‘Wars of the Roosevelts’ is a gossipy tale
William J. Mann finds much to wag about in famous, flawed family
The Roosevelt family of New York provided America with two of its greatest presidents, and for author William J. Mann, a vast trove of familial dysfunction that resembles the plot lines of a 1980s nighttime soap or a Mexican telenovela.
There’s Theodore Roosevelt, our 26th president, and his younger brother, Elliott, who was the father of Eleanor, who married her fifth cousin, Franklin, and became first lady.
There’s Franklin and his nephew, Taddy, who was the ne’er-dowell son of his much older brother, James Jr.
There’s Franklin and his five children, whose antics were the source of constant presidential concern.
In The Wars of the Roosevelts (Harper, 530 pp., out of eeeE four), these rivalries and collisions make for colorful reading. But this is also an account that’s aimed at ratcheting up the melodrama, which Mann, who has specialized in books about Hollywood, knows how to do well. He takes the Roosevelt story away from Washington and politics and shows how scores were settled and family members banished as the two presidents climbed their way to power.
Theodore Roosevelt assumes the brunt of Mann’s focus, as he casts the ambitious and impulsive future president as a cruel taskmaster to his brother.
“For all his desire to be a force for good and for change in the world, the ironic dichotomy of Theodore Roosevelt would be his often brutal control of his family and his inability to countenance different worldviews, such as the one his brother held.”
Well, it was a little more complicated than that. It wasn’t as if Elliott Roosevelt and his brother disagreed about the free coining of silver or wildlife conservation. Elliott was at the very least suffering from bipolar disorder. His moods pitched from one extreme to another, and he drank too much, cheated on his wife and fathered at least one child outside his marriage. Elliott was just as often a danger to himself and others, and his brother’s attitude was driven not just by concern for his political reputation but for the well-being of Elliott’s family. Despite Mann’s often hyperbolic treatment of the Roosevelt family dynamics, his documenta- tion of their internal strife shows how these troubles shaped the two presidents and their families. Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt had a unique marriage, and their children often suffered because of it. The five Roosevelt children — James, Anna, Elliott, Franklin Jr. and John — burned through multiple marriages as they sought their own places in life.
The younger Elliott Roosevelt shunned politics, mostly because his parents embraced it. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, however, Franklin allowed his son to find his own path, “even when his choices were increasingly unorthodox.”
Concern over those choices, as well as the travails of his other children, occupied Franklin even as he grappled with the monumental challenges he faced as president, starting with the Great Depression and continuing into World War II.
While Mann sometimes overdoes the family drama, he shows again that the image surrounding presidents and their families is often not reality, and that familial tensions often bleed into public policy in unexpected ways.