Word: hickok
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...most important reassessment of E.R. began in 1979, 17 years after her death. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, N.Y., unsealed a mass of 3,500 letters exchanged between the President's wife and Lorena Hickok, a stocky onetime A.P. reporter nine years her junior. An entirely typical letter written by Eleanor on March 7,1933, begins, "Hick darling, All day I've thought of you . . . Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it & think she does love...
...When the Hickok letters were released, Biographer Joseph Lash had already written three books about Eleanor-a memoir of their long friendship, which began in the late 1930s when he was a leftist youth leader in Washington, and the bestselling two-volume study, Eleanor and Franklin and Eleanor: The Years Alone. Lash has set out to balance his work with two more volumes, of which Love, Eleanor is the first...
...Eleanor have a physical relationship with "Hick"? Lash's cautious but firm conclusion is that she did not (though Hickok's sexual orientation was more clearly lesbian), and it seems likely that he is right. To cover the situation, he resurrects the archaic term "Boston marriage," meaning a close and longstanding, but not necessarily sexual, relationship between two women. The fact is-and this is the main subject of Lash's new book-that throughout her life E.R. carried on a series of intense and rather schoolgirlish friendships with a variety of women and men, none...
...love is to be despised," Eleanor once copied into a diary, and the truth seems to be that she successfully conducted her sentimental friendships as if sex did not exist. Earl Miller, F.D.R.'s handsome bodyguard when he was Governor of New York, was another such friend; Lorena Hickok seems merely to have been the most important of Eleanor's attachments. By the time their friendship was cooling, in the early war years, the First Lady had two other favorites: Joe Lash and his wife-to-be, Trude Pratt...
...task for philosophers, Marx said, is not to interpret the world, but to change it. As Hickok never pretends to philosophy, there can be no faulting her unwillingness to call for change. What a reader finds in her reporting, instead, might prove more enduring. With her sensitivity, her thirst for detail, and above all, her sincerity, Lorena Hickok succeeded in finding what radical social theorists have merely postulated to exist--that among us which is human. In taking to the home' of America, and then, reporting what she felt, Lorena Hickok avoided the flaw that undermined other 1930's writers...