Character Above All: Doris Kearns Goodwin on Franklin D.Roosevelt

Rating:
Summary: An excellent attempt to get to FDR, the inner man.
Review: Doris Kearns Goodwin, who is a top rank presidential historian in her own right gives a speech written by David McCullough. Strange. Franklin Roosevelt was a patrician who literally abandoned his own class to defend & help all the people. The masses of America somehow knew this from the start & responded to it. He genuinely like everyone or was very good at giving that impression. Most people loved him. But he never let anyone in, get too close to his heart. He seemed not to have a mean bone in his body. Yet he was made of steel, leading America thru two of its worst crises, one on top of the other. What did he know & when did he know about Pearl Harbor? Hard to say, but in this case, the means definitely justified the ends.