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Balance of Power. But no one private individual summed up the hope that the U.S. stood for. It was the U.S. of Ford—and of Lindbergh in his untroubled, heroic days—of factories, of a willingness to change; it was the U.S. as a whole, the strongest power on earth, if it could find a key to its power. Nor could any private citizen stand against Franklin Roosevelt as Man of 1941, for one simple reason: as leader of the U.S. at war he had become leader of the democracies against Hitler. The use of the strength of the U.S. had become the key to the future of the war, and Franklin Roosevelt was the key to the forces of the U.S.
At the close of 1940 the two great figures locked in the world struggle were Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. In midsummer of 1941, Stalin and Churchill perhaps shared the position of being Hitler's chief opponents. By the time that 1941 ended, Franklin Roosevelt stood out clearly as Hitler's major adversary. Stalin, Churchill, Chiang Kaishek, whatever their individual stature, had their future dependent on the help that the U.S.—and Franklin Roosevelt—alone could give.
In 1941 Franklin Roosevelt obtained the Lend-Lease Act, which gave the U.S. the beginnings of that preeminence. When he signed the declaration of war, that pre-eminence was inescapable. Betweentimes, in the long nightmare of the "undeclared war," in the exhausting debate about convoys, he had guided the U.S. to the strategic spot where its weight could become the deciding factor in the world struggle which he, but not all of his people, believed was real.
In his own right and on his own record, President Roosevelt stood out as a figure of the year and of the age. His smiling courage in the face of panic, his resourcefulness in meeting unprecedented threats to the nation's economy and morale, his sanguine will place him there. The intensity of his feeling for what America can be and therefore will be—a feeling that awakened the country to master its creeping paralysis—these qualities prepared the nation for its struggle in the depth of depression. On a far greater scale, for a far greater cause, against a worldwide sense of hopelessness, those same qualities were called into play when the Japanese on a sunny December morning descended from the sky on Pearl Harbor.
War President. The U.S. has had five war Presidents in its history, and for Lincoln, the greatest of them, the war was civil war. In the wars with foreign foes, Madison, Polk, McKinley, Wilson—predecessors of President Roosevelt—faced no such task as he faces. Never before has the U.S at the beginning of a foreign war found itself on the defensive, in diplomacy, on land, at sea. Never before had a U.S. President faced so great a task in unifying the country that had made him President, of summoning up the spirit that would make the factories produce on a scale equal to the needs of the world's worst war.