From Riad to Roosevelt

MY UNCONSIDERED JUDGMENT--Noel F. Busch--Houghton, Mifflin ($2).

WHAT MANNER OF MAN?--Noel F. Busch--Harpers ($2).

Noel F. (for Fairchild) Busch, 38, is a character who would seem wholly plausible to any reader of detective stories. New York City-born and Princeton-bred, he is tall, lean, dark, fastidious, athletic and adventurous, conceals a lively curiosity beneath an air of skeptical and somewhat bored amusement, and is gifted with a sardonic manner which is most effective when directed at waiters who neglect to have his food prepared without butter or his bacon fried to a sufficient crispness. He is also an accomplished journalist, and has been called the rich man's Ernie Pyle. Long a TIME writer, principally of Sport and Cinema, he is now a LIFE editor and war correspondent. Last week he published his second book exactly 22 days after the appearance of his first.

Dark Clothes, Loud Animals. My Unconsidered Judgment is an account of Author Busch's wartime investigations of some of the world's most foreign nations : Argentina, the Union of South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, England and Ireland. It does nothing to dissipate their foreignness. Of Argentina he reports: "Solemn in mien, Argentinians are addicted to dark clothes, funerals, and liver trouble. . . . Going about with downcast eyes, they are fussy about floors and pavements. These are elaborately made, in little slippery squares and patterns." Of South Africa: "Large animals, while more numerous than they should be, are not an influential segment of the population. . . . None of the animals in South Africa have learned to keep quiet. Lions roar, monkeys chatter and even crickets squeak louder than is reasonable. The trees contain doves which croak and gurgle constantly."

Strewn with sprightly observations and anecdotes, My Unconsidered Judgment is principally composed of a series of biographical articles which appeared originally as LIFE closeups. Their subjects include Field Marshal Jan Smuts, a South African witch doctor named John Chavafoimbira, Anthony Eden, an Irish publican named Jack Nugent and Saudi Arabia's King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud.

Noel Busch was the first non-Moslem journalist in a century to visit Riad, Saudi Arabia's capital, and Ibn Saud was a journalist's dream assignment: one of the most colorful and least-written-about of the world's rulers. But in his second book, What Manner of Man?, Author Busch set himself the task of discussing the world's most-written-about head of state. He approached the subject of Franklin D. Roosevelt with precisely the same mixture of curiosity, detachment and aplomb that he took to Riad. The result is, with the possible exception of Gerald W. Johnson's Roosevelt: Dictator or Democrat, the most balanced and readable book about the President that has yet appeared.

Presidential Portrait. Author Busch, who believes that the truth is generally obvious, re-examines the facts of Mr. Roosevelt's life from the viewpoint of an amateur and humane psychoanalyst. What emerges is a friendly and convincing portrait of a man whose paramount drives are a love of people and excitement, a dislike of friction and contradiction. He is "a good but not a very wise man; vain, captious, overconfident and warmhearted; no more honest than most, but friendlier than the average; courageous but at the same time . . . not totally without a certain somewhat meretricious grandeur."

The President likes to travel fast, even has his valet push his wheel chair rapidly. He is disconcerting, quick, and a mild tyrant in social affairs; he invents complicated variations of poker, which he almost invariably wins and which in consequence he is the only one who enjoys playing. But if the other players protest he good-naturedly returns to the rules. He goes to the movies at the White House about every fortnight, sits in the front row, and comments aloud about the picture. If he did the same thing in a public theater, it "would cause people in the nearby seats to shush him."

He reads detective stories until he falls asleep, usually about 11:30 p.m. He does not care about their quality, will even read the same one twice.

New Crises. Today, says Noel Busch, the President is, if not quite in top form, still on his game. "Polite and assured, full of seasoned stamina and lively as a cricket, he seems still quite ready to enjoy a series of new and even-more-exciting crises. Sitting with a caller in his upstairs study he sometimes pushes his freewheeling chair back from his cluttered desk and sits still for a minute chewing reflectively on the tip of his cigaret holder. At such moments the deep lines in Roosevelt's face suggest that he is listening to some sound that pleases him--as though the subdued hum of the household behind the closed door, the murmur of the capital beyond the curtained windows, and further away still the vast chatter of the continents all blended together for him into a sort of music in whose warm and complex counterpoint he found comfort and a sense of ultimate harmony."

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