A Certain Amount of Deviltry

...He enjoyed light social occasions in company where he could relax, and welcomed a certain amount of "deviltry" among his official family...

...Jackson reserves his most severe criticism for FDR's policies on civil liberties...

...Yet he concedes that FDR's third and fourth terms were necessary because of the War...

...in 1941, FDR appointed him to the Court, from which he took a brief leave to act as Chief U.S...

...coauthor, "The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America" Encouraged by his friend and publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson began to compile a memoir of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1953...

...He was ideally suited to the task...

...Reviewed by Susan Dunn Professor of Humanities, Williams College...

...Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials...

...Now readers can accompany Jackson as he goes on fishing cruises with the President, engages him in horseplay in the White House pool, dines with him in the family quarters when Eleanor is out of town, schmoozes with his set over martinis, and joins him and other Cabinet members for late-night games of poker...

...intended to reduce them to slavery: "It seemed to be a departure from the Wilsonian tactic which had succeeded so well, of driving a wedge between the German people and the government by insisting that he would make peace with the people if they got rid of the government...

...For he could be sharp in dealing with people—and devious, sometimes doing the opposite of what he seemed to have promised...

...In public testimony on the subject in 1937, when he was an assistant attorney general, he attacked the Court's reactionary philosophy and its attitude toward the country's problems...

...The result is a somewhat disjointed narrative that is thin on historical context and lacks the deep insight of the best Roosevelt historians...

...A diary keeper, Jackson was as observant and analytical in social settings as he was in the courtroom...

...In 1943, FDR declared that the Allies would accept nothing less from the Nazis than "unconditional surrender...

...A member of the President's small inner circle, he served as his Solicitor General and then Attorney General...

...A few humorous anecdotes are scattered throughout That Man, but given the grim problems facing the country and the world in the '30s and '40s, even these stories have their dark side...

...Nevertheless, Jackson is an engaging commentator on FDR's relations with Congress...

...After his stint prosecuting War criminals at Nuremberg, he believed the Nazis used the phrase to convince the German people that the U.S...

...He liked to tell friends what a Pullman car porter told him during a campaign: "All the passengers in the parlor cars are against you, all the passengers in the day coaches are for you—and our train has two parlor cars and nine day coaches...

...Given the lack of international experience of the Republican candidate, Wendell L. Willkie, he reasons that a Willkie Presidency "would have been a rather dangerous experiment in 1940...

...Jackson admires FDR's ability to speak plainly to Americans and get across "something that stirred them as few leaders could do...

...This support was built piece by piece...

...Ultimately, he would use the political organization he had nurtured as an "instrument of government...

...Winston Churchill objected, but Roosevelt's son Elliott backed Stalin's idea of executions without trials...

...Roosevelt, he declares, "was not the strong champion of so-called civil rights that some of his appointees to the Supreme Court became...

...Recognizing the need to develop a new Democratic constituency, he reached out to young people and to moderate Republicans...

...Like other strong Presidents who would follow, Roosevelt conceived of himself not only as the nation's Chief Executive, but also as the leader of his party...

...Curiously, however, Jackson never mentions FDR's most egregious violation of civil liberties: the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps...

...On the issue of FDR's attempt to pack the Court Jackson is supportive...

...The argument was becoming hot and unpleasant when FDR defused the situation by suggesting a compromise: Instead of 50,000 officers, only 49,000 should be shot—a jest that may have seemed funnier at the time than it does today...

...But the President accepted animosity as something of a tribute, not to mention a source of amusement...

...On matters of immigration, deportation, and wire-tapping of suspected Communists in labor unions, he opposes the President...

...Still, whatever the limitations of Jackson's belated memoir, FDR fans will relish being the fly on the wall with him, eavesdropping on some of history's greatest actors...

...He never seemed to be reading or reciting...

...In his own dissenting opinion he wrote, "if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable...

...At the final dinner of the Teheran Conference in late 1943, Josef Stalin proposed rounding up and summarily shooting 50,000 German officers...

...Jackson admits the words galvanized the country for the fight ahead, but in retrospect he judges them militarily counterproductive...

...His memorable denunciations of the "economic royalists," his outlining of the "Four Freedoms," his attacks on the Supreme Court for taking the nation back to "the horse-and-buggy age" still resonate in the collective American memory...

...The FDR he shows us was so self-confident that "he made big decisions with an apparent nonchalance that sometimes took away the breath of his advisers...

...Whatever the nature of his detractors, FDR attracted a fiercely loyal following that, Jackson observes, "nobody could discount and nobody could separate from him...

...Despite his admiration and affection for FDR, Jackson does not applaud his breaking the traditional two-term limit...

...But the memoir, incomplete at the time he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1954, remained in a file labeled "Roosevelt Book.' A half century later John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St...

...Even when it was his speechwriters who crafted his public addresses, he "made any speech that he delivered so much his own that it was what he might say in conversation...

...Priorto Roosevelt's victory in 1932, the Democratic Party had not won a Presidential election since Woodrow Wilson's Administration...

...The episode, he says, taught him it is "not safe to be a humorist...

...There was genuine need of some kind of reform in the Supreme Court," he maintains...

...John's University, has carefully edited it into That Man: An Insider's Portimi of Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...This silence is especially puzzling because he was one of three dissenters in the important Korematsu case, where the Court held that "the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily...

...He was in fact known to play practicaljokes himself...

...Jackson divided his recollections into chapters about Roosevelt as politician, lawyer, commander-in-chief, administrator, economist, companion and sportsman, and leader of the masses...

...A President, he contends, "certainly can make any contribution that he is capable of in two terms...

...onhis 1940 campaign strategy of promising peace while he quietly prepared for war...

...Along with Justices Frank Murphy and Owen J. Roberts, Jackson disagreed, calling the internment policy the "legalization of racism...

...The memoir is organized thematically, rather than chronologically...

...The remark was greeted with laughter, but it appeared less amusing in newspapers the next day...

...and on the complex diplomatic negotiations with Great Britain concerning old U.S...

...on his shocked reaction when he received the news that the Supreme Court had unanimously decided against him in the Schecter case invalidating the National Recovery Act...

...His later inclusion of Republicans Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War and Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy was motivated, Jackson points out, by a belief that there should be a bipartisan defense program...

...Another of Roosevelt's ringing phrases Jackson considers less successful...

...And yet, "no person of taste or discernment" took liberties with Roosevelt...

...Symbolic of the latter was his appointment of Harold L. Ickes as Secretary of Interior and Henry A. Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture in his first Cabinet...

...Jackson once quipped at a luncheon that Roosevelt's seeking a third term was not really an issue because the Supreme Court had invalidated the first term...

...Few people were indifferent to FDR, Jackson notes: "By 1940, every home regarded him as a household idol or its demon...

...The idea of unconditional surrender, he concludes, inspired among Germans "a strong sense of solidarity with the Hitler government" and "doubtless" made ending the War more difficult—a point that many would contest...

...Navy destroyers during the critical summer of 1940...

...Actually, he may have been the one who planted the seed of the idea in FDR's mind in 1935, when he mentioned to him in passing that President Ulysses S. Grant named two additional Justices to the Court to reverse a certain decision...