No Ordinary Time; Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 21, 1994 by Richard Brookhiser

When I was a boy, I had a book on the Presidents, from George Washington to John Kennedy, the incumbent. They were all presented as decent men, and every one was credited with some accomplishment. (The authors must have scratched their heads over Millard Fillmore; thank goodness for Commodore Perry.) Though I have grown older, I have not grown up. Covering presidential elections strikes me as the most wonderful job in the world. Nor am I alone in my interest. Thousands of children read books about Presidents, and millions of adults follow the elections.

Forrest McDonald's The American Presidency offers an intellectual history of the institution we find so fascinating: how the Framers came to create it, and how it has changed since their day. Mr. McDonald discusses a vast array of topics, from the Roman Republic to antitrust, in a flowing, witty voice. Copious footnotes - printed at the foot of the page - direct the reader to contrary points of view. College should have been like this.

Libertarians will be unhappy to learn that there was never an Eden when Presidents did not seek to push the envelope of their powers. Periods when that seems to have been the case were simply periods when Congress or the Supreme Court grabbed power more effectively.

One of the earliest and most ardent aggrandizers of presidential power was Thomas Jefferson. He paid seven and a half times as much for Louisiana as he had been authorized to spend; he got from Congress the power to seize without warrant ships suspected of violating the embargo of 1807; anticipating a later Democrat, he tried to pack the Supreme Court by impeaching a hostile Justice on trumped-up charges. The last scheme failed because Aaron Burr, as president of the Senate, conducted the trial fairly. The practice of waging campaigns by calling up storms of feeling on "issues" that are in fact spurious or trivial goes back to John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Theodore Roosevelt brought the tactic into the modern world. The pioneer of symbiotic relations with the press turns out, surprisingly, to have been the bland William McKinley.

Mr. McDonald does not take an Old Testament view of all these developments. Some of them have been salutary, and many were unavoidable. The broad impulse to revere the Presidency was probably inevitable, and one of the subtlest threads in Mr. McDonald's book is his awareness of the source of this reverence in human nature. Because all men have fathers, all societies seem to require father figures. Philip Schuyler, senator from New York in the First Congress, remarked that "I think the President a kind of Sacred Person." The aura comes down the decades, even to George Bush and Bill Clinton.

This may be why Mr. McDonald's final judgment is benign. "The Presidency has been and remains a powerful force for ensuring domestic tranquillity among a diverse and sometimes bellicose people." Hence, "it has been responsible for less harm and more good ... than perhaps any other. secular institution in history."

A darker view emerges from Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time, a portrait of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II. The darkness is unintentional. Mrs. Goodwin, a fluent writer and an industrious compiler, is a solemn worshipper of her subjects. Yet her narrative keeps undercutting her judgment.

If we make the office mythic, what kind of man will seek it, and what sorts of people will he gather round him? The big news of No Ordinary Time is that the wildest rumors of the Roosevelt haters were simple truth. The facts about Franklin's girlfriends and Eleanor's girlfriends and boyfriends have come out before, but reading them all together is startling. The atmosphere of the Roosevelt White House was crazed and incestuous, like some cross between Wuthering Heights and The Pearl. It was as if eight people had the equivalent of seven personalities among them, and each one sought to make up his or her missing fraction by feeding off the others.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the most damaged. She had had a loveless childhood, and in the 13th year of her marriage, her husband had transferred his love to her secretary, Lucy Mercer. These blows left her unsuited for every other intimate relationship of her life, whether as mother or lover. She repaired the loss by relating to strangers - millions of them. She plugged the hole in her being with America.

Franklin was both more sinister and more admirable. His charm, like that of all narcissists, masked a cold core. As he was dying, he smuggled Lucy Mercer Rutherford (now a widow) into the White House and Warm Springs. His last slap at his wife was to leave Fala, their Scottish terrier, to a cousin in his will. But the charm was real. Winston Churchill, no dull fellow himself, said that meeting Roosevelt was like opening a bottle of champagne. From the Depression to the Battle of the Bulge, the country needed champagne, even if the policies that were served up alongside were flawed or disastrous.

The combined lesson of Forrest McDonald and Doris Goodwin is that the Rolling Stones were right. You can get what you need. But you may not always like what you get.