Historian David Reynolds looks past the New Deal and the war rooms to the private man behind them, arguing that Franklin Roosevelt's presidency cannot be separated from the wreckage of his marriage. Eleanor Roosevelt discovered her husband's affair with Lucy Mercer years before he took office, and the film traces how the couple's arrangement, one of political partnership without intimacy, shaped the secrecy that came to define his White House. Reynolds walks through the concealment of Roosevelt's paralysis from polio, the small circle who managed what the public and even his own cabinet were allowed to see, and the toll of running a country through depression and world war while isolated inside a household built on discretion rather than trust. Archival photographs, newsreel footage, and Reynolds' own narration carry the argument, moving between the intimate details of the marriage and the constitutional weight of the decisions Roosevelt made largely alone. It is a portrait of power sustained by loneliness rather than undone by it.