The marvels of the Internet continue to stun us. We now have at our fingertips the power to reach deeply into our own past and to pull it into our own day. We can access the spoken words of our long-dead leaders and compare them with what we hear today.

And we can visit the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. There, we will have a chance to smile, perhaps to laugh, at the parody magazine cover they’ve displayed. It shows President Barack Obama riding in an open car, a battered fedora atop his head, his head thrown back, and his dazzling smile radiating throughout the room. In his brilliant teeth is clenched a cigarette holder, held at a jaunty angle.

It’s a sight gag. It’s a throwback. It’s a pose so familiar to older Americans that it’s instantly recognizable.

Franklin D. Roosevelt died when I was still in my mother’s womb. Still, I grew up with stories about him. His voice was familiar in our home–if not on records, certainly from TV documentaries of World War II. My relatives would delightedly mimic his head-tossing delivery and his stentorian eloquence.

Now, you can hear him, too. The Miller Center at the University of Virginia has archived many original recordings. Included in their collection is President Roosevelt’s great speech from June 10, 1940, delivered seventy years ago this week to the graduating class at U.Va.

For context, you must realize that the British Expeditionary Force, the main British army, had just been evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk, France. The French army was in a state of stunned collapse, reeling from the powerful blows of German panzers rolling swiftly through Northeastern France and strafed from above by Nazi Stukas. Hitler’s Luftwaffe chief, the hugely menacing Marshal Goering, had fitted sirens to the wings of his dive bombers for the express purpose of terrifying the women and children upon whom their wicked fury was wreaked.

The peoples of the Americas looked on as newsreels and newspaper photos showed fleeing refugees. These refugees–old men and women and little children crowded the roads and market squares of quiet Belgian, Dutch, and French villages. French reinforcements couldn’t get to the scene of the battle.

It would not have been surprising if young people in America–those like the U.Va. Class of 1940 –felt that the world was just too threatening a place and retreated from it.. But that is not how they reacted. Despite the terrors of war–in the air, on the seas, under the oceans–the reaction of President Roosevelt’s audience that day was strong, thunderous, and like Roosevelt himself, confident.

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Franklin Roosevelt is not a hero of mine. Arguably the father of today’s big government and a president who never let the Constitution get in the way of his political agenda, FDR summoned a weird confection of Leftists, liberals and disaffected, vulnerable citizens to obtain election to the presidency no less than four times.

His legacy has led to serious problems in the courts, the economy and the way Americans understand their federal government. Yet there is still much to admire about the Democratic Roosevelt – the way he heartened Americans with his optimism, the masterful manner in which he spoke to the hopes and fears of ordinary people, and even his unabashed invocation of the God of the Bible in times of national need.

FDR was also nothing if not decisive. He did not dawdle in times of crisis. For better or ill, he acted. People knew that they had a leader in the White House.

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