Success Quote by Stuart Symington

Power, Symington suggests, is often a private scrapbook dressed up as public service. The aside about “how many pictures of ships they took out of the White House after he died” is a needle of domestic detail aimed at puncturing the monument. FDR the war leader gets reduced, for a beat, to FDR the Navy enthusiast who never quite stopped being Assistant Secretary in his head. The phrase “now forgotten” does double work: it flatters the speaker’s access to inside lore while hinting at how quickly even the supposedly intimate truths of great men evaporate into trivia.

Then Symington pivots: “But he could choose good men.” The “but” is the whole point. Yes, Roosevelt was sentimental, maybe even a little obsessive, curating ship imagery like a collector. Yet Symington, a businessman turned public servant, is quietly staking out a managerial theory of leadership: taste matters, not as aesthetics but as judgment of people. In an era when the presidency was swelling into an executive empire, Symington’s line implies that Roosevelt’s real genius wasn’t the iconography of strength but the staffing of it - the capacity to assemble competence and loyalty at scale.

There’s also a small swipe at the way Washington remembers. We preserve grand narratives and lose the revealing oddities. Symington keeps the oddity because it humanizes FDR without diminishing him; it makes the case that idiosyncrasy and effectiveness can coexist. The ships aren’t just decoration. They’re a clue about how Roosevelt imagined the state: as a fleet, coordinated, crewed, and commanded.