HAPPY RULER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 71, 25 March 1940, Page 5

HAPPY RULER.

ROOSEVELT'S ZEST. '" REMARKABLE STAMINA. TWICE HE DIDN'T SMILE. I . (By JOSEPH ALSOP and ROBERT KINTNER.) On August 25, and again on September '• 2, the door of the Cabinet room was thrown open, the usher solemnly , announced "the President of the United • States," and Franklin Delano Roosevelt!' joined his colleagues without a cheerful greeting. He had been lighthearted ' enough in the fearful domestic crisis! with which his first term began. Even he|' could not smile in the face of the world ' catastrophe with which his second term ' is ending. But it takes more than a world catastrophe to get the President down.' His administration had been eventful and exhausting. The world he knows and we ' know seems to be crumbling before our eyes. But he is still riding the whirlwind as though he had learned this difficult form of horsemanship on his boyhood pony at Hyde Park. Just now he is directly supervising the State Department, reading the foreign cables three times a day, receiving regular personal reports by telephone from his ambassadors abroad, and making all final decisions in the vital field of foreign affairs. He is also serving, unofficially, and as a pastime, as his own secretary of the navy, and enjoying it so much that he finds time to plan the movements of the neutrality coast patrol. He has just finished preparing the Federal Budget, and is working on his Budget message and his message to Congress on the state of the Union. Then besides these special and temporary preoccupations, he is also performing nil the ordinary duties of the most arduous office in the world. He is watching over the personnel, receiving and passing on reports from the multifarious departments and agencies, re- 1

surveying his farm programme and thinking about new taxes. He is planning his strategy for the coming session of congress, and discussing the principal legislative issues with the appropriate leaders. He is also acting as the political leader of his party, and pondering the difficult problem of his own and the party's future. Saddened by the War. The strange tiling is that he continues to tackle his huge job with visible zest. A year ago, this was ceasing to be so. The New Deal programme had been enacted and still the times were out of joint. The "purge" had proved a sorry failure. The Democratic party was split. New ideas and new remedies 'were not easy to come by. Then he often seems tired and grey, and a little sour. He is often tired now, and he has aged conspicuously in the last two years, but the sourness has disappeared. The war has saddened him and he makes [his jokes less often. Yet, by giving him inew issues to face and new questions to rdecide, it has somehow renewed his energies. His energies are really incalculable. During an acute stage of the pre-war crisis, for example, the chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission, Mr. Jerome N. Frank, called on him to report on plans for handling possible panic in the securities market. After he hadj declared that the "fire escapes were| ready," and-these had been discussed inj detail, he rose to go. He knew the President was immensly busy, and he was really concerned when the President made him sit down again and explain at great length the commission secretary's pet scheme of a brokerage bank to sereve as a central depository of the brokerage houses. The President's subordinates ofte"n have this kind of experience. To Live i» to Function. You may question the Roosevelt .judgment. You may regard the ■Roosevelt measures as little better than i ruinous to the countrj'. You mayi accuse the man of superficiality or lightmindedness or any of the other crimes, . in the calendar. But, if you are reason- ■ able, you cannot withhold admiration ! for the. gusto and ,force, the personal ; stamina, and the appetite for work '. which he has in such overflowing • measure

The key to the man is to be found, | perhaps, jn a talk he had a year or so ago with one of his cronies and advisers. This man is one. of the New Dealers who make a cult of the great Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes. He mentioned to the President, Holmes' often-repeated dictum that the principal pleasure of man is "to function." The President agreed enthusiastically, adding that he had often thought how much better it was, for a man accustomed to public life, to have all the trouble of making decisions than to experience the frustration of watching others making them. This may—or may not —throw some light on the question of the. hour most personal to the President, which is whether he will desire to go on making the decisions after 1940.—(copyright N.A.N. A.) •