Volume 17, Number 8 · November 18, 1971
Eleanor
By Gore Vidal
Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship Based on Eleanor Roosevelt's Private Papers
by Joseph P. Lash
Norton, 765 pp., $15.00
Nicholas and Alexandra. Now Eleanor and Franklin. Who's next for the tandem treatment? Dick and Pat? J. Edgar and Clyde? Obviously there is a large public curious as to what goes on in the bedrooms of Winter Palace and White House, not to mention who passed whom in the corridors of power. All in all, this kind of voyeurism is not a bad thing in a country where, like snakes, the people shed their pasts each year ('Today nobody even remembers there was a Depression!' Eleanor Roosevelt exclaimed to me in 1960, shaking her head at the dullness of an audience we had been jointly trying to inspire). But though Americans dislike history, they do like soap operas about the sexual misbehavior and the illnesses—particularly the illnesses—of real people in high places: 'Will handsome, ambitious Franklin ever regain the use of his legs? Tune in tomorrow.'
Review, 5295 words
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