Welcome to Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt’s house, as it is described, in slightly less lurid terms, in Doris Kearns Good-win’s new biography, “No Ordinary Time” (759 pages. Simon & Schuster. $30). Her account of the Roosevelts in wartime is a delicious read. At the same time, Goodwin, who has written studies of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and the Kennedy family, offers a historical perspective on questions of character and leadership, as well as the role of the press, that has relevance to our more uncertain and prurient age.
The Roosevelt style of leadership, as Goodwin portrays it, gives a good name to psychological denial and genteel hypocrisy. The president and First Lady, as a number of biographies have revealed, were emotionally damaged and ultimately lonely souls. FDR liked to drink, smoke and dissemble, and he was definitely not in touch with his inner child. On the other hand, he helped win World War II. Eleanor was incapable of truly loving her husband. Still, she was a tireless and effective social crusader.
President Roosevelt lived in a bubble of privacy that would be inconceivable today. Reporters in those days gossiped about the private life of the president, but they didn’t write about it. (These days, it’s never too late: Goodwin has sold her book to CBS as a mini-series.) Most Americans didn’t even know the president was disabled. In the 12 years of FDR’s presidency, there was not a single photograph published of the president in his wheelchair. A photographer who failed to observe the rules might find his camera “accidentally” knocked to the ground by another photographer. The president’s unusual menage, which was widely known about by the press and his discreet handlers, was protected to the moment he died with his old mistress, not his wife, at his side.
Yet, without question, the “veil of silence” around Roosevelt worked to the public good. Physically isolated by his paralysis, Roosevelt needed to be surrounded by charming women with whom he could flirt, in between facing down Hitler and outfoxing congressmen. Betrayed by her alcoholic father and then by her philandering husband, Eleanor could be passionate only about social causes. She was a noodge to her husband–but also his conscience and stalking horse on controversial issues like civil rights.
Readers of “No Ordinary Time,” as well as viewers of a sumptuous four-and-a-half-hour PBS series on FDR that will be aired Oct. 11 and 12, will be struck by eerie comparisons between the Roosevelts and the Clintons. Both presidents: eager to please, voluble, expedient, a little slick. Both First Ladies: independent, moralistic, determined to do good. Yet one couple accomplished a great deal; the other, so far at least, not much.
The challenges were different, of course. Fascism and the Depression posed dangers that called for bold acts. The press was more tolerant back then, but also lazier. As president, Roosevelt once covered for a reporter by writing his copy. Such coziness was fine as long as the president was conspiring with Churchill to beat the Nazis, but it worked less well with, say, J. Edgar Hoover.
What’s really missing today at the White House, and in other high offices, may be a sense of stoicism and determined optimism. Roosevelt never complained. He laughed at his foes, joking that he didn’t really eat millionaires for breakfast and archly mocking Republicans for being mean to his dog Fala. Clinton, by contrast, bites his lower lip, whines about the cynical press and goes on MTV to discuss what kind of underwear he prefers.
The Roosevelts’ courage, so uplifting to the public, concealed great personal pain. Some of the most poignant passages of Goodwin’s book are FDR’s attempts, uncertain and groping, to win Eleanor back as his true wife. Though she admired her husband, she could never quite get over her hurt. For all its nosiness, the press today does not know the true nature of the Clintons’ marriage. One hopes that if Bill and Hillary are less effective than Eleanor and Franklin, they are at least happier together.
