Dore Schary’s F.D.R.

Sunrise at Campobello is a very successful play, and why shouldn’t it be? Dore Schary has demonstrated his skills before, and it was always clear that he is too sophisticated a man to lard a Broadway production with some of the stuff that pays off in Hollywood. As for the fight Franklin Roosevelt waged and won upon being struck down by polio, it is, in historical context particularly, the raw meat of drama. What one could not reasonably have counted on is the extraordinary performance of Ralph Bellamy. On first seeing him— dressed in the swimming suit of the twenties, wrestling with his children after the fatal afternoon’s swim in the frigid waters of New Brunswick— one is conscious that there is indeed a resemblance there but (thank Heaven) no cosmetic effort to exactly reproduce the original. But so convincing is his performance that very soon one loses sight of any facial (Coward-McCann, $7.50), is rather loose-jointed and weak in the text, but the illustrations are usually good and certainly various.

So there it is. Good books, bad books, fair books. Nowhere on the horizon is there a complete history of the war comparable to Douglas Southall Freeman’s treatment of Lee, nor more military studies like Fuller’s. Perhaps we can hope for such things to appear before the centennial activity is over. We can at least expect that the best memoirs, etc., will be reissued. But we must fear the obvious: that someone will shortly contrive to see in the Civil War a question-and-answer opus dealing with the great constitutional and social problems the war failed to settle, and which plague us today. The Establishment can scarcely miss such an opportunity to show us the “true lessons” of the war.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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Sunrise at Campobello is a very successful play, and why shouldn’t it be? Dore Schary has demonstrated his skills before, and it was always clear that he is too sophisticated a man to lard a Broadway production with some of the stuff that pays off in Hollywood. As for the fight Franklin Roosevelt waged and won upon being struck down by polio, it is, in historical context particularly, the raw meat of drama. What one could not reasonably have counted on is the extraordinary performance of Ralph Bellamy. On first seeing him— dressed in the swimming suit of the twenties, wrestling with his children after the fatal afternoon’s swim in the frigid waters of New Brunswick— one is conscious that there is indeed a resemblance there but (thank Heaven) no cosmetic effort to exactly reproduce the original. But so convincing is his performance that very soon one loses sight of any facial (Coward-McCann, $7.50), is rather loose-jointed and weak in the text, but the illustrations are usually good and certainly various.

So there it is. Good books, bad books, fair books. Nowhere on the horizon is there a complete history of the war comparable to Douglas Southall Freeman’s treatment of Lee, nor more military studies like Fuller’s. Perhaps we can hope for such things to appear before the centennial activity is over. We can at least expect that the best memoirs, etc., will be reissued. But we must fear the obvious: that someone will shortly contrive to see in the Civil War a question-and-answer opus dealing with the great constitutional and social problems the war failed to settle, and which plague us today. The Establishment can scarcely miss such an opportunity to show us the “true lessons” of the war.