The big hand across the sea
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT by Roy Jenkins Macmillan, £15.99, pp. 176, ISBN 1405046325 THAT MAN: AN INSIDER'S PORTRAIT OF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT by Robert H. Jackson OUP, £20, pp. 320, ISBN 0195168267 No, many men (and fewer women) have combined politics and literature at a high level. Some very eminent writers dabbled in politics — Marvell, Sheridan, Mill and Belloc all sat as MPs (there's a quiz question in that) — and some professional politicians have had literary aspirations. Churchill may have been a master of sham-Augustan prose, in Evelyn Waugh's unkind phrase, and his Nobel prize for literature may have been stretching a point, but he was a very enjoyable writer. I cannot claim to have read his one novel, nor Chips Channon's, nor indeed the fictional products of Edwina Currie or lain Duncan Smith.
But Disraeli's novels are deservedly still read, and even if fewer people now read the enormous essays, on church music or Tennyson or Leopardi, which Gladstone turned out with his slightly manic prolificity, they testify to a remarkable mind. Only a generation ago the Commons still contained writers and scholars of genuine distinction — Richard Crossman and Michael Foot, Enoch Powell and Norman St John Stevas — and it's a reflection both interesting and dispiriting that no one could possibly say the same today.
By any standards, Roy Jenkins stood near the top in two fields, as politician and as writer. He was a conspicuous success in every ministerial job he held, and he wrote more than half a dozen excellent books, from his earlier admirable studies like Mr Balfour's Poodle and the DiIke story to the best-selling biographies of Gladstone and Churchill he wrote during a literary Indian summer before his death last year at 82. He also turned his hand to biographical essays, of which this short book on Franklin Roosevelt is sadly the last example. Readable and entertaining, but slight not only in length, it was left unfinished at Jenkins's death and has been completed by Richard E. Neustadter, though it doesn't appear to have been edited with any equivalent care.
The chapter on American entry into the war begins with the sentence, 'Although in retrospect it looks improbable, when the United States was in the war and the Russian front had held for six months, the Allied victory was not a foregone conclusion,' where sense suggests that 'improbable' should be 'inevitable'. We are also told that the special train on which FDR campaigned in 1938 'jogged along (never faster than 35 miles an hour) ...', and then, 37 pages later, that he campaigned again at the next midterm elections in 1942 'and travelled 8,754 miles (at never more than 35 miles an hour) ...', so we may conclude that one thing which didn't improve in those years was the speed of the presidential train.
As ever, Jenkins is good on the texture of everyday life, social as well as public, and he had a well-informed relish for the detail of American politics. It seems curious that a president should have devoted some of his time to campaigning against senators and governors from his own party, as Roosevelt did at more than one election. But then most great parties have been coalitions, often of highly disparate elements, and it was more than just a minor oddity of history that the Democrats' heartland during that Rooseveltian liberal heyday was the segregationist South.
In his later writing, Jenkins could sometimes be found in his anecdotage Cone is reminded of the joke about ...') and could lapse into self-parody, as with his description of someone who was 'not a man with whom to hunt butterflies, let alone tigers', the meaning of which I have been puzzling over. Sometimes he is just wrong, as when citing the claim that in the Hitler years the United States 'accepted about twice as many Jewish refugees as the rest of the world put together: about 200,000 out of 300,000'. The total number of immigrants of all kinds to America from Europe in the years 1933-44 was 365,955, and about 132,000 emigrants from Germany and Austria eventually — before, during and after the war — arrived in the United States. American policy in this regard was not generous, and FDR's own attitude to the Jewish catastrophe was at the least negligent or thick-skinned.
For all that, the book is well worth reading, as is the fascinating discovery, long after his death, of the reminiscences by Robert Jackson, FDR's Attorney General, a Supreme Court Justice, and maybe the closest friend of the president to have written about him. That Man is not only personally fascinating but of real historical interest on the subject of Lend-Lease. Both books complement Conrad Black's full-dress biography of FDR which I reviewed here recently.
Reading this last little book made me wonder about Roy Jenkins's reputation, and whether we didn't get him back to front, as it were. He was famously a man of languid charm, a Welsh miner's son who had fashioned himself into the last Whig grandee and excited thereby not always good-natured mockery, as in Aneurin Bevan's gibe: 'People say that Roy Jenkins is lazy. Lazy? Could a boy from Abersychan acquire that accent if he was lazy?' All of which might suggest that he was a brilliant flaneur in politics, a Bolingbroke or Lord Randolph.
Although Jenkins was at his best a ruthlessly effective parliamentary debater, as he showed in his complete rout of Quintin Hogg over the escape of George Blake, he was maybe not in the very top echelon (that's very much his own kind of phrase), not besides Bevan or kin Macleod. On the other hand, he was an outstanding departmental minister, which simply isn't true of indolent men. The easy-going manner concealed an unusually industrious and diligent statesman.
And so with his books. Jenkins wasn't a dazzling phrase-maker or scintillating stylist. On the other hand again, he was a first-class political biographer working on a large canvas. Captious critics decried those later biographies because they weren't works of original scholarship based on archival research. But they didn't pretend to be. Jenkins very cleverly as well as assiduously mined published work — the Gladstone diaries, the companion volumes to Sir Martin Gilbert's enormous biography of Churchill — and turned them into truly excellent narratives, informed with a deeper understanding of public life than most academic historians can command. He was a good writer, not only by comparison with some overrated popular historians of the moment, and he was a good thing, not only by comparison with the detritus now found on the Treasury Bench. 'We shall not see his like again' is a ponderous phrase, but in Jenkins's case I am not sure that we shall.
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