Hidden Assets: a new window into the FDR White House.

• Author: Dallek, Matthew

That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt By Robert H. Jackson Oxford University Press, $30.00

In the late 1940s, Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court Justice, decided to write a book about FDR and recount his experiences in Washington during the New Deal and World War II. His former colleagues, he thought, had written their memoirs, and they had said their piece about Roosevelt; now Jackson wanted to weigh in with a balanced, honest recollection, a candid portrait of the man who had nominated him to the high court. He called the manuscript "That Man" as a rejoinder to Roosevelt's critics, who so hated FDR they couldn't bear to say his name.

But in 1954,Jackson suffered a heart attack and died before he could finish this book. More than 40 years later, Robert Barrett, a law professor at St. John's University, working on a Jacksun biography, received a call from Jackson's family. They told him that Jackson's son, Bill, had died, and that the relatives had found a manuscript in a closet in Bill Jackson's Manhattan apartment.

Barrett read the pages and believed that he had struck historical gold. He decided that the book deserved to get published. In order to round out the portrait of FDR that Jackson was seeking to write, Barrett inserted excerpts from many other sources, including Jackson's oral history and his unpublished autobiography. At times, these insertions disrupt the book's flow. But on the whole, this is a winning memoir--the story of Jackson's life in the White House; a powerful portrait of our 32nd president; and, most of all, a tribute to the humanity and the vision that stood at the heart of the Roosevelt administration.

Robert Jackson had a unique vantage point on his times. When he arrived in Washington in 1934, he took a job as general counsel at the Bureau of Revenue, the IRS's predecessor. He rose rapidly through the ranks. He became the chief of the anti-trust division at the Department of Justice. He later served as solicitor general, then as assistant attorney general, and then as a Supreme Court justice followed by the capstone to his career--as the senior US. prosecutor at Nuremberg. One of Roosevelt's close friends, Jackson played various rules in FDR's White House: As presidential counselor and aide-de-camp, he served as an unofficial sounding hoard for Roosevelt's ideas and strategies.

Jackson had a hand in many of the most important debates of the 1930s and 1940s. He sent memos to the president, and he...