It did not escape my notice that in preparing the morning diary, I was turning to a man who had people locked up in concentration camps to help me deal with my strong emotions about our government locking people up in concentration camps. FDR was a privileged political pragmatist who perpetrated and enabled racism; an entitled son of wealth who promoted himself as a representative of the “common man”; a profoundly disabled man who did everything possible to hide his disability, while simultaneously establishing a foundation to assist others who had survived polio. Roosevelt is the embodiment of the description, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But that’s part of the reason remembering him is a never-ending, often contradictory, process.
Offered without comment and in full contradictory glory.