Eleanor As Cold Warrior

Eleanor: The Years Alone By Joseph P. Lash Norton, 368 pp., $9.95 Frances Perkins, the woman who had been chosen to be Secretary of Labor by Franklin D. Roosevelt, complained from her obscure post-political refuge at the Cornell School of Industrial Relations that Eleanor Roosevelt did not even have an intellectually tidy mind. The judgment may have been born in pique, for FDR’s widow had gone out from the White House to perform on the world stage of the UN while Frances had been relegated to Big-Frog-in-Small-Puddle status. Yet, regardless of motivation, Miss Perkins’ observation was true enough. To the end, Eleanor Roosevelt wholly lacked a capacity for abstract thought. This, combined with her native innocence, laid her open to all those Westbrook Pegler parodies that struck home with such visible impact before they became dulled by incessant repetition.

But if she never learned to dig out a major premise, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been born a lady in the society of Old New York, did know when she had been struck in the face. Up against Andrei Vishinsky, the old purge trial prosecutor, in the UN, she learned some things about the cold war from experience that she never could have deduced from reading even the plainest critique of Marxism. The most surprising thing about Joe Lash’s book, which completes the chronicle begun in his Eleanor and Franklin, is his exaltation of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Cold Warrior.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

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

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Eleanor: The Years Alone By Joseph P. Lash Norton, 368 pp., $9.95 Frances Perkins, the woman who had been chosen to be Secretary of Labor by Franklin D. Roosevelt, complained from her obscure post-political refuge at the Cornell School of Industrial Relations that Eleanor Roosevelt did not even have an intellectually tidy mind. The judgment may have been born in pique, for FDR’s widow had gone out from the White House to perform on the world stage of the UN while Frances had been relegated to Big-Frog-in-Small-Puddle status. Yet, regardless of motivation, Miss Perkins’ observation was true enough. To the end, Eleanor Roosevelt wholly lacked a capacity for abstract thought. This, combined with her native innocence, laid her open to all those Westbrook Pegler parodies that struck home with such visible impact before they became dulled by incessant repetition.

But if she never learned to dig out a major premise, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been born a lady in the society of Old New York, did know when she had been struck in the face. Up against Andrei Vishinsky, the old purge trial prosecutor, in the UN, she learned some things about the cold war from experience that she never could have deduced from reading even the plainest critique of Marxism. The most surprising thing about Joe Lash’s book, which completes the chronicle begun in his Eleanor and Franklin, is his exaltation of Eleanor Roosevelt, the Cold Warrior.