Daring Rectitude

By John Skow

LOVE, ELEANOR: ELEANOR ROOSEVELT AND HER FRIENDS

by Joseph P. Lash

Doubleday; 534 pages; $19.95

MOTHER & DAUGHTER: THE LETTERS OF ELEANOR AND ANNA ROOSEVELT

Edited by Bernard Asbell

Coward, McCann & Geoghegan;

366 pages; $17.95

She was stiff and prudish and homely and a do-gooder. She signed innumerable petitions and promoted countless social causes without questioning their country of origin or their ultimate goal. But she could also be brainy, fearless and tough, and just hammy enough at times to take the curse off her indomitable goodness. After all, when impressionists mimicked Eleanor Roosevelt's buck-toothed smile, they were also repeating her messages on tolerance and humanity.

The most important reassessment of E.R. began in 1979, 17 years after her death. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, N.Y., unsealed a mass of 3,500 letters exchanged between the President's wife and Lorena Hickok, a stocky onetime A.P. reporter nine years her junior. An entirely typical letter written by Eleanor on March 7,1933, begins, "Hick darling, All day I've thought of you . . . Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it & think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it!"

When the Hickok letters were released, Biographer Joseph Lash had already written three books about Eleanor--a memoir of their long friendship, which began in the late 1930s when he was a leftist youth leader in Washington, and the bestselling two-volume study, Eleanor and Franklin and Eleanor: The Years Alone. Lash has set out to balance his work with two more volumes, of which Love, Eleanor is the first.

Did Eleanor have a physical relationship with "Hick"? Lash's cautious but firm conclusion is that she did not (though Hickok's sexual orientation was more clearly lesbian), and it seems likely that he is right. To cover the situation, he resurrects the archaic term "Boston marriage," meaning a close and longstanding, but not necessarily sexual, relationship between two women. The fact is--and this is the main subject of Lash's new book--that throughout her life E.R. carried on a series of intense and rather schoolgirlish friendships with a variety of women and men, none of whom, almost certainly, was a lover.

Indeed, the First Lady was never on familiar terms with love. Her mother, who seems not to have cared much for the child, died when Eleanor was eight, and her beloved father, Teddy Roosevelt's charming, doomed younger brother Elliott, died when she was ten, after two years during which he was exiled from his family for drunkenness and other sins. She was an awkward, serious girl, nicknamed "Granny" by her mother. She did arouse at least the admiration of her cousin Franklin, whom she married when she was 20, but her attitude toward sex, which she recommended to her daughter Anna, was the proper one for upper-class women of her time: it was an ordeal to be borne. In 1918. as a young mother of five children, she was crushed, but not quite destroyed, to learn that her dashing husband, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was having an affair with her own pretty social secretary, Lucy Mercer.

Some of this has been told before, by Lash himself. What the new book brings to E.R.'s story is an appreciation of the degree to which, after her armed truce with F.D.R. over the Mercer affair, she found and gave her own kind of affection. One of the first of these idiosyncratic friendships was with Louis Howe, an early political aide of her husband, a man described as ugly and misshapen, an impossible choice for a lover. Yet her daughter Anna was shocked once to find her sitting at Howe's.feet as he stroked her hair. "No form of love is to be despised," Eleanor once copied into a diary, and the truth seems to be that she successfully conducted her sentimental friendships as if sex did not exist. Earl Miller, F.D.R.'s handsome bodyguard when he was Governor of New York, was another such friend; Lorena Hickok seems merely to have been the most important of Eleanor's attachments. By the time their friendship was cooling, in the early war years, the First Lady had two other favorites: Joe Lash and his wife-to-be, Trude Pratt.

For a time Lash seems to give inordinate space to his own relationship with E.R., which appears to have been that of a much indulged son (he was 25 years her junior). But the autobiographical aspect is more than justified. After Lash was drafted into the Army in 1942, it was obvious to him and to E.R., with whom he exchanged visits, that he was under surveillance. Their reasonable assumption was that this was because of his left-wing background. Not until 1978 did he learn, after demanding to see his FBI and Army counterintelligence files under the Freedom of Information Act, that Army spooks had concluded that the two of them were having a sexual affair. In 1943, moreover, an FBI agent reported hearing at "a social function" that the results of the bugging had been presented to F.D.R., who squabbled with Eleanor in the presence of an Army counterintelligence officer and then ordered "that anybody who knew anything about this case should be . .. sent to the South Pacific for action against the Japs until they were killed."

In a foreword, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. condemns this report. The notion that his parents "might have engaged in marital recriminations in front of staff and aides is totally inconsistent with their semi-Victorian upbringing and their personal reticences." The letters exchanged between Eleanor and Lash, he says, accurately reflect the innocent nature of their unusual friendship. Here, the reader is the jury. The old Roosevelt haters who recall her muzzy newspaper columns and his years of autocratic rule will believe the worst. But those who see in E.R. a complex, endlessly charitable woman can only answer with more charity.

Mother & Daughter, a selection of the letters of Eleanor and her oldest child Anna, is a book whose surprises are more quiet, but a reader who has become fascinated by E.R. will not want to miss it. The collection traces a warm relationship, though Anna was aware that her mother did not always comprehend human weaknesses, and utterly failed to understand, for instance, why F.D.R., during World War II, insisted on having a 20-minute cocktail break before dinner. But there was no pomposity to this doer of what Lash, quoting George Eliot, calls "deeds of daring rectitude." Anna recalled that toward the end of her life, E.R. was offered $35,000 to make a margarine commercial for television. She translated the fee into CARE packages, decided she could save 6,000 lives, and made the commercial. Later she reported that "the mail was evenly divided. One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation." --ByJohn Skow

Excerpts

"Eleanor in the White House had become a benison. She gave hope to the desperate and defeated, seeking out the underdog and the eccentric . . . It was as if she engaged in a dialogue that was always invested with love. . . Relationships enabled her to remain human and to plumb depths of feeling from which she had long been absent. She was grateful and did not care what the papers wrote.

From LOVE, ELEANOR

Anna said to me [Bernard Asbeli] one day:

'Soon after Thanksgiving 1944 . . Lucy Rutherfurd told me something that was very revealing . . . "You know, I had the most fascinating hour I've ever had. [F.D.R.] just sat there and told me of some of what he regarded as the real problems facing the world now. I just couldn't get over thinking of what I was listening to, and then he would stop and say, 'You see that knoll over there? That's where I did this-or-that.' He would interrupt himself, you know. And we just sat there and looked."

"As Lucy said all this to me--Father was right there in the room--I realized Mother was not capable of giving him this--just listening.' "

From MOTHER & DAUGHTER

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