Revisionist History with a Difference

...And I don't see any point in trying to edit my past by destroying papers which showed precisely what I did and how I did it...

...Reviewed by Thomas O'Brien Especially after Watergate, it is refreshing to read Harry Hopkins' insistence that none of his papers be destroyed...

...I feel we will both come out with credit...

...Considered an odd couple, the airy Hyde Park patrician and the wise-cracking Iowa social worker actually were a perfect match...

...The Byrnes appointment, according to Adams, "reduced the huge piles of papers on Hopkins' desk, bed, and bureau...

...Whatever that means, it betrays a dim understanding of the period...

...Today, however, there is widespread recognition that the Roosevelt years overturned tradition to relieve suffering...

...Adams' favorite technique is quoting from his subject's papers, and the great bulk of the letters, memoranda and telegrams he uses appeared initially in Roosevelt and Hopkins...

...That was what Roosevelt wanted, of course...

...As head of the Work Projects Administration (WPA) he initiated thousands of programs that put millions of unemployed to work...

...Sherwood had mentioned that their dinner included "vegetable soup, boiled chicken, spinach omelet, let tuce and tomato salad, chocolate ice cream, and a lot of side dishes...

...The inac curacies are of the most trivial variety—spelling errors by Hopkins and the like: Not content with cannibalizing Sherwood, Adams complains of the gristle...

...At one point he reproduces with a flourish a Hopkins memorandum that, he tells us, "was 'secret' until its declassification on February 1, 1973, by the Deputy Archivist of the U.S...

...But only rarely does he inform the reader of this...

...Published in 1951, the volume is entitled Techniques of Revision...

...Hopkins, the only man wearing an overcoat, stood in the second row, behind Admiral King and between Sumner Welles and Averell Harriman...

...many of the WPA's accomplishments are still standing, and its beneficiaries have not forgotten the flush of self-respect that came with earning a paycheck again...

...In a kind of requital for the raw deal he got from the press during his lifetime, Hopkins has received posthumous justice in such works as Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins (1948), Searle F. Charles' Minister of Relief: Harry Hopkins and the Depression (1963), and Paul Kurzmran's Harry Hopkins and the New Deal (1974...

...Both Roosevelt and Churchill tended to digress and shilly-shally when confronted by unpleasant realities, but with Hopkins around there was no escaping the point at issue, prompting Churchill to dub him "Lord Root of the Matter...

...A man is known by his friends and enemies, and Hopkins, along with FDR, had plenty of both...

...The same situation inspires Adams to quip: "A chicken in every pot was replaced with a pink dismissal notice in one pay envelope after another...

...Adams concludes: "There is no evidence in the Hopkins papers, but it seems likely that he persuaded FDR to give Nelson another chance...

...Sherwood said that the appointment of James Byrnes as Director of Economic Stabilization "greatly reduced the accumulation on Hopkins' desk...

...Perhaps because he has produced a four-volume history of World War II, Adams seems most comfortable describing the military events in the background of Hopkins' activities...

...Of Roosevelt's decision to retain Donald Nelson as head of the War Production Board, Sherwood concluded: "I do not know just what part Hopkins played in it, but it seems evident that he backed Nelson and persuaded the President to give him another chance...

...Behind them were standing the officers and civilian members of their parties...

...The whole story of Roosevelt—and my story is part of it—is going to come out anyway in the next 50 years...

...Sherwood concluded his life of Hopkins with the sentence: "He also took with him the knowledge that there were very few men who ever lived who were as fortunate as he in the possession of such enemies and such friends...

...Similar examples run throughout the book...

...The last is too ambiguous for our author, so he sets the record straight with the addition of buttered sweet peas, candied sweet potatoes, mushroom gravy, hot rolls, and currant jelly...

...Adams tells the same anecdote, ending on this note: "Hopkins being Hopkins, it seems unlikely that his efforts to stay out were one hundred percent successful...

...On the next page, in a typical passage, Adams details the final church service of the conference: "Church services were celebrated on the stern, with the altar in the midst of a hollow square made up of seamen of both nations intermingled...

...Faithful surrogate that he was, he caught the flak but not the bouquets...

...It was a practical approach, to keep all parts of the enterprises of the country balanced so that all might be free...

...Henry Adams includes the first two in his bibliography, and could not have been faulted for building his new biography on Sherwood's masterful a-chievement...

...Quoting the memorandum Sherwood used in connec tion with the Casablanca Conference, Adams remarks that "the ac curacy of his transcriptions leaves something to be desired...

...And revelations: "Johnson held on to the [Kennedy] 'Mafiosi,' but added cronyism in the person of Bobby Baker...

...A newspaper reader in 1933 might have thought his tenure as Federal Emergency Relief Administrator demonstrated merely Federal usurpation of state and local responsibilities...

...Yet no other New Deal official was so reviled as Hopkins—except "that man," Franklin D. Roosevelt, but his unmatched popularity more than compensated for the bilious outpourings from the Right...

...Baker worked for Senator Johnson...

...To his critics they were all boondoggles and palliatives, paying loafers for raking leaves and leaning on shovels...

...These slurs seem almost quaint now...

...Anyone who plods through Adams' relentlessly pedestrian prose will find in the last ohapter such epiphanies as "Kennedy was another President who wanted to be abreast of almost all matters, but he found that he needed administrative assistants to keep things going...

...Hunger is not debatable," Hopkins said, and no subsequent administration has contested him...

...Writing about the aftermath of the 1929 crash, Sherwood said that Herbert Hoover's "chicken in every pot was replaced by a discharge slip in every other pay envelope...

...Describing the historic first meeting of FDR and Churchill at the 1941 Atlantic Conference...

...Adams evidently finds writing history a tricky business without Robert Sherwood as his guide, and he finds his way back to him before the end...

...I also want them to know why I played politics...

...During World War II, faced with unprecedented strains on the nation's productive capacity, the President could confidently command, "Take care of this, Harry," and Hopkins, with his ability to digest prodigious quantities of information and organize people, would come up with a solution to the problem...

...He was also FDR's "no" man, shielding the President from the multitude of supplicants and advice-mongers...

...Besides enjoying each other's company and holding the same principles, where Roosevelt shied away from conflict Hopkins stomped on any toes to get a job done...

...His "fresh" information is on the same level...

...When he is not dealing with documents, Adams frequently just takes what he likes and drops the bothersome footnotes...

...nevertheless, Hopkins was cast as a sinister influence, a Svengali and a Rasputin...

...The statement is characteristic: Hopkins was blunt, incisive and?though he had little patience with visionaries—prescient...

...It is improbable," wrote Sherwood, "that Hopkins was entirely faithful in living up to this resolve...

...Sherwood related the story of Byrnes telling Hopkins to stay out of his business and Hopkins agreeing...

...Buried in all the protocol and itinerary is a two-sentence paragraph about something else that took place on that journey: the signing of the Atlantic Charter...

...Instead, though, he has borrowed heavily from it—editing, rewriting, condensing, offering misleading citations—and chosen to be a secret admirer...

...And in writing about the New Deal generally, he is at sea: "As might be expected, the second New Deal had no gospel...

...Roosevelt and Churchill were seated in chairs well aft on the starboard side, facing forward...

...But what grates even more than the effort to pass off this dull a-bridgement as a scholarly contribution is the author's snideness where he does acknowledge the classic he has cribbed from...

...The rest of the ohapter is a ship's log account of the President's return voyage...

...I want people to know that I played politics...

...as President, Johnson barely admitted that he knew him, much less added him to the White House staff...

...Incidentally, Adams' works include a guide for writing compositions...

...Unfortunately, his battle chronicle is as exciting as his dinner litanies...

...It can be found in exactly the same form on page 764 of Roosevelt and Hopkins...

...most often he merely cites the Hopkins archives at the FDR library in Hyde Park, giving a spurious originality to the material...

...Adams' peroration: "Those who hated Roosevelt hated Hopkins, and those who admired Roosevelt admired Hopkins...