Word: first
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...said jokingly in Washington that Roosevelt had a nightly prayer: Dear God, please make Eleanor a little tired. But as Roosevelt himself would be the first to admit, he would never have become the kind of President he was without his tireless wife. She was the agitator dedicated to what should be done; he was the politician concerned with what could be done. It was Eleanor who insisted that the government's wartime partnership with business must not be forged at the expense of labor. It was Eleanor who insisted that America could not fight racism abroad while tolerating...
...century's struggle for freedom, Roosevelt won two decisive victories: first over economic depression and then over fascism. Though he was surrounded by turmoil, he envisioned a world of lasting peace, and he devoted his life to building a new era of progress. Roosevelt's leadership steered not only America but also the world through the roughest seas of the century. And he did it with a combination of skilled statesmanship, innovative spirit and, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, "a first-class temperament...
Even though Franklin Roosevelt was the architect of grand designs, he touched tens of millions of Americans in a very personal way. When I first worked on political campaigns in the 1960s, I could not help noticing the pictures of F.D.R. that graced the walls and mantels of so many of the homes I visited. To ordinary Americans, Roosevelt was always more than a great President, he was part of the family...
...speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. These were, in his own words, "essential human freedoms." His expression of American ideals helped make them the world's ideals. Because of that commitment and its embrace by every American President since, today we can say, for the first time in history, a majority of the world's people live under governments of their own choosing...
Much of my own political philosophy and approach to governance is rooted in Roosevelt's principles of progress. That's why one of the first things I did after I became President was make a pilgrimage to Hyde Park. And that's why when Prime Minister Tony Blair came to visit, I took him on a tour of the F.D.R. Memorial. Rather than cling to old abstractions or be driven by the iron laws of ideology, Roosevelt crafted innovations to the circumstances in which he found himself. He sought, above all, practical solutions that worked for people. He called...