Unprecedented power

As President Obama began to unveil sweeping government programs to restore the crippled economy, the pubic and media drew numerous comparisons with the actions of Franklin Roosevelt, who faced the grim prospects of the the Great Depression almost eighty years earlier. Now, Steven Fenberg tells the story of Jesse Holman Jones, the Houston businessman who went to Washington as an appointed official and provided the pragmatic leadership that salvaged capitalism during the Great Depression and militarized industry in time to fight and win World War II. Jones - an entrepreneur with an eighth-grade education who built Houston's tallest buildings of the time - was considered to be the most powerful person in the nation, next to President Roosevelt.