No Ordinary Time
Goodwin, Doris Kearns
W ith No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin has produced a history of Franklin and (especially) Eleanor Roosevelt's years in the White House that is cause for celebration. Granted, it is written at...
...When she writes to her great friend, Lorena Hickock, "Hick darling, I want to put my arms around you, to hold you close," and when Hick replies, "Most clearly I remember your eyes . . . and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips," what is the intelligent eighth-grader to think...
...Granted, it is written at the level of an intelligent eighth-grader...
...Another reads, "Separation between people who love each other makes the reunion always like a new discovery...
...You forget how much you love certain movements of the hands or the glance in the person's eyes or how nice it is to sit in the same room and look at their back...
...There is, then, much food for thought in Mrs...
...Isn't it important to introduce young readJoseph Shattan is a writer living in Silver Spring, Maryland...
...I believe Eleanor sort of fell in love with Joe Lash and began to feel like a young woman again," observes Lash's friend, the eminent scholar Lewis Feuer, and her letters to Lash bear Feuer out...
...Goodwin makes it clear that reporters collaborated with the White House in disguising President Roosevelt's disability...
...0 f particular interest to me is the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Joseph P. Lash...
...T o be sure, FDR's marital infidelities and Mrs...
...Roosevelt, it seems, was on poor terms with her four sons, but on the most intimate terms with the youthful student activist...
...Call me a fuddy-duddy if you will, but these passionate avowals of love made by a 60-year-old woman to a man half her age strike me as strange...
...Was this unusual state of affairs part of what Eleanor called the "old order of things" that needed to be swept away...
...Are you fascinated by the White House butler's recollection of Winston Churchill, "standing in his long underwear, demanding a 90year-old brandy in his White House suite every night...
...Against the Soviet Union...
...Goodwin cites repeatedly and approvingly, that, "the war would not be worth winning if the old order of things prevailed" in the United States—was this a reasonable position for Mrs...
...Again, there is much room for spirited discussion here...
...Think of No Ordinary Time as the literary equivalent of midnight basketball—a way of reaching out to the kids...
...I warmly sec-and the respectful reviews it has received from some of our most eminent historians...
...How many of our children have heard of Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle...
...Roosevelt's unconventional private life raise complicated issues...
...Roosevelt to take...
...These are the sort of vivid and arresting anecdotes that make history come alive for young readers, and Mrs...
...This raises a troubling question: Can a man carry on an intense relationship with an older woman for many years, then write an objective biography of her...
...As a result, most Americans hadn't the vaguest idea that the man they had elected president for four consecutive terms was a paraplegic...
...And the first lady's insistence, which Mrs...
...For that matter, how many adults know who Harry Hopkins was, or Bernard Baruch, or John Lewis...
...Can you picture "how the president's face would light up when his daughter, Anna, walked into the room...
...The gifted social studies instructor could organize many animated debates around this crucial and controversial issue...
...Eleanor's barely repressed, lesbianism might be difficult for a young person to comprehend...
...It does, however, contain a floor plan of the second story of the Roosevelt White House that carefully explains who slept where—just the kind of striking detail a twelve- or thirteenyear-old might relish before moving on to high school...
...For his part, the object of Eleanor's love could think of nothing more apt than to note in his diary, "She personifies my belief and faith in the possibility of the social democratic way instead of the communist...
...Stranger still is that when Lash published his massive, Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Eleanor Roosevelt in 1971, NO ORDINARY TIME: FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: THE HOME FRONT IN WORLD WAR II Doris Kearns Goodwin Simon & Schuster/759 pages /$30 reviewed by JOSEPH SHATTAN 82 The American Spectator December 1994 he never mentioned these letters, let alone the feelings that inspired them...
...It contains not a single new insight, not a single sparkling sentence, not even a single map...
...Did an imperfect America have no moral right to wage and win a war against Nazi Germany...
...Do you know "the nightly ritual Roosevelt followed as he tried to fall asleep in the middle of the war...
...Goodwin's book...
...Goodwin provides them in abundance...
...Or consider the role of the media during FDR's presidency...
...ers to these great historical personages in a "reader-friendly" fashion, while leaving the complicated diplomacy and strategy for grad school...
...The American Spectator December 1994 83...
...My quarrel is with the book-review editors who insist on treating it as a serious work of history written for grown-ups and refuse to place it in the Young Readers' section, where it could do so much more good...
...Eggheads, neocons, and other killjoys might question the propriety of treating the great and terrible events of World War II as little more than the backdrop for a lengthy, White House–based soap opera, but who are we to judge...
...I'd like to believe you had a right to my love and interest," goes one such letter...
Vol. 27 • December 1994 • No. 12
