The patrician paralysed by polio who became the voice of a broke country on the radio, then made America the 'arsenal of democracy' and designed the order that came after the war.
The fork
1921. Polio at thirty-nine should have ended a political career. Instead it gives him a patience and a sympathy his class never taught him. In 1932 a frightened country wants exactly that voice.
What they wanted
To save American capitalism from itself with the New Deal, keep a reluctant country out of the war long enough to arm it, and then build a peace with institutions, the United Nations among them, that might hold.
What it cost
Executive Order 9066 and the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans; a New Deal that left Southern segregation alone; refugee doors that stayed shut in the 1930s. He dies in April 1945, four weeks before the victory in Europe.
The fight
Did the New Deal end the Depression, or did the war? Was he naive about Stalin at Yalta, or realistic about where the Red Army stood? Historians are still split on both.