During Franklin Delano Roosevelt's lifetime, TIME magazine kept constant and careful track of his accomplishments and failures F.D.R. first graced our cover in May 1923, when, as president of the American Construction he called for an end to speculative building; he appeared six more times and was thrice named Man of the Year (1932, 1934, 1941), more than any other person. This week, to mark his 100th birthday TIME's eighth F.D.R. cover story reassesses his legacy. "There are several ways we could have celebrated the event says Senior Writer Otto Friedrich. "We decided to re-ask the question, What was the New Deal? Roosevelt's came a half-century ago. It still reverberates; we still debate some of the problems. It is important to reconstruct what it was really like."

The task of historical reconstruction is a specialty of Friedrich's. As a TIME senior editor, he oversaw the preparation of the magazine's two Bicentennial issues, which reported the events of the weeks of July 4, 1776 and Sept. 26, 1789 as if TIME had been there. He is the author of three volumes of history and biography: his newest book, The End of the World, a description of catastrophic moments in history in which people thought the world might be doomed, will be published next September. Helping Friedrich sift the vast amounts of material on Roosevelt was Reporter-Researcher Peggy T. Berman.

The cover painting of Roosevelt is the work of Alice Neel, a New York City artist known for her psychologically revealing portraits. Among them: Composer Virgil Thomson, Artist Andy Warhol and Feminist Kate Millett, the last a commissioned TIME cover of August 1970. Neel, who celebrates her 82nd birthday this week, was a direct beneficiary of the New Deal. Reduced to a pinchpenny existence in Greenwich Village during the early days of the Depression, she was invited in 1933 to participate in a Government program that evolved into the WPA's Federal Art Project. She was paid less than $30 a week to turn out paintings for public buildings. A WPA employee for ten years, she says, "The WPA kept me and a lot of other artists from starving." She considers the Federal Art Project "a great creative venture," and praises Roosevelt as "a compassionate man." Last week, in honor of the centennial, Neel traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington for the opening of an exhibition of her work and that of four other WPA alumni.

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