Memorial Address by Hon. John Gilbert Winant United States Representative on the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations Franklin Delano Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, and distinguished guests, it has been the custom of the Congress to set aside a day for appropri ate exercises in commemoration of the life, character, and public services of Presidents of the United States who have died. This day has, therefore, been set aside in memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thirty-second President, who took office at the gravest moment of an economic crisis which threatened the security of the Republic, who twice preserved his country, was three times reelected to its Presidency, and died in office in his country's greatest war, having lived to see the victory assured but not to share it. The final estimate of Franklin Roosevelt's achievement will not be made by us or in this room. It will be made elsewhere, and later, and by men who will judge all of us, not him alone. What Lincoln's message of December '62 said of his listeners in this same House is true of us: We cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insig. nificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. But though we cannot pay the final tribute which time reserves to others, we can do what later generations may not do. We can speak of Franklin Roosevelt as a living man. All of us in this room, or almost all, are men and women who knew him-men, for the most part, who served with him in government in this country's greatest war. Some of us loved him well. Some of us opposed him earnestly. Many in this room bore responsibility at his request; sat in council with him. There is not one of us here who did not watch him near or at a distance, privately or publicly, in the great trial which was his life. Greatness in a man, as in a mountain, requires distance to be seen. The things a man has lived by take their place be side his actions in the true perspective of time, and the inner pattern of his life becomes apparent. In the long range, it is the things by which we live that are important, although the timing and circumstance play their part. This was true in the life of Franklin Roosevelt. He might have been speaking of himself, as well as of the country, when he said: To some generations much is given; of some generations much is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with destiny. He played a great part in great events. He was his coun try's President and undisputed leader at a great and decisive moment in its history. Under his Presidency, the Republic reached the position of principal importance and power among the nations of the earth which it now holds. It may be, indeed, though God forbid, that the power to which the Republic then reached was the high power of its destiny: only we, the living, can determine whether that be so. These are the facts of history which no man disputes. But greatness does not lie in the association-even the dominating association-with great events. Events have an impersonal inertia of their own and a nation is something other than the purpose of its officers of state. Greatness lies in the man and not the times; the times reflect it only. Greatness lies in the proportion. In Franklin Roosevelt the qualities we knew were these— we who worked with him and watched him. He loved man kind. There was no one in public life in our time who had the confidence of a greater part of the people of the earth than Franklin Roosevelt. He had their confidence not only because he believed in them as men and women, but because he expected much of them as men and women. The world to him was not composed of nations only, nor the nations of classes. He did not believe in abstractions. He believed in individual human beings. The compact, as Walt Whitman put it, was always with individuals. The decisions, whether in war or in peace, were decisions which affected the lives of individuals. The friendships, the dissensions, the agreements were indi vidual friendships, individual dissensions, individual agree ments. He loved men, but he loved them to be free, to be themselves. He was brave. There is no man in this room-not those who saw him in the weakest moments of a frightful illness— not those who saw him in the most terrible moments of the war-there is not one of us who can say that he saw Franklin Roosevelt afraid. He was steadfast. Once the decision had been made, he stood to it. Strong-willed and stubborn of purpose, he chose the men and framed the plans to bring to bear upon his coun try's enemies the full and overwhelming power of its strength, turning the first and terrible defeats to victories unprecedented in the history of war. Those who know of their own knowledge what risks he had to take, what burden of responsibility he had to bear, know how to estimate his steadfastness. He saw the facts and faced them. Even in the brief per spective of a year we have learned how well he saw the facts of danger to his country. At a time when few men other than he, whether in positions of responsibility or not, understood the meaning of the history of our time, he understood it. We know now from the mouths and records of our enemies how |