Affectionately F.D.R., by James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett (Harcourt, $5.75) concentrates on F.D.R. the family man, the gallant victim of polio, rather than on F.D.R., the idolized-despised man of history. But history was so much the making of Franklin Roosevelt that what remains of him in Hyde Park and Campobello and Warm Springs and even in the private chambers of the White House is, well, dull. Further, James Roosevelt seems to be addicted to the great democratic idea that to be endearing his subject must be described vulgarly. As a result the portrait is drawn with methodical banality.
The five children (consistently referred to as “kids” or “chicks”) were “highly individualistic persons with independent minds” who, frequently though they “scrapped,” would “in times of crisis… close ranks and fight to the death for [sic] each other.” “Though most people thought of [F.D.R.] as an extroverted, gregarious person… basically he was a shy, reticent person.” And Groton, Harvard and his mother notwithstanding, he was not a snob; James Roosevelt himself has spoken to “old-timers” in Warm Springs “who swear they have seen Pa sample some of these [locally distilled] beverages, drinking right out of a fruit jar along with everyone else.” When the Secret
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