ELEANOR AND FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: The Story of their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers

by Joseph P. Lash ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 1971

Essentially a sympathetic biography of Eleanor Roosevelt by an old friend, this gigantic book traces her relationship with FDR. There are no startling revelations. The pre-White House years, however, are especially absorbing reading. Family branches are anecdotally traced, and Eleanor's youth fully described, with well-dimensioned portraits of her scornful mother, dissolute father, chilly grandmother, and flighty aunts, as well as her emergence into self-confidence at boarding school. The FDR courtship is convincingly presented as an earnest, rather tender affair. Along with World War I, FDR's intrigue with Lucy Mercer is held responsible for Eleanor's emergence as a public woman: Lash underlines the fact that she did give Franklin the option of divorce. The sunrise-at-Campobello efforts are played down, but Eleanor's conflicts with her mother-in-law are prominent throughout. Louis Howe, who developed Eleanor's political and organizational capabilities, brought the couple together on new terms but two households were gradually established with two camps of intimates and a good deal of jealousy on Eleanor's part, as when Hopkins deserted her patronage for FDR's. But as Lash shows she learned to exert influence in more subtle ways, she served as ""double agent,"" a spokesman for liberal causes inside the White House, and a White House agent in liberal circles; she was a ""loving and principled opposition"" to the husband/politician whom Lash presents as shallow, basically heartless, and shocking in his enthusiasm for replacing Dr. New Deal with Dr. Win-the-War. There are relatively dull chronicles of Eleanor's projects, her relations with youth, Communists, pacifists, minority groups, etc. (she got over her anti-Semitism but even in the '30's used ""darky""). The book ends with FDR's death and Eleanor's discovery that Lucy Mercer had joined bis Warm Springs circle. The kind of hagiographer who loves all the warts instead of erasing them, Lash shows Eleanor to have been both humorless and self-ironic, pragmatically shrewd and contemptibly naive, and shows the relationship to have been a source of recurrent pain. Lash's occasional bursts of fulsomeness are matched by excerpts from the malicious Alice Roosevelt Longworth. There are cozy limits to the psychological depths and hardly any sense at all of political landscape, but the story is broad and rich enough to engage its doubtless large readership.

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION