Countdown to the most popular prez: FDR

6. Barack Obama

5. Theodore Roosevelt

4. Ronald Reagan 

3. Andrew Jackson 

2. Franklin Roosevelt

Each generation has its historical touchstones, the moments that are etched in shared memory. Nearly all Americans born between about 1910 and 1935 could (and in some cases still can) recall where they were when they received news that Franklin Roosevelt had died. He was the longest-serving president in American history. For many of that generation, at the time he died he was the only president they could remember.

And they could remember Franklin Roosevelt in a way no previous generation had remembered a president. Roosevelt had come into their homes on a regular basis during the twelve years of his presidency. The great presidents are masters of the dominant medium of communication of their day. Roosevelt's medium was radio, and he used it to connect emotionally to Americans as no president had connected before and no president would after. Radio allowed Roosevelt to speak to tens of millions of Americans at once, but in a voice that allowed each to think he was speaking to him or her alone. 

On Sunday evenings, three or four times a year, Roosevelt's voice would come over the airwaves and through the radio speakers in living rooms and kitchens around the country. Its tone was reassuring, especially in the dark days of the Great Depression. These fireside chats, as Roosevelt called them, caused Americans to think of the president as a distinguished friend, a well-connected uncle, a powerful father. Like a father, he laid out the challenges facing the American family. He explained what his administration proposed to do about them. And he invited his listeners, the members of his family, to join him in overcoming the challenges.

Roosevelt didn't offer reassurance only. His four terms in office were filled with more substance than any other president’s one or two terms.The New Deal programs of his first two terms dramatically altered the relationship between government and individual Americans. The 1936 election was a referendum on the initial phase of the New Deal, and Americans delivered a thunderous endorsement. He won election to an unprecedented third term in 1940, and then to a fourth term in 1944, when American voters concluded they couldn't do without him amid the worst war in human history.

Like other enormously popular presidents, Roosevelt was enormously unpopular among a minority of voters. Conservatives called him a socialist for intruding government into the economy as no president had done before. Opponents of American involvement in World War II accused him of misleading America into a conflict that was not America’s business and not in America’s interest. Distrusters of executive power condemned his use of the war to make himself what amounted to president for life.

Roosevelt’s supporters were unfazed. His popular margins of victory diminished from the peak of 1936, but he still outdistanced his opponents easily. His strength was fading toward the end, as anyone who compared photos from 1932 with pictures from 1944 could tell.

Even so, when the nation learned on Sunday April 12, 1945, that a cerebral hemorrhage had taken Roosevelt’s life, the world seemed to stand still. Harry Truman, the vice president who became his successor, said he felt as though the sun, the moon and all the planets had fallen on him. Other Americans put it differently: they’d lost a father, a trusted captain of the ship of state, the one who made them believe government cared about them. Most were sure they’d never see his like again.

They never did.