That Was No First Lady ...

Despite its exhaustive detail, Eleanor Roosevelt Volume One, 1884-1933 (587 pages. Viking. $27.50) brings no startling new facts to light. Instead, Cook gives the familiar story-the triumph over an unhappy childhood and a difficult marriage-a convincing feminist frame. In showing ER as a strong, confident, independent woman, she’s bucking not merely sexist caricatures but also the reflexive self-deprecation of ER’s own autobiographical writings. But the facts are on Cook’s side. ER was a teacher, an editor, a columnist and a political activist-often at the same time. While married to FDR, she had her own career, her own social life, even her own residence. Being First Lady was just one of her jobs.

Fastidious readers will weary of Cook’s autopilot prose, with its “crucibles, " “quests " and “struggles “; some feminists may be less tolerant than Cook of ER’s opposition to the ERA. But her overall reading of ER’s public life seems beyond debate. The private life is another question. Cook accepts the old rumors that ER had affairs with her muscular bodyguard Earl Miller and journalist Lorena Hickock. Letters (from all three) that might have confirmed such rumors have been lost or destroyed-suggesting to Cook that they were true. Consequently, she depends upon her interpretation of faded photographs (ER’s hand on Miller’s knee) and passages in surviving letters: ER “aching " to hold Hickock, Hickock reminiscing about “the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips. "

Cook argues that ER and Hickock were grown-up women who “knew the score. " No matter what Freud said, “a cigar may not always be a cigar, but the ’north-east corner of your mouth against my lips’ is always the north-east corner. " Other historians, studying the same evidence, haven’t been convinced. On the subject of ER’s sexuality, Cook seems to agree with James Roosevelt, who once said it was insulting to his mother to think she didn’t sleep with Earl Miller - “that because of her hang-ups she was never able to be a complete woman. " Ah, chivalry. ER might not have been aghast over “Eleanor Roosevelt. " But she would have been amazed.