THAT W'S NO FDR:

Bush's Wake-Up Call Was a Snooze Alarm (Tom Shales, March 7, 2003, The Washington Post)

George W. Bush kept seeming to lose interest in his own remarks last night as the president did that rarest of rare things -- for him -- and held a prime-time news conference. Televised live on all the major networks from the East Room of the White House, the occasion found Bush declaring this to be "an important moment" for America and the world, yet he spoke with little urgency and no perceptible passion.

Have ever a people been led more listlessly into war? It's tempting to speculate how history would have changed if Winston Churchill or FDR had been as lethargic as Bush about rallying their nations in an hour of crisis. There were times when it appeared his train of thought had jumped the tracks.

Occasionally he would stare blankly into space during lengthy pauses between statements -- pauses that once or twice threatened to be endless. There were times when it seemed every sentence Bush spoke was of the same duration and delivered in the same dour monotone, giving his comments a numbing, soporific aura. Watching him was like counting sheep.

Network commentators by and large tippy-toed around the subject of Bush's curiously subdued performance. But at least Terry Moran of ABC News dared to say that the White House press corps had definitely seen Bush "sharper" than he was last night. Tactfully and gingerly, Moran said Bush seemed to be "trying to keep his mannerisms as cool as possible" as he fielded questions and spoke of ultimatums. The lethargy was contagious; correspondents were almost as logy as Bush was.

The contrast between the foggy Bush of last night and the gung-ho Bush who delivered a persuasive State of the Union message to Congress not so long ago was considerable. Maybe Bush thought he was, indeed, coming across as cool and temperate instead of bored and enervated, and this was simply a rhetorical miscalculation. On the other hand, it hardly seems out of order to speculate that, given the particularly heavy burden of being president in this new age of terrorism -- a time in which America has, as Bush said, become a "battlefield" -- the president may have been ever so slightly medicated.

He would hardly be the first president ever to take a pill.

Apparently, Mr. Shales didn't get the "certainty" memo. However, here's the real irony: this is the robust FDR to whom he's comparing George W. Bush:

Mr. FLEMING: This was n--late 1943. And this was the moment when Roosevelt lost all control of the State Department. Welles was his guy in there. And this--this--the whole issue of who controlled the State Department is very, very important in this book.

LAMB: This photograph...

Mr. FLEMING: Yes.

LAMB: ...was taken when?

Mr. FLEMING: That photograph was taken in ni--in--in the fall of 1944. It's a rain-spattered face that you're looking at there. Franklin D. Roosevelt is riding through New York in a freezing-cold downpour, a Northeast storm. He's running for a fourth term, and he's trying to prove to the people that he's not a fatally ill man. He managed to do this, although it--it's a miracle that he did it.

LAMB: How sick was he?

Mr. FLEMING: His doctors thought he would die. We--we know now--excuse me? What...

LAMB: How sick was he?

Mr. FLEMING: He was extremely sick. In early 1944, he was examined by a heart specialist, and they found that he could die--the doctor, Dr. Harvey Bruenn, found that he could die at any time. And they restricted him--to keep him alive, Dr. Bruenn restricted him to a 20-hour week. Now the president of the United States, the leader of a global war, was told he could only work 20 hours a week.

LAMB: How would he do that?

Mr. FLEMING: He s--slept very late and got to the Oval Office only about 11:00 in the morning, would see a few visitors, then would have lunch, take a long nap, come back to the Oval Office for another two hours; in other words, work about four hours a day, five days a week, and that was supposed to be it.

LAMB: What kind of shape was he in in Tehran, and what was the--the meeting all about? And then, also, Yalta.

Mr. FLEMING: At Tehran, he was, as far as we know, in still fairly good shape, although he had a--an episode in Tehran at which, in the midst of a dinner, he fl--turned green and faltered and--and lost consciousness in his--in his chair and had to be rushed back to his room. And his--his...

LAMB: Who was there at the dinner?

Mr. FLEMING: Stalin, Churchill and a whole slew of aides. It was a very, very uc--upsetting episode. And after that--when he came back from Tehran, he--he was definitely a very sick man. And tha--that was when they had this physical examination, which led them to put him on a 20-hour workweek.

LAMB: That was when? What year?

Mr. FLEMING: This was 1944--early 1944, and that was when Ben Cohn, the most brilliant of the New Dealers, I think--he was a really brilliant lawyer, who wrote the Securities and Exchange Act. He was working in the East Wing of the White House during the war. And he wrote an eight-page memorandum, which I found in the files of the Roosevelt Library, in which he begged Roosevelt not to run again. H--i--he--he told him, as I've already said, the coalition had collapsed, but he was really saying, too, that he wasn't up to the job. [...]

LAMB: What about Yalta? What kind of shape was that--and I think I've got a--let me make sure I've got the right--yeah, this is a Yalta photograph.

Mr. FLEMING: Roosevelt was--he--he mustered all his dwindling energy for Yalta, and there's no really hard evidence that he was non compos mentis or anything like that. But you--you can see the impact of--of this--this tremendous effort that he made there when--on the--on the ship home, Sam Rosenman, who was his top speechwriter and in--inside Oval Office aide, he--he spent the entire voyage home trying to get Roosevelt to talk about the speech that he was going to give to Congress about Yalta. And Roosevelt just sat there like a zombie staring into space for the entire voyage.

LAMB: You have a photograph, the last one that was taken of him?

Mr. FLEMING: That's the last picture that was taken of Roosevelt, yes, down in Warm Springs. It was taken the day he died. And that is a--a--a very heart-breaking picture to look at.

No president has ever done anything remotely as irresponsible as FDR seeking a fourth term. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 7, 2003 8:31 PM