WHEN he looks at the world stage Dr Arthur Schlesinger sees small men where once there were giants. The two-time Pulitzer prize-winning author and historian was responding to a question about his view of today's leaders after speaking about the wartime US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He said his generation had witnessed Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, "leaders for good or for evil and larger than life".
There had been a general collapse in leadership, he said, possibly because there had not been a world crisis which required great leadership. "Tony Blair and Bill Clinton are young and promising and Helmut Kohl in Germany is big, strictly in the physical sense," he said.
He said Roosevelt had been "one of the great towering figures of US intellectual and political life". And, when a Washington memorial had been dedicated to him last month, it had proved as controversial as the man himself. Roosevelt had been an "inveterate smoker" and had been depicted in the monument jauntily clasping a cigarette-holder. The anti-smoking lobby had objected and it had been removed. Eleanor Roosevelt "innocently wore a fur neck-piece" and this also had to be removed from the monument after pressure from the anti-fur lobby.
The disability lobby wanted the former president depicted in a wheelchair, "understandably eager to show that disability was no obstacle to progress". But Roosevelt's granddaughter objected that he had spent only a small fraction of his life in a wheelchair.
The US was a "society perhaps overly pre-occupied with political correctness", Dr Schlesinger said.
New scholars had "cast cold eyes on leaders of my generation", he said, and this form of revisionism was "not without its uses". Roosevelt was a difficult man to define and "frustrates historians as he once frustrated politicians". But history could "try to make sense of what he did". Roosevelt had brought in the New Deal, which "rescued capitalism from the capitalists", and the US had moved towards a mixed economy and welfare state.
The president had also left his mark on international affairs, setting up "post-war blueprints for international organisations".
Asked about the anti-UN sentiment in the US, he said that most public opinion polls showed a majority "sympathetic to the UN", but those who hated the UN were more intense in their opposition.