This volume is in many ways Roosevelt's political autobiography. It permits Roosevelt, in his own words, to tell what he intended to do and what he tried to do as a political leader.

Prologue; I: Political Apprenticeship; One: Kidnapped into Politics; Two: In the Big Puddle; Three: "I Hate War; I Have Seen War"; Four: "Not a Landslide but an Earthquake"; II: The Long Wait; Five: Fate Deals a Hand; Six: "Good Neighborman"; III: Good Neighborman to New York; Seven: Back in the Main Channel; Eight: "The Objectives Were the Same"; Nine: "I Pledge You to a New Deal"; IV: Good Neighborman to the Nation; Ten: "The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself"; Eleven: "One Hundred Great Days"; Twelve: He Kept Dealing New Hands; Thirteen: Straights and Flushes and Lots of Deuces; Fourteen: The Court Ordered the Old Deck; Fifteen: Declaration of Economic Independence; Sixteen: "I See One Third of a Nation Ill-housed, Ill-clad, Ill-nourished"; Seventeen: "Fire Burn, and Cauldron Bubble"; Eighteen: The First Cold War; Nineteen: "A Date That Will Live in Infamy"; V: One Gangland or One Neighborhood; Twenty: "Angered Forces of Common Humanity"; Twenty-One: "Hit Him and Hit Him Again"; Twenty-Two: Through the Mists: One Neighborhood; Twenty-Three: "To Go Back to My Home on the Hudson"; Epilogue