Publisher's Weekly-Rezension
Persico (Roosevelt's Secret War) engagingly and eloquently narrates the tangled relationships between Franklin and the various women to whom he became close, including his mother; his wife; Lucy Mercer (the young Eleanor Roosevelt's social secretary during WWI and later Mrs. Winthrop Rutherford); his longtime secretary, Missy LeHand; and his distant cousin Margaret (Daisy) Suckley. These relationships have been examined before; the major revelation of the volume-backed up by documents recently discovered by Mercer's descendants-is that her relationship with FDR continued throughout his life, even after it was supposedly ended by Franklin at the demand of his mother, who threatened to cut off both his income and his inheritance were he to leave his wife and family. (Previously, it was believed that FDR's relationship with Mercer only rekindled once Franklin's mother died, at the very end of his own life.) Another intriguing aspect of the book is Persico's informed speculation on how Franklin's frequently nonchalant womanizing affected Eleanor, who appears, quite possibly, to have pursued several relationships of her own, both hetero- and homosexual. In sum, Persico offers what will prove an important, lasting addition to the literature of the Roosevelts. (Apr. 29) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books-Rezension
Joseph E. Persico's biography of Franklin Roosevelt focuses on Lucy Mercer but doesn't stop there. WHEN did we become so interested in the sex lives of presidents? Torrid tales circulated about Thomas Jefferson and Grover Cleveland in their days, and after Warren Harding's death, his paramour Nan Britton published a racy if unreliable account of their liaison. But only with the loosening of sexual mores in the 1960s, accompanied by the false air of familiarity fostered by television, did the dam burst. In a 1963 New York Times Magazine article the historian Eric Goldman wondered, "Can Public Men Have Private Lives?," noting with some unease magazine photographs of John Kennedy that showed a "bare-chested president with bikini-clad bathers." Goldman didn't know the half of it. The journalistic instinct toward all-too-full disclosure, fueled by Watergate, heightened the sense that the public had a "right to know" about the White House bedroom and whatever might be going on in there (or not going on, as the revelations about the Nixons' marriage in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's 1976 book, "The Final Days," made clear). It was turned retroactively on presidents like Kennedy, whose infidelities didn't fit most people's definition of news in 1963 but became grist for a number of trashy biographies beginning in the 1970s. The trend reached its apotheosis in the contemptible 1998 document known as the Starr report. Joseph E. Persico, the author of several works of history and biography, has, with "Franklin and Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life," written a book that lacks the Comstockian prurience and religious-right agenda of the Starr report but nonetheless takes readers where they might prefer not to go. Principally the story of Roosevelt's affair with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor Roosevelt's social secretary in the 1910s, and of the resumption of a close bond between them in their later years, "Franklin and Lucy" may be able to make the dubious claim of being as complete a record as we have of the president's sexual history. Roosevelt's dalliance with Mercer (later Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd), conducted when he was a young assistant Navy secretary, has been known for years. Persico retells it in the context of the intimate lives of Franklin and Eleanor more generally. He focuses on the rift that Eleanor's discovery of the liaison in 1918 introduced into the Roosevelt's 13-year-old marriage, before pivoting to a thorough chronicle of Roosevelt's subsequent relationships with various women, including a probably-amorous one with Marguerite LeHand, known as Missy, his longtime personal aide. Persico speculates, too, about an encounter with Margaret, or Daisy, Suckley, a distant cousin of the president's, and leaves scattered hints about Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of The New York Post, and Princess Martha of Norway. For good measure, the book revisits the probably romantic attachment between Eleanor Roosevelt and the journalist-turned-White House aide (and White House resident) Lorena Hickok. Everyone likes a bit of gossip now and then, but Persico's relentlessness is disconcerting. He pursues questions about when and with whom Roosevelt went to bed with the same solemnity that other historians take to the question of when and with whom he decided to go to war. So we have reflections like this: "The extent of Franklin's premarital experience is unknown. His pawing of Alice Sohier, his adventures in Switzerland with the phony noblewomen and the older French woman in Trinidad suggest an intact libido." Or, after noting Eleanor's distaste for sex: "Obviously the mechanics at least succeeded since, upon the couple's return home in September, Eleanor was pregnant." Or again: "If Franklin had been shut off from conjugal relations at home, where, one wonders, would a virile 34-year-old man seek relief?" And the coup de grace: "Polio had destroyed feeling and movement in his legs, but elsewhere his body was unaffected. ... In plain English, he could sustain an erection." File all this under "too much information" - and not enough justification of why that information matters. To be sure, it should by no means be out of bounds for a historian to write about a public figure's intimate life. Previous volumes dealing with the private Roosevelt by such eminent authors as Joseph P. Lash, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Blanche Wiesen Cook and Geoffrey C. Ward met with some reproof from stuffy historians for seeking to titillate. Yet overall those works achieved their goals of illuminating significant historical or biographical questions about the president. (Less enduring has been the otherwise slight 1966 book by Jonathan Daniels, "The Time Between the Wars," which first brought the Mercer affair to light.) Although Persico rightly maintains that "the female influences" on Roosevelt "were immense and formative," he doesn't really explain how. Indeed, rather than using Roosevelt's relationships with women to analyze the president's leadership in office, Persico often does the reverse - using world events to contextualize Roosevelt's pursuit of the ladies. "On the weekend of Oct. 24-25," he writes about the year 1941, "days after the hard-line general Hideki Tojo became Japan's prime minister, boosting the odds of war, F.D.R. invited Princess Martha to Hyde Park. ... The day following Japan's threatening message, Martha was again with F.D.R. for dinner, this time at the White House, and stayed until almost midnight. She was there for lunch on Nov. 15, after which the president had an Army projectionist run the new Walt Disney movie, 'Dumbo,' for the two of them." Later, he says, "Besides dinner at the White House, the president hoped to take Lucy to Shangri-La" - his name for the retreat later known as Camp David. "But first he had to get through meetings with Gen. Charles de Gaulle." THE recent news stories about Senator John McCain, alleged without much evidence to have had an affair with a lobbyist, and of the former New York governor Elliot Spitzer, pressured to resign after having been revealed as a john, remind us of the subtleties and variations in the politics of sexual exposure. Sometimes a politician's bedroom recreations matter and sometimes they don't. Like journalists, historians must be specific and rigorous in framing their arguments about why and when private acts are of public significance. The line between history and gossip can be treacherously thin. Does the public have a 'right to know' about whatever may be going on in the White House bedroom? David Greenberg, a professor of media studies and history at Rutgers University and a columnist for Slate, is the author of "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image" and other books.
Library Journal-Rezension
There's more to Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd's affair with FDR than we ever knew--and what about the other women in his life? Reading group promotion. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Chapter 1 SCARLET LETTERS He belonged in uniform. His country was at war. He was thirty-six years old and bursting with vitality. Before going to work in the morning at the Navy Department he often played a round of golf. On weekends, he rarely got in less than thirty-six holes. During the week he worked out with Walter Camp, the football coach and fitness enthusiast. Lathrop Brown, his Harvard roommate, was serving in the new tank corps. Harry Hooker, his former law partner, was now Major Hooker, on the staff of the 53rd Division American Expeditionary Forces. Another law partner and Harvard pal, Langdon Marvin, was driving an ambulance in France with the Red Cross. His four distant cousins, Archibald, Kermit, Theodore Jr., and Quentin, sons of Franklin's idol, former President Theodore Roosevelt, had all enlisted. The exploits of TR's boys filled the newspapers, arousing in Franklin competing emotions of pride and envy. Even his nearsighted brother-in-law, Hall Roosevelt, had volunteered. On the very day that war had been declared, April 6, 1917, the Roosevelt clan gathered at the home of TR's married daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. There the former commander-in-chief seized Franklin by the shoulders, fixed him with his myopic gaze, and pleaded with him to resign as assistant secretary of the navy. "You must get into uniform at once," TR urged. "You must get in." Franklin was all too willing. Patriotism was the main reason, but politics intruded as well. In 1898, when America had gone to war against Spain over Cuba, TR had resigned from the very Navy post Franklin now held. He had formed his own regiment, the Rough Riders. He had worn the uniform, known war, and subsequently reached the political pinnacle. TR's trajectory was not lost on his ambitious young relative. Franklin's chief, Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels, easily detected the parallels. "Theodore left the position of assistant secretary to become a Rough Rider, later Governor of New York and then President, and both had served in the legislature of New York," Daniels noted. "Franklin actually thought fighting in the War was the necessary step toward reaching the White House." Franklin's mother, Sara, had recently written her son, "The papers say buttons and pictures of you are being prepared to run for Governor." But Franklin preferred to take TR's route, military service first. Theodore Roosevelt, now fifty-nine, blind in one eye, partially deaf, his body racked by punishing expeditions into the disease-infested Brazilian jungle, was itching to answer his country's call again. He hoped to raise a volunteer division just as he had raised a regiment in the earlier war. He pleaded with Franklin to get him an appointment with President Woodrow Wilson. This request could prove ticklish. Ever since TR, as a third-party candidate, had been beaten by Wilson five years before in the 1912 presidential election, he had been lambasting the winner for everything from woolly-headedness to cowardice for not getting America into the European war sooner. Nevertheless, the day after the Roosevelt gathering at cousin Alice's house, Franklin did go to the secretary of war, Newton Baker, and persuade him to intervene with Wilson on TR's behalf. The president would later say of meeting with his old foe, "I was charmed by his personality . . . you can't resist the man." Evidently he was able to resist, since he told Baker afterward, "I really think the best way to treat Mr. Roosevelt is to take no notice of him." TR was baffled by Wilson's failure to seize upon his heartfelt offer. As he left the White House with Wilson's confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, he complained, "I don't understand. After all, I'm only asking to be allowed to die," to which House reportedly responded, "Oh, did you make that point quite clear to the President?" Uncle Ted had not made it back into uniform himself, but his admonition still echoed in Franklin's ear: "I should be ashamed of my sons if they shirked war." After TR's White House visit, Franklin did submit his resignation as assistant secretary in order to enlist. But when the letter landed on Wilson's desk, the president rejected what he considered military romanticism. He told Secretary Daniels to inform his subordinate that he was no different from any draftee. "Neither you nor I nor Franklin Roosevelt has the right to select the place of service," he warned. "Tell the young man . . . to stay where he is." Unfazed, Roosevelt next went to Wilson personally, only to be turned down again. The rejection, nevertheless, did illuminate Roosevelt's rising star. Wilson's former Army chief of staff, General Leonard Wood, observed that "Franklin Roosevelt should under no circumstances think of leaving the Navy Department; that would amount to a public calamity." The real power in the U.S. Navy, Wood believed, was not Secretary Daniels, but his aggressive deputy. As the country entered its fifteenth month of the war a still frustrated Franklin managed to wangle an assignment that lifted him, if not exactly to combatant status, at least to something more than a deskbound civilian. He urged Secretary Daniels to allow him to go to Europe "to look into our Naval administration in order to work more closely with the other services." The essentially pacifist Daniels felt no necessity himself to witness the bloodletting firsthand and eventually yielded to Franklin's ceaseless importuning, even allowing his assistant to write his own orders, essentially a blank check to pursue "such other purposes as may be deemed expedient upon your arrival." Franklin confided to his wife that he had been promised a commission as a Navy lieutenant commander upon his return. Before leaving, he sent President Wilson a letter saying he hoped the speculation about his running for governor of New York would end. He was not going to "give up war work for what is frankly very much a local political job in these times." That summer of 1918, as the day of his departure approached, his behavior began taking on an air of mystery. He told Eleanor only that he must leave her alone with their five children, but could not disclose where he was going or for how long. She was not to see him off, since the mission was secret. "Don't tell a soul," he warned her, "not even Mama." Franklin had one more goodbye to make before he left, one unknown to Eleanor, and one that moved him to mixed longing and pride. Meeting secretly, he and a beautiful woman made impassioned promises of letters to be exchanged, how this was to be safely carried out during his absence, and what needed to be resolved on his return, for Franklin Roosevelt was in love. He sailed for Europe from the Washington Navy Yard on July 9, 1918, aboard the destroyer USS Dyer, rushed into service just eight days before and heading into the war zone without benefit of sea trials. Despite his position, he told his wife that he had requested no ceremonies. Once aboard ship, Franklin started a diary, the basis for a book he intended to write, an intention that showed through in the grandiloquence of his first entry: "The good old ocean is so absolutely normal just as it always has been, sometimes tumbling about and throwing spray, sometimes gently lolling about . . . but now though the ocean looks much unchanged the doubled number of lookouts shows that even here the hand of the Hun False God is reaching out to defy nature; ten miles ahead of this floating City of Souls a torpedo maybe waiting to start on its quick run." The Dyer joined a troop convoy delivering another twenty thousand doughboys to the over one million already in France: "a wonderful sight," Franklin noted in the diary, "five monsters in the half light . . . it thrills to think that right there another division is on the way to the front." Every element of danger quickened his sense that at last he was in the war, as when the Dyer zigzagged to thwart marauding U-boats, "9 different course changes," in an hour; and when he learned that "only 15 or 16 of the crew" had ever been in the war zone; and when he was assigned his abandon ship station, whale boat number 2, should the worst happen. He was gone just over ten weeks. Looking back, he counted the mission a brilliant success. He had met personally with all the Allied leaders, the fiery British prime minister, David Lloyd George, whom Franklin was delighted to find "is just like his pictures." Even more impressive to Roosevelt, with his weakness for royalty, was a private audience at Buckingham Palace with King George V. Franklin recorded in his diary that the king had given him forty minutes alone and seemed genuinely impressed that his American visitor had crossed the Atlantic on a warship. "His one regret," the king told him, "was that it had been impossible for him to do active Naval service during the war," reflecting Franklin's own disappointment. The king then confided that though he had blood relatives in Germany, particularly Kaiser Wilhelm, "in all my life I have never seen a German gentleman." Franklin had next gone on to France, where he was again welcomed at the summit, meeting French president Raymond Poincairé and premier Georges Clemenceau. "I was in the presence of the greatest civilian in France," he wrote in his diary of Clemenceau. "He almost ran forward to meet me and shook hands as if he meant it." The sixty-six-year-old premier, known as "The Tiger," related to Roosevelt a thrilling account of his recent visit to the front where a French and German soldier were found "trying to bite each other to death when a shell had killed them both," their upright bodies still clinched. "And as he told me this," Franklin recalled, "he grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me with a grip of steel." Before the mission was over Franklin had met with Marshal Ferdinand Foch, commanding all Allied forces, the leader of the British army, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, General John "Black Jack" Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, and Italy's prime minister, Vittorio Orlando--everyone who was anyone in the war. At each stop he checked eagerly with the Army postal service and the American embassy's diplomatic pouch for letters from his wife, his mother, and his secret passion. Though he savored his reception at the top, for Franklin, these moments paled alongside what had been the real objective of the trip. Before it was over, he could claim, with enough justification to satisfy his ego, that he had seen the face of war. His military escort, the American naval attaché in Paris, Captain R. H. Jackson, had interpreted his orders as making sure that Assistant Secretary Roosevelt came through this journey with his hide intact. As Franklin put it, Jackson's "plans called for easy trips and plenty of bombed houses thirty miles or so behind the front." He brushed Jackson aside and "from now on for four days I ran the trip," he wrote Eleanor. Wearing vaguely military dress of his own invention--khaki pants tucked into leather puttees, a gray knee-length coat, a French army helmet, and a gas mask looped around his neck--he arrived at Verdun where the previous year the French and Germans had bled each other white with losses totaling 696,000 men. He was standing at an angle in a road snapping pictures of a devastated village, when an officer raced out and yanked him to safety just as "the long whining whistle of a shell was followed by the dull boom and a puff of smoke of the explosion at the Dead Man's Corner we had just left." He added in the diary, "It is indeed quite evident that we are on the battlefield." He was briefly embarrassed at another village where a great bang of artillery sent him diving for cover. It turned out that a well-concealed American battery was firing into the German lines. The artillerymen howled with laughter as Franklin rose and dusted himself off. His equanimity quickly recovered, he strode over and greeted the doughboys with hearty handshakes. As they reloaded, they allowed him to pull the gun's lanyard, propelling a shell toward the German lines. Years later, retelling this experience he would say, "I will never know how many, if any, Huns I killed." Roosevelt did eventually witness the end product of war. In Belleau Wood, site of America's first full-scale battle, he slogged through oozing mud, weaving his way around water-logged shell holes, and came upon "discarded overcoats, rain-stained love letters . . . and many little mounds, some wholly unmarked, some with a rifle stuck, bayonet down, in the earth, some with a helmet, and some too with a whittled cross with a tag of wood or wrapping paper hung over it and in a pencil scrawl an American name." The sight of these Marine graves especially moved Roosevelt since the Corps was under the Navy Department. He asked an officer to show him a list of the latest casualties among "my Marines," which revealed 760 killed and three times as many wounded. The sight of German dead moved him not at all. Near Rheims he came upon a stack of unburied enemy corpses and found the stench an offense to "our sensitive naval nostrils." Before leaving the war zone, Franklin authorized the Marines to wear the Corps insignia on their collars, though they were under Army command. He did so without consulting Washington. How else, he told friends, could he get anything done? When, during the mission, he met a Harvard acquaintance, Robert Dunn, who asked, "How's the job and Josephus?," referring to Franklin's chief, Franklin answered, "Gosh, you don't know, Bobby, what I have to bear under that man." Back in Paris he stopped to visit his Roosevelt kin in a house near the Arc de Triomphe. There he found two of TR's sons, Archie and Ted Jr., recuperating from serious wounds. Another brother, Kermit, had volunteered for a machine gun unit. He "will at no very distant time share the fate of his brothers," TR had written. The younger Roosevelts spoke somberly but proudly of Quentin, the youngest brother. On July 14, Bastille Day, while Franklin was still aboard the Dyer, Quentin had flown his French Nieuport 28 behind German lines near Château-Thierry where a Fokker shot him out of the sky and to his death. TR put up a brave front, but a friend, Hermann Hagedorn, observed that after the death of his son in a war he had so vigorously supported, "the boy in him had died." The effect of these calamities on his cousins only sharpened Franklin's eagerness to get into uniform. He ended his European adventure in a frenzy of activity, fearful that he might miss something. He began a marathon inspection of airfields and Navy bases from the Spanish border to Brest. He slept on the floor of a barn, his sleep broken by an artillery bombardment and two air raids, followed by lunch the next day with King Albert of Belgium. Then it was up to Scotland's Firth of Forth to inspect the British Grand Fleet, a squadron of American battleships, and to ride in a Navy dirigible. He wrote Eleanor of his "frightfully busy week on the road each day from 6 am to midnight." Most gratifying, back in France, he was able to see a tactic of his own invention come to life. American cruisers carried fourteen-inch guns that could hurl a shell twenty-five miles. Why not place them on railroad flatcars, Franklin had urged, and have them blast deeply deployed German fortifications? He inspected, with ill-concealed pride, the first rail-borne guns headed for the front, with large white letters painted on the side reading "U.S.N." From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from by Joseph Persico All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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