Word: roosevelted
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Like many historic mistakes, Executive Order 9066 won approval almost offhandedly. On Feb. 11, 1942, preoccupied by a two-front war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided not to bother with a meeting on the subject and simply said yes in a phone call to his Secretary of War, adding the bland advice, "Be as reasonable as you can." Signed a week later, the order led to the roundup and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans for the duration of World War II, an action that Hawaii Senator Spark Matsunaga calls the "one great blot on the Constitution." Last week...
...smile could raise welts, and her dinner-table conversation regularly drew blood, some as blue as her own. She dismissed her cousin Franklin Roosevelt as "two-thirds mush and one-third Eleanor." When Columnist Joseph Alsop, another cousin, attributed grass-roots support to Wendell Willkie, the Republican hope to topple F.D.R. in 1940, she said yes, "the grass roots of 10,000 country clubs." It was she who demolished Thomas E. Dewey, the 1944 G.O.P. candidate, with the gibe that "he looks like the little man on the wedding cake...
Such swordplay was what the world expected of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt's oldest child, widely described as the "other Washington Monument," who died in 1980 at the age of 96. Friends saw something more. Near death, she roused herself to reprove a guest for being too polite: "I will not have good manners in my house." But as this fascinating, sharply observed biography makes clear, courage and an edged wit were not Alice Longworth's only strong qualities. She was also unfailingly selfish and intermittently cruel. The ruling event of her life came shortly after her birth, when...
...hundreds into the capital of Lhasa, "Home of the Gods." There he had to live alone with his immediate elder brother in the cavernous, 1,000-chamber Potala Palace and undertake an 18-year course in metaphysics. By the age of seven, he was receiving envoys from President Franklin Roosevelt and leading prayers before 20,000 watchful monks; yet he remained a thoroughly normal little boy who loved to whiz around the holy compound in a pedal car and instigate fights with his siblings. "I recall one summer day -- I must have been about seven -- when my mother took...
Brinkley's lively account fades out with Roosevelt's death. Postwar Washington, he observes, was the only major capital "on the winning side, or any side, to survive without a scratch." Psychologically, however, it was altered almost beyond recognition. Within a generation, the unthinkable would be commonplace in D.C.: desegregation, Medicare, a 50-state union, peace marches, feminism. Brinkley is uniquely qualified to narrate the causes of that change. After all, in the early 1940s, what title could have been more incomprehensible than that of TV network anchorman...