Eric Burns - Someone to Watch Over Me

For
Lorraine Battipaglia,
il mio miracolo,
sempre, sempre

Elliott Roosevelt and his beloved daughter, Eleanor, his little Nell, whom
he treated like no one else, and thus made all the difference.

Elliott, after having returned from India, in his dashing
younger days that fooled everyone

The First Lady of the World

CONTENTS

SOMEONE to WATCH
OVER ME

E LLIOTT BULLOCH ROOSEVELT, ONE OF the two costars of this book, was the brother of Theodore Roosevelt and the father of Eleanor. Which means he was the sibling of one president of the United States and the father-in-law of another. It is a claim no other American can make.

Yet to historians and biographers, he has had very little relationship at all. The former often ignore Elliott in their volumes, or perhaps toss him a handful of lines, something in the manner of an aside when they are writing about Eleanor; for the most part, though, he is an insignificant figure in a significant era. Biographers might give him more attentiona few paragraphs, a few pages, perhaps even a chapters worth of information scattered throughout their more-thorough tales of his daughters life. But nowhere is Elliott examined in detail; he remains a shadowy figure, a man of puzzling behavior and unclear motives in a family of more illustrious men and women. Yet it is these very shadows that make him worth knowing. Or worth trying to knowfor his was not a life that lends itself to easy entrance, a clear interpretation.

According to my research, and that of others who have assisted me, no one has ever written a book about Elliott Roosevelt, and I have managed to turn up only two magazine articles about him, both of them helpful but limited, and both in publications of which you have likely never heard: The Freeholder and The Hudson Valley Regional Review. Fortunately, the magazines provide bits and pieces of information not available elsewhere.

I also found a feature story about Elliotts exile from his family, which will be explained later, in a long-ago edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. As far as I know, no one else who has written about this particular Roosevelt has utilized these sources.

However, the FDR Presidential Museum and Library in Hyde Park, New York, has a complete, or nearly complete, collection of Elliotts letters, especially to his daughter, and they were indispensable to the writing of this book. For the most part, they cover only a two-year period, but they gave me not only a sense of the mans character but also an understanding of the tribulations that he both suffered and inflicted on others. Further, they revealed the strength of will he exerted to hide these tribulations from his beloved daughter. He loved Eleanor more than anyone else ever did, certainly including her husband. And he influenced her character more than anyone else ever did, both profoundly and beneficially, despite himself. It seems impossible, but truth sometimes appears in disguise.

It is this influence that prompted me to write Someone to Watch Over Me, so intriguing is it to contemplate how a father like Elliott could have produced a daughter like Eleanor. Especially considering the hostilityor, less harshly, the lack of rapportbetween Eleanor and her mother.