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FDR's Grandson, Delano Roosevelt, Talks Democratic Party, JetBlue, Long Beach And His Life

by Doug Krikorian
Special to LBREPORT.com

Mr. Krikorian, an award winning journalist and author of two books, earned multiple awards in his 22 years of writing for the Long Beach Press-Telegram and 22 years for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He is happily retired in Naples.



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(August 10, 2020, 7:35 a.m.) -- He is a scion of the legendary Roosevelt family of Hyde Park whose most prominent member, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was his grandfather and America's only four-term president during an historically eventful incumbency in which he oversaw the Great Depression and World War II and instituted the New Deal with its slew of policies that dramatically increased the role of the federal government.

His great uncle Teddy Roosevelt served as the 26th president of the United States---he took over when William McKinley was assassinated on September 14, 1901 and left office in 1909---and is enshrined on Mt. Rushmore along with Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

His father James Roosevelt became a Brigadier General of the Marines during World War II and earned the Silver Cross for his South Pacific exploits and also was active in Democratic politics -- he was a trusted advisor to FDR and Time Magazine in 1937 described him as the "Assistant President of the United States" -- and served six terms as a U.S. Congressman from Los Angeles before becoming a UN Ambassador to Geneva for America.


Former Cong. James Roosevelt (left) with son Delano Roosevelt (right), circa 1977. Photo courtesy Del Roosevelt.

To say the life of Hall Delano Roosevelt has been unique, unusual, even unreal, would be a staggering understatement of epic proportion.

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"Obviously, when I was very young, I didn't understand our family's lore," he says. "But as the years went by, I certainly began to understand it, although I always remained a typical young kid who just liked to have fun.

"But I'd hear comments over the years about my grandfather, some very good and some very negative. I'll never forget the time I went to a March of Dimes event with my father at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. I was seated at a table with 10 people, none of whom I knew.

"Bob Hope was the Master of Ceremonies, and my dad was one of the speakers. When he was up there talking, an older fellow seated next to me said, 'That guy Jimmy Roosevelt is the biggest sonofabitch there is! The only sonofabitch worse than him was his old man.'

"And, after my dad spoke, he came down to our table and asked me how he did. The guy next to me turned absolutely white. He got up and headed briskly to the exit. I guess sometimes karma does intervene. I was 16 at the time."

Delano Roosevelt -- he goes by his middle name -- actually has had a political imprint in Long Beach, having been elected as a councilman of the 4th District in 1995 and serving until 2000 when he was unseated by the person he had defeated five years earlier, Dennis Carroll.

"I started believing my own press clippings -- and took it for granted I'd be re-elected, which is the worst thing a politician can do," he says. "It was totally my fault I didn't get re-elected. I just messed up."

But Mr. Roosevelt didn't mess up in one vital area.

"I was on the city council that welcomed Jet Blue to Long Beach and promised it we'd renovate the Long Beach Airport," he says proudly. "And that's precisely what we did. I was saddened to hear that Jet Blue plans to depart Long Beach. They've been such a great neighbor and friend to this community over the years. They have given money to so many organizations and they were such a great airline. Major loss for Long Beach."

Of course, he still closely follows the political scene, and admits the Democratic Party of today isn't faintly like the one of his younger days.

"This is not the Democratic Party I grew up in," he says. "That one always kept an open door policy for the other side of the aisle. In those days, both sides would work to get to the middle, to make compromises. There used to be a bi-partisan cooperation. But no longer. Both sides these days pretty well refuse to bend.

"The Democratic Party was always known to give you the shirt off its back if you were in trouble. But one of the stipulations was always that you would have to get a job, unless you were physically and mentally unable to work. But now a lot of people don't work---and still get money. That's not right. I don't know how the politicians are going to put the genie back in the bottle."

Born on June 27, 1959, at Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles, Delano Roosevelt attended Brentwood Military Academy and graduated from Pacific Palisades High between spending six years with his family in Geneva.

"I learned to speak fluent French," he says of his time in Switzerland.

"Like many teenagers who have gone to school at Pacific Palisades across the decades, Mr. Roosevelt became more obsessed with surfing than studying and moved with a friend after his high school graduation to Balboa Island where he had a lot of fun surfing at nearby beaches and not a lot of fun attending Orange Coast College.

After a year of such frivolity, he re-located to Westwood and began attending Woodbury College and majoring in business.

He wound up going to work for Southern California Edison where he became heavily involved in its energy conservation services and later served for a decade as its community relations representative, taking various elected officials and VIPs to the company's key outlets around the area.

In 1980 during his time with Edison, he moved to Long Beach where he had an office and later would meet his wife, the former Janice Stockton, a Jordan High graduate with whom he would have two sons.

After departing Edison and working a few years at the old Sea Launch communications satellite operation at the Long Beach port, he teamed with a New York gentleman named Robert Stang to start a company called Global Energy Preservation.

"The company was based in New York, and I was spending most of my time back there, as my wife stayed in Long Beach taking care of our kids," he says. "That wasn't working out for her -- or for me. So I eventually sold my share of the business to my partner and returned home."

He scuffled for awhile after that -- a contractor job here, a consulting gig there -- but his life would change dramatically one January afternoon in 2005 when out of nowhere he received a phone call from a Dr. Michael Saba, who said to Mr. Roosevelt, "I'm representing His Royal Highness, King Abdullah Bin Abduliziz of Saudi Arabia."

"I immediately hung up on the guy thinking it was some kind of hoax, but he called right back and said to me, 'I knew you'd hang up . . .people always do when I tell them who I'm representing,'" relates Mr. Roosevelt. "It turns out what he wanted from me was to help improve Saudi Arabia's image in America, which after 9/11 wasn't that positive.

"And he sought me out because I was FDR's grandson. You must understand the historic impact my grandfather had on Saudi Arabia. On February 14, 1945, he became the first American president to meet with a Saudi Arabian king, who then was Abdul Aziz Bin Abdul Rahman. They met on the USS Quincy on the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt, and they got along great. The visit turned out to be quite historic because it set in motion America becoming the dominant figure in Saudi Arabia's oil.

"I accepted Dr. Saba's offer, and soon after that I began traveling around the country with a Prince Turky Al Faisal. We went to many cities throughout America giving speeches about Saudi Arabia and it turned out to be quite successful."

Delano Roosevelt must have made a deep impression on the Saudis, since he's been heavily involved with the country for the past 15 years, serving as the director of business development for the Alireza family, who are among the most successful merchants in the Kingdom.

He also is the president and CEO of something called the US-Saudi Business Council in Washington D.C.

He divides his time these days among Washington D.C., where he maintains an apartment, Saudi Arabia and Long Beach, where he still has the same east Long Beach home he bought in 1989.

"I'm now on the go a lot, but eventually my wife and I will retire to our house in Long Beach," he says. "I love the city. No, I won't run for office again. This Roosevelt is done with politics, which is not like I remember it anyway..."


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