The longest-serving president in U.S. history, and leader through the Great Depression and World War II -- two of the nation's worst crises -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered by many to be our greatest president. In his early years, as a pampered, sheltered scion of a wealthy family, FDR exhibited no outward signs of greatness. With his cousin Theodore as a role model, however, FDR purposely forged a successful political career for himself,...

With his election to the New York State Senate in 1910, Franklin D. Roosevelt sets out to make a name for himself in Albany, much as Theodore Roosevelt had done twenty-nine years earlier. He joins forces with reform-minded Democrats to fight against the powerful bosses of their own party, and battles for state government and labor reforms – but to the dismay of many, his support is sometimes unreliable. For Eleanor Roosevelt, distance away from...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1933 presidential inauguration comes during the nation's worst economic crisis – the Great Depression. Banks have failed and savings accounts have been wiped out, so to explain the banking system and how it works, Franklin Roosevelt gives his first "fireside chat" to the American people. In fourteen and a half minutes he calms the public, and by the next Monday people begin to redeposit their money, thereby averting a...

In the 1920s, memories of Theodore Roosevelt begin to fade. The Great War is over, Woodrow Wilson is ill, and the American public is weary of domestic reform and events overseas. The Republican Party nominates Warren G. Harding for president, while Democratic nominee James M. Cox chooses thirty-eight-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt to be his running mate. FDR campaigns with relish, and eventually persuades Eleanor to join him as he crisscrosses the...

By April of 1944, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt have occupied the White House for more than eleven years. The President is secretly convalescing in South Carolina from a recently diagnosed bout of congestive heart failure while the war rages overseas and his family is under press scrutiny at home. Despite his failing health, FDR has ambitious postwar plans for his country: to see the horrific struggle through to victory, and then to bring the United...

As Great Britain faces an imminent war with Germany, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, invited the King and Queen of England for a weekend at their home in upstate New York. But during the first-ever visit of a reigning British monarch to America, international affairs must be juggled with the complexities of FDR's domestic establishment, as wife, mother, and mistresses all conspire to make the royal trip an unforgettable one....