Reading The Sphinx is like listening to a grandmother recount an oft told tale, each telling with a shift of emphasis, different point of entry, and, for the blessed, a new detail. What I learned in Nicholas Wapshott’s book about FDR had nothing to do with Churchill, Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Kennedy, and the rest; it’s this sentence in the prologue: “His sexual drive was so insistent that not even the polio he contracted at age thirty-nine, while summering at the family’s vacation home on the Canadian island of Campobello in 1921, brought his womanizing to an end.” Apart from the boldness with which Wapshott confronts decades long suspicions about whether Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer Rutherford kept seeing each other after Eleanor found those ill-fated love letters in Franklin’s suitcase, the sentence packs more biographical shorthand in a few phrases than I’m used to seeing. “Whew, that takes care of that,” I imagine Wapshott saying.
This account of how FDR coaxed a reluctant public and isolationist Congress into sending arms and ships to England in 1941 before Pearl Harbor, unimaginatively titled at length The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II, comes at an unfortunate time. Nigel Hamilton’s recent The Mantle of Command already documented how the wily and perspicacious FDR charmed underlings and frustrated career officers, all while fending off Churchill, prolonged contact with whom exhausted him and probably contributed to his wretched health. Lynne Olson’s Those Angry Days covers the same period with greater finesse. Finally, David Nasaw in 2012 had fun noting the ways in which the oafish Joe Kennedy wrote his own political obit with each assurance of British perfidy and Nazi triumph while ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. There simply isn’t enough new material in The Sphinx to justify the mysterious title or archaic chapter names of the A.A. Milne “In Which It Is Shown that Tiggers Don’t Climb Trees” ilk.
Ominously, the book is marred by horrifying mistakes. FDR confidant and Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter was never “Treasury chief” (was Wapshott thinking of fellow Jew and bearer of a three-syllable last name Henry Morgenthau?). Jeanette Rankin, notable for voting against bills authorizing World Wars I and II, was not a senator — she was the first woman elected to the House in 1916 and reelected in 1940. He applies prose with a trowel, such as when he praises FDR’s parable about a neighbor and a garden hose as “the most elegant and fanciful piece of American fiction since Mark Twain penned Huckleberry Finn.” Heavy breathing aside, the adjectives I would have chosen include “effective” and “corny,” joined by “and.” And the book ends with the kind of specious analogy between 1940 and the present day that delights readers of TIME in doctors’ offices. If you’re a fan of the period, stick to the books cited.
Humanizing The Vacuum 