealistic and illogical as it can be assumed that in the contemporary events Burns writes in, Roosevelt was acting as any political leader would towards new and unknown economic theories, especially considering the circumstances. In this sense, Burns’ measurements of Roosevelt’s leadership are debatable and do not pertain to his overall theses and research questions listed in his prologue at the beginning of his work. As brilliant as Burns’ work is as a political biography it fails to analyze Roosevelt as a sociologist might.

However, where the second half of his analysis fails to answer and incorporate his proposed theses, the first half of his work, while slow and long, does so brilliantly. From his wealthy beginning at Hyde Park to his time at Groton, Burns does not hesitate in pointing out the key factors that shaped Roosevelt’s personality and cultivated the traits that Burns claims made him both a lion and a fox. While he admits that there was something in Roosevelt’s ancestry to suggest that he was, for a lack of better words, destined for political leadership and greatness on a large scale, Burns shows how it was in his personality that Roosevelt really became the great leader history proclaims he was. And this personality, Burns argues, was cultivated throughout his somewhat sheltered childhood, a stable, peaceful thing that allowed him to mature and simultaneously cling to optimistic, ambitious boyhood ideals.

In this sense, while Burns’ did fully live up to his claim of applying his analysis to “political leadership in the American democracy” (p. ix), fulfilled his tasks of probing the inner workings of personality and politics in order to throw some light on the current (1956) problems of political leadership” (p. x). The title is taken from Machiavelli who notes the importance of having both cunning and decisiveness, and Burns explores many examples of FDR’s mixture of both qualities and how these attributes came to be formed. Burns details the development of Roosevelt’s character and personality as a political leader from his earliest moments to his larger political career in the White House, and in doing so, shows the effect Roosevelt’s personality had on not just his political career, but the office of the President. The only fault is that carried away in his analysis, Burns loses his synergy with his original theses and research questions and instead delves into a sociological criticism of Roosevelt’s failures as a creative, ideologically innovative leader.

In addition, the book has clear prose and intelligent, logical conclusions and arguments that contribute to Burns’ superb research and analysis. It is clear that Burns worked hard in learning how to maintain and create the parameters found in his biography and how to correctly and clearly evaluate his research questions. One quotation illustrates Burns’ ability to clearly articulate his analysis is: “The most important instrument a leader has to work with is himself-- his own personality and its impact on other people… When the people’s opinions are vaguely directed the way, the leader is headed but lack depth and solidity, action by the leader can shift opinion in his own favor. Roosevelt, to a surprising degree, was captive to the political forces around him rather than their shaper. In a democracy, such must ever be the case.”

A wonderful addition to Burns’ work is the dedicated portion at the end of his narrative to an overview of the war years that took up the latter half of Roosevelt’s presidency. While not a complete analysis like the other contents of the book, it is a significant precursor to the second volume in his work on FDR. The small supplementary work titled “A Note on the Study of Political Leadership” also needs to be taken into consideration. Seven pages of content that guide the reader towards applying the theory of the biography and its conclusions to political leadership in the United States, Burns offers a clear rationale for why his scholarship and writing is important not just for academia, but for those living under democracies. A personal evaluation of his dissertation presented in his book, Burns shows how his analysis can be applied to contemporary political leadership and why it is a duty for all Americans to criticize, study, and learn from their leaders.

In his work, Burns has introduced an FDR that has never been considered before. His analysis provides insight into not just how the man became a great leader, but why he proved to be such an effective one. The impact of Roosevelt’s personality and view towards politics is seen in our political system today and while Burns does lose sight of his theses at times, he has provided a comprehensive look into how personality makes not just a man, but a leader. Burns presents material that, while readily available elsewhere, is unique in its analysis and evaluation, commenting not just on the failures and successes of a president, but on how and why these failures and successes occurred and the effects they had on the Presidency. This should stimulate scholars and Americans alike to apply the methods found in Burns’ writing to our current political leaders in order to actively learn about the ever-evolving institution of political leadership.