"God's Gift to the U.S.A."

"To the Greatest Man in the World," the letter said, and the postal authorities knew just where to deliver it. To the same place where they delivered letters addressed to "God's Gift to the U.S.A." and "My Friend, Washington, D.C." To the desk of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House. This was not pure sycophancy in the Post Office. The mailmen also knew where to deliver letters addressed to "Benedict Arnold 2nd" and "Chief Shooter at the Moon, White Father of the Pretty Bubbles."

And Roosevelt, the most loved and hated of Presidents, saved the envelopes. They became part of his famous stamp collection, which eventually numbered 1.25 million different items. With the instinctive frugality of the rich, Roosevelt also collected first editions, coins, ship models, naval prints, Christmas cards, portraits of Presidents, Dutch tiles and campaign buttons. But stamps were special. He not only approved every new issue that appeared during his presidency, but sketched the designs for half a dozen, including one for Mother's Day and one in honor of Susan B. Anthony.

It was his mother, the formidable Sara Delano Roosevelt, who had inculcated in him her own love of collecting and given him his first stamps. She was 26 when she married a widower twice her age, James Roosevelt, 52, a member of the landed gentry of the Hudson Valley and ex-President Theodore Roosevelt's fourth cousin once removed. Franklin was her only child, and she kept him in dresses and long curls until he was five. He was 14 before he first went to school, to Groton and then Harvard. He maintained what was known as "a gentleman's C average" and yearned to be popular. Though he became editor of the Crimson, he could not make the freshman football team, and he was crushed at failing to get into Harvard's fanciest club, the Porcellian. Girls who encountered him at debutante dances considered him a lightweight and nicknamed him Feather Duster. His newly widowed mother bought a house in Boston to be near by.

Roosevelt did better at Columbia Law School, then sampled life at the prestigious Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. When he married his high-minded cousin Eleanor in 1905, his mother bought and furnished their house. Roosevelt restlessly entered local politics, won a seat in the state senate, made himself a name as a "reformer" by blocking a Tammany Hall candidate for the U.S. Senate. Woodrow Wilson made him Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Roosevelt went on to win the vice-presidential nomination in the doomed 1920 campaign of James C. Cox. The next year, after two long days of sailing and swimming at his summer home on Campobello Island in New Brunswick, he suffered a chill that was misdiagnosed, then the horrifying paralysis of polio. He was told that he would never walk again.

That a man seemingly so destined for limbo should be wheeled into the White House twelve years later was a great triumph of will. A number of his friends came to believe that it was the illness that transformed the amiable associate of 1920 into the magnetic leader of 1932. The long struggle endowed him with an extra measure of courage, of resilience and of sympathy for the afflicted.

There were other elements to Roosevelt's success: an immense charm, an instinctive feel for politics, a wide-ranging interest in people and ideas. Not least was sheer luck; all great leaders appear to be blessed with it. "Roosevelt weather" was the envious politician's term for the fact that the sun always seemed to come out when F.D.R. was scheduled to speak. Roosevelt was superstitious and avoided 13 at dinner, but he knew perfectly well that "luck" is mainly a matter of shrewd ness and timing. Characteristically, he was an expert at seven-card stud poker, with one-eyed face cards wild.

He had a ready smile and a sharp sense of the absurd. He learned that one of the White House servants, a robust woman of perhaps 190 lbs., believed in reincarnation, so he asked her what she wanted to be in her next life. A canary, she said wistfully. Roosevelt couldn't resist laughter. "I love it, I love it, I love it," he said. One of his most celebrated bits of clowning was his mock-solemn response to a Republican charge that he had accidentally left his Scotch terrier Fala behind on a trip to Alaska and then sent a destroyer to retrieve it. "Of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them," Roosevelt told a guffawing campaign audience. "You know, Fala is Scotch and . . . his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since."

Presiding over the White House, Roosevelt came to resemble what his father had been, a Hudson Valley squire. He relished sailing on the Potomac. He enjoyed puttering around in a tweed jacket that he had inherited from his father; he eventually bequeathed it to one of his four sons. He was squirishly indifferent to many of the conventional social graces; his wife even more so. He served martinis mixed with Argentine vermouth. They were, one visitor recalls, "about the color of spar varnish." The President liked wild game and carved it expertly, so admirers regularly sent him venison and antelope and partridges, but Eleanor squeamishly banished such things from the White House table. Her own specialty was to cook and serve Sunday-night scrambled eggs, which one survivor recalls as "undeniably discouraging."

Roosevelt was not, most certainly, a saint. Even so admiring an observer as John Gunther, drawing up a catalogue of Roosevelt's many virtues and achievements in Roosevelt in Retrospect, charged him with "dilatoriness, two-sidedness (some critics would say plain dishonesty), pettiness in some personal relationships, a cardinal lack of frankness . . . inability to say No, love of improvisation, garrulousness, amateurism, and what has been called 'cheerful vindictiveness.' " And, as Duke's James Barber bluntly puts it, "he cheated on his wife."

Both early and late in his life, Roosevelt pursued Lucy Mercer with a love that was truly reckless. An impoverished Maryland aristocrat, Lucy was 22, nine years younger than Roosevelt, when she began serving his wife as social secretary in Washington. One day in 1918, Eleanor found some letters that Lucy had written him, and there was a terrible scene. Eleanor told him that he must either break with Lucy forever or she would "give him his freedom." When they both reported this situation to Roosevelt's mother, however, she warned that if he abandoned his five children, she would cut him off without a penny (despite his Navy position, he still depended on a parental allowance, though he ultimately left an estate of $1 million). Roosevelt apparently decided to choose Lucy, come what might, but Lucy said that as a Roman Catholic she could not marry a divorced man. Instead, she soon married a wealthy widower, Winthrop Rutherfurd, and the Roosevelts patched together their semblance of a domestic life.

More than 20 years later, in 1941, Lucy returned to Washington from the Rutherfurd estate in South Carolina so that her ailing septuagenarian husband could get the best medical attention. Eleanor Roosevelt, busy with her career in good works, seems never to have known that Lucy Rutherfurd began coming secretly to dine at the White House.

On the morning of April 12, 1945, at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga., Roosevelt complained of a headache but seemed to be in good spirits. He poked around in his beloved stamp collection and inspected some new specimens that the Japanese had issued during their occupation of the Philippines. It was nearly lunchtime when he said to a woman who was painting his portrait, "Now we've got just about 15 minutes more to work." Then, as she watched him silently studying some papers, he groaned, pressed a hand to his temple, and fell into a coma from which he never recovered.

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