If you like your history breathless and a narrator who’s not afraid to put his subjects on the couch, then this book’s for you. William J. Mann, whose previous titles were biographies of stars like Hepburn and Streisand and, recently, about Hollywood in the ’20s (TINSELTOWN), has written a 600-page tome about the “wars” between the Oyster Bay and Hyde Park Roosevelts. Covering a century of rivalry, both personal and familial, the story of distant cousins Theodore and Franklin and their respective families makes for interesting reading --- even before Mann melodramatizes aspects of it.

There are many themes in this book --- fathers and sons, the rich and the self-made, expediency versus integrity --- and the Roosevelt saga gives Mann many opportunities to explore them in depth. What he is also eager to explore --- and perhaps exploit --- are scandals that at times threatened to bring down a member of the family, if not the whole clan.

"If you like your history breathless and a narrator who’s not afraid to put his subjects on the couch, then this book’s for you."

One that Mann is particularly focused on is Theodore’s brother, Elliott Roosevelt. Was he a depressive and drunk, as his brother Teddy and sister Anna believed, or simply an embarrassment to them, as Mann suggests? Did their actions hasten his decline and subsequent death? At one point, the author firmly states that “ultimately Elliott was destroyed by his family’s attempt to control him.”

Besides Eleanor and her brother, Hall, Elliott had an illegitimate son, Elliott R. Mann (whose mother, Katie, had worked for the family). Mann’s thesis is that young Elliott’s was an exemplary life, suggesting he may have been the true heir to the Roosevelt name if he had been embraced by the clan, instead of their paying off his mother. Toward the end of the book, Mann compares him to Eleanor Roosevelt, who is one of the author’s heroes: “both had lived according to the values of hard work, honesty, and integrity.”

There are many other tales that Mann tells --- FDR’s affairs; Alice Longworth’s illegitimate daughter whom she brought up as her husband’s child; Teddy’s son Kermit’s suicide, among them. He is often clear about his preferences: Teddy has “beady” eyes, and about his oldest child he says at one point: “If ever people stopped talking of her, Alice might have ceased to exist.” 

To Mann’s credit, he covers a lot of ground --- from personal history to politics, business and society, while telling the stories of dozens of people and keeping the reader absorbed, if occasionally skeptical. THE WARS OF THE ROOSEVELTS is best read as a companion book to the more scholarly biographies that come out regularly, offering as it does a passionate, if partisan, view of the “first American dynasty.”