"No Ordinary Time" Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Homefront in World War II.

• Author: Roberts, Chalmers M.

In early 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked his daughter Anna to become his hostess, filling in for the peripatetic first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. World War II was at a critical stage, and FDR would have to decide whether to run later that year for his fourth term.

Anna tried to shield the already ill president from strain and stress, but Eleanor, a self-described "pest," often made this difficult. At one White House cocktail hour, Anna recounted, Eleanor appeared, wolfed down her limit of one drink, and "sat down across the desk from Father. And she had a sheaf of papers this high and she said, 'Now, Franklin, I want to talk to you about this. . .' I just remember . . . that I thought, 'Oh God, he's going to blow.' And sure enough, he blew his top. He took every single speck of that whole pile of papers, threw them across the desk at me and said, 'Sis, you handle these tomorrow morning.'"

Eleanor said, "I'm sorry," and turned to talk to someone else; Franklin "picked up a glass and started a story."

Anna explained: "Intuitively, I understood that here was a man plagued with God knows how many problems and right now he had twenty minutes to have two cocktails . . . He wanted to tell stories and relax and enjoy himself - period. I don't think mother had the slightest realization."

The relationship between Eleanor and Franklin is central to an understanding of FDR and his presidency. And Doris Kearns Goodwin, in this massive book, has made it central to her account of the World War II years.

The major events in FDR's life were (1) his conquest of the polio that crippled him, at age 39 in 1921, for life and (2) the effect on the Eleanor-Franklin relationship of the love affair he had - pre-polio - with Eleanor's social secretary, Lucy Mercer, a younger woman "tall, beautiful, and well-bred, with a low throaty voice and an incomparably winning smile."

Goodwin adds nothing new about the polio, but she does provide the most complete, and, to me, the most satisfying account of the Lucy affair and its ramifications and consequences.

For today's generation it should at once be said that Lucy was no bimbo in the Kennedy or Clinton sense. True, in 1918, when Eleanor found a packet of Lucy's love letters, her husband was 36 and physically a whole man. Still, Goodwin is doubtful that there was a sexual relationship, either then or later; the evidence is simply lacking.

Eleanor bore Franklin's six children (the first FDR, Jr. died) but, as she told Anna...