Seeing Roosevelt in Full Color

...Eleanor, liberated from a heterosexual life she had not been comfortable with in spite of having six children (the same number as the Theodore Roosevelts), at last could cultivate her vast range of social and economic interests...

...FDR was the sole member of the Senate who did not feel impelled to play a part in improving the lot of New York’s poorest workers...

...Following the brutal Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village that killed 146 Italian and Eastern European immigrant women laboring under miserable conditions, the New York State Legislature began the mammoth task of reforming industrial standards...

...Immediately after Franklin’s first election she gave serious thought to fleeing with Earl Miller, a New York State trooper who was her closest male friend and for whom she kept a room at Val-Kill, her home in Hyde Park, and later in her Greenwich Village apartment...

...Sara’s intervention prevented a divorce, which would have been fateful for her son’s political career, but the two were never effectively a married pair again...

...Eleanor was overwhelmed by the thought of being a First Lady...

...There is a famous photograph of Eleanor and Franklin, drenched by the storm that enveloped his second inauguration in 1937, yet smiling broadly as they rode from the Capitol to the White House...

...Franklin’s attending the best schools— Groton, Harvard, Columbia Law—did not turn him into a scholar, a talented attorney or, like TR, a splendid writer...

...he arrived to an empty house...

...The most significant one involved the lovely Lucy Page Mercer, who had been hired by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1914 to help with the overwhelming secretarial and social tasks she had to handle because of Franklin’s appointment...

...British and American cryptographers who read Japanese naval codes made possible Admiral Chester W Nimitz’ gigantic destruction of Nippon’s armada aiming to take Midway Island...

...Other stories round out the picture...

...After his unsuccessful bid for the Vice Presidency with James M. Cox in the 1920 election, the world changed for the whole family—and as it turned out, for the whole world...

...The result is a picture of the 32nd President richer in detail and explanation than any other work...

...His idol, after his adored parents, was Theodore Roosevelt, a distant cousin whose career and mannerisms he aped as best he could...

...An only child, he also never experienced the sandpapering of sibling rivalry that can make one skilled in dealing with challengers...

...The Roosevelt who emerges started out as a beloved “mama’s boy” and had few contemporary friends while growing up...

...Though Smith does not say so, it is not too much to conclude that wooing Eleanor, TR’s niece, whom the 26th President came to New York to give in marriage in 1905, must surely have appealed to FDR as a way to bring himself closer to the Rough Rider...

...He has dug more deeply into the Roosevelt collection of books and documents than all of his predecessors...

...The Harvard Libraries Portal, which provides counts of books by subject, lists 1,321 volumes about the man...

...When, for instance, FDR returned from his wartime summit in Casablanca via a long, tiring route to avoid being shot down, Eleanor found it possible not to be there to greet him...

...It was Howe who coordinated Roosevelt’s appearance at the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City...

...His nomination of Al Smith was one of the high points in the history of party conventions, and Jean Smith’s account of it makes us realize what the current Presidential primary system has cost the nation in political purpose and drama...

...We know more are in the offing because the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York, chief breeding ground of its master’s story, remains the busiest of the growing number of Presidential pyramids...

...Lucy and Franklin resumed seeing each other in 1940, and as Smith tellingly reports, hers was the last face he saw when he died five years later...

...The coming of World War II and the development of FDR’s friendship with Winston Churchill are told by Smith with what can only be called concentrated panache...

...As one who lived through the era, I found that FDR brought marvelously alive the theater created by AngloAmerican life and history...

...Winning a New York State Senate seat in 1911 proved the value of his name, despite his running as a Democrat...

...FDR, who loved the company of women—especially if they exhibited a warmth he could not seem to find or arouse in his wife—became intimate with Lucy while the family was in Campobello, Canada, for the summer...

...And Eleanor’s sensitive, exhausting care of Franklin is skillfully presented without altering the reader’s awareness of the couple’s ice-cold private life...

...The particulars are so good that you even learn the brand of cigarettes that finally brought him down...

...The role of Louis McHenry Howe, a close aide and confidant of both Franklin and Eleanor from 1912 until his death in 1936, shines in these pages...

...Even Smith’s footnotes throughout the text, not to mention his 153 pages of endnotes, are instructive and absorbing...

...Whatever concern for society’s deprived people he seemed to display as President came only slowly to him...

...Gradually the reading of codes won the Battle of the Atlantic, prevented the Nazis from destroying the supply lifelines to Britain, and was invaluable in eliminating General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korp...

...Still, he cultivated friendships that would help him in his political life...

...FDR’s limited physical recovery and triumphant political career are recounted with a sense of both their inevitability and their uncertainty...

...Jean Edward Smith, the illustrious biographer of Ulysses S. Grant, John Marshall and General Lucius D. Clay, shows us that the answer is Yes...

...We do not know whether Mother Sara was the dominant influence here, or whether Franklin himself stood back...

...But he never wore a uniform, as Teddy had when war came in 1898...

...clearly, he is catching up on Woodrow Wilson’s 1,482 and on Theodore Roosevelt’s 2,014...

...Curiously, though, the author largely glosses over the effect Roosevelt’s physical shortcomings had on his performance...

...Having been a 21-year-old member of the Army Security Agency, specializing in reading Japanese codes and ciphers, I would further note that he gives insufficient attention to the impact cryptanalysis had on the War’s outcome...

...Roosevelt’s struggle with polio is of course well-known, but Smith’s is the most complete secondary account— except perhaps for Geoffrey C. Ward’s in A First-Class Temperament (1989...

...His activities on the domestic front, however, were intense...

...When the Great War broke out in 1914 Roosevelt, a lover of the sea and a Wilson supporter, took on the post of assistant secretary of the Navy...

...editor, “The Presidents: A Reference History” THIS IS THE fourth book on FDR published in the first half of 2007...

...But he overcame both circumstances by the time he reached adulthood...

...It was her price for staying with Franklin...

...Readings of Magic code messages from Japan’s Ambassador Hiroshi Oshima in Berlin regularly gave away conversations he had with Hitler about Nazi intentions and most significantly, provided an on-the-ground description of German defenses in North France that the Allies would soon confront in Normandy That lapse aside, Smith’s treatment of the Franklin-Eleanor relationship is memorable...

...As the remarkable race continues, it is reasonable to ask: Is there anything new to say about the immortal New Dealer...

...After reading FDR, I suspect people will see it very differently than they did before...

...Britain’s success in reading German Enigma messages saved England from being destroyed by the Luftwaffe...

...When Eleanor found out about the affair, she was ready to break with her husband...