Publisher's Weekly Review
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 Review
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 Review
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.