President Roosevelt

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 304, 20 April 1945, Page 5

President Roosevelt

T is impossible to dissociate the death of President Roosevelt, announced as we go to press, from the tremendous events in which it has happened. His place in history we cannot now fix, if by history we mean the events of centuries. But we can fix his place in the events of our own times, and it is an understatement to call it overshadowing. Throughout the whole period of the war he has been one of the three men on whom the hopes of half the world have rested. Even when "the American people stood outside the struggle it was their President who saw most clearly that they would eventually have to come in, who made others see it, and who, when the day came, had the majority ready. It may easily be that posterity will be as grateful to him for the things he did before Pearl Harbour as for his momentous work afterwards. Many men can lead when all are marching the same way. It was President Roosevelt’s great achievement, conceivably his greatest, to give a lead before there was unity-to head off the independents, rouse the slumberers, and bring back the wanderers-all before the madness of the enemy made isolation impossible. Then he became a dynamo. For a man with his physical infirmities his driving force was almost incredible, but the price has been his life. The world has lost him, not indeed when it most needed him, ;since that period is safely qver, but when it is still a calamity to lose his courage, energy, wisdom, and friendliness, and his almost uncanny political sagacity. It cannot be doubted that his: war policy will remain, since it was overwhelmingly endorsed by his people when he was re-elected, but it is a tragedy that he should have died before victory was finally achieved, and on the eve of conferences in which his presence would have been one of the guarantees of a good and enduring peace.