"Let's Wait"

ROOSEVELT IN RETROSPECT (410 pp ]--John Gunther--Harper ($3.75).

Journalist John Gunther has made a career of breezing through countries, even whole continents, and persuading his readers that he is giving them inside stuff. His "Inside" (Europe, Latin America, Asia, U.S.A.) books have considerable popular virtues: they can be read in a hammock, they seldom induce thought, and they almost never leave a deep residue of conviction or concern. Writing with ebullience and wide-eyed surprise, he projects men and events just far enough beyond the daily-news level to satisfy those who dislike being serious but are plagued by the need to seem informed.

In Roosevelt in Retrospect, Gunther has brought these talents to bear on the complex personality of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In spite of his avowed aim of getting at his subject's "root qualities and basic sources of power," Gunther has conspicuously failed to "pin something of his great substance against the wall of time." Getting inside a man is something quite different from getting into a continent or a country; it takes more than visas. What Gunther has achieved is a lively journalistic profile pieced together with materials largely lifted from the mushrooming literature on F.D.R. and loosely held together by Gunther's own surface researches.

Shudders & Secrets. Writing "as objectively as possible," Gunther is obviously too dazzled by the Roosevelt glitter to do a balanced job. Even when he concedes F.D.R.'s political deviousness and lack of candor, he is much more interested in finding excuses for them than in showing their damaging consequences. They "arose not so much out of duplicity but from . . . agreeableness . . . and his marked distaste for hurting friends."

Gunther's mouth often seems as wide open as his eyes. Noting that F.D.R. and his mother both nearly died at his birth from an overdose of chloroform, he ponificates: "Of such hairbreadths is history nade." A shudder passes over him when he recalls that Roosevelt was elected governor of New York in 1928 by only 25,000 votes: "His whole future career was made possible by less than 1 per cent of the electorate. What would have happened to America in the turbulent 19303--and later , --if this minuscule handful of voters had gone the other way?" Admirers of F.D.R. who have as much" faith in the U.S. as Roosevelt had will feel that the nation would have survived. At times, Gunther's bald style fails him and his subject entirely: "Young Roosevelt was still at Harvard. Presently he found himself in love with Eleanor. He kept this passion a great secret, however; he did not even tell his roommate . . . Late in 1903 he asked her to marry him, and she at once accepted." The Roosevelt romance will probably get more imaginative treatment one day.

Poodles & Poker. Roosevelt in Retrospect nonetheless has Gunther's reader-tested qualities of liveliness and high quota of anecdote. Example: F.D.R. was economical. As a young man he disliked paying more than $2 for a shirt, and in the White House he charged Mrs. Harry Hopkins 50-c- a day for the keep of her poodle. Gunther names the only man who ever called F.D.R. an s.o.b. to his face: Leon Henderson. Myrna Loy was the President's favorite actress, and he loved poker. He saved and filed Christmas cards and he kept the bullet fired at him by an assassin in Miami. When F.D.R. flew to Casablanca, a strong swimmer was brought along to keep him afloat should the plane crash.

For such tidbits and for its admiring enthusiasm, Roosevelt in Retrospect will be attractive reading for a ready-made audience. But it was F.D.R. himself who used to put off would-be biographers with the warning: "Let's wait a hundred years."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.