A flawed colossus.(Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom)(Book Review)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, by Conrad Black (Public Affairs, 1,280 pp., $39.95)

WHAT historians do is make generalizations. They study and take notes from the relevant documents and secondary literature. As they ingest the data, they digest them and reduce them to general propositions. When they sit down to write they select and report only that which makes cogent the story they are telling or the analysis they are offering. Two other kinds of folks who study the past go about their tasks differently. Antiquarians delight in learning details for their own sake and are likely to report them accurately and fully, if somewhat randomly. Authors of academic history characteristically record their research on note cards, arrange them in chronological order, and write by turning the cards over one by one. The results in either case are well-nigh unreadable.

Conrad Black's unconscionably long biography of Franklin Roosevelt shares almost none of the characteristics of genuine history and falls halfway between the work of antiquarians and academicians. Like them, he includes every detail, however irrelevant, though he is not always accurate and sometimes arranges his note cards out of sequence.

Consider some examples of irrelevance. Black devotes five paragraphs to Dean Acheson's reappointment to a minor State Department position and informs us that "Acheson was sworn in by Justice Brandeis in the presence of Frankfurter, Attorney General Biddle, and the congressional librarian, Archibald MacLeish, at Brandeis's home." Does one really need to know that in order to understand the life of Franklin Roosevelt? Again, when Winston Churchill comes to America for his first meeting with Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, we are told the names and positions of everyone in his entourage, though none is mentioned in the further account of the discussions. In the middle of a long narrative of the proceedings at the Yalta Conference, we are subjected to a paragraph telling us that at one point Stalin went to the men's room for two minutes, disconcerting his NKVD guards who did not know where he had gone. As for details out of sequence, we are told of Mussolini's rescue by Germans pages before we are told that Americans captured him.

A few of the extraneous details, to be sure, are entertaining. Roosevelt's strange relationship with Eleanor affords examples. When he first ran for governor of New York she told a reporter, "I am not excited about my husband's election. I don't care." In early 1933, when told of an apparent assassination attempt on Roosevelt, Eleanor nonchalantly noted, "These things will happen." At another point, interrupting a conversation about tax reform, she interjected ideas that Roosevelt and his guest regarded as absurd; Franklin said, "Oh Eleanor, shut up! You never understand these things anyway." Soon after Pearl Harbor she suggested that American planes "should be filled with hornets, wasps, and bees and emptied near enemy lines to torment German and Japanese soldiers." Those of us who already have a store of anti-Eleanor gossip need not endure a thousand pages to get more.

In addition to the burdensome detail, Black repeats himself. Steve Early is mentioned as Roosevelt's press secretary 15 or 20 times before Black finally decides that we know who he was. Mike Reilly is identified as Roosevelt's "security chief" every time he appears. At least half a dozen times we are informed that FDR and Churchill met in 1919, that Roosevelt had unpleasant memories of the encounter, and that Churchill did not remember it at all. On back-to-back pages we are told that Operation Gymnast was the code name for the invasion of North Africa. Frequently we are reminded that Margaret Suckley took care of Roosevelt's Scottie dog Fala. When Black describes naval artillery as 16-inch or 14-inch, he always throws in parenthetically that the inches refer to barrel diameter.

The book teems with errors, small and large. I shall restrain myself and cite but a few. FDR did not learn of the collapse of the Insull utility companies in ...