FLORENCE KING: A Man's Woman

...In the intervening 230 pages, Barone uses his well-honed style of learned political analysis (familiar to political junkies, such as I, who devour his biannual Almanac of American Politics) to cover the period from the English Civil War to the Glorious Revolution for which Lord Macaulay needed five volumes of dense mid-19th century prose...

...TR was ever vocal about his belief in “large families, the purity of and the courage to bell the cat...

...Thomas E. Dewey’s handsome, the little man on the wedding cake,” was actually coined by two women editors putting out a brochure for the GOP...

...A Man’s Woman b o o K s I n R e V I e W T n c u o Y “ , s u a c e b 8 4 9 1 n i n a m u r T t s n i a g a n r h f o r i g a s a , 6 e b o t d e v l h r e k o m s thing ou w r w o uss i ified era ho 9 lds sacred...

...No matter what, this child would always be hers and, in the way children do, could fill an ancient void inside her...

...and two, loving life in the White House, she wanted to catch a husband of presidential timber and 7 2 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8 b o o K s I n R e V I e W again, and so she took refuge once more in her dependable substitute of shocking the bourgeoisie...

...But even worse than smoking was Alice’s other indulgence, one for which she was even more famous: She was witty...

...They were still held together by mutual political ambitions, he to use the Roosevelt connection to become president and she to get back in the White House, but the one time she almost left him was over politics...

...The author analyzes the various theories that have been put forth: she may have been seized by late-blooming guilt for defying TR’s dictum that motherhood was woman’s sacred duty and decided to do hers while there was still time...

...Alice and Nick hammered out a modus vivendi and settled into a workable marriage, but he still ran with women...

...One, she needed much more money than her trust fund provided...

...After Nick died in 1931, President Herbert Hoover and Ohio Sen...

...She obeyed but she campaigned for the Bull Moosers anyway, and Nick lost his seat...

...or she may have wanted Nick to think the baby was his...

...Secretary of War William Howard Taft kept track of the number of cigarettes she went through and worriedly noted her jitteriness when protocol prevented her from smoking after state dinners...

...From Britain (“one corner of Europe”), however, there emerged “constitutional monarchy with limits on government, guaranteed rights, relatively benign religious toleration, and free market global capitalism...

...She simply stopped doing it, and Washington gradually followed suit...

...This massive conspiracy and successful coup d’état, in the interpretation of Michael Barone, would inspire the American republic’s liberties, from representative democracy to individual gun rights...

...Her closest friend Ruth Hanna seriousness and actually coached her in drawing-room repartee, finishing sentences for her until she developed a bad stutter and a “receding” personality...

...Alice adored Aunt Bye and wanted to stay with her but TR said no, and so Alice lost another mother...

...TR forbade it, took Nick’s side, and ordered her to stay away from the convention...

...Nick went beyond the call of duty, not only acknowledging the little girl as his, but doting on her and proudly taking her everywhere...

...Among the subjects that loomed largest in Alice’s wide-ranging intellectual interests and compulsive reading were evolution, eugenics, and Social Darwinism...

...The author tries to put a better face on it than other biographers, who have said that she mocked and bullied the child, but she is forced to admit that Alice was disappointed in Paulina’s quiet M a R c H 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 7 3 b o o K s I n R e V I e W the League of Nations fight and was the undisputed stormy petrel of the America First Committee, but she unhesitatingly turned down a sure chance at a constituency...

...Her only child, born when she was 41, she called her “gland baby...

...She named her Paulina, after an ancient Roman courtesan, also the name of the servant in A Winter’s Tale who defends her mistress against a charge of adultery...

...The family plan to recapture the presidency called for TR to run in 1916 and 1920, and Nick in 1924...

...In an era when the religion of the ruler was all-important and in a country that was over 90 percent Protestant, James’s conversion promised a world of trouble...

...to smoke “under my roof” by climbing up on the Her most famous quote, that Dewey “looks like roof of the White House and puffing away there...

...After Charles I was dethroned and executed and Britain’s experiment with a republic ran its dismal course, the monarchy was restored in the person of Charles II...

...Nobody ever did, though TR called her a “guttersnipe” when she roughhoused with a gang of boys and rode her bicycle with her feet on the handlebars...

...She could do no wrong even when she did wrong, as when she gambled at the racetrack, got ticketed for speeding in her red “touring car,” and attended dinner parties with a live green snake in her evening bag, curled no doubt around her cigarettes and the miniature bottles of whiskey she made sure to pack whenever she was invited to a “dry” occasion...

...Cord . h a e l d t he story of aliCe’s preGnanCy is a tangled a a lcoho t l an r d barb s itur i ates th t at w s as ruled t an u accid o en s - - - traception fail her...

...He also looked like TR: short, stocky, with a big mustache and a big grin...

...Her favorite color was dubbed “Alice blue” and millions of women wore it...

...Of motherhood, which TR called woman’s “sacred duty,” she said, “Having a baby is like trying to push a grand piano through a transom...

...Loath to be pitied for her motherless state, she resolved early on that nobody would ever call her “the poor M a R c H 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 7 1 b o o K s I n R e V I e W thing...

...I am with Nick heart and body,” she said with uncharacteristic melodrama, “but I am with Father heart and soul...

...At least they had wit in common...

...None of these will quite do, however, so she sounds her “unconditional love” tocsin once more: “A child of her own might finally be one human who would never abandon her...

...Pearl Mesta gave parties, but Alice Roosevelt Longworth had a salon...

...Known as the most TLongworth, who at 36 had the experien l o h c i N a s e r ng o i f o o s r p t h h e e m e oney n and O h the c o timber s m ap n peared c a in e s flagrant womanizer in Washington, he had as many as four women on the string at a time...

...Next they sailed to Cuba to see the hill where TR led his famous charge, which a disappointed Alice judged to be only “mildly sloping” instead of the Everest of her oedipal imagination...

...Humor goes for the jocular but wit goes for the jugular, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth always drew blood...

...Tomboy shenanigans were small beer after President William McKinley was assassinated, an event that Alice later claimed filled her with unabashed delight...

...Alice’s devastated father turned her over to his older sister, Aunt Bye, a kind and loving woman who doted on her and showered her with affection and tender concern for three years while TR went through a classic Victorian guilt complex...

...As she approached marriage we see a very different Alice in the pages of her diaries...

...But Barone, a preeminent chronicler of the U.S...

...Her young mother die l u h g l r l u c t p r e d n u o w t d e r n e he t e woma h n e who r ld Generated a r s i o m a uc y h m o irth d - when she was two days old, of Bright’s disease complicated by childbirth, while on another floor in the same New York townhouse, her paternal grandmother also died...

...This time she single-handedly ended the calling custom—going from one “at home” hostess to another armed with engraved cards, and suffering other bored matrons to do the same...

...When Wendell Willkie’s populist pretensions inspired the claim that he was “backed by the grass roots,” she shot back, “The grass roots of ten thousand country clubs...

...Certainly she influenced McCormick said at the time, “She feels humiliated and dreads what people will say,” which hints at an accident...

...But Alice’s granddaughter Joanna Sturm thinks, “She just let it happen...

...They were inseparable until his death six years later...

...political scene, is not a historian as such and thus not restricted by that profession’s p recedents...

...Her contribution is best described by the author’s Such a strong connection between Britain’s With ancient feudal rights being overpowered by newly centralized states in 1688, “absolutism”— epitomized by the Sun King, Louis XIV of France— “seemingly modern and efficient, seemed the wave of the future,” Barone writes...

...What happened next could only happen to a celebrity: she received an anonymous poison-pen letter on her honeymoon from a woman claiming to have had a child by Nick...

...Cast a Long Shadow Orange led across the English Channel a 15,000-man Dutch army, the largest force to On november 5, 1688, William the Prince of invade the British Isles since the Roman legions...

...7 4 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8 Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That inspired america’s Founding Fathers By Michael Barone (crown, 339 pages, $25.95) Reviewed by Robert d. novak So, as these words in the book’s first chapter promise, “our first revolution” is an American revolution—a promise fulfilled in the final chapter (“Revolutionary Reverberations...

...Charles was indolent and pacific...

...alice: alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker By Stacy A. Cordery (Viking, 590 pages, $32.95) Reviewed by florence King Tish circumstances...

...In 1912 TR split the GOP and started a third party composed of Progressive Republicans, which he named the Bull Moose Party...

...Glorious Revolution of 1688 and American freedom over the centuries is not the consensus among academic historians...

...Both deaths occurred on February 14, 1884—Valentine’s Day...

...When she became the first Washington woman to smoke in public, her enormous popularity made the habit instantly acceptable for all women...

...well-crafted distinction: “Alice preferred the company of men who ran the government to the company of women who wanted to reform it...

...This in turn, writes Barone, was “the backdrop for the amazing growth, prosperity, and military success of eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain—and for the American Revolution and the even more amazing growth, prosperity, and military success of the United States...

...All but the most intrepid suitors were scared off by her beauty, brains, position, and celebrity, but she had two solid reasons for wanting to marry, neither of which had anything to do with children...

...She got away with i t i r e … s s n g n i g n o l e f e s n e a d l l a h i r d l A t, sa c ys c the e au “ th s or, be o ca b use she ha e d wha a c t N ta els n on y of place and station...

...In Our First Revolution, he presents a sweeping view of 17th-century English history and Euro pean power politics and masterfully traces reverb erations that persist more than 300 years later...

...TDid she conceive deliberately or did her con- stituency” who changed the course of political hi n c a t o h i w n a m e t a s “ a e c l A l l a c y e web because no one knows the whole story...

...The healthy baby girl arrived without complications and was almost named Deborah, as in De-Borah, until even Alice realized that it would not do...

...Washington has always had its share of political hostesses whose homes have served as salt licks for the best and the brightest, but Alice was cast in the mold of Madame Recamier...

...If so, why...

...She died in 1956 at the age of 31 from a combination of tory during her long life...

...In our leveled culture she would land in rehab and be called a “pop tart,” but early 20th-century America attributed her hijinks to the “exuberance of youth” and called her Princess Alice...

...Ironically, Nick’s fathering gave Paulina the same kind of emotional good start that Aunt Bye had given Alice, but Alice’s mothering was another matter altogether...

...One day in the House a congressman ran his hand over Nick’s bald head and said, “This feels just like my wife’s behind,” whereupon Nick reached up, ran his own hand over his smooth pate, and replied, “By God, it does...

...She was identified in the press by her first name only, like Cher and Madonna...

...The next day it was all over Washington, and soon the whole country was convulsed...

...The German navy named a “torpedoboat- destroyer” after her and the Kaiser sent her a bejeweled miniature of himself...

...It was not a recipe for unconditional love but it got her the next best thing: attention...

...The same theme reappears in a letter to him...

...He was childless, and the succession went to his brother, James, the Duke of York...

...By the end of the honeymoon the “unconditional love” that Cordery believes she was still searching for had eluded her womanhood, and the sanctity of marriage,” and so Alice organized a group of her more outré friends into “The Race Suicide Club...

...Because her Roosevelt identity was a fixed star she need never fear any adverse consequences for being herself...

...Your losing your temper and getting these uncontrollable dislikes for me has got to stop...

...Barone’s genius is making fascinating what was massively boring in my school days and is now not even taught in America...

...She was 17 when her vice president father became president, making her the first young lady in the White House since Nellie Grant and the first ever to come out in a White House debutante ball...

...The associations became so ingrained that her stepmother, consulting with repairmen at the Roosevelts’ Oyster Bay home, inadvertently said, “The chimney smokes like a daughter...

...She was a man’s woman who loved to talk shop...

...But when TR died in 1919, Nick threw his support behind fellow Ohioan Warren Harding and campaigned successfully for his old House seat...

...Then he remarried and took her back, turning her over to a dutiful but aloof stepmother who promptly began having the five children of his second marriage...

...Proud of their work but knowing it would end up as just another campaign throwaway, they credited Alice with it, then went to an embassy party and asked everyone they met, “Is it true that Alice Longworth said...

...The low point of the voyage was finding a drunken Nick passed out on the cabin floor...

...It sounds as if a long-buried fear of being disliked by her father for “killing” her mother had come to the surface, but we shall never know...

...She also rode it in the house, tobogganed down stairs on serving trays, and made her entrances on stilts...

...Nick opted to stay with the Stalwart Republicans to keep his seat, and Alice demanded a divorce...

...She never did, but the three years of ideal childhood provided by Aunt Bye were enough to form the strong personality that enabled her to live without it...

...The apple never falls far from the tree and she was the tree...

...James was active and bellicose,” Barone writes...

...Humor is acceptable to toastmasters, icebreaker attendees, and the “healing power” gang who think it cures cancer, but wit takes no prisoners and hence incites the wrath of the compassion police, the political correctness police, and those guardians of the lowest common denominator who are sworn to stamp out wit because its requisite linguistic precision makes it “elitist...

...Not funny, not comical, not humorous, but witty, an unforgivable sin in today’s America...

...Her best shot was directed at President Lyndon B. Johnson when he showed his gall bladder scar to the press: “I’m glad it wasn’t a prostate operation...

...A l cha 1 in 8 D e ew a ey, she didn’t bother to vote for him e again w a he o s ” . g i d r a H t e n o h a s a o i h O f o r e k c i B eddy roosevelt’s dauGhter defied everyw r hite-haired ru , n w ning “ m n ate in s 19 44, Go n v. Jo A hn f W n ’ r t . she defied her father’s order forbidding any woman make a soufflé rise twice...

...She didn’t want a child of her own, she wanted a grandchild of Theodore Roosevelt, and who the father was mattered not at all...

...As soon as she had an adoring audience again her aplomb returned and carried her triumphantly through a dazzling White House wedding...

...Sweet are the uses of aristocracy...

...It may have been a defense mechanism against a fear of being an old maid because very few men actually approached her...

...She was “too shy” to campaign, and she would not “use my husband’s coffin as a springboard to a political career...

...without the taint of the stage...

...A progressive who worshiped TR, Borah was also a nonconformist like Alice, so much so that when Calvin Coolidge saw him riding in the park he said, “I wonder if it bothers Borah to be going in the same direction as his horse...

...The country went wild over her beauty and style and in no time she became the first American female to achieve celebrity status without the taint of the stage...

...William E. Borah of Idaho, a m l b i r va n . e i s u o u n r s e h e v l d n a m h s s i h e r cu an of a th t e Wes a t w h i ere t th e t y e oung T l R f ha I d gon a e to y described as “leonine,” Borah was brought down by the big-game hunter’s daughter when they worked together to defeat America’s entry into the League of Nations...

...Twenty-two-year-old Alice fell hard for him and he, an old hand at handling women, set out to dominate her, playing head games with her until her diary entries s h me… as if he didn’t like me,” d k o l … k c i N “ t e c s o ad n r lo ounded le like n th . e bleats o o f a e lo s ve a e - t wrote...

...Calvin Coolidge looked as though he had been “weaned on a pickle...

...Massive defections by English commanders and soldiers prompted King James II to flee to France, effectively transferring power to William...

...The country went wild over her beauty and style and in no time she became the first American female to achieve celebrity status graduate from First Daughter to First Lady...

...After Dewey lost the election it was generally agreed among political operatives that the devastating description had done him a great deal of harm...

...Her Roosevelt cousins: “Franklin is one-third mush and two-thirds Eleanor...

...He was elected Speaker in 1925, the year his 41-year-old wife had a baby by Sen...

...she may have wanted to give the childless Borah a token of their love...

...For the rest of her days,” writes biographer Stacy Cordery in a statement of her theme, “Alice sought unsuccessfully to duplicate that unconditional love...

...Robert d. novak is a nationally syndicated columnist, a commentator for Fox News, and the author of The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (Crown Forum...

...I take a darker view...

...Robert Taft wanted her to run for Nick’s old seat, but she demurred in words that sound almost eerily modest coming from her...

...After James directed the English military conquest of Dutch New Amsterdam (which became New York in his honor) and ably commanded the British fleet against the Dutch, James became a Catholic around 1668...

...florence King’s collections include The Florence King Reader, STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991 to 2002, and, most recently, Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again...