Puzzle for Totalitaricms

THE PUBLIC PAPERS AND ADDRESSES OF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, VOLS. XXIII (2,411 pp.)--Edited by Samuel I. Rosenman--Harper ($40).

With these four gargantuan volumes, the job of collecting the public documents of Franklin Roosevelt is completed. Totaling 13 volumes (8,625 pp., 35 1/2 lbs.) in all, The Public Papers make a monumental record of a nation in crisis and an indispensable source for future historians, even if not the sort of thing an ordinary reader will care to pick up on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

The Public Papers contain three main kinds of material: 1) official presidential papers which, whatever their reference value, are often the dullest kind of reading; 2) speeches ranging from fireside chats to campaign broadcasts; and 3) White House press conferences.

Roosevelt meant his speeches to be listened to; with their ear-catching slogans, their thrusts at old opponents, and their frequent oversimplifications of complex issues, most of them do not stand up very well in print.

Yet some of the speeches still ring with the old rhetoric and the masterful irony, e.g., the 1944 defense of Fala: "I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself . . . But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog." And in the more formal addresses there are still passages that read as impressively as they sounded when they were first delivered: "The life of a man is threescore years and ten: a little more, a little less. The life of a Nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live." These and many other individual passages are good enough to arouse curiosity as to who actually phrased them: How much is Roosevelt's and how much his ghostwriters'--Rosenman, Harry Hopkins, Playwright-Historian. Robert Sherwood, et al.?

Pardons for the Press? But by far the most fascinating of The Public Papers are F.D.R.'s press conferences, parts of them off-the-record and now published for the first time. Roosevelt would receive the reporters with easy informality--joking about their having had to be fingerprinted, or chortling with glee ("You stepped right into it") when a reporter asked if a large pile of papers, which turned out to be pardons, was for the press. But when the reporters began to dig into ticklish subjects, F.D.R. could be chilly, huffy or schoolmasterish. Once he told them: "Now mind you, it is not important for the people to know whether my left eyebrow is raised or whether my tone of voice is angry--you better cut that out." But from his continued gibes at the "bright boys" of the press it is clear that they went on writing pretty much as they pleased.

In view of the strains under which he worked during the war years, Roosevelt showed remarkably good humor during the conferences. When the Russian armies were on the offensive at Stalingrad, he told the reporters: "You can say [I am] dee-lighted, if you want to." And when they questioned him on U.S. dealings with the dubious Admiral Darlan, he retorted with "an old Balkan proverb": "My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge."

An Intact Empire? Roosevelt came off worst when he talked about Russia. To a reporter's query about freedom of worship in Russian-occupied territories, he answered by referring to the Russian constitution's provision for free worship. When a reporter asked him what he thought of Stalin, Roosevelt answered: "I would call him something like me--he is a realist."

In other judgments of personalities Roosevelt was more tart. He took the expected jabs at Congressman Hamilton Fish and the Chicago Tribune's Colonel McCormick, poked fun at De Gaulle's stubbornness and, according to Editor Rosenman, "had a feeling of strong personal dislike [for] Governor Dewey." Among his personal remarks is a patronizing estimate of Churchill. When a reporter asked if Churchill expected the British Empire to remain intact after the war, Roosevelt cracked, "Yes, he is mid-Victorian on all things like that. . . Dear old Winston will never learn on that point."

Throughout, the press conferences have a quality that may puzzle totalitarians: the President of the U.S. allowed give & take. When he chided a reporter at one conference for asking bothersome questions the reporter shot back: "That's what I get paid for." The reporter was neither liquidated nor sent to Siberia. The transcript reports the conference's reaction in one word: "Laughter."

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