F.F. to F.D.R.: Yours to Command

ROOSEVELT AND FRANKFURTER: THEIR CORRESPONDENCE, 1928-1945, annotated by Max Freedman. 772 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $17.50.

This thick volume of correspondence presents a unique over-the-shoulder view of the intimate relationship between the master politician of the New Deal and the great jurist who was his friend and adviser. The most startling aspect of that view is Felix Frankfurter's capacity for ladling out the adulation and his President's insatiable capacity for lapping it up. In their candor, the letters are an almost unexampled casebook of politics and history in the making.

The Symbol. Roosevelt and Frankfurter first met in 1906 when they were both young lawyers in New York. The brilliant Frankfurter, who was twelve when he came to the U.S. from his native Austria, hit it off at once with the Hudson Valley aristocrat. Was young Felix merely charmed into a state of uncritical friendship by a gay, handsome fellow with a name that was practically a political key? Frankfurter himself supplied an answer in 1930 when he wrote to his friend Walter Lippmann that if he were in New York he would vote for F.D.R. for Governor, even though "I know his limitations . . . lack of an incisive intellect ... an ambition that leads to compromises." Though Roosevelt was eventually shown this letter by Frankfurter, those reservations seem to have vanished only two years later, when he was assuring "Dear Frank" that he had "equipment of transcendent importance" and a "wide and deep understanding" to bring to the presidency.

From then on, vast numbers of telegrams and letters were exchanged by the two men, with Frankfurter sending far more than he received. Such mild expressions as "the candor, courage and conscience of your humane leadership" must have seemed routine to F.D.R., next to the uninhibited assurance that "You know how I have felt about you as a symbol of manliness . . . the symbol that is forever one of our great national possessions--utterances--as rare as they are precious, that will live forever in the amber of history." If F.D.R. ever squirmed, he never showed it. His small contribution to this massive collection is made up mostly of delighted thanks for Frankfurter's fawning and requests for his help: "Tell me what to write--dictate right now the note that you think I ought to send [Stimson]."

The Court. Perhaps the most important exchange involves F.D.R.'s effort to pack the Supreme Court. Both men overestimated the people's mandate, and both came off badly. The President, as Frankfurter's letters make clear, did not let his friend in on the scheme until it was sprung on the country. But then he enlisted Frankfurter's legal advice as he tried to push it through. Although Frankfurter had misgivings over Roosevelt's political heavyhandedness, he acquiesced. He was convinced that the Court had provoked reprisals by its exercise of judicial power, and in a letter to F.D.R. dated Feb. 7, 1937, he wrote that "means had to be found to save the Constitution from the Court, and the Court from itself." And as Annotator Freedman points out, he could salve his conscience "with the justified belief that his legal scholarship would save the President from more flagrant blunders."

What made Frankfurter's performance particularly questionable, however, was that F.D.R. had long since promised him that he would some day be appointed to the Supreme Court. As if with that promise in mind, Frankfurter even told his closest friends that he had no role in the court-packing scheme. For the Senate Judiciary Committee that was to confirm his appointment, Frankfurter even prepared a statement saying that he had been both silent and neutral. The statement never had to be used. But the fact is that Frankfurter was ready to use it. All his brilliance on the bench, his great capacity for friendship, his loyalty to the President, cannot quite erase this shortcoming of character.

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