It was said that Franklin Roosevelt was, "The best newspaperman who has ever been President of the United States."*

" 'The White House school of journalism,' Raymond Clapper, one of the most distinguished of Washington reporters, labeled the entire operation.
"Every day there were two or three stories coming out of the White House.  He intended to make the whole federal government his, make it respond to his whim and vision, he did so, and in that struggle he became this century's prime manipulator of the new and increasingly powerful modern media.  Thirty and forty years later, politicians like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson would study how Franklin Roosevelt had handled the press, it was a textbook course in manipulation.

"In another time he [Roosevelt] might have seemed overbearing, but in the midst of the Depression when the nation had lost its faith, it took comfort in the fact that he was so sure of his destiny and his role.  His destiny would become theirs.

"He was the greatest news maker that Washington had ever seen. He came at a time when the society was ready for vast political and economic change, all of it enhancing the power of the President and the federal government, and he accelerated that change.  The old order had collapsed, old institutions and old myths had failed; he would create the new order.  In the new order, government would enter the everyday existence of almost all its citizens, regulating and adjusting their lives.  Under him Washington became the focal point, it determined how people worked, how much they made, what they ate, where they lived."

~ The Powers That Be, David Halberstam, American Journalist, Pulitzer Prize (1934 - 2007)Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.
~* Heywood Broun.

Today, January 20, 2013, Barack Obama will be sworn in for a second term in office as President of the United States of America.