Statues, especially memorial statues, seem to require lots of drapery, though we are seldom told why. Even Lincoln, though he doesn't seem to need it, has a big cloak tossed over the back of his throne. FDR wears a floor-length cape, and a gratuitous blanket has been thrown over the lead horse in Baskin's funeral cortege, as if cloth were a sort of blessing. One thing that's missing is his deadliness. Roosevelt, Navy-trained, was a planner of battles, a deployer of armies and armadas.
Most memorials dedicated to warriors cloak the death.
The Vietnam veterans' wall, with its named dead, is one exception. This Roosevelt, unlike the man himself, has none of that ferocity. And a bit humorless. The cartoonists of his day rightly understood it as symbolic of his spirit. He used it to chase gloom away, the way the good fairy uses her wand, and to demonstrate self-confidence, the way the general uses his swagger stick.