The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

Roosevelt…disliked being completely committed to any one person. He enjoyed being at the center of attention and action, and the system made him the focus through which the main lines of action radiated……. The main reason for Roosevelt’s methods, however, involved a tenacious effort to keep control of the executive branch in the face of the centrifugal forces of the American political system. By establishing in an agency one power center that counteracted another, he made each official more dependent on White House support; the President in effect became the necessary ally and partner of each. He lessened bureaucratic tendencies toward self-aggrandizement; he curbed any attempt to gang up on him. He was, in effect, adapting the old method of divide and conquer to his own purposes……. His technique was curiously like that of Joseph Stalin, who used the overlapping delegation of function, a close student of his methods has said, to prevent “any single chain of command from making major decisions without confronting other arms of the state’s bureaucracy and thus bringing the issues into the open at a high level.” Roosevelt, like Stalin, was a political administrator in the sense that his first concern was power—albeit for very different ends. ROOSEVELT: THE LION AND THE FOX, JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS, 1956