The Fishmonger & the Squire

ROOSEVELT: THE LION AND THE Fox (553 pp.)--James MacGregor Burns--Harcourf, Brace ($5.75).

THE HAPPY WARRIOR (320 pp.)--Emily Smith Warner-- Doubleday ($4.50).

Governor Alfred E. Smith was ready to leave the executive mansion in Albany for good. Xo one was very happy that December night in 1928, because only the month before Al had lost a presidential election in which Prohibition, religious bigotry and snobbery were big issues. Now the trunks of his successor were piled in the hall, the baggage of the same Franklin D. Roosevelt who had nominated him for the presidency and dubbed him "the happy warrior." Prohibition was the law of the land, but Al called for a bottle of champagne, anointed F.D.R.'s trunks and intoned to his absent friend: "Now, Frank, if you want a drink, you will know where to find it."

It was pleasant nonsense, and if Roosevelt had been present, he would have appreciated it. But not too many years later. Al was pouring verbal vitriol on an F.D.R. whom he had come to see as an enemy of U.S. institutions. Two recent books make this understandable, though neither one succeeds in really pinning down its man. The Happy Warrior, by Emily Smith Warner, is so obviously a daughter's accolade that one of the most colorful politicians in U.S. history can scarcely be seen through the swaddling layers of worshipfulness. Yet something of his genuineness, of his dedication to the job of government, comes through. He was a Tammany boy, protege of a Lower East Side saloonkeeper turned political boss; yet he managed to stay clear of the Tammany odor. When he spoke on government to a distinguished group of scholars at Harvard, one professor remarked: "If I had a transcript of that speech, I would have the greatest textbook on civics ever written."

Williams College Professor James Burns has a more elusive fellow to trap in Roosevelt: the Lion and the Fox, and he knows it. Burns wears his objectivity on both sleeves. Though his F.D.R. is not noticeably different from the composite constructed in a score of other books, his book is more vividly told and more sharply dramatized, has risen high on bestseller lists since its publication three months ago. Burns quotes with approval what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, retired and 92, said of F.D.R.: "A second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament!" Nothing in this biography contradicts the judgment. F.D.R. played the presidency by ear, sometimes with real political virtuosity, as often as not with "a thin streak of cruelty.'' (Said Tammany Hall's Big Tim Sullivan in 1911 when F.D.R. was a brash young New York state senator: "This fellow is still young. Wouldn't it be safer to drown him before he grows up?") About economics Roosevelt knew little; in foreign affairs before World War II he was vacillating. But his political dexterity would have tickled Machiavelli, and his confidence and vitality astounded many a first-class intellect blessed with only a second-rate temperament.

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