The F. D. R. Memoirs
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. 24 cm. xxi, 461 pages. Appendices. Bibliography and Sources. Index. Faint "damaged" stamp on front endpaper, DJ worn, rear DJ flap separated. Introduction by Anna Roosevelt Halsted. Bernard Asbell spent six years analyzing Roosevelt's private papers, and diaries of White House associates and interviewers. He has written--as a speculation on history--F.D.R. 's New Deal memoirs for him. Bernard Asbell was a writer on politics and government and a college professor. Mr. Asbell wrote 12 books, including ''When F.D.R. Died,'' which was on The New York Times best-seller list in 1962. Other books included ''The Senate Nobody Knows'', which followed the activities of Senator Edmund S. Muskie for 18 months in 1975-76; ''The Pill: A Biography of the Drug That Changed the World''; and, with Joe Paterno, the football coach at Pennsylvania State University, ''Paterno: By the Book.'' He also edited ''Mother & Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt''. Mr. Asbell wrote hundreds of articles for magazines including Harper's and The Saturday Evening Post, and he was president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors in 1963 and 1964. He taught writing at Yale and Clark Universities before joining the faculty at Penn State in 1984 as an associate professor of English, retiring in 1992. ''He was one of few professors without a Ph.D. to hang onto,'' Professor Brenchley said. In fact, Mr. Asbell had no college degrees. This work is the "memoirs" F.D.R. might have written, based on Roosevelt's own papers and letters, and presented as a draft for Roosevelt's use. Bernard Asbell spent six years analyzing Roosevelt's private papers, and diaries of White House associates, and interviewers. He has written, as a speculation on history, F.D.R.'s New Deal memoirs for him. Each chapter includes a background memorandum, exploring Roosevelt's character. Rich in fact and psychological speculation, these memoranda reinterpret the political man in terms of his most personal experiences. Derived from a Kirkus review: What would FDR's memoirs from 1932 up to the war have been like? Asbell, a professional writer, assumes they would have been first-drafted by someone like himself, submitted to the President for editing, and eventually published as FDR's last word. Thus this ghosted memoir. The book's effort is to "understand [FDR's] public behavior by matching it against his private experience." Would FDR actually have maintained in his memoirs the rhetoric of "the forgotten man" and the "people's cause"? Might he not have at least hinted that the campaign against Hearst and the economic royalists and surely the 1937 courtpacking "mistake" represented an attempt to fabricate a reactionary opposition? In the same vein FDR's campaign use of Hoover and bankers as whipping boys finds its way into the memoir. FDR must have been keenly aware of the spreading CIO. It is possible that FDR, a consummate politician whose shrewd tactics were virtually automatic reflexes, might never have bared his political motives even if he had lived to write his memoirs. Asbell is successful in penetrating FDR's private personality -- his relationship with his mother and his response to paralysis are sensitively handled, as are his closeness with Missy LeHand and the affair with Lucy Mercer. Eleanor remains in the gray background: good insight or a wish not to try to replicate Eleanor and Franklin? The book constantly encourages the reader to ask, Would FDR have said this? Condition: Good / Good.
Keywords: Democratic Party, Franklin Roosevelt, New Deal, Liberalism, James Farley, Felix Frankfurter, Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Henry Wallace
ISBN: 0385084145
[Book #27594]
Price: $45.00