for many year. one of the things i most appreciate about it is that the articles there frequently portray franklin d. roosevelt in an appreciative and admiring light. it s one of the few conservative periodicals that does this. i recently defended finishing dr to a fdr to a professor, and my question to you is if by some miracle roosevelt had lived to finish his fourth term, what do you think his take on stalin would have been? what would their relationship have been like? well, let me just make a comment on your earlier. the weekly standard likes fdr. and we like the sort of roosevelt/truman/kennedy approach to foreign policy in the democratic party. when i took my present job, um, i was putting my various things in my office. and one of them, they have a few over here in the library, i have a clock which has it s franklin roosevelt, it s this little statue of fdr, and he s standing sort of holding the clock as if it s a, um, a ship s wheel. and it says at the wheel of
and now, from the 20 2011 roosevelt reading festival philip terzian discusses his book architects of power roosevelt, eisenhower and the american century. it is about 50 minutes. [applause]honod thank you, and good morning and i am honored and delighted to be here.i at the roosevelt reading festival. i don t live around here so iusm don t get to visit the roosevelt library very often. of henry morgan thaw who was fdr s neighbor here in duchess county and probably knew him as much as anyone and said that roosevelt had a thickly-forested interior which meant that roosevelt was a very rather enigmatic, um, distant, almost secretive man in many ways. but i ve always felt that when you visit the house, especially, and walk around and look at it, you get as close as you ll ever get to appreciating franklin roosevelt as a human being and where he came from and what he was and how he became what he did become. and i m delighted to be here, too, at the roosevelt library which
influence on his distant cousin, franklin, was a reality in his life up until his death even though we tend to ignore it. remember, too, that theodore roosevelt became prominent at strategic moments in fdr s life. franklin roosevelt was a schoolboy when theodore roosevelt became mckinley s assistant secretary of the navy. he was at school when theodore roosevelt charged up san juan hill. he had just become, just entered his sophomore year at harvard when theodore roosevelt became president. so roosevelt s vision of an american sentry, of a globally-assertive united states was something that was bred into franklin roosevelt really in his youth. and i don t think ever left him. and all through his public career you hear kind of theodore rooseveltian rhetoric. i was just reading and listening the other day to his third inaugural speech where he talks about, um, in lincoln s day the great challenge facing the presidency was danger from within. now we are dealing with danger from
here on the grounds of his old family estate in 1940. and who i am a great fan of presidential libraries around the country and have made it my lifelong task to visit each one so i patiently await the george w. bush one in dallas which is supposed to open in the next year or two and a friend of mine is an official soy keep hinting theresi must be a panel discussion. [laughter] . . is that i think that they reflect in some ways what i call the civic protestantism of america. and by that i mean we don t as a culture, we don t revere religious relics so much anymore. we don t, we don t bow before the fragment of the true cross and that sort of thing. but because america is a nation founded on an idea, we ve sort of substituted that human instinct and transferred it to our political founders. so you go to the archives in washington where i live, and there s the declaration of independence and the constitution, and they re housed in the these brass and glass helium-filled rell squ