Word: lashings
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...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...
Some of this has been told before, by Lash himself. What the new book brings to E.R.'s story is an appreciation of the degree to which, after her armed truce with F.D.R. over the Mercer affair, she found and gave her own kind of affection. One of the first of these idiosyncratic friendships was with Louis Howe, an early political aide of her husband, a man described as ugly and misshapen, an impossible choice for a lover. Yet her daughter Anna was shocked once to find her sitting at Howe's.feet as he stroked her hair...
...time Lash seems to give inordinate space to his own relationship with E.R., which appears to have been that of a much indulged son (he was 25 years her junior). But the autobiographical aspect is more than justified. After Lash was drafted into the Army in 1942, it was obvious to him and to E.R., with whom he exchanged visits, that he was under surveillance. Their reasonable assumption was that this was because of his left-wing background. Not until 1978 did he learn, after demanding to see his FBI and Army counterintelligence files under the Freedom of Information...
...foreword, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. condemns this report. The notion that his parents "might have engaged in marital recriminations in front of staff and aides is totally inconsistent with their semi-Victorian upbringing and their personal reticences." The letters exchanged between Eleanor and Lash, he says, accurately reflect the innocent nature of their unusual friendship. Here, the reader is the jury. The old Roosevelt haters who recall her muzzy newspaper columns and his years of autocratic rule will believe the worst. But those who see in E.R. a complex, endlessly charitable woman can only answer with more charity...
...warm relationship, though Anna was aware that her mother did not always comprehend human weaknesses, and utterly failed to understand, for instance, why F.D.R., during World War II, insisted on having a 20-minute cocktail break before dinner. But there was no pomposity to this doer of what Lash, quoting George Eliot, calls "deeds of daring rectitude." Anna recalled that toward the end of her life, E.R. was offered $35,000 to make a margarine commercial for television. She translated the fee into CARE packages, decided she could save 6,000 lives, and made the commercial. Later she reported that...