F. D. R.

ROOSEVELT -- Emil Ludwig -- Viking ($3).

From Cleopatra to Roosevelt, from a long-dead queen to a live President is probably the record biographical jump. But Emil Ludwig's two latest biographies offer similarities. They are Biographer Ludwig's two weakest books; their subjects, credited with almost equal charm, have aroused almost equal controversy about the use to which they put their charm.

As in his other biographies, Emil Ludwig takes factual material already at hand --in this case Ernest K. Lindley's The Roosevelt Revolution and Half Way with Roosevelt--draws his own "psychological" picture. No study of Franklin Roosevelt in house slippers, the result is something like an expensive, formal portrait by a visiting European painter, something like an official cinema shot.

"That Roosevelt 'bewitches' people," challenges Ludwig, "is one of the silliest objections raised by his opponents." Far from his personal charm being fake, says Biographer Ludwig, it is the very key to Roosevelt's unique "destiny," of the greatest "symbolic significance for our age," the reason, in fact, that "the spirit of the biographer found itself akin to that of his subject." As here traced, the decisive fact is that Roosevelt was born of Hudson River landed gentry, thus naturally acquired simplicity of manner, a distaste for arrogance and showoff.

Inclined despite his democratic manners to be a playboy, a first recognition of social inequality came to Franklin Roosevelt from seeing the New York poor on excursion steamers as he sailed past on his yacht. The first really good lick destiny got in was his marriage to serious, social-minded Eleanor Roosevelt. Among the many excellent and sobering results of his marriage, avers Ludwig, was that it trained him for keeping peace in Congress. Louis Howe's misanthropic advice checked his "easygoing nature." With his heroic fight against infantile paralysis, the playboy streak was eradicated. So far as Biographer Ludwig can see, the only remaining flaw in Roosevelt is a streak of Dutch stubbornness, and even that, he thinks, may be "Nature's compensation against his amiability." Even in tiny details he can find no dissonances in Roosevelt's harmonious blend of thought and action. "It is no accident," he declares, attesting Roosevelt's genuine sense of humor, "that this man should like scrambled eggs as a light dish, and detest the clayeyness and heaviness of bananas."

As for the opposition's claim that Roosevelt is dictator-minded, Biographer Ludwig dismisses it thus: "[This opposition] cannot forgive him for the exhibition of despair which it vouchsafed in that moment ; just as a proud woman never quite forgets her resentment against the man to whom she yielded in a moment of weakness."

And as his final words to these injured haughties, Biographer Ludwig asks them not to forget this: What they now call a seduction was, as they freely admitted in 1933, really a necessary operation performed to save their capitalist lives.

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