Telling Specifics
GRAFF, HENRY F.
Telling Specifics Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom By Conrad Black Public Affairs. 1360 pp. $39.95. Reviewed by Henry F. Graff Professor of history emeritus, Columbia;...
...This is no single-minded hagiography...
...Winston Churchill later confessed that he went home and "slept the sleep of the saved...
...To Roosevelt the greatest danger had been entry into the War against Japan, and not immediately Germany, with something less than a united public opinion...
...Not without some acid...
...convincing the Left he was one of them, when he wanted to make the country safe for the squire of Hyde Park...
...Truckling to the isolationist newspaper tycoon, he publicly denounced the League of Nations, calling it "a mere meeting place for the political discussion of strictly European national difficulties...
...As a campaign ploy, Roosevelt's move was brilliant, a way of slipping the noose of his position in 1920, when he ran for Vice President and ardently supported America's joining the League...
...IT is exhausting but exalting to read Franklin Delano Roosevelt from beginning to end...
...they are numerous enough...
...Above all, however, he is awed by Roosevelt's command of his party, his country, and his effort to end the Great Depression...
...The role of TR's niece, Eleanor Roosevelt, in the making and conduct of her husband's Presidency is parsed with considerable sensitivity and interwoven with Black's account of his subject's entire career...
...For instance, Black outlines how FDR curried the favor of William Randolph Hearst in pursuit of the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1932...
...Black's discussion of Roosevelt's dealings with Douglas MacArthur is a little gem, laying out the path by which the general came to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor after the fall of the Philippines in 1942...
...Until he became the center of a corporate financial scandal early in November, Canadian-born Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbor had been the chief executive of Hollinger International, a far-flung publishing empire he founded whose properties include the Chicago SunTimes, the Jerusalem Post and, in England, the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator...
...His handling of the months preceding Pearl Harbor demonstrates a subtle understanding of the copious record...
...Black reserves some incisive words for son Elliott, who, he believes, could rile FDR with impunity because of all the Roosevelt children he was wisest to the deal his parents made after his father's affair with Lucy Mercer nearly ended the marriage...
...The night of the assault Roosevelt slept soundly, "without medication...
...But when the nation entered the War in 1917 he became his own man, recognizing that he had the tide of history, and luck, on his side...
...Black provides abundant proof of the deviousness that betrayed itself early on...
...The intricacy and abundance of its detail are testaments both to its storied subject and to the assiduousness of its author...
...He paid an ostentatious visit to the Western Front, though he never saw action on the battlefield as his illustrious relative did...
...As a politician Roosevelt was an exquisite opportunist...
...FDR was then Assistant Secretary of the Navy—as Teddy had been when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898—and he made the most of the larger stage now fortuitously opened to him...
...Conspiracy theorists are assured that it would have been inconceivable for a man who loved the Navy as much as FDR to plan the annihilation of its battleship fleet...
...As a father Roosevelt was inattentive and uninvolved...
...While he renders pungent judgments, Black is not in the game of discovering warts...
...But his wife was so incensed by the turnabout that for a time she refused to speak to him...
...From the start of her son's rise to become a tyro in Democratic politics and through the days when he was laid low by polio—just as his career was taking off and his marriage was in troubled waters—the overbearing Sara confidently micromanaged his adult life...
...Black's analysis of Elliott conforms with an episode a former Secret Service officer once related to me...
...For example, when four-yearold Franklin andhis mother, Sara, attended the Ring cycle in Bayreuth in 1896, they sat "not far from the box that the then seven-year old Adolf Hitler would occupy faithfully every year from 193 3 to 1940...
...That he is not a historian by profession makes his accomplishment all the more extraordinary: He has carved the vast body of Rooseveltiana into a compelling narrative of an epic life, without discarding any of the choicest morsels...
...Even after Black's expansive treatment (and mountain of footnotes) FDR remains an enigma—still a sphinx, hiding behind his winning smile and deftly shielding his cards from view...
...But Black's attention to minutiae unearths intriguing scenes and connections...
...Her ongoing supervision is among the factors Black weighs in addressing the subject of Roosevelt's libido after his paralysis, a matter much discussed sotto voce in the press corps and elsewhere...
...Black writes, "Eleanor and her world federalist friends didn't represent anyone except a few feminists and Socialists around Washington Square...
...And nowhere else has there appeared a more nuanced retelling of the Roosevelt-Churchill relationship, a bond resulting in an entente between their nations that, Black maintains, preserved the West...
...One of the most astonishing and lesser known of these dissimulations was Roosevelt's claim of credit for New York State's legislation in response to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire...
...He heard Elliott ask his father if he might take a Stetson from the White House trophy room (the two wore the same hat size...
...Even readers who, like this reviewer, lived through that period and World War II will be absorbed by the way Black brings those years to life once more...
...The Republican Oyster Bay wing of the Roosevelt clan took due notice of this—with much scorn...
...He was in fact inert in the drive to eradicate the factory conditions that caused the tragic deaths of 146 people, 123 of them young immigrant female workers...
...There can be little doubt that with this lavish presentation FDR has now been "done" for our time...
...Rather, like a good golfer, he hits the ball as it lies...
...Time and again Black provides ready particulars about lies and exaggerations FDR uttered from his boyhood on to everyone—including his beloved Mama—to cast himself in abright light...
...holding himself out as the defender of the patrician classes, when he in fact regarded them as idiots politically...
...Black has also managed to make telling specifics about familial matters integral to the whole...
...Despite the disastrous strike on the Navy, Black recounts, "Roosevelt was relieved that he had effected entry into the War so unambiguously...
...Although a Democrat, he constantly aped the style of his Republican cousin, donning pince-nez and incorporating the word "bully" into his speech as if it were his own...
...He is clearly smitten, though, by the man he deems the giant of 20th-century giants—the one who saved Western civilization and restored faith in democracy...
...Roosevelt turned his son down instantly, "Those hats were given to me, not you...
...Those familiar with the FDR canon will not find fresh evidence here on major matters...
...Some readers may be surprised to learn that while the young Sara had set her cap for Stanford White, the celebrated architect, she settled in 1880 for James Roosevelt, a match more appealing to her parents...
...The couple doted on Franklin, their only child, who in his youth was mesmerized by the dazzling career of Cousin Ted, the President...
...Black concludes it was unlikely that FDR could conduct "a physically ambitious extramarital romantic life from a wheelchair under the sensitive and intrusive noses of his wife and mother, two of the most assertive and puritanical women in American history...
...On another matter there can be no quibbling: Neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln has yet been the subject of such an outsized literary monument...
...His detractors may argue with Black's conclusion that Roosevelt belongs "in the same pantheon as the father of his country and the savior of the Union and emancipator of the slaves...
...editor, "The Presidents...
...A Reference History" This colossal volume is the ne plus ultra of Roosevelt biographies...
...Elliott," Black writes, "considered his father to be, in large measure, an elegant hustler, misleading the country about the extent of his illness...
Vol. 86 • November 2003 • No. 6
