Books: One of Those Who Served

THIS I REMEMBER (387 pp.)—Eleanor Roosevelt—Harper ($4.50).

“There are some things I know that I feel sure nobody else can know,” says Eleanor Roosevelt in casual explanation of why she wrote the second volume of her autobiography. For more than four years, while Franklin Roosevelt’s housekeepers and bodyguards, speechwriters and Cabinet members have been carrying their manuscripts to the publishers, his widow has said little about him beyond some references in her syndicated newspaper column. In This-I Remember, she tells her story of the Roosevelts’ private life in the White House.

Author Roosevelt’s memoir has little of the high historic excitement of Robert Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins and none of the hero-worshiping quality of Grace Tully’s F.D.R., My Boss; she just runs along easily as though she were showing the family album to some old friends. Yet every few pages she comes to a striking, familiar snapshot of the great ones among whom she and her husband moved. Random shots:

¶ When Molotov visited the White House, “one of the valets was quite astounded … to find inside [his suitcase] a large chunk of black bread, a roll of sausage and a pistol.”

¶ “At a dinner party . . . Franklin turned to Madame Chiang and asked, ‘What would you do in China with a labor leader like John Lewis?’ She never said a word, but the beautiful, small hand came up very quietly and slid across her throat.” ¶ At one of the Big Three meetings, “Franklin had been wondering aloud what would happen in their respective countries if anything happened to [the Big Three], and Stalin said: ‘I have everything arranged in my country. I know exactly what will happen.’ “

No Time for Advice. Her pictures of the private life of the Roosevelts are among the best in the area of “things nobody else can know.” Every morning when she was home, Mrs. Roosevelt called on the President in his room after breakfast ; if he was too busy reading the newspapers she left without disturbing him.

Otherwise they met at meals, usually with several guests present, or at receptions, with several hundred. Life for the President became so crowded that his sons soon gave up going to their father for advice; he seldom had time to talk with them at any length.

Eleanor herself soon became chief executive in family matters. Her biggest problem, as she tells it, was her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt. She snaps with wifely irritation: “I doubt if as long as she lived she ever let [Franklin] leave the house without inquiring whether he was dressed warmly enough . . . She never accepted the fact of his independence and continued to the last to try to guide his life.”

No Time for Christmas. The full-length portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt is the picture that dominates the book. “I did not want my husband to be President,” she states, probably to the surprise of thousands. “As I saw it, this meant the end of any personal life of my own . . . The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great.” Nonetheless, “I never mentioned my feelings on the subject to him.”

Eleanor undertook her daily column and her lecture tours, she says, mostly to keep herself busy, but also because they “gave me more money for things I wanted to do than my husband could afford to give me.” She also took trips at her husband’s suggestion (though she landed on Guadalcanal against his express orders), and gave him detailed reports on what she had seen. Nevertheless, she says flatly, her “political influence . . . was nil where my husband was concerned.”

In the last months, she watched “the weariness” come over Franklin Roosevelt. Over his last Christmas, he was working so long and hard that he did not have time to open his Christmas presents until well into January. Long before he died, he had ceased to belong to his family and had passed almost completely into the public domain.

Life Must Be Lived. At the end of the book, Eleanor draws a line under her life with Franklin, and adds up the score in a memorable passage:

“Before . . . 1933, I had frankly faced my own personal situation . . . Much further back I had had to face certain difficulties until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is, circumstances force your children away from you, and you cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be …

“In my early married years the pattern of my life had been largely my mother-in-law’s pattern. Later it was the children and Franklin who made the pattern. When the last child went to boarding school I began to want to do things on my own … [but] when I went to Washington … it was almost as though I had erected someone a little outside of myself who was the President’s wife . . .

“He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical. That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in other people. Nevertheless, I think I sometimes acted as a spur, even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcome. I was one of those who served his purposes.”

-The first, This Is My Story, was published in 1937, covered her life until 1924-