The Fifties

by David Halberstam

called NRA”). He had been somewhat neutral during Franklin Roosevelt’s first run for the presidency; they had been, after all, at Groton at the same time, and for a time there were even Dear Frank/Dear Bertie letters. But he quickly turned on Roosevelt as the direction of the New Deal became constantly more clear. It was anathema to him. In time his hatred of Roosevelt and the New Deal became like a virus. He seemed to differentiate little between Roosevelt’s administration and those of Hitler and Stalin. His vendetta was finally far more poisonous to the colonel himself, given the essential popularity of most of Roosevelt’s reforms. Their feud became ever more bitter, ever more personal, and ever more obsessive on his part. (Roosevelt seemed almost amused by it, and when a Trib reporter would ask a question at a Roosevelt press conference, the President would tell him to tell Bertie to stop seeing things under the bed.) Late in his life, a decade after Roosevelt’s death, as McCormick himself lay dying, all he could do was talk about was Roosevelt. During the Roosevelt years, he liked to say—and he most definitely was not joking—that he had kept the Republican party alive. By the Republican party he did not mean the party of Dewey and Willkie and Cabot Lodge, he meant the old Republican party—one rooted in small Midwestern towns, one that was antilabor, conservative on all fiscal matters, wary of government intervention in any public matter, and one that did not see the wo...