I have been sharply reminded that I have not written about Mrs. Roosevelt, and that only a coward would use the excuse that when she died, he was in Africa. There, there are lions and tigers and apartheid. Here, there was Mrs. Roosevelt to write about. Africa was the safer place.
People get very sore when you knock the old lady. And it isn’t just the widow who thinks of Mrs. Roosevelt as the goddess who saved her children from getting rickets during the Depression. It is also the Left intellectuals. “When are you going to stop picking on Mrs. Roosevelt?” a very learned writer asked me at a reception a few years ago after one of my books was published. (I had a sentence in it that annoyed him, something like, “Following Mrs. Roosevelt in search of irrationality is like following a lighted fuse in search of an explosion: one never has to wait very long.”) I answered: “When you begin picking on her.” I meant by that that people are best reformed by those they will listen to. Westbrook Pegler could never reform Mrs. Roosevelt, or her legend. But Adlai Stevenson, or Max Lerner, might have.
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