FDR

Having survived Jean Edward Smith's "FDR," a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (636 pages of text, 134 of notes), I want to recommend it to those who have (and will make) time to read it. Most especially those who are fascinated by politics and seniors who actually lived through the momentous Roosevelt years.'The book is indeed ponderous in bulk, but not in style or spirit. If you tackle it, you could find yourself reading well beyond the intervals you've set aside for it. And you could find yourself grinning -- even, on occasion, laughing out loud. It's a lulu.

A few samples:

Item: Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill braved the deadly threat of Nazi U-boats to sail to America to confer with FDR in Washington. Winnie bunked at the White House.
He took time to instruct FDR's butler, Alonzo Fields, thus: "One, I don't like talking outside my quarters. Two, I hate whistling in the corridors. And three, I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast, a couple of glasses of scotch before lunch, and French champagne and well-aged brandy before I go to sleep at night."

Item: "One morning FDR wheeled himself into Churchill's bedroom just as the prime minister emerged from his bathroom stark naked and gleaming pink from a hot bath. Roosevelt apologized and turned about, but Churchill protested, 'the Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States'."

Item: In the Roosevelt years, even staunchly progressive and sensitive politicians were not as careful about racial and ethnic references as they may be now, at least in private communication. In 1913, FDR wrote to his wife, Eleanor, that "the Secretary and I worked like niggers all day." The reference is to Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels; (Roosevelt was an assistant secretary.)
Eleanor once reported, after a social event, that "the Jew party was appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels, and sables mentioned again." In a letter, she once wrote that she had found Harvard professor Felix Frankfurter to be "an interesting little man," but "very Jew."

Item: Political campaigning in the 1930s in the redneck backwoods really got lowdown dirty sometimes. In a primary contest in 1938, Florida senator Claude Pepper was accused by his opponent of "having been guilty of celibacy before marriage and addicted to monogamy ever since."
In 1950 Pepper was defeated by a rival who informed voters that Pepper's sister, an actress, was "a practicing thespian living in New York's Greenwich Village."

Item: "In the first years of the twentieth century, Prohibitionist sentiment was such that battleships named for dry states (e.g. Mississippi) were christened with lemonade rather than champagne."

Item: In 1916, FDR began an intimate relationship with Lucy Mercer, his wife's part-time social secretary. The relationship continued quietly and privately until his death, at which she was present, in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1945.
Over the years, this affair was an open secret among political insiders and even elements of the press. But that was a very different time from now, and such private behavior was commonly sheltered from public view. There was no public disclosure of the Mercer affair until the 1960s.