Franklin D. Roosevelt learned early from his father’s charitable example that those born into privilege carried a responsibility to help others. When he was five years old, his father took him to the White House, where President Grover Cleveland leaned down to the boy and said, “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you will never be President of the United States.” But given Roosevelt’s heritage, that seemed unlikely. By birth or marriage, FDR was related to no fewer than eleven presidents, including his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt.

At age thirty-four, Roosevelt’s rising political career came to a sudden halt when he was diagnosed with polio. His wife Eleanor later reflected, “I know that he had real fear when he was first taken ill, but he learned to surmount it. After that, I’ve never heard him say he was afraid of anything.” That resilience would become the defining quality of his public life.

In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Roosevelt offered hope to a shaken nation in his inaugural address, assuring Americans that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” For the next twelve years—longer than any president in American history—Roosevelt led the country with his New Deal programs, fundamentally reshaping the nation’s political, economic, and social landscape. Yet the depression was only one crisis he would confront. World War II soon threatened the very fabric of the nation.

After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—“a date which will live in infamy”—Roosevelt guided the United States through the largest global conflict in history. Following his unprecedented fourth inauguration, he met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on the left, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, on the right, at Yalta to plan for the post-war world and lay the groundwork for the United Nations. When critics accused him of giving too much away, the weary president simply replied, “I didn’t say the result was good. I said it was the best I could do.”

Roosevelt would not live to see the end of the war he fought so hard to win. In April 1945, just weeks before Germany’s surrender, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office, leaving behind a legacy that transformed both the nation he led and the world he helped to shape.

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