Shining City Audio, a John Meacham and C-13 original studio.

January 30, 1882, Franklin D. Roosevelt is born at Hyde Park, New York.

I'm John Meacham, and this is Reflections of History.

He was the only child of an older father and the most attentive of mothers.

The sion of a great political family, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

would become the most influential American president since Lincoln,

fundamentally changing the relationship of the people to their government,

and defending liberty worldwide in an hour of terrible danger.

His achievement was not only political but spiritual.

He affirmed faith in democracy when forces conspired to assert autocracy in America and abroad.

To mark the anniversary of his birth, here is part of what Winston Churchill said of FDR after the president died,

at the strikingly young age of 63 in 1945.

I conceived an admiration for him as a statesman, a man of affairs, and a war leader.

I felt the utmost confidence in his upright, inspiring character and outlook in a personal regard, affection, I must say,

for him beyond my power to express today, his love of his own country, his respect for its constitution,

his power of gauging that pides and currents of its mobile public opinion.

We're always evident, but added to these were the beatings of that generous heart,

which was always stirred to anger and to action by spectacles of aggression and oppression by the strong against the weak.

It is indeed a loss of bitter loss to humanity that those heartbeats are still forever.

President Roosevelt's physical affliction lay heavily upon him.

It was a marvel that he bore up against it through all the many years of tumult and storm.

Not one man in ten millions, stricken and crippled as he was, would have attempted to plunge into a life of physical and mental exertion,

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