Toast to a Hero

Celebrating happy days

Ronald Reagan originally stood aloof from the planning for Franklin D. Roosevelt's centenary, but in the end he graciously got involved. And why not? Though critics charge that the New Federalism dismantles the New Deal, F.D.R. was a hero to the youthful Reagan, who voted for Roosevelt all four times he ran.

At a White House lunch last week, guests at the President's table, including F.D.R.'s son Jimmy, ate off china from the Roosevelt years. In a deft tribute, Reagan recalled his first glimpse of F.D.R. "It was 1936, a campaign parade in Des Moines, Iowa. What a wave of affection and pride swept through the crowd." Reagan obliquely compared Roosevelt with himself; he praised the American ability to "sense when things have gone too far, when the time has come to make fundamental changes. Franklin Roosevelt was that kind of a person too." The President then led a toast to "one of history's truly monumental figures," and the Marine Band blared out Roosevelt's old campaign song, Happy Days Are Here Again.

The White House lunch followed a joint session of Congress that was marked by a rare bipartisan cheer. Attending were such ancient adversaries as Florida Representative Claude Pepper, 81, once a red hot New Dealer, and New York's venerable Hamilton Fish, 93, who was stigmatized and immortalized in F.D.R.'s 1940 campaign refrain lambasting three conservative Republican Congressmen, "[Joseph] Martin, [Bruce] Barton and Fish." Among the speakers: Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, who was first elected as a Congressman in 1932; and F.D.R. himself, heard in recordings. Pepper drew guffaws by recounting how he went to the White House to pitch a program and was filibustered throughout the interview with F.D.R.'s reminiscences of his ancestor Robert Livingston, negotiator in 1803 of the Louisiana Purchase. Said Pepper: "I didn't make much progress on my project. But I was the world's best-informed man on Robert Livingston."

One Roosevelt son, Franklin Jr., boycotted the White House lunch to protest Reagan's "undoing steps that my father's Administration took 40 to 50 years ago." For other Roosevelts, the happy days were saddened by a more material loss. The President's gift to the nation, his ancestral estate at Hyde Park, N.Y., had caught fire, the result of old, faulty wiring, which caused damage of $2 million to the 35-room house and $600,000 to furnishings. Few of the nearly 6,000 items of F.D.R. memorabilia were beyond repair. Custodians of the mansion raced in to retrieve items ranging from a Gilbert Stuart portrait of a Roosevelt forebear to F.D.R.'s mother's 3-ft. potted palm.

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