Friday, June 13

That Man


It does not matter when a book was written. If you have not read it then when you do the contents will nourish, enlighten and entertain.  Such is the case with That Man, a memoir written in the early 1950s by Robert H. Jackson, one of the giants of the Franklin D. Roosevelt era. Jackson was an intimate of Roosevelt (they vacationed and fished together) and served as Solicitor General, Attorney General, Supreme Court Justice and America’s chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of the top Nazis after World War II.

Jackson’s suffered a major heart attack in March 1954, and was hospitalized. In May, he went directly from the hospital to the Supreme Court where he joined the other eight justices in the unanimous decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, declaring school segregation to be unconstitutional. He died in October 1954. He had been at work on the memoir prior to his major heart attack.

That Man was an epithet used by Roosevelt haters in the thirties and early forties who could not bring themselves to even speak his name. But by the mid-forties when Roosevelt ran successfully for a fourth term it was obvious he had won the argument as to his worth.

After his death the manuscript came into the hands of Jackson’s son, William, and when he died in 1999, the family found it a closet and later turned it over to John Q, Barrett, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York, who was at work on a biography of Justice Jackson.

Jackson wrote about FDR as he knew and observed him. The manuscript is anecdotal, not researched in great detail. Think sitting around with the family and telling stories about a favorite member who has died.

Reading in short spells over a period days I reflected on my feelings about FDR, and how they changed in three phases over my lifetime. Growing up damn poor during the depression I thought highly of the President and what he did to help us.  Later I listened to his critics and thought maybe he, after all, was a socialist.  He raised taxes, regulated businesses and gave us several social programs which exist to this day. During the second half of the 20th Century being a socialist was only one step from being a communist.  As the century came to an end and I had read more and more history and biographies I thought FDR a remarkable man for the times.

Maybe someone could have been a better leader and President, but no one else was able to capture the job and so we will never know. We are stuck with our history and when you consider how the other three giants of the age, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, ruined their respective countries, That Man was a great man.This memoir enhances that view.

Oh, yes, there was one totally new - to me - tidbit. FDR and Eleanor were married on St. Patrick’s Day in 1905. Joyce and I were married on St. Patrick’s Day in 2013. 





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