Roosevelt

"In the United States, the drift dates back to the great crisis of 1929, “the first crisis of dirigisme.” To Georges Menant of Paris Match, he explained in 1978 that “Roosevelt decided to innovate by applying to the American economy the famous remedies advocated by Keynes: devaluation, income redistribution, industry control, and multiplication of public investments. This resulted in a spectacular recovery that everyone would applaud without seeing, furthermore, that the unemployment rate remained very high and would remain so."

"Churchill also exploited the force of simile and metaphor. Of his opposition to socialism, he said, “We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue.” He wrote of a meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin, “There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and, on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one of the three, who knew the right way home.”"

"“Winston has fifty ideas a day,” Roosevelt observed, “and three or four are good.”"

"Margaret Mead expressed concern about both figures, warning: "If the war should ever come to seem a battle in which Roosevelt and MacArthur and Kaiser are supermen father figures who do our fighting or our thinking for us while we simply watch the show then there would be danger, for such an attitude would bring out not the strengths of the American character but its weaknesses." 32 She was responding to the fact that, in an age of authoritarianism overseas, both Kaiser and Roosevelt created institutions at home characterized more by a cult of personality than by any dominant strategy or structure."

"Roosevelt proudly recalled how well he bypassed bureaucratic red tape: "From Feb. 6 to March 4 [1917] we in the Navy committed acts for which we could be, and may be yet sent to jail for 999 years. We spent millions of dollars we did not have. . . . We went to those whom we had seen in advance and told them to enlarge their plants and send us their bills."37 Although Roosevelt oversaw the takeoff of the modern bureaucratic state, he had little patience for many of its organizational features. As president, Roosevelt devised another way to circumvent a recalcitrant bureaucracy: he created new agencies to do what he wanted. While Roosevelt established agencies in the public sector, Kaiser created enterprises in the private sector."

"Although the personalities of the sometimes abrasive Kaiser and usually smooth Roosevelt contrasted, their attitude and organizational temperament did not. Above all, they shared the classic American "can-do" attitude. The can-do president and the can-do entrepreneur shared a boundless optimism and personified the possibilities. And they were both nearly irresistible: few men in Washington have been more convincing in one-on-one situations than Roosevelt and Kaiser."

"Roosevelt shared Kaiser's distaste for bureaucratic rules or structures that might get in his way. As Roosevelt biographer Frank Freidel puts it, he ''dearly loved a semblance of insubordination.""