Eleanor and Franklin.
Inscribed by Joe Lash and FDR Jr.
to Maureen Corr
[Roosevelt, Eleanor]. Lash, Joseph P. Eleanor and Franklin. The story of their relationship, based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s private papers. Foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Introduction by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, (1971).
8vo.; illustrated; blue cloth, stamped in gilt; dust-jacket. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed by FDR, Jr.: For Maureen Corr Who so greatly helped with dedication the lady of this book. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Affectionately, Franklin. And also inscribed by Lash: To which I am happy to add my affectionate best wishes. Joe. Corr was ER’s final secretary during “the years alone,” the somewhat misleading title of one of Lash’s later works on the former First Lady. The last 17 years of ER’s life were anything but lonely as she led a peripatetic existence as author, UN diplomat, Democratic Party elder stateswoman and matriarch. Her life was crowded with writing, politics, travel, family, and, above all, friends.
Joe Lash, as Schlesinger points out in his Foreword, was among the closest of those friends during the last two decades of ER’s life. Born in 1909 and graduated from City College, Lash was a prominent student radical in the 1930s, and it was his posts in the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the American Student Union that first drew Eleanor’s attention. Lash became her ambassador to the radical youth movement, and he impressed her with his political passion and judgment. Lash soon became more than just her conduit to the campuses and was a frequent White House guest during the Forties. Mrs. Roosevelt even visited him at his military posts in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, their paths never verged far, as Lash worked the UN beat for the New York Post and later became an editorial writer for the then-liberal daily. Before writing this book, Lash had penned a short memoir, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend’s Memoir and he had also provided editorial assistance to Elliott Roosevelt in the late 1940s in connection with volumes III and IV of FDR’s Personal Letters. Thus he was no stranger to Roosevelt scholarship or to the archival holdings at Hyde Park when FDR Jr., commissioned him to do this work.
Precisely such closeness led Schlesinger to fear that Lash could never write an objective biography. He was pleasantly surprised. Lash depicted ER “with love but without illusion or sentimentalism.” He examined the frightful emotional scars inflicted on her in childhood by a veritable army of neurotic, alcoholic and emotionally abusive relatives; he detailed her long and successful struggle for independence and fulfillment within a difficult and disappointing marriage; and he succeeded not only in telling her story, but in capturing the mood and texture of the world around ER throughout her long life, from the Edith Wharton atmosphere of her youth to the nervous ideological tensions of the Cold War. FDR Jr. was pleased as well: he had hoped Lash would be “objective yet sympathetic and recapture something of her reality as she moved through eight of the most significant decades in our country’s history. This book fulfills my hope.” Lash’s success was rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1972.
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