They Hated That Man

That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt – Robert H. Jackson

Heirs are busy people so the manuscript for this book was stored in a box in a closet for about 50 years after it was written. A lawyer, Jackson was a Democrat in Western New York, as a rare species in the first half of the 20^th century as it is at present. That was how he started his personal and political relationship with Roosevelt, who was a luminary in New York state politics. After FDR became President, Jackson worked in the Treasury, the SEC, and then Justice in the Tax Division, the Antitrust Division, and ultimately Solicitor General and Attorney General.

He was appointed to the Supreme Court when Harlan Fiske Stone replaced the retiring Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice in 1941. He established a reputation as a masterful writer, though one admits that the competition is other attorneys, not professionals known for their clarity of expression.  However, his prose is clear in this memoir. Some subject matter is inherently murky -  controversies relative to extensions of executive power have to be written in a prose a bit technical and opaque in places.

But its value is that it presents a unique perspective on working with FDR. The most interesting chapter is on "That Man as Politician," while the most objective were on the administrative abilities and economic knowledge (both low) of the subject.

Some readers may regard it as filler but I found extremely interesting the capsule biographies of people whose names we wide-ranging readers have often come across – e.g. David Dubinsky, Louis Howe, Harold Ickes, Missy Le Hand – but had only a vague idea of their background and role. Like writing captions for photographs, I imagine writing capsule biographies is harder than looks.