John Chamberlain on Eleanor and Franklin

Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers By Joseph P. Lash Norton, 765 pp., $15 “Majesty and mischief,” so William S. White summed up the public service of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The phrase keeps running through one’s mind as one turns the pages of Joseph P. Lash’s packed, emotionally stirring and nostalgialaden Eleanor and Franklin. FDR used the “missus” for his own ends, which were often complex to the point of deviousness, and she used him, though in a far more candid way. Their purposes, both for good and for ill, ran together more often than not. When I was much younger I felt that their buoyancy had turned the U.S. back from the brink of collapse, which may or may not have been true. But husband and wife in the White House shared the same incredible naiveté about many things, from economics to Stalin, and, while the New Deal may have had its temporary use, the verdict is not yet in: maybe the Roosevelt years have laid the basis for our permanent loss of character as a nation. Collapse may have been merely postponed.

The great deficiency of Mr. Lash’s book is its lack of even a spoonful of the salt of skepticism. Before going into that, however, one must pay tribute to Mr. Lash’s skill as a biographer. It is impossible not to be moved by the human story he has to tell. There was the uncertain and frightened girl, niece of “Uncle Ted” Roosevelt but an orphan among the Oyster Bay branch of her tribe. She was bedeviled by her own feelings of inadequacy, her sense that she had been unwanted by her mother (who died young), her half-realized knowledge that there was something wrong with her father (he was an alcoholic), and her conviction that she was ugly. With her Uncle Ted in mind, she tried to be duty’s child, and she made much of the tender letters she received from her father Elliott Roosevelt after he had been banished to drink himself to death. She lived with her Hall relatives at Tivoli on the Hudson; when she visited with the Roosevelts, who were generally gay and ebullient, “Eleanor,” as her cousin Corinne recalled, “was just sad.”

JC

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John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers By Joseph P. Lash Norton, 765 pp., $15 “Majesty and mischief,” so William S. White summed up the public service of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The phrase keeps running through one’s mind as one turns the pages of Joseph P. Lash’s packed, emotionally stirring and nostalgialaden Eleanor and Franklin. FDR used the “missus” for his own ends, which were often complex to the point of deviousness, and she used him, though in a far more candid way. Their purposes, both for good and for ill, ran together more often than not. When I was much younger I felt that their buoyancy had turned the U.S. back from the brink of collapse, which may or may not have been true. But husband and wife in the White House shared the same incredible naiveté about many things, from economics to Stalin, and, while the New Deal may have had its temporary use, the verdict is not yet in: maybe the Roosevelt years have laid the basis for our permanent loss of character as a nation. Collapse may have been merely postponed.

The great deficiency of Mr. Lash’s book is its lack of even a spoonful of the salt of skepticism. Before going into that, however, one must pay tribute to Mr. Lash’s skill as a biographer. It is impossible not to be moved by the human story he has to tell. There was the uncertain and frightened girl, niece of “Uncle Ted” Roosevelt but an orphan among the Oyster Bay branch of her tribe. She was bedeviled by her own feelings of inadequacy, her sense that she had been unwanted by her mother (who died young), her half-realized knowledge that there was something wrong with her father (he was an alcoholic), and her conviction that she was ugly. With her Uncle Ted in mind, she tried to be duty’s child, and she made much of the tender letters she received from her father Elliott Roosevelt after he had been banished to drink himself to death. She lived with her Hall relatives at Tivoli on the Hudson; when she visited with the Roosevelts, who were generally gay and ebullient, “Eleanor,” as her cousin Corinne recalled, “was just sad.”