FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny
Goldberg, Joyce
liar," which says it all. In fact, Truman listed Nixon as one of but two men whom he absolutely despised, the other a minor Missouri pol who had lied to Harry. Plain Speaking is based on tapes...
...In so far as FDR believed Destiny beckoned him to greatness, Davis shows how Roosevelt's environment, personality, and the accidents of history attested to this thesis...
...And not just any old body...
...Davis examines the reality of Roosevelt's illness as well as the legend of "spiritual transformation" to which some historians have attested...
...Why the devil, who could presumably go anywhere, should go to Washington is never explained, which is just as well...
...The whole movie is just a backdrop for one horrible event about every seven minutes--a beating, some super-filthy language, vomiting, tons of blood...
...David Brudnoy FDR : The Beckoning of Destiny & IF NAPOLEON WAS right, if history is a myth that men agree to believe, then historians are the myth-makers who gather the facts which make the truths...
...It is enough, therefore, here to appraise its fineness and place it in some context...
...and Paul Newman (Wow...
...Was the Roosevelt of 1936 and 1945 (to be described in future volumes) the same as the Roosevelt of 1914, 1920, and 1928, only wiser, more serene, more sophisticated...
...Such story as there is concerns the devil's taking up residence in a human body...
...He acknowledges his debt to such important scholarly works as James MacGregor Burns' Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox) Frank Freidel's volumes, Joseph P. l~.qh's Eleanor and Franklin, as well as the reminiscences of Josephus Daniels, Frances Perkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many others...
...But then, HST was prickly and initially suffered Miller warily...
...We know that the girl is inhabited by a devil when she starts urinating on the floor and talking dirty...
...Demonstrating the courage to tackle Boss Murphy and Tammany Hall, slow to recognize the problems of urban workers and farmers, shrewd enough to align with Progressive Democrats and Woodrow Wilson, mastering the craft of manipulation and dissimulation to make headway against Secretary of the Navy Daniels, and above all learning the art of political ~style" as vice-presidential nominee in 1920, Roosevelt became acutely perceptive of his political skills...
...This is no warts-and-all book, and the definitive biography by some future historial will require some reappraisals...
...What emerged on Miller's tapes is Truman almost at ease...
...But for anyone who believes that movies should be about the development of human life and should elucidate anything about the human condition, or even that movies should be clever or witty, The Exorcist is a serious setbhck...
...The title suggests, and the author subtly maintains the theme, that Destiny, an almost unalterable, invincible, predetermined force, somehow fated FDR to greatness...
...Or is it a myth...
...While all of this has been going on, there is a parallel plot about I)amien Karras, S.J., a psychiatric priest, whose job it is to treat priests who think they have lost their "vocation" while he is rapidly losing his...
...When I got inside the theater and The Exorcist started, the dialogue did not get any better...
...The Roosevelt ancestry and heritage, the social position of his parents, the special relationship between mother and son, were the founding elements of Roosevelt's personality...
...A typical spaghetti western is like Othello in terms of plot by comparison with The Exorcist...
...That FDR may have used his handicap to advantage might indicate perspicacity, but Davis considers Roosevelt's personality almost totally formed prior t~) the crippling illness: ~he himself remained essentially the same as before...
...Joyce Goldberg & The Sting Of course they find nothing and neither does a psychiatrist, whom Regan knocks across the room with a single punch...
...His toughness, sincerity, decency, decisiveness made Truman unique in the post-Teddy Roosevelt presidency...
...Just seeing Newman and Redford in their wide-brimmed hats and waspwaisted suits is enough to guarantee a very substantial box office...
...All of this is about half as exciting as an examination in trigonometry...
...He was shrewd, witty, profane, a surprisingly adept historian himself, and his respect for the office of the presidency was huge: he Was not about to diminish that office by letting go entirely, nor did Miller push very hard...
...Paul Newman...
...By this time Franklin Roosevelt habitually measured himself and his progress against the personality and career of his famous Cousin Theodore...
...In this sense the attempt to 'tmythify" individuals, to reckon with their behavior, appeal, impact, has inspired the biographies which unceasingly deluge us...
...We have been through the blandness of Ike, the tinsel and show-biz of Kennedy, the overbloated messianism of LI~, and the chintziness of Nixon and his merry band of crooks...
...It has wonderful supporting characters, excellent sets, and a plot which is both its doing and its undoing...
...Truman was then a decade into retirement, enjoying to the full his "promotion," as he called his return to private life...
...Far out...
...almost, because the former President hardly let it all out...
...Add the spiritual growth provided by Endicott Peabody at Groton and the pressures for social achievement at Harvard, and Davis' insistence on the importance of early character formation is clearly justified...
...If only there were some way to exorcise garbage like The Exorcist from the filmic system and put it in circus sideshows, where it belongs, the movies'would be far better off...
...For better or worse the 'tmovers" of history are mythified according to popular interest, available information, and the effect of their lives...
...It simply is only a series of gory tableaux...
...The devil enters the body and soul of a lovely, not-yet nubile twelve-year-old girl...
...Private citizen, spry (and how he hated that word), sound in the head, Truman accepted Miller as friend and scribe, came to see him as a vehicle for getting the message across...
...She also does many other stunts, such as vomiting upon people far across the room and twisting her head all the way around in a circle...
...As a wonderful bow to the women's rights movement, the torpedo is a woman...
...Just what part heredity took in determining FDR's personality is difficult to say, but the circumstances of birth and childhood must have been critical...
...We read Plain Speaking and realize what we have lost in the White House...
...The gangster whom Redford and Newman want to con, a blustering Irishman lovingly called "The Big Mick," has killed a friend of Redford...
...Davis' purpose is to relate the background and course of Roosevelt's road to national acclaim...
...Devoted less to principle than expediency, he made his way as much through the efforts of Louis Howe The Alternative June-September 1974 25 and Eleanor as through his own political abilities...
...But lest the reader conclude that this tome is 853 pages of Calvinist theology, one might note that Davis' book is the result of careful study, especially of available secondary materials...
...But The Sting gives the audience much more than that...
...That is the problem...
...That is the same team who conquered time and space in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid...
...no doubt Miller felt he could not afford to press firmly...
...Not just ward-heeler politics of a dubious variety, which loss we suffer without regret, but also the plainness and fundamental honesty of the real middle American serving country with a minimum of personal aspiration, serving mother land with a maximum of unabashed patriotism...
...In the meantime, a hired killer is stalking Robert Redford...
...The friendship between Redford and Newman grows extremely intense, and it is authentically upsetting when it begins to look as if one is going to sell out the other...
...Rejecting the idea that Roosevelt underwent a spiritual rebirth and purification through suffering a ~aersonal Gethsemane," that he came to believe Providence had intervened and saved him from death as a sign of his "chosen" work in the world, Davis measures the change in FDR brought about by physical disability...
...The film is richly and lushly atmospheric...
...The book has been excerpted in magazines up one wall and down the other, reviewed everywhere, climbed to the top of the best-seller lists before its official publication, and soon it will be out in paperback and will capture an audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands...
...But the movie is punctuated at regular intervals by individual horror events, such as the highly touted scene in which Rogan abuses herself with a crucifix...
...Davis emphasizes the nob/esse oblige enviroument in which FDR was reared, the early exposure to politics CLittle man, I am making a strange wish for you," said President Grover Cleveland to the five-year-old Franklin, '~It is that you may never become President"), and Roosevelt's subtle rebellion against maternal dominance (~Ttlease don't make any more arrangements for my future happiness," he once wrote his mother...
...But the book leaves the reader with some uncertainties...
...Most important, is it valid to suggest that Roosevelt was destined for greatness...
...We read it, moreover, to see what we have lost in America...
...While it does not matter who starred in The Exorcist, it is vitally important to know that for The Sting George Roy Hill directed Robert Redford (Robert Redford...
...All of the scenes between the horror are pure filler...
...She takes the tyke, whose name is Regan, to a series of doctors who suspect brain damage and put the child and the devil through a series of medical procedures which make anything the devil does look positively beatific by comparison...
...presidents head the list of individuals whom historians and journalists most readily popularize...
...Never showing signs of intellectual genins, FDR succeeded because of indomitable will, although Davis also notes the special influence of Cousin Theodore: ~l'he boy's admiration of the colorful ~reddy' became a motivating force: his identification of himself with his famous distant cousin bolstered his self-confidence and suggested, albeit vaguely, a possible career...
...The Exorcist is a movie which is so bad that one must stand back and watch the full scope of the retreat on which it has led modern moviemaking to fully understand its significance...
...Kenneth S. Davis, responding to popular interest in one of 'tthe most controversial and complex personaHty ever to occupy the White House," has made his contribution to historical mythology in FDR" The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882-1928...
...He was only further confirmed in vital principles, traits, tendencies already firmly e s t a b l i s h e d . . . " FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny is readable, if interminable...
...And despite the energy expended to compare the mind and personality of the two cousins, Davis makes a rather peculiar contrast: ~I'here was a strong element of the feminine in his makeup and _9 . . this was the principal difference, so far as character and personality were concerned...
...At those moments the movie takes on an air of tragedy and starts to tell us something about the limits of friendship and the motive power of fear...
...Fne percentage increase of seriousness, integrity, tenacity, understanding of self and others . . . was little, if any greater than that which occurred during his time of troubles in early 1920 and the subsequent campaign for the Vice Presidency...
...Recognizing his power to charm colleagues, opposition, and constituents, Roosevelt plotted the road to the White House as early as 1920--detours, setbacks, failures notwithstanding...
...I consider him [Truman] one of the most extraordinary human beings who ever lived," Acheson said...
...That he achieved it is, of course, undeniable...
...What emerged, Davis stresses, was a personality founded in determinationqto learn, to grow, to overcome and achieve...
...From birth through the years until his bout with polio, FDR came to believe that national preeminence was in1882-1928 by Kenneth S. Davis Putnam $15.00 evitable...
...Well, what's a mother to do...
...If book titles are indicative of more than an attempt to capture public attention, Davis introduces his theme immediately...
...She is the daughter of a movie star who is temporarily living in Washington, D.C., in a mansion in Georgetown...
...The Exorcist is a good movie for those who want to be scared for a few minutes...
...But then comes the cutesie-pie clever 26 The Alternative June--September 1974 WHILE I WAS waiting in a long, cold line to get into The Exorcist, a girl who was with a group of people behind me detached herself from the group and went to sit on a stone stoop...
...Indeed, one real criticism of the book is that its author did not prod enough, didn't ferret out some of the nastier sides of Truman...
...So Rogan has to go to the hospital for the insane, where nothing can be done either...
...Harry comes up smelling like roses...
...The public, statesmen, even historians live within the world of those truths, arranging them so that the mysteries of life may be more easily understood...
...Americans today--those studying international conflict, those yearning to sustain or destroy the images of political heroes, those convinced that current usurpations of political power have important precedents, those simply fascinated by trivia or nostalgia--recognize that U.S...
...Money is so precious to the Irishman that the con men figure it would hurt him more to take his money than his life...
...Will Davis' evidence for later years be as dependent on "he must have thought" analyses...
...This time Redford and Newman get together to play two confidence men during the Depression who set out to swindle a gangster out of a large sum of money...
...and qualitatively as perceptive as most biographies...
...Basically, the show has no more plot or development than would a visit to a freak show...
...They somehow get together the money to put on a truly elaborate display for swindling the Big Mick...
...They are utterly unmemorable and serve only as prelude to each new shock...
...This first volume, an accoUnt of Roosevelt's life down to the decision to run for governor of New York, is also a history of the political culture in which Franklin D. Roosevelt grew and ultimately emerged as its leader...
...Plain Speaking is based on tapes made in 1961-1962 for a TV program that died aborning...
...The movie would have been just as good (bad) had the theater simply gone dark for a few minutes between each violent scene...
...Hey, I hope you freeze your tail off,"one of her friends said...
...From this point of view, if polio was a 'blessing in disguise,' it was largely for reasons having nothing to do with interior change...
...That way the contrast between the scary scenes and the vacant interludes would have been even more stark...
...This is a puff for Truman as seen from Truman's perspective, amplified by testimonials from, seemingly, every codger in Missouri, not t o mention such as Dean Acheson, the patrician whose love of the plain-spoken, somewhat coarse Missourian puzzles lay folk...
...Hey, I hope you get a hemorrhoid," one of her male friends said...
...Far more subtly destructive is The Sting...
...The movie is just a carnival of scary scenes, It is strung together without any sensible connective tissue whatever...
...informative, if only collating the best of other books on FDR...
...Roosevelt's political education, from state senator in New York to assistant secretary of the navy to his unsuccessful vicepresidential campaign, helped his development...
...Miller concurs, as might the reader after a pleasant amble through his exceedingly pleasant book...
...Finally someone has the presence of mind to suggest an exorcist from the Holy Mother Church, and then the contest begins...
...But the movie was terribly scary...
Vol. 7 • June 1974 • No. 9
