ELLIOTT 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 attention—a few paragraphs, a few pages, perhaps even a chapter’s worth of information scattered throughout their more-thorough tales of his daughter’s 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 know—for 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 Elliott’s 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 Elliott’s 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 man’s 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 hostility—or, less harshly, the lack of rapport—between Eleanor and her mother.
The letters, then, both to and from Elliott Roosevelt, have enabled me to acquaint myself with the man as much as any author has yet been acquainted with him, or so I like to think. And they have enabled me to provide him with the most prominent role he has yet known in a book, even though it is not a book of great heft.
But although the letters were a solution to the problem of the man’s relative anonymity, they raised another problem the moment I opened the first of several boxes that contained them. Most of the letters are undated. How was I to know where to place them in the narrative, to learn where an individual letter fit into the order of events?
The answer proved to be simpler than I had initially thought; already familiar with the events about which I was writing, I now had to become just as familiar with the correspondence. I read it diligently, much of it more than once, and as I found out more and more about my two principals, I became more and more able to determine the dates upon which they wrote or received mail from each other. It is upon these deductions, and occasional certainties, that I have relied. Any mistakes I have made . . . well, I can do no more than apologize for them in advance. Regardless, I am certain that they are few in number and, more to the point, that they do no harm. The essential truths, so compelling about this most unusual of fathers, are captured on the pages.
As for the letters that are dated, it should go without saying that I have been able to incorporate them into the text without difficulty.
In a sense, Someone to Watch Over Me: A Portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt and the Tortured Father Who Shaped Her Life is a sequel to my previous volume, The Golden Lad: The Haunting Story of Quentin and Theodore Roosevelt. In both books, what I have done is ignore much about the public lives of this famous family in favor of the personal. And in both cases, I mean “personal” to refer to the bond between parent and child, how and why it was formed, and what the consequences of the bond proved to be for both individuals.
In this book, however, I have found a very different kind of parental love for a child than I did with Theodore and Quentin, a love that could easily have been destructive for the little girl. Perhaps should have been destructive. Yet, somehow, it contributed more than any other factor to her unlikely rise to eminence, and to her becoming the most esteemed woman of the twentieth century. This particular story has never been told before, at least not in something close to its entirety.
It was a painful ascent from childhood for Eleanor Roosevelt. I trust I have been both accurate and properly analytical in describing its steepness and the extraordinary, and in many ways mysterious, role that was played by her father, Elliott.