Edward Asner Gives FDR His Say

For the record, there is almost no physical resemblance between President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with his patrician good looks, and legendary TV newsman Lou Grant, with that penetrating scowl. No matter. Edward Asner plays each of them with more than enough conviction to be absolutely convincing.

"I never looked a bit like FDR but I try to sound as much as I can like him," he said. "Besides, almost all of it is sitting down. Who's going to compare height when you're doing that?"

Asner, multi-Emmy-winning star of Lou Grant and co-star on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, will bring his one-man show, FDR, to CSUN's Valley Performing Arts Center on Thursday. Using many of the words written by Dore Schary for the play, Sunrise at Campobello,  Asner will transport yet another audience back to a time when nearly all Americans not only believed in their president but dearly loved him.

"It is a very huge history lesson for a lot of people," Asner said from Austin, Texas, where he performed the show last week.  "My main reason for doing it is to show what this country produced in terms of a great leader and to ask the same kind of results from any other leader."

Most historians regard Roosevelt, who led America through the Great Depression and practically to the end of World War II, as one of the greatest of all presidents. They get no argument from Asner.

"He was a master of finesse," the actor said. "He knew how to use people. He knew how to draw the best out of them. He knew how to combine their efforts. He knew a good idea when he smelled it. And he was brave. With all of his chameleon-like wheeling and dealing, he was still brave."

At 39, Roosevelt had become ill, perhaps with polio, that left him paralyzed from the waist down.  "He willed himself to be strong during that disease," Asner said. "He conquered it."  And with the cooperation of the White House reporters, most of whom respected and admired him, there were practically no public images of him in a wheelchair or on crutches.

Although most scholars praise FDR's leadership and vision, some controversies remain unresolved. Did FDR know in advance about Japanese plans to bomb Pearl Harbor but look the other way for strategic reasons? Did he cater to anti-Semitism by electing not to bomb the Auschwitz death camp even though he knew it was a murder factory?

Asner addresses both questions as FDR and shared his own thoughts.

"My feeling is that, by their actions, they (the FDR administration) knew the Japanese would try something because they were frustrated in their attempts to get oil. But I don't think that he ever considered Pearl Harbor was a possibility," Asner said. "I speak about how they bombed a gunship in China. He thought there might have been a bigger incident than that but nothing compared to the attack on Pearl Harbor."

Asner previously narrated a documentary on the American failure to bomb Auschwitz  despite the pleas of Roosevelt's own head of the Treasury department, Robert Morganthau. 

"It could have been done so simply, which is evidence of the great amount of anti-Semitism that existed in government and in the country at that time."

Though FDR was not anti-Semitic, his failure in this respect is a black mark on his leadership, Asner said.

"Greatness does not mean 100 percent purity. Greatness does not mean that there are no evil acts of either omission or comission," Asner explained. "Even if he was anti-Semitic, the fact that he knew to take Jews into his administration is a sign of his greatness because he overcame his antipathies and put some of the best people in the country to work for him."

Asner, known as much for his passionate pursuit of social justice as his much-honored acting career, shows no signs of slowing down. At 81, he is not only performing FDR but preparing a second one-man show. Meanwhile, he and fellow cast members of Working Class on CMT are awaiting word of whether the comedy will be renewed for a second season.

His appearance at CSUN is part of his third FDR tour,  which has taken him to cities large and small.

"We've been everywhere," he said. "We had a show in Grand Rapids, Minnesota–six hundred people–and they loved it. And then we ended up in Manitowoc, Wisconsin in a 1,200-seat theater with 250 people in attendance. It's an arch-Republican area."