VOL. 2 ISSUE 7
NOVEMBER 2026
Franklin Delano Roosevelt liked to boast that he was as good or better than any practicing Thespian on stage or screen – Norman B. Schwarz
Franklin D. Roosevelt (2012) Photograph Underwood & Underwood, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Public Domain
Norman B. Schwartz is the author of the comic novels ‘ALL THINGS small‘, Paradise Now, Don Juan in Space, True (Cinema) Confessions, Hollywood: Below and Beyond, and the DIY guide, The Art Of The Schnoorr. He spent over forty years working on films in Hollywood and Rome. Norman was the first ADR sound editor / post-production dialogue director to be admitted to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. Norman B. Schwartz’s essays appear in sequence monthly in each issue of Ars Notoria Magazine. In October of 2025, a paperback edition of the complete collection of his essays titled: HOLLYOOD Actors & Politicos/ a Shared Profession was published and is available for purchase from Centre House Press.
23. THE GREAT IMPROVISATOR
FDR. And the Award Goes To…
Of all the nation’s “acting” presidents, only one has been a professional. The current president by contrast was a talented amateur hired to improvise dialogue on a reality show. The 32nd President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of America’s most skilled politicians, liked to boast that he was as good or better than any practicing Thespian on stage or screen. For four terms, from 1933 to 1945, he played the role of the benevolent aristocrat for the longest uninterrupted run in his nation’s history, leading his country out of the Depression, through the Second World War, and into Empire.
Gore Vidal (1925–2012), American novelist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and occasional candidate for office, was one of the president’s most astute observers and ambivalent admirers. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Vidal could claim (and did) that he was the only one among many who could claim to be a true insider. Gore’s mother, Nina, was the daughter of the blind senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma; Gore’s father, Gene, had been the director of the Bureau of Air Commerce during Roosevelt’s first administration. After Nina and Gene divorced in 1935, Gore’s mother married one of the national capitol’s most respected citizens, the stockbroker Hugh Auchincloss. That marriage lasted until 1941, when he (Hugh) divorced her (Nina) and married the Virginia socialite, Janet Lee Bouvier. Janet was the mother of two beautiful little girls from her first marriage to another less prosperous but handsomer stockbroker. Her daughters – Lee and Jacqueline. Lee would one day become Princess Radziwill, her sister Jacqueline First Lady of the land. Gore first learned about the act of politics from his father, who knew Washington from first-hand experience. Gene Vidal told him: “They tell lies, even when they don’t have to.” He had once witnessed the Commander in Chief grow so angry with the amount of money commercial airlines demanded from the government for flying airmail that he cancelled all their contracts, and ordered the task assigned to the Army Air Corps. Gore’s father, once a military pilot himself and the first instructor in aeronautics at West Point, warned his chief that these men, brave and well-trained as they were, were ill-equipped for flying in bad weather. But the president insisted. At the end of the first week, five army pilots were dead, and eight planes wrecked; after seventy-eight days twelve pilots were gone. America’s flying hero, Charles Lindbergh, was in the newspapers, accusing Roosevelt of murder, but FDR remained unfazed. “One evening, my father was called to the White House,” Vidal wrote. “As Gene pushed the President’s wheelchair along the upstairs corridor, the President, his usual airy self, said, ‘Well, Brother Vidal, we seem to have a bit of a mess on our hands.’ […] ‘I found that we pretty funny.’”
Gene Vidal knew, and his son would learn to admire, that FDR had an actor’s talent for improvisation. Confronted with disaster or setback, he never hesitated to change course or what he said. By spring of that year, FDR’s campaign manager and Postmaster General Farley announced the army would no longer fly the mail, and the United States Post Office was once again open to bids.
Vidal speaking for the People’s Party in 1972. Photograph Susmart, Wikimedia Commons
Gore Vidal continued to study the president through his father’s eyes for the rest of his life. There was one act that astonished him more than any other. Despite the uproar his allegations caused, Vidal never ceased to claim that FDR’s greatest sleight of hand, one he could not have performed without the aid of his gifted stage assistant, Winston Churchill, was getting the United States into the Second World War when the United States was at its most isolationist.
The friendship between the two men, destined to be leaders of their wartime nations, began back in the teens of the century when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty (October 1911 through May 1915), overlapping Roosevelt who held a similar position as United States Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the first years of World War One. After the United Kingdom officially entered World War Two in 1939, Churchill served again as First Lord until May 1940 when with Chamberlain’s resignation he became his country’s prime minister. Churchill desperately needed Roosevelt’s help, but sixty to eighty per cent of America’s population were opposed to going to war to defend the British Isles and distant Europe as America had once before.
MORE POLITICS IN THE NOVEMBER ISSUE
The Great Improvisator
Norman B. Schwartz offers an insightful portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a great actor; of his performances as a politician, and a view of the theatricality of FDR’s presidency.
An open Letter to Andy Burnham
An Ars Notoria Editorial where we beg Andy Burnham to make peace with the Russian Federation instead of escalating on behalf of US imperialism.
For a New British Liberation Theology
Matthew Taylor. A theological treatise advocating for a new radical British liberation theology centred on the poor and marginalised.
Letter to ‘Ugly Americans’ in The Alternative Media
Richard Steinhardt. A critique the the self confident insularity and occasionally reactionary postures adopted by talking heads within the independent media in the USA.
Israel Must Embrace A Middle East Identity
Richard Steinhardt. A geopolitical essay arguing Israel should reject Western proxy status and embrace a native regional Middle Eastern identity.
The Russian Federation Roped the NATO Dope
Richard Steinhardt. A strategic military and geopolitical commentary the strategy of overreach between NATO and Russia.
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