FDR: his pervasive presence.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to his first term, I was only ten years old, yet I was moved to save the text of his inaugural address from the newspaper. On the recent anniversary of his death, I took out that yellowed clipping still preserved between the pages of an old book of my grandfather's, Washington and His Generals.

Reading the speech after all these years it was easy to recapture the message of hope it inspired in our family during the darkest days of the Great Depression. Not only did Roosevelt assure us--in the now well-worn words--"that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he also pledged to seek the power "to wage war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."

The excitement of his inauguration, along with the belief that finally something was being done, was all around me and so were signs of his presence. When I went to the neighborhood movie house, the audience cheered FDR's appearance in a newsreel. The Blue Eagle emblem of his National Recovery Administration flew in almost every store window. FDR's voice on the radio became as familiar as Jack Benny's. We were reminded of his crippling illness only when people danced at balls on his birthday to raise money to fight infantile paralysis.

Only once did I see him in person, and that was during a family vacation trip to Washington, D.C., when he rode by in an open car, jauntily smiling and waving, the "happy warrior." As I grew older, FDR remained a presence, but I realized not everyone agreed with him. There were jokes about workers on WPA relief projects leaning on their shovels, or about the gallivanting travels of FDR's wife Eleanor. I found my high school classmates divided on Roosevelt's policies toward the war in Europe. All one summer there were heated arguments on our front porch about American intervention.

When I went to college the argument continued on campus, and FDR's candidacy for a third term was also troublesome. Although I was not eligible to vote I was impressed by the candidacy of Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt's opponent in 1940. For my freshman political science class I wrote a paper on FDR's reelection which began, "Today I saw democracy die in America...." Whether you were for him or against him, there was no way to avoid the FDR presence.

As the war went on and the danger of the Nazi threat became more ominous, I returned to the fold. After Pearl Harbor, I listened to FDR's "a date which will live in infamy" speech. I enlisted in a college army reserve unit that was called up three months later. The first time I voted was by absentee ballot from an Army Air Force base in France. I voted for FDR

And it was there in France that Roosevelt as a living presence left my life. In April, 1945, our bombers were flying over Germany from a base near a little French village in Picardy, a poor place in the midst of sugar-beet fields. I lived there with three other intelligence noncoms in a building that also housed a schoolroom. We often saw children from the school waiting outside our dining hall to take home leftovers scraped from mess kits.

After our group's planes came back, the crews interrogated, and the strike photos interpreted, it was often my job to drive the intelligence reports to headquarters. Late one night I bounced along in a jeep across the springtime countryside, a carbine at my side, to an old chateau on a wooded estate. When I pushed open a heavy hardwood door into the shadowy room that befitted an intelligence operation, I was shocked to hear that the president's death had just been announced on the radio. It was as though half of my young life had suddenly come to an end.

All the way back to our village I thought about that part of my life, about that familiar voice that would speak no more. I thought of the portraits of the Big Three in every little French cafe in the area: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin--and FDR always first. What was there about this vital presence that had followed from a boy's home in Kentucky to the rutted roads of a poor village in France?

The next day I found it was even stronger than I knew. People in that down-and-out village came up to say, "We're sorry the president is dead." He had made them feel he was their president, too.