his distant cousin, Theodore, a vigorous leader who told Franklin during one of his infrequent visits to the White House that "men of good background and education owed their country public service."
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that FDR had a "second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament ." James MacGregor Burns reaches the same conclusion in his highly readable, two-volume biography, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, 1956, cloth; 1963, paper)...