THE YANKEE SPHINX

A historical novel inspired by the public and private lives of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

FDR’s arc across the 20th century is broadly known: marriage and estrangement, polio and paralysis, election four times to the White House. The narrator, Bill Hassett, is a journalist who joins Roosevelt’s administration in 1935. For ten years he keeps a daily account of the public and private actions of the man he calls the Boss in an “effort to pierce the lifelong veil of secrecy FDR had drawn around himself.” Hassett wants to understand what makes FDR tick—he differs so completely from his predecessors—and he comes closer than most because the two men like and trust each other. The nickname “Sphinx” comes from FDR’s ability to keep his intentions to himself. Will he run for a third term in 1940? The press keeps asking, and like a sphinx, he refuses to answer. He doesn’t really want to, but if his Party insists…Then, in 1941, the United States goes to war. Once FDR makes a difficult decision, advisor Harry Hopkins says, he’s “serene as a goddamn Buddha.…He’s the damn Yankee Sphinx.” Hassett observes the emotional and physical separation between Franklin and Eleanor and offers a fascinating reason why they didn’t divorce so Franklin could marry Lucy Mercer Rutherford. Franklin is a complex man with frailties both moral and physical: He uses a wheelchair beginning in 1921 following a bout with polio and is eventually diagnosed with congestive heart failure, yet he claims to be in “exemplary health” while doctors beg him to cut down on smoking. But Hassett learned in his youth that life is “about as eternal as a lit match,” a theme that gains ever more relevance as the president’s health declines. This is closer to nonfiction wrapped in skilled storytelling in the manner of Jeff Shaara’s novel The Old Lion (2023), about FDR’s fifth cousin, Teddy Roosevelt. Readers won’t be able to distinguish the diarist’s remembrance from the author’s fiction, save the dialogue.

A compassionate story about one of the most consequential Americans of the 20th century.