The Roosevelt I Knew

A vivid and intimate portrait of the New Deal president by the first woman ever appointed to the U.S. Cabinet.

When Frances Perkins first met Franklin D. Roosevelt at a dance in 1910, she was a young social worker and he was an attractive young man making a modest debut in state politics. Over the next thirty-five years, she watched his career unfold, becoming both a close family friend and a trusted political associate whose tenure as secretary of labor spanned his entire administration. FDR and his presidential policies continue to be widely discussed in the classroom and in the media, and The Roosevelt I Knew offers a unique window onto the man whose courage and pioneering reforms still resonate in the lives of Americans today.Adam Cohen is assistant editorial page editor of The New York Times, where he has been a member of the editorial board since 2002. He was previously a senior writer at Time and is the author of The Perfect Store: Inside eBay and a coauthor of American Pharaoh, a biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Before entering journalism, Cohen was an education-reform lawyer, and he has a law degree from Harvard.