No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor
Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994)
5 Stars out of 5
Doris Kearns Goodwin
759 pages
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize winning book “No
Ordinary Time” describes the war years of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Goodwin begins her chronicle in May of 1940 and largely concludes it in April
1945 after FDR’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage. Goodwin relies on extensive
interviews with the people that knew the pair as well as an exhaustive review
of their private correspondence and other key secondary historical sources. “No
Ordinary Time” is not in the definitive biography category, but it is a good
example of the style that Goodwin has also brought to her biographies of
Theodore Roosevelt/William Howard Taft and her study of Abraham Lincoln and his
cabinet. In each of these books, Goodwin’s research and style of writing lend
her books both great historicity and a sense of personal connection to her
subject material.
For me, the best part of “No Ordinary Time” is the section
devoted to 1940. Having grown up in the sixties, I have had an inborn sense
that America was always ready and willing to defend herself; in fact, ready to
defend any country or group of people that needed defending from the tyrants of
the world. To be sure, there is considerable naiveté in such a belief. Like any
country, the US will always ensure that her needs are first being met whenever
she ventures into war. But the willingness to intervene or the actual lack thereof
were striking features of the period leading up to WWII and indeed continued well
into the war as FDR and his advisors actively chose not to defend the rights of
Americans of Japanese extraction, or only reluctantly chose to move to defend
the rights of Black Americans, and in awful fact chose not to take certain
actions to reduce the carnage experienced by the Jews of Europe.
Goodwin spends some little time explaining the personal
histories of FDR and ER. He was the only and thoroughly adored child of a
wealthy couple made up of an aged father and doting, younger mother. The death
of FDR’s father and the now enhanced attention his mother could now foist on
him helped create a remarkably secure but terribly secretive (as regards his
inner life) adolescent, and in time adult. ER’s situation could not have been
more different. She grew up in a loving and nearly equally prosperous family as
her fifth-cousin FDR, but unfortunately for her, also in the home of an
alcoholic father – one who would die and leave his family in some fiscal and
emotional straits. Fortunately for ER, her uncle, the older brother to her
unfortunate father was Theodore Roosevelt. TR took an active interest in the
family of his younger brother and did make various attempts to help ER’s family
situation. But like FDR, the situation of her youth, the cauldron from which
she would arise shaped ER just as surely as FDR’s far more secure childhood
shaped his. ER would grow with an unquenchable desire to intervene on the behalf
of the less fortunate, but quite likely just as insecure in her most intimate
relationships as FDR was secure in all of his. It is easy to over generalize
but based on Goodwin’s recitation of the events leading to the adulthood of FDR
and ER, it is tempting to draw some conclusions about their remarkable and
troubled marital union.
Goodwin uses a layered approach to her biographies wherein
she begins a description of (say) the events of May 1940 when Hitler is on the
very cusp of waging a devastating aerial bombardment of England and how and why
FDR and ER would respond to both the international events in FDR’s case or the
plight of the American Negro in ER’s case. Having narrated an historical record
for both FDR and ER, she uses inference and occasionally more direct
explanation for their action. Why was FDR so driven to help England and his
close friend Winston Churchill; why was ER as equally driven to improve the
situation for America’s Negros (I use the term the Goodwin has chosen and
presumably the times chose to use), or the mine workers, or union members, or
enlisted men, or and the list is a very long one of Americans not well served
by the wealthy and powerful.
As noted above, I found the efforts made by America and FDR
to first move from a position of absolute unpreparedness to become the “Arsenal
of Democracy”, to move from strict isolationism to waging wars over two oceans,
to move from being a bystander to world events to being a shaper of world
events. Goodwin narrates a long involved tale that describes the various legal
and legislative machinations made by FDR when he set up Lend Lease to first
help England and later the USSR and Joseph Stalin. Added to the considerable
difficulties FDR faced in moving a very recalcitrant congress to establish the
means to help these two erstwhile allies, he also faced immense hurdles in
turning American’s peacetime manufacturing energies into wartime powerhouses:
making tanks and airplanes instead of cars, making gunpowder instead of
ceramics, and making transport ships at a rate faster than the German U-boats
could sink them – something they did not do very well until 1942. However, by
1943 America was supplying her own military and that of the English and the
Russians, and doing it at a pace that was several factors higher than the early
targets for planes, tanks, ships and armament that were initially thought to be
impossible to achieve. Goodwin goes to great lengths to demonstrate just how
integral FDR’s vision and most importantly his leadership went into creating
this powerful force for good.
At the same time, ER continued her work as America’s
conscience. Prior to the outbreak of war and following the near catastrophic (in
a marital sense) discovery by ER of FDR’s romantic relationship with Lucy
Mercer (ironically one of ER’s aides), ER had sought to find her own way; a way
that supported FDR but was in many ways independent of FDR. Throughout their
marriage, ER protested time and again her love for FDR, but her actions clearly
show her first priority was a passionate desire to be busy; to be busy working
tirelessly helping others. ER travelled the US in the years prior to WWII
always acting as the eyes and ears for a president limited by his job
requirements and physical condition. Their dinners on the evenings of her
returns to DC appear to have been one half familial reunions, one half business
meetings. According to Goodwin, this type of life was essential to keeping FDR
more fully informed of the effects of his social legislation, was essential to
ER’s desperate need to help the downtrodden, but perhaps most of all,
critically important to ER’s sense of self. On those occasions when events
conspired to force her into a traditional First Lady role, she chafed; on the
many other occasions when she could break free and do some good, she bloomed.
Thus when WWII dawned in Europe and even more so following 7December1941
when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and forced America to finally enter the
war as more than an arms merchant, ER was very ill prepared for the second
place (or worse) position the previous decade’s social programs had to take.
FDR was overwhelmingly preoccupied with conducting the war, and after a long
day of having done so, was rarely prepared to face ER at dinner and her
constant push for the rights of Black America, of Americans of Japanese
descent, of housing for workers, of European Jew immigration to America, and of
many other “rights of man” types of issues. Worse for ER and her goals was the
simple fact that the level of racism in 1940’s America would startle an
American in 2015. Racism was rampant in the government and the military. The
mere concept of equal protection under the law for Black Americans in the Navy,
for example, was so non-existent, the longest battle fought during the years of
1940 to 1943 was whether Black sailors could perform any job outside of the
mess hall. In Detroit as the burgeoning population of workers swelled to work
in the arms industry based there, fights over housing became violent and always
seemed to have a racial component. Americans in the 40’s not only did not have
any sense of equal protection, they did not seem to think it was ever even a
question; it was simply natural that WASP rights superseded all others – there was
never any question of this basic fact. And when ER as she so often did in her
daily newspaper column called for recognition of such rights, she would receive
letters of startlingly insensitivity telling her she was a troublemaker, the
source of the various riots over the denial of such rights, and that she really
should just go home and take care of FDR as any good wife would. Needless to
say, ER did not do any such thing.
The war years for FDR and ER were difficult years for them
as a couple, for ER’s passionate pursuit of rights for all Americans, and for
FDR’s physical health. According to Goodwin, by mid-1944 FDR’s health was in a
dangerous decline. America and her allies had both the Japanese and Germans in
retreat, but the path for FDR to help get them there had ruined his health. He
suffered from extremely high blood pressure, his heart was greatly enlarged,
and his strength was failing. Now was the time, if ever she was going to do so,
that ER should at the very least curtail her activities and spin more time with
a man that desperately needed such companionship. But that was not in her
nature; she did not seem to see the need in his eyes and she certainly never changed
her behavior to meet his needs. Instead, their daughter Anna who had being
filling the role of substitute First Lady for nearly a year met her father’s
request to arrange an reunion with FDR’s old flame, Lucy Mercer. This
relationship continued up to the day of FDR’s death. It was an unfortunate
position to place Anna, and yet was a strange kind of symbol for the unusual
partnership between FDR and ER. That someone that loved them both, which wanted
to help them both was forced to try and find a middle way to please them both
at the very end of their marriage.
It’s hard to read “No Ordinary Time” and not be
simultaneously impressed and disappointed in ER and FDR. They were both people
of towering abilities, leadership and vision, and yet so very human. FDR couldn’t
not flirt or worse with a significant number of women that came into his life,
while ER could hardly extend the love she wrote of so often in her letters to
FDR or her children. His extroverted, overly self-confident pursuit of any
relationship he wanted stood in stark contrast to her constant withdrawal into
the introvert’s private seclusion any time she felt over-whelmed by events. And
yet, between the two of them, it is impossible to find any couple in American
history that have done even half as much as the two of them did during the war
years of WWII. Goodwin’s book won’t tell the reader too much about the war at
the front, but it will tell you a lot about two very gifted people and what
they accomplished for America. This book is a must read.
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