Isaiah Berlin spent most of the years of World War II in Washington, DC, at the British Embassy, writing perceptive, incisive accounts of the war and its major figures on all sides, as well as gathering friends among Washington's young and liberal elite.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. remembered him many years later, after Berlin's death in 1997: "I first encountered Isaiah in the winter of 1942–3. He was then only thirty-three years old. One was startled from the beginning by the glittering rush of words and wit, the dazzling command of ideas, the graceful and unforced erudition, the penetrating assessments of personalities, the passion for music, the talent for merriment and, most remarkable of all, the generosity of spirit that led him to treat all of us as his intellectual equals. He had the exciting quality of intensifying life so that one perceived more and thought more and understood more."
Schlesinger continued,
"His years in Washington confirmed him in his view of the benefits of pragmatism in political affairs. He was delighted by the young men and women of the New Deal and exhilarated by the spirit and effectiveness of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s humane experimentalism. The New Deal, he later said, was ‘the most constructive compromise between individual liberty and economic security which our own time has witnessed’. He regarded FDR as ‘the most genuine and unswerving spokesman of democracy of his time, the most contemporary, the most outward-looking, the boldest, most imaginative, most large-spirited, free from the obsessions of an inner life, with an unparalleled capacity for creating confidence in the power of his insight, his foresight, and his capacity genuinely to identify himself with the ideals of humble people’. As Roger Hausheer writes in the introduction to the recently published Berlin anthology The Proper Study of Mankind, ‘Berlin has always been an enthusiastic New Dealer – a natural allegiance, surely, for an objective pluralist.’ His love and hope for America survived even the vicissitudes of the post-war years.
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"Isaiah was above all a most civilised man in this horribly uncivilised century – the ‘most terrible century in Western history’, he called it. Wise, brave, kind, unaffected, an exemplar of moral courage, unalterably committed to the politics of decency, he was himself a stirring prediction of what a truly civilised world might be."
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Though in the course of his war years in Washington, improbably, Berlin never saw FDR and heard him only on the radio, he later wrote of him with extraordinary insight. "He was seeking to establish new rules of social justice," and to do that "without forcing his country into some doctrinaire strait-jacket, whether of socialism or State capitalism, or the kind of new social organization which the Fascist regimes flaunted as the New Order." Roosevelt, for Berlin, was a supreme example, of "political skill - indeed virtuosity - which no American before him had ever possessed." He was, preeminently, a fox, "a magnificient virtuoso of this type, and he was the most benevolent as well as the greatest master of his craft in modern times.... He became a legendary hero - they themselves did not know quite why - to the indigent and the oppressed, far beyond the confines of the English-speaking world."
"Roosevelt's example strengthened democracy everywhere, that is to say the view that the promotion of social justice and individual liberty does not necessarily mean the end of all efficient government; that power and order are not identical with a strait-jacket of doctrine, whether economic or political; that it is possible to reconcile individual liberty - a loose texture of society - with the indispensible minimum of organizing and authority; and in this belief lies what Roosevelt's greatest predecessor once described as 'the last best hope of earth.'"*
*Berlin was referring to Abraham Lincoln's message to Congress on December 1, 1862.