The Roosevelts: An American Saga.

• Author: Beschloss, Michael R.

Since their days as the editors of Ramparts magazine in the 1960s (they have now renounced their radical backgrounds and support others who follow suit), Peter Collier and David Horowitz have written a substantial subliterature on American dynasties. Before they came to the subject, books on famous American families tended almost always toward antiquarianism. Breaking that mold, Collier and Horowitz have performed the extraordinary task of getting reticent people to talk about their lives, their minds, and their relatives as well as deconstructing the densely packed array of ambitions, anxieties, responsibilities, traumas, and opportunities thrown on the rich and famous from birth.

In The Rockefellers (1976), they showed how the great-grandchildren of John D. Rockefeller grew up to be wildly different from their patriarch and from one another, despite the strong efforts of that family's infrastructure to imprint them with common values, manners, and goals. Published just after the 1984 drug death of Robert Kennedy's son David, with whom the authors had spoken at length, The Kennedys showed the human cost that Joseph Kennedy's insatiable drives exacted from his children and grandchildren. The Fords (1987) was more cursory and brisk, largely because that family, on closer inspection, did not prove to have the intensity and depth that had allowed Collier and Horowitz to weave the two earlier tales, tales that were almost out of Thomas Mann.

The Roosevelts is at least a partial return to the tradition of their first two books. Despite the credit line, it has evidently been written by Collier alone (in his author's note, he thanks "my good old friend David Horowitz for his help in rounding up some of the material in the first stages of this book"). Mining the huge literature on Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and sundry aspects of their families, as well as private papers and interviews with descendants, the book breaks with usual practice by treating the often bitterly opposed TR and FDR branches as one, closing with a 1989 Hyde Park rapprochement that family members gibed as "the Peace of Utrecht."

As with the earlier volumes, Collier is most interesting on the figures to whom history has paid less attention-- for instance, Eleanor Roosevelt's father Elliott, who drank and was "the leading character in what had become the families' ongoing melodrama." Other characters are presented in new light: Eleanor's childhood "behavior was calculated to...