Father by Son

As HE SAW IT (270 pp.)--Elliott Roosevelt--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3).

A smart errand boy hears a lot, especially if he happens to be the son of a President. F.D.R.'s second son and self-styled errand runner ("I'm the Roosevelt who didn't go to Harvard") undoubtedly heard plenty: at the Atlantic Charter conference, at Casablanca, Cairo and Teheran. How well he remembers what he heard may be something else, as his mother tactfully suggests in her foreword to this book: "I am quite sure that many of the people who heard many of the conversations recorded herein, interpreted them differently, according to their own thoughts and beliefs."

Elliott's views on international affairs--which are not likely to impress many readers--are pretty much of a piece with those of Ralph Ingersoll, Louis Adamic, or Henry Wallace. The gist of them is that the U.S. has "deliberately" betrayed F.D.R.'s hopes and plans.

By V-E day or soon after, he argues, the British were able to persuade U.S. "reactionaries" in the State Department and elsewhere to back British imperial interests against Russia. The Soviets became alarmed and rang down the Iron Curtain. Thinks Elliott: the "only two nations whose security interests clash today" are Britain and Russia. Instead of arbitrating these differences, "as Father had always been careful to do," Harry Truman and Jimmy Byrnes have gone over to the British. Observer Roosevelt adds a footnote: "'The biggest thing,' Father commented [after Teheran], 'was in making clear to Stalin that the United States and Great Britain were not allied. . . . I think we've got rid of that idea, once and for all.' "

Shuffling briskly between fervent opinion and intimate revelation, As He Saw It is far more interesting in the second role. Elliott must be one of a tiny handful who have seen Winston Churchill "stalking about the room, clad only in a cigar." Bits like this and F.D.R.'s comments on his contemporaries, as remembered by Elliott, will be noted by more serious biographers. Sample F.D.R. comments:

On De Gaulle: "Elliott, De Gaulle is out to achieve one-man government in France. I can't imagine a man I would distrust more."

On Churchill: "Winnie is a great man for the status quo. He even looks like the status quo, doesn't he? . . . He's scared of letting the Russians get too strong."

On Stalin: "I'm sure we'll hit it off, Stalin and I. . . . He's got a kind of massive rumble, talks deliberately, seems very confident . . . altogether quite impressive. . . . He gets things done, that man. He really keeps his eye on the ball."

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