Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on 30 January 1882 at Hyde Park, New York, and died on 12 April 1945 at Warm Springs, Georgia, aged sixty-three. In August 1921, while on holiday at Campobello Island, he contracted the illness diagnosed as polio and was left permanently paralysed from the waist down. He was thirty-nine, and the conventional expectation was that his political life was finished.

He taught himself to walk short distances on iron braces, at enormous physical cost, and constructed an entire apparatus of concealment around it - never appearing in a wheelchair publicly, arranging podiums and cars so that he could be seen upright, and relying on an understanding with photographers that they would not record it. He was elected governor of New York in 1928 by less than one percent, recognised the scale of the Depression early, established the first state employment commission and was the first governor to back unemployment insurance publicly.

What did Roosevelt do as president?

He beat Herbert Hoover in a landslide in 1932 at the depth of the Depression, and in his first hundred days pushed through more federal legislation than any president before him - the relief programmes, the banking reforms, the regulation of finance, communications and labour that together became the New Deal. He had begun the fireside chats as governor and continued them from the White House, speaking directly to the country by radio in a conversational register nobody in office had used before. He won four consecutive elections in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, the only president to serve more than two terms. After Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 he took the country into the war, mobilised its economy, and authorised the development of the atomic bomb. He died in office three months into his fourth term and was succeeded by Harry Truman.

Roosevelt is dominant Fe, and the fireside chats are the purest instance of that function in American political history. He worked out that radio was not a public address system but a private one - that he was speaking into people's living rooms, one household at a time - and adjusted his entire manner accordingly, using ordinary vocabulary, second-person address, and a pace that assumed the listener was in the room. Fe reads what an audience actually needs and supplies it, and what a terrified country needed in 1933 was to be spoken to as though someone had it in hand.

The auxiliary Ni is why the New Deal was a direction rather than a list. He was not an economist and did not pretend to be; what he had was a settled picture of what the country would have to become, and a willingness to try programmes, discard them and try others while the direction stayed fixed. Fe with Ni behind it produces a leader who takes the room somewhere.

How did Roosevelt conceal his disability?

Through the same faculty, applied to himself. He understood exactly what the sight of a paralysed man would do to public confidence in 1932, and constructed a performance of physical capability that cost him real pain to sustain - the braces, the son's arm, the fixed grip on a lectern. The tertiary Se is what made that possible at all: enormous physical courage and an actor's command of his own body. The inferior Ti is the standing criticism of his presidency, and it is fair - the New Deal was not a coherent economic programme, several of its measures worked against each other, and he was frequently indifferent to whether the theory held as long as the direction felt right.

ENTJ is the most common alternative, given the scale of what he built and the four terms. The difference is the primary instrument. An ENTJ leads through structures and results, and is comfortable being disliked. Roosevelt led through relationship - with the electorate, with Churchill, with a Congress he charmed and manoeuvred rather than commanded - and his greatest asset was that people trusted him personally rather than that they followed his logic.

ESFJ is occasionally suggested because of the warmth and the mastery of public feeling. But he was not working from precedent or established practice; the first hundred days were an unprecedented improvisation toward a future he could see and most of his party could not. Ni in second position rather than Si.