A Fireside Chat with James Roosevelt Jr.

 

Jim Roosevelt, 60, has a moon face, an easy laugh, a cluttered office and the clear, firm voice of his grandfather. He’s Rooseveltian, too, in his commitment to pairing service to community with individual accomplishment — he became CEO of Tufts Health in June 2005 — and in championing the principles underpinning what he calls “the most successful program this country has ever had.”

 

Roosevelt’s views are buttressed by his experience as an associate commissioner at the Social Security Administration under President Clinton. He aggressively guards his grandfather’s legacy from charges by Brit Hume of Fox News and other conservative groups that FDR would have supported President Bush’s privatization plans. Though he never knew his grandfather — having been born six months after he died — Roosevelt is certain that he understands the original philosophy behind Social Security. “[It] is supposed to be a part of an absolutely secure base for retirement that people will know they will have,” he says from his Waltham office. “It’s intended, as my grandfather said, to prevent destitution in retirement or disability or premature death of the wage earner.” The program, he points out, was never intended to make anyone rich. “It is supposed to free up people who have the resources to make riskier investments, but Social Security itself should not be at risk and, therefore, privatization is absolutely inappropriate.”

 

Roosevelt acknowledges that solvency issues need to be addressed, but with less drastic, fairer measures, and not under what he considers a trumped-up crisis of impending bankruptcy. He cites widely accepted projections showing that even under pessimistic assumptions Social Security can pay full benefits until 2042, and notes that FDR held out against considerable pressure to secure a discrete and inviolable line of funding for the program.

 

The basic concepts of what became Social Security are outlined in a note his grandfather sent his father in 1933, as the program was being formulated. The note, which Roosevelt keeps in his office, is written on thick, beige paper in elegant handwriting. “The details are different, but the principles are all the same,” he says, bringing it down from its perch to examine more closely. “This is what I call leadership.”

 

Because he believes that the point of Social Security is to ensure a reasonable standard of living in old age, Roosevelt opposes shifting the basis for calculating benefits. That includes “progressive indexing,” a blend of wage and price indexing, which was proposed by Boston financial executive Robert Pozen and embraced by the White House. “I know Bob Pozen. He was a classmate,” Roosevelt says. “He’s very smart and very honest. We just disagree on this.” He adds with a touch of vindication in his voice, “You’ll notice that he just came out against privatization.”

 

Current events were regularly discussed in Roosevelt’s home as he grew up. He remembers thinking that all grandmothers wrote a daily newspaper column — Eleanor Roosevelt’s My Day was syndicated nationally from 1935 to 1962 — and he cites his grandmother, who lived until he was a senior in high school, as a major influence. “She felt very strongly about every American’s responsibility to be involved in community and public life in their own way, and she certainly communicated that to her grandchildren. A little more strongly to her female grandchildren, actually, than to her male grandchildren,” adds Roosevelt, approvingly. He’s the father of three daughters himself.