Politician into President

F.D.R.: HIS PERSONAL LETTERS, VOLS. III & IV (1,615 pp.)--Edited by Elliott Roosevelt--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($ 10).

"Be very certain," wrote F.D.R. to his friend and counselor, Louis McHenry Howe, in November 1928, "that the 'A' letter goes to the successful candidates and the 'B' letter to the defeated candidates." Just elected governor of New York, Roosevelt was already patching and extending his fences. The bulk of the letters he wrote during the next few years show a man glad-handing his political allies, shrewdly holding the lid over his political boom lest it explode prematurely, and generally behaving the way a governor does when he wants to become President.

Very little in the first hundred pages of this final batch of F.D.R.'s letters (Vols. III & IV cover the years from 1928 to 1945) would lead anyone to suspect that he would soon become one of the most daring and controversial political leaders of his time. But after he took office as President, the letters have a more thoughtful tone; they are dominated by a grave anxiety over the future of the country and by an almost imperious energy in behalf of the program by which Roosevelt proposed to save it.

In November 1934, he wrote to Newton D. Baker, a rival for the Democratic nomination two years before: "One of my principal tasks is to prevent bankers and businessmen from committing suicide!" Somewhat earlier he had written a friend: "There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation. History shows that where this occurs occasionally, nations are saved from revolutions."

"Old Friend, Good Shot." During these years everything seems to have struck his attention, as if he were delighting in the many facets of policy and power suddenly available to him. He teased Jim Farley about an NRA stamp showing a stringy girl with big feet ("If recovery is dependent on women like that I am agin recovery"), exchanged notes with Virginia's Carter Glass on U.S. fiscal policy, rather fatuously wrote (in 1933) to U.S. Ambassador Breckinridge Long in Rome that he was "deeply impressed" by Mussolini's intention "to prevent general European trouble," and, with a cheerful egalitarian touch, recommended Ambassador Robert Bingham to Britain's King George V as "an old friend of mine and . . . like you, a good shot."

The letters in these years lack the personal touches found in those of the younger F.D.R. Nonetheless, there are occasional notes to his "Dearest Mama," reassuring her that "it was only a 2 day cold in the nose." And to his wife ("Dearest Babs") he found time to send a teasing letter declaring that, after worrying all week whether she wanted "undies, dresses, hats, shoes, sheets, towels, rouge, soup plates, candy, flowers, lamps, laxation pills, whisky, beer, etchings or caviar" for their wedding anniversary, "I GIVE IT UP."

New Friend, No Worry. With U.S. entry into the war, F.D.R.'s letters reflected his preoccupation with military victory. They range from a 1942 proposal to Admiral Harold R. Stark that naval planners use more ingenuity in thinking of ways to immobilize the Italian fleet ("I can't believe that we must always use the classical offensive against an enemy who seems never to have heard of it") to an attempt to elaborate on his unfortunately uttered "unconditional surrender" by referring to Grant's magnanimous treatment of the defeated Lee.

He seemed fully confident that he and Stalin understood each other. As early as 1941 he wrote to Admiral William D. Leahy: "I do not think we need worry about any possibility of Russian domination" in Europe. He wrote Pope Pius XII: "I believe there is a real possibility that Russia may as a result of the present conflict recognize freedom of religion in Russia . . ."

Indispensable though they will be to historians, F.D.R.'s letters hardly make popular reading in bulk. Lacking the literary quality and range of Churchill's wartime writings, they succeed only intermittently in suggesting why Roosevelt was such a dynamic wartime leader or why he captured the love and affection of so many millions of Americans and their Allies. His gifts were essentially for aural relations. On the platform, on the radio and in the newsreels, his qualities got across in a manner only faintly suggested by the plain, black & white written word.

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