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No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (Paperback)
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
| Category:
World War II, American history, Leadership |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A superbly moving and readable narrative, this book is a compelling portrait of an extraordinary couple. |
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Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition
Pub. in: October, 1995
ISBN: 0684804484
Pages: 768
Measurements: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00634
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0684804484
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- Awards & Credential -
The New York Times Bestseller and the winner of Pulitzer Prize. |
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- MSL Picks -
Of the making of books on Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt there is not end. By any standard they remain two of the most remarkable people to have inhabited the White House, he as one of greatest presidents ever and she as without any serious competition the greatest first lady. Together, they forged a partnership without parallel in the nation's history.
In a sense, the book is deceptively delimited. Goodwin ostensibly deals with the Roosevelts and the Home Front during WW II, but in fact this is more like a joint biography of the two. She freely shifts the narrative from the years of 1939-45 to any point in the lives of the two, whether to dwell on their first meeting, to the time in which Franklin was afflicted with polio and his attempted recovery, to Eleanor's upbringing and the sufferings she experienced with alcoholics, to Franklin's adulterous affair that effectively ended his and Eleanor's marriage if not their partnership. So the book ends up as a wide-ranging exploration of the lives of the two main characters, as well the major figures in their lives, whether in the war years or not.
Franklin emerges in the book as what he certainly was: one of the truly great presidents in American history (even his detractors need recall that Ronald Reagan called him the greatest president). Virtually every poll of scholars since his lifetime has placed him among our three greatest presidents, but even that can overlook the fact that no president in our history faced more challenges than did Roosevelt, and few dealt with them so successfully. Goodwin is brilliant at showing both Franklin's great strengths as both president and a human being, as well as his weaknesses. As she demonstrates, perhaps no president had a greater sense of what could actually be achieved politically at any moment, as opposed to what ought to be achieved. He was the great master of compromise, at crafting seemingly impossible solutions to intractable problems. Could any other president have conceived the land-lease program that may have been as essential in determining the outcome of WW II? As she quotes Churchill as saying, no other individual of his age thought so globally and comprehensibly as he. And has there ever been a president who generated such confidence in the people as a whole. Whatever his moral shortcomings, his leadership qualities were beyond parallel, and surely no president spoke so brilliantly and directly to the hearts of Americans. Sometimes we don't get the leaders we deserve, but the ones we need.
But despite Roosevelt's brilliance as a political leader, Goodwin does not spare in presenting him warts and all. She shows him as someone seemingly incapable of intimacy, despite the hordes of people he needed to surround him at all times. He possessed a host of admirable qualities, but he could also be disappointing, such as his behavior towards Missy Lehand after her debilitating stroke. He is also presented as someone who detested the dirty business of firing someone, someone who would go to the greatest lengths to avoid anything unpleasant, someone who, in fact, comes across as the pampered child he had been. He emerges both as someone worthy of the greatest admiration despite some very real emotional shortcomings.
Much the same is true of Eleanor, who while coming across as the nearest thing to a saint as we are ever likely to see in our country, was deeply lacking in a host of human qualities. Goodwin shows her as alternatingly scolding, insensitive of Franklin's momentary needs, as unaffectionate and fearful of sex, as unspontaneous and lacking in humor, as lacking in confidence, and unforgiving of Franklin's unfaithfulness with Lucy Mercer. At the same time, did any American ever have a better heart where the downtrodden and needy were concerned, or any American have some unselfish concern with social and political justice? Throughout the book, Franklin and Eleanor emerge as so admirable in part because they are also so human. These are not marble statues, but they are nonetheless all the more remarkable for all that.
Any presidency contains a host of supporting characters, but this was especially so in the Roosevelt administration, largely because of Franklin's need to be surrounded by others. Probably no presidency saw so many people living in the White House as the Roosevelt years. Consequently, the book provides mini-biographies of a score of characters, whether the uber-secretary Missy Lehand, the remarkably gifted though gravely ill Harry Hopkins, the Roosevelt children, Eleanor's friend (and perhaps lover) Hick, or Eleanor's friend Joe Lash. There are also wonderful portraits of such important individuals as Winston Churchill, whose friendship with Roosevelt was one of the reasons for the close cooperation between the U.S. and Britain during the war.
Because the basic subject matter is one of our greatest presidents during a period of great crisis, there is an inescapable political element to the book, but the actual tone of the book focuses more on the personalities rather than the issues. I do not find the book the least less successful for that. In fact, I think this book is a wonderful corrective for other biographies that focus more on the New Deal and WW II years as a succession of debates on issues or military crises. I would place this fine book on any short list of books to read about Roosevelt and presidential leadership during the war years.
(From quoting Robert Moore, USA)
Target readers:
People interested in the subject of World War II, modern American history, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and their leadership during the war.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize in history for No Ordinary Time, which was a New York Times bestseller. She is also the author of bestsellers The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She is a political analyst for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with her husband, Richard Goodwin, and their three sons.
****
In Author's Own Words:
I trace my love of history to the days when I was six years old and my father taught me the mysterious art of keeping score at baseball games so that I could listen to the Dodgers play in the afternoons while he was at work and re-create for him at night the entire history of each day's game, play by play, inning by inning. He made it even more special for me because he never told me that all this was described in the newspapers the next day so that I thought without me he would never even know what happened to our beloved Dodgers! Thus history acquired for me a magic that it still holds to this day.
But if my love of history was planted in that childhood experience, my
particular style of writing - a love of storytelling and an attempt to fuse history and biography with as much detail as possible so that the characters can come alive for the reader-is rooted in the experience of knowing one president Lyndon Johnson - very well when I was only thirty four. I worked for him first as a White House Fellow in his last year in office and then helped him on his memoirs the last four years of his life. It should have been a time in his life when he had much to be grateful for. His career in politics had, after all, reached a peak with his election to the presidency and he had all the money he needed to pursue any leisure activity. But here was a man whose entire life had been consumed by power, success, and ambition, and as a result, he could barely get through the days once the presidency was gone.
And, in his vulnerable state, he opened up to me in ways he never would have, had I known him at the height of his power, telling me of his fears, his nightmares, and his sorrows.
It was this experience that fired within me the drive to understand the inner person behind the public image that I'd like to believe I have brought to each of my books, beginning with Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, published in 1976 when I was still teaching at Harvard where I had gotten my Ph.D. in 1968. Watching Johnson's desolation at the end of his life also had an impact on my personal life. I had started my second book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, shortly after I was married and had two sons in two years. I was still a professor at Harvard, trying to teach, write, and be a mother at the same time and doing nothing right. The image of Johnson's sad retirement helped me to make some choices-to give up teaching so that I could stay at home with my children and write. Even then, it took ten years to write the Kennedy book, which was finally published in 1987. But when I look at the young men my boys have become, I have never regretted the years I spent at home.
I was drawn to my third book, No Ordinary Time, by a fascination both with the period of time, a time when our country was united by a common cause against a common enemy, and by a fascination with the extraordinary partnership between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The research was a labor of love: I spent months at a time at Hyde Park, New York, conducted hundreds of interviews with people who knew the Roosevelts personally, perused dozens of diaries and thousands of letters, read old newspapers and magazines, and truly felt as if I had been transported back 50 years in time.
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From Publisher
No Ordinary Time is a monumental work, a brilliantly conceived chronicle of one of the most vibrant and revolutionary periods in the history of the United States. With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines - Eleanor and Franklin's marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor's life as First Lady, and FDR's White House and its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin effectively melds these details and stories into an unforgettable and intimate portrait of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and of the time during which a new, modern America was born.
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Chapter 1
"THE DECISIVE HOUR HAS COME"
On nights filled with tension and concern, Franklin Roosevelt performed a ritual that helped him to fall asleep. He would close his eyes and imagine himself at Hyde Park as a boy, standing with his sled in the snow atop the steep hill that stretched from the south porch of his home to the wooded bluffs of the Hudson River far below. As he accelerated down the hill, he maneuvered each familiar curve with perfect skill until he reached the bottom, whereupon, pulling his sled behind him, he started slowly back up until he reached the top, where he would once more begin his descent. Again and again he replayed this remembered scene in his mind, obliterating his awareness of the shrunken legs inert beneath the sheets, undoing the knowledge that he would never climb a hill or even walk on his own power again. Thus liberating himself from his paralysis through an act of imaginative will, the president of the United States would fall asleep.
The evening of May 9, 1940, was one of these nights. At 11 p.m., as Roosevelt sat in his comfortable study on the second floor of the White House, the long-apprehended phone call had come. Resting against the high back of his favorite red leather chair, a precise reproduction of one Thomas Jefferson had designed for work, the president listened as his ambassador to Belgium, John Cudahy, told him that Hitler's armies were simultaneously attacking Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. The period of relative calm - the "phony war" that had settled over Europe since the German attack on Poland in September of 1939 - was over.
For days, rumors of a planned Nazi invasion had spread through the capitals of Western Europe. Now, listening to Ambassador Cudahy's frantic report that German planes were in the air over the Low Countries and France, Roosevelt knew that the all-out war he feared had finally begun. In a single night, the tacit agreement that, for eight months, had kept the belligerents from attacking each other's territory had been shattered.
As he summoned his military aide and appointments secretary, General Edwin "Pa" Watson, on this spring evening of the last year of his second term, Franklin Roosevelt looked younger than his fifty-eight years. Though his hair was threaded with gray, the skin on his handsome face was clear, and the blue eyes, beneath his pince-nez glasses, were those of a man at the peak of his vitality. His chest was so broad, his neck so thick, that when seated he appeared larger than he was. Only when he was moved from his chair would the eye be drawn to the withered legs, paralyzed by polio almost two decades earlier.
At 12:40 a.m., the president's press secretary, Stephen Early, arrived to monitor incoming messages. Bombs had begun to fall on Brussels, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying thousands of homes. In dozens of old European neighborhoods, fires illuminated the night sky. Stunned Belgians stood in their nightclothes in the streets of Brussels, watching bursts of anti-aircraft fire as military cars and motorcycles dashed through the streets. A thirteen-year-old schoolboy, Guy de Liederkirche, was Brussels' first child to die. His body would later be carried to his school for a memorial service with his classmates. On every radio station throughout Belgium, broadcasts summoned all soldiers to join their units at once.
In Amsterdam the roads leading out of the city were crowded with people and automobiles as residents fled in fear of the bombing. Bombs were also falling at Dunkirk, Calais, and Metz in France, and at Chilham, near Canterbury, in England. The initial reports were confusing - border clashes had begun, parachute troops were being dropped to seize Dutch and Belgian airports, the government of Luxembourg had already fled to France, and there was some reason to believe the Germans were also landing troops by sea.
After speaking again to Ambassador Cudahy and scanning the incoming news reports, Roosevelt called his secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and ordered him to freeze all assets held by Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg before the market opened in the morning, to keep any resources of the invaded countries from falling into German hands.
The official German explanation for the sweeping invasion of the neutral lowlands was given by Germany's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Germany, he claimed, had received "proof" that the Allies were engineering an imminent attack through the Low Countries into the German Ruhr district. In a belligerent tone, von Ribbentrop said the time had come for settling the final account with the French and British leaders. Just before midnight, Adolf Hitler, having boarded a special train to the front, had issued the fateful order to his troops: "The decisive hour has come for the fight today decides the fate of the German nation for the next 1000 years."
There was little that could be done that night - phone calls to Paris and Brussels could rarely be completed, and the Hague wire was barely working - but, as one State Department official said, "in times of crisis the key men should be at hand and the public should know it." Finally, at 2:40 a.m., Roosevelt decided to go to bed. After shifting his body to his armless wheel chair, he rolled through a door near his desk into his bedroom.
As usual when the president's day came to an end, he called for his valet, Irvin McDuffie, to lift him into his bed. McDuffie, a Southern Negro, born the same year as his boss, had been a barber by trade when Roosevelt met him in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1927. Roosevelt quickly developed a liking for the talkative man and offered him the job of valet. Now he and his wife lived in a room on the third floor of the White House. In recent months, McDuffie's hard drinking had become a problem: on several occasions Eleanor had found him so drunk that "he couldn't help Franklin to bed." Fearing that her husband might be abandoned at a bad time, Eleanor urged him to fire McDuffie, but the president was unable to bring himself to let his old friend go, even though he shared Eleanor's fear.
McDuffie was at his post in the early hours of May 10 when the president called for help. He lifted the president from his wheelchair onto the narrow bed, reminiscent of the kind used in a boy's boarding school, straightened his legs to their full length, and then undressed him and put on his pajamas. Beside the bed was a white-painted table; on its top, a jumble of pencils, notepaper, a glass of water, a package of cigarettes, a couple of phones, a bottle of nose drops. On the floor beside the table stood a small basket - the Eleanor basket - in which the first lady regularly left memoranda, communications, and reports for the president to read - a sort of private post office between husband and wife. In the corner sat an old-fashioned rocking chair, and next to it a heavy wardrobe filled with the president's clothes. On the marble mantelpiece above the fireplace was an assortment of family photos and a collection of miniature pigs. "Like every room in any Roosevelt house," historian Arthur Schlesinger has written, "the presidential bedroom was hopelessly Victorian - old-fashioned and indiscriminate in its furnishings, cluttered in its decor, ugly and comfortable."
Outside Roosevelt's door, which he refused to lock at night as previous presidents had done, Secret Service men patrolled the corridor, alerting the guardroom to the slightest hint of movement. The refusal to lock his door was related to the president's dread of fire, which surpassed his fear of assassination or of anything else. The fear seems to have been rooted in his childhood, when, as a small boy, he had seen his young aunt, Laura, race down the stairs, screaming, her body and clothes aflame from an accident with an alcohol lamp. Her life was ended at nineteen. The fear grew when he became a paraplegic, to the point where, for hours at a time, he would practice dropping from his bed or chair to the floor and then crawling to the door so that he could escape from a fire on his own. "We assured him he would never be alone," his eldest son, Jimmy, recalled, "but he could not be sure, and furthermore found the idea depressing that he could not be left alone, as if he were an infant."
Roosevelt's nightly rituals tell us something about his deepest feelings - the desire for freedom, the quest for movement, and the significance, despite all his attempts to downplay it, of the paralysis in his life. In 1940, Roosevelt had been president of the United States for seven years, but he had been paralyzed from the waist down for nearly three times that long. Before he was stricken at thirty-nine, Roosevelt was a man who flourished on activity. He had served in the New York legislature for two years, been assistant secretary of the navy for seven years, and his party's candidate for vice-president in 1920. He loved to swim and to sail, to play tennis and golf; to run in the woods and ride horseback in the fields. To his daughter, Anna, he was always "very active physically," "a wonderful playmate who took long walks with you, sailed with you, could out-jump you and do a lot of things," while Jimmy saw him quite simply as "the handsomest, strongest, most glamorous, vigorous physical father in the world."
All that vigor and athleticism ended in August 1921 at Campobello, his family's summer home in New Brunswick, Canada, when he returned home from swimming in the pond with his children and felt too tired even to remove his wet bathing suit. The morning after his swim, his temperature was 102 degrees and he had trouble moving his left leg. By afternoon, the power to move his right leg was also gone, and soon he was paralyzed from the waist down. The paralysis had set in so swiftly that no one understood at first that it was polio. But once the diagnosis was made, the battle was joined. For years he fought to walk on his own power, practicing for hours at a time, drenched with sweat, as he tried unsuccessfully to move one leg in front of the other without the aid of a pair of crutches or a helping hand. That consuming and futile effort had to be abandoned once he became governor of New York in 1929 and then president in 1933. He was permanently crippled.
Yet the paralysis that crippled his body expanded his mind and his sensibilities. After what Eleanor called his "trial by fire," he seemed less arrogant, less smug, less superficial, more focused, more complex, more interesting. He returned from his ordeal with greater powers of concentration and greater self-knowledge. "There had been a plowing up of his nature," Labor Secretary Frances Perkins observed. "The man emerged completely warmhearted, with new humility of spirit and a firmer understanding of profound philosophical concepts."
He had always taken great pleasure in people. But now they became what one historian has called "his vital links with life." Far more intensely than before, he reached out to know them, to understand them, to pick up their emotions, to put himself into their shoes. No longer belonging to his old world in the same way, he came to empathize with the poor and underprivileged, with people to whom fate had dealt a difficult hand. Once, after a lecture in Akron, Ohio, Eleanor was asked how her husband's illness had affected him. "Anyone who has gone through great suffering," she said, "is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind."
Through his presidency, the mere act of standing up with his heavy metal leg-braces locked into place was an ordeal. The journalist Eliot Janeway remembers being behind Roosevelt once when he was in his chair in the Oval Office. "He was smiling as he talked. His face and hand muscles were totally relaxed. But then, when he had to stand up, his jaws went absolutely rigid. The effort of getting what was left of his body up was so great his face changed dramatically. It was as if he braced his body for a bullet."
Little wonder, then, that, in falling asleep at night, Roosevelt took comfort in the thought of physical freedom.
The morning sun of Washington's belated spring was streaming through the president's windows on May 10, 1940. Despite the tumult of the night before, which had kept him up until nearly 3 a.m., he awoke at his usual hour of eight o'clock. Pivoting to the edge of the bed, he pressed the button for his valet, who helped him into the bathroom. Then, as he had done every morning for the past seven years, he threw his old blue cape over his pajamas and started his day with breakfast in bed - orange juice, eggs, coffee, and buttered toast - and the morning, papers: The New York Times and the Herald Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post and the Washington Herald.
Headlines recounted the grim events he had heard at 11 p.m. the evening before. From Paris, Ambassador William Bullitt confirmed that the Germans had launched violent attacks on a half-dozen French military bases. Bombs had also fallen on the main railway connections between Paris and the border in an attempt to stop troop movements.
Before finishing the morning papers, the president held a meeting with Steve Early and "Pa" Watson, to review his crowded schedule. He instructed them to convene an emergency meeting at ten-thirty with the chiefs of the army and the navy, the secretaries of state and Treasury, and the attorney general. In addition, Roosevelt was scheduled to meet the press in the morning and the Cabinet in the afternoon, as he had done every Friday morning and afternoon for seven years. Later that night, he was supposed to deliver a keynote address at the Pan American Scientific Congress. After asking Early to delay the press conference an hour and to have the State Department draft a new speech, Roosevelt called his valet to help him dress.
While Franklin Roosevelt was being dressed in his bedroom, Eleanor was in New York, having spent the past few days in the apartment she kept in Greenwich Village, in a small house owned by her friends Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read. The Village apartment on East 11th Street, five blocks north of Washington Square, provided Eleanor with a welcome escape from the demands of the White House, a secret refuge whenever her crowded calendar brought her to New York. For decades, the Village, with its winding streets, modest brick houses, bookshops, tearooms, little theaters, and cheap rents, had been home to political, artistic, and literary rebels, giving it a colorful Old World character.
The object of Eleanor's visit to the city - her second in ten days - was a meeting that day at the Choate School in Connecticut, where she was scheduled to speak with teachers and students. Along the way, she had sandwiched in a banquet for the National League of Women Voters, a meeting for the fund for Polish relief, a visit to her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, a radio broadcast, lunch with her friend the young student activist Joe Lash, and dinner with Democratic leader Edward Flynn and his wife.
The week before, at the Astor Hotel, Eleanor had been honored by The Nation magazine for her work in behalf of civil rights and poverty. More than a thousand people had filled the tables and the balcony of the cavernous ballroom to watch her receive a bronze plaque for "distinguished service in the cause of American social progress." Among the many speakers that night, Stuart Chase lauded the first lady's concentrated focus on the problems at home. "I suppose she worries about Europe like the rest of us," he began, "but she does not allow this worry to divert her attention from the homefront. She goes around America, looking at America, thinking about America... helping day and night with the problems of America." For, he concluded, "the New Deal is supposed to be fighting a war, too, a war against depression."
"What is an institution?" author John Gunther had asked when his turn to speak came. "An institution," he asserted, is "something that had fixity, permanence, and importance... something that people like to depend on, something benevolent as a rule, something we like." And by that definition, he concluded, the woman being honored that night was as great an institution as her husband, who was already being talked about for an unprecedented third term. Echoing Gunther's sentiments, NAACP head Walter White turned to Mrs. Roosevelt and said: "My dear, I don't care if the President runs for the third or fourth term as long as he lets you run the bases, keep the score and win the game."
For her part, Eleanor was slightly embarrassed by all the fuss. "It never seems quite real to me to sit at a table and have people whom I have always looked upon with respect... explain why they are granting me an honor," she wrote in her column describing the evening. "Somehow I always feel they ought to be talking about someone else." Yet, as she stood to speak that night at the Astor ballroom, rising nearly six feet, her wavy brown hair slightly touched by gray, her wide mouth marred by large buck teeth, her brilliant blue eyes offset by an unfortunate chin, she dominated the room as no one before her had done. "I will do my best to do what is right," she began, forcing her high voice to a lower range, "not with a sense of my own adequacy but with the feeling that the country must go on, that we must keep democracy and must make it mean a reality to more people... We should constantly be reminded of what we owe in return for what we have."
It was this tireless commitment to democracy's unfinished agenda that led Americans in a Gallup poll taken that spring to rate Mrs. Roosevelt even higher than her husband, with 67 percent of those interviewed well disposed toward her activities. "Mrs. Roosevelt's incessant goings and comings," the survey suggested, "have been accepted as a rather welcome part of the national life. Women especially feel this way. But even men betray relatively small masculine impatience with the work and opinions of a very articulate lady... The rich, who generally disapprove of Mrs. Roosevelt's husband, seem just as friendly toward her as the poor... Even among those extremely anti-Roosevelt citizens who would regard a third term as a national disaster there is a generous minority... who want Mrs. Roosevelt to remain in the public eye."
The path to this position of independent power and respect had not been easy. Eleanor's distinguished career had been forged from a painful discovery when she was thirty-four. After a period of suspicion, she realized that her husband, who was then assistant secretary of the navy, had fallen in love with another woman, Lucy Page Mercer.
Tall, beautiful, and well bred, with a low throaty voice and an incomparably winning smile, Lucy Mercer was working as Eleanor's social secretary when the love affair began. For months, perhaps even years, Franklin kept his romance a secret from Eleanor. Her shattering discovery took place in September 1918. Franklin had just returned from a visit to the European front. Unpacking his suitcase, she discovered a packet of love letters from Lucy. At this moment, Eleanor later admitted, "the bottom dropped out of my own particular world & I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time."
Eleanor told her husband that she would grant him a divorce. But this was not what he wanted, or at least not what he was able to put himself through, particularly when his mother, Sara, was said to have threatened him with disinheritance if he left his marriage. If her son insisted on leaving his wife and five children for another woman, visiting scandal upon the Roosevelt name, she could not stop him. But he should know that she would not give him another dollar and he could no longer expect to inherit the family estate at Hyde Park. Franklin's trusted political adviser, Louis Howe, weighed in as well, warning Franklin that divorce would bring his political career to an abrupt end. There was also the problem of Lucy's Catholicism, which would prevent her from marrying a divorced man.
Franklin promised never to see Lucy again and agreed, so the Roosevelt children suggest, to Eleanor's demand for separate bedrooms, bringing their marital relations to an end. Eleanor would later admit to her daughter, Anna, that sex was "an ordeal to be borne." Something in her childhood had locked her up, she said, making her fear the loss of control that comes with abandoning oneself to one's passions, giving her "an exaggerated idea of the necessity of keeping all one's desires under complete subjugation." Now, supposedly, she was free of her "ordeal."
The marriage resumed. But for Eleanor, a path had opened, a possibility of standing apart from Franklin. No longer did she need to define herself solely in terms of his wants and his needs. Before the crisis, though marriage had never fulfilled her prodigious energies, she had no way of breaking through the habits and expectations of a proper young woman's role. To explore her independent needs, to journey outside her home for happiness, was perceived as dangerous and wrong.
With the discovery of the affair, however, she was free to define a new and different partnership with her husband, free to seek new avenues of fulfillment. It was a gradual process, a gradual casting away, a gradual gaining of confidence - and it was by no means complete - but the fifty-six-year-old woman who was being feted in New York was a different person from the shy, betrayed wife of 1918.
Above the president's bedroom, in a snug third-floor suite, his personal secretary, Marguerite "Missy" LeHand, was already dressed, though she, too, had stayed up late the night before.
A tall, handsome woman of forty-one with large blue eyes and prematurely gray, once luxuriant black hair fastened by hairpins to the nape of her neck, Missy was in love with her boss and regarded herself as his other wife. Nor was she alone in her imaginings. "There's no doubt," White House aide Raymond Moley said, "that Missy was as close to being a wife as he ever had - or could have." White House maid Lillian Parks agreed. "When Missy gave an order, we responded as if it had come from the First Lady. We knew that FDR would always back up Missy."
Missy had come a long way from the working-class neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she had grown up. Her father was an alcoholic who lived apart from the family. Her mother, with five children to raise, took in a revolving group of Harvard students as tenants. Yet, even when she was young, Missy's childhood friend Barbara Curtis recalled, "she had a certain class to her. I remember one time watching her go around the corner - our houses weren't too far apart - and my mother looked out the window and called my attention to her. She said, 'she certainly looks smart.' She had a dark suit on to go to high school. She stood out for having a better appearance and being smarter than most."
After secretarial school, Missy had gone to New York, where she became involved in Roosevelt's vice-presidential campaign in 1920. Impressed by Missy's efficiency, Eleanor asked her to come to Hyde Park after the election to help Franklin clean up his correspondence. From the start, Missy proved herself indispensable. When asked later to explain her astonishing secretarial skill, she said simply, "The first thing for a private secretary to do is to study her employer. After I went to work for Mr. Roosevelt, for months I read carefully all the letters he dictated... I learned what letters he wanted to see and which ones it was not necessary to show him... I came to know exactly how Mr. Roosevelt would answer some of his letters, how he would couch his thoughts. When he discovered that I had learned these things it took a load off his shoulders, for instead of having to dictate the answers to many letters he could just say yes or no and I knew what to say and how to say it."
A year later, when Franklin contracted polio, Missy's duties expanded. Both Franklin and Eleanor understood that it was critical for Franklin to keep active in politics even as he struggled unsuccessfully day after day, month after month, to walk again. To that end, Eleanor adhered to a rigorous daily schedule as the stand-in for her husband, journeying from one political meeting to the next to ensure that the Roosevelt name was not forgotten. With Eleanor busily occupied away from home, Missy did all the chores a housewife might do, writing Franklin's personal checks, paying the monthly bills, giving the children their allowances, supervising the menus, sending the rugs and draperies for cleaning.
When Roosevelt was elected governor in 1928, Missy moved with the Roosevelt family to Albany, occupying a large bedroom suite on the second floor of the Governor's Mansion. "Albany was the hardest work I ever did," she said, recalling the huge load she carried for the activist governor without the help of the three assistants she would later enjoy in the White House. By the time Roosevelt was president, she had become totally absorbed in his life - learning his favorite games, sharing his hobbies, reading the same books, even adopting his characteristic accent and patterns of speech. Whereas Eleanor was so opposed to gambling that she refused to play poker with Franklin's friends if even the smallest amount of money changed hands, Missy became an avid player, challenging Roosevelt at every turn, always ready to raise the ante. Whereas Eleanor never evinced any interest in her husband's treasured stamp collection, Missy was an enthusiastic partner, spending hours by his side as he organized and reorganized his stamps into one or another of his thick leather books. "In terms of companionship," Eliot Janeway observed, "Missy was the real wife. She understood his nature perfectly, as they would say in a nineteenth-century novel." ...
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New York Times (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
Goodwin has pulled off the double trick of making Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt seem so monumental as to have come from a very distant past, and at the same time so vital as to have been alive only yesterday.
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Kirkus Reviews (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
A superb dual portrait of the 32nd President and his First Lady, whose extraordinary partnership steered the nation through the perilous WW II years. In the period covered by this biography, 1940 through Franklin's death in 1949, FDR was elected to unprecedented third and fourth terms and nudged the country away from isolationism into war. It is by now a given that Eleanor was not only an indispensable adviser to this ebullient, masterful statesman, but a political force in her own right. More than most recent historians, however, Goodwin (The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 1987) is uncommonly sensitive to their complex relationship's shifting undercurrents, which ranged from deep mutual respect to lingering alienation caused by FDR's infidelity. One element creating tension was tactical politics: FDR, seeing increased arms production as crucial to the war effort, sought to close the divide between businessmen and his administration, while Eleanor prodded him not to forget about labor, civil rights, and Jewish refugees. As grateful as he was to her for acting as his political eyes and ears, Franklin also could react testily to her unremitting lobbying at times when he desperately needed relief from the strains of running the war effort. Equally fascinating here are the often semi-permanent White House guests who filled the couple's "untended needs": their daughter and four sons; FDR alter ego Harry Hopkins, shaking off grave illness to go on critical diplomatic missions; Franklin's secretary Missy LeHand, prevented by a stroke from serving the man she loved; exiled Princess Martha of Norway, who gave Franklin the unqualified affection of which Eleanor was incapable; two of Eleanor's confidantes, future biographer Joe Lash and the lesbian ex-journalist Lorena Hickok; and Winston Churchill. A moving drama of patchwork intimacy in the White House, played out against the sweeping tableau of the nation rallying behind a great crusade. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
My parents and their generation grew up during the Depression and WWII, and said that Franklin Roosevelt was the difference with his upbeat attitude and sound leadership, giving the country the confidence needed to overcome all obstacles. He was not afraid to lead and take chances, they told me, and was for them the most revered patriot in the history of our country.
I finally decided to read a book that might give me some perspective on this. Were my parents right in their assessment, or was this mythological thinking, making something better in retrospect than it was in real time?
So I turned to this carefully researched and crafted, and Pulitzer Prize winning account of that time, No Ordinary Time. The book found FDR to be complex, charming, hard-to-know, optimistic, resilient, crafty, and ruthless when necessary; in other words, FDR was a master politician. His vision and timing were impeccable and he was fearless, as he navigated the stormiest waters of the 20th century. I found him, by this book's account, to justify the admiration of my parents, even with 60 to 70 years perspective.
Doris Kearns Goodwin gives us a stroll through his life, stopping here and there to go into the history of an event or the background of a key person. It was a little bit soap opera with the various relationships FDR and Eleanor had, not only with each other, but with others they loved. She and Franklin had parted intimate ways just after WWI because of an extended affair FDR had with a certain Lucy Mercer, and so they both sought intimacy elsewhere. It seems that none of the relationships were sexual, including, of course, the one between FDR and Eleanor; and at least one was a lesbian affair. FDR and Eleanor truly loved each other, but it's a mystery how they kept their marriage going. Their relationship is one of the most important mysteries of American political history, as they both put together patched-up personal lives to compensate for the failed marriage.
All of this proves that the President and his First Lady were very human and depended on each other. For the crippled Franklin, Eleanor was his eyes and ears to what was really going on throughout the country; and for Eleanor, it was a way of pressing for her social concerns. In fact, her efforts sowed some of the seeds that fomented the Civil Rights movement in the 60's.
Franklin was very good at keeping his own counsel, and hardly ever showed his hand until he announced a decision. Also, he took chances, especially in supplying England early in the war when our resources at home were almost completely decimated by the Depression. He was able to pump up production of war materials in the US to record levels, by navigating the tricky waters between unions and big business. (In fact, the book says that our production, more than our military manpower, was the reason we won the War.) He was able to bring out our best. He was also adept at dealing with our allies, notably the great but high-strung Churchill, and the mysterious and deadly Stalin.
Eleanor was also truly remarkable. She was tireless in her liberal causes for the under-classes (women, minorities, the poor) and set a standard for First Ladies that has never been equaled. She was better with crowds, making speeches, than one-on-one, and had a more difficult time with personal relationships. She did not seem to be able to reveal her true self even to those closest to her. That said, you couldn't help but be impressed with her tireless drive and dedication. The Presidency would not have been as successful if not for her.
I can't imagine the amount of research that went into this book. Doris Kearns Goodwin deserved the Pulitzer Prize for it. It was a great read about a great subject.
FDR and Eleanor were no ordinary couple!
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Shawn Sullivan (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-18 00:00>
Doris Kearns Goodwin is simply at her best in No Ordinary Time. It is a wonderful historical narrative of what went on inside the White House during the Depression, the years leading up to the war and WWII itself. Dr. Goodwin picked a topic and added an immense amount of research and color to it. She manages to astutely put the reader into the Roosevelt White house and the relationship between these two towering figures. Yet she never allows the reader to lose site of the bigger picture, always seemlessly bringing a broader historical framework back into her pages. Her depiction of FDR's true leadership but failure at in-depth human relationships is well done. Her look at the pioneering Elenor Roosevelt and her inability to slow down and deal with a marriage even after a near failure in its very nascent stages, her desire to influence her husband to keep the social progress of the New Deal alive when his hands were beyond full leading an all-encompassing war effort and her jealousies of women with social graces is truly terrific stuff. Literally all the players that set both the world stage are there with much of her attention at the White House where friends, family, advisors, lovers, and world leaders lived and stayed and created a dynamic that literally shaped U.S. policy during this incredible period of world history.
One could go on about how well each topic is covered. Suffice it to say this is one well done book. If the reader desires to learn more about another relationship that greatly effected the war effort, I would recommend Franklin and Winston by Jon Meacham or, for a broader and terrific work on the period, Freedom From Fear by David M. Kennedy (part of the Oxford History of the United States). For a great couple of historical fiction pieces I would pick up Winds of War and War and Rememberence by Herman Wouk (don't let a poor televions mini-series poison your view of a couple of terrific novels that give you a feel for a period that even the best writers of narrative history, simply cannot given the purpose of their writings). |
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