The Roosevelts: An American Saga.

Since their days as the editors of Ramparts magazine in the 1960s (they have now renounced their radical backgrounds and support others who follow suit), Peter Collier and David Horowitz have written a substantial subliterature on American dynasties. Before they came to the subject, books on famous American families tended almost always toward antiquarianism. Breaking that mold, Collier and Horowitz have performed the extraordinary task of getting reticent people to talk about their lives, their minds, and their relatives as well as deconstructing the densely packed array of ambitions, anxieties, responsibilities, traumas, and opportunities thrown on the rich and famous from birth.

In The Rockefellers (1976), they showed how the great-grandchildren of John D. Rockefeller grew up to be wildly different from their patriarch and from one another, despite the strong efforts of that family's infrastructure to imprint them with common values, manners, and goals. Published just after the 1984 drug death of Robert Kennedy's son David, with whom the authors had spoken at length, The Kennedys showed the human cost that Joseph Kennedy's insatiable drives exacted from his children and grandchildren. The Fords (1987) was more cursory and brisk, largely because that family, on closer inspection, did not prove to have the intensity and depth that had allowed Collier and Horowitz to weave the two earlier tales, tales that were almost out of Thomas Mann.

The Roosevelts is at least a partial return to the tradition of their first two books. Despite the credit line, it has evidently been written by Collier alone (in his author's note, he thanks "my good old friend David Horowitz for his help in rounding up some of the material in the first stages of this book"). Mining the huge literature on Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and sundry aspects of their families, as well as private papers and interviews with descendants, the book breaks with usual practice by treating the often bitterly opposed TR and FDR branches as one, closing with a 1989 Hyde Park rapprochement that family members gibed as "the Peace of Utrecht."

As with the earlier volumes, Collier is most interesting on the figures to whom history has paid less attention-- for instance, Eleanor Roosevelt's father Elliott, who drank and was "the leading character in what had become the families' ongoing melodrama." Other characters are presented in new light: Eleanor's childhood "behavior was calculated to win sympathy, yet there was something in Eleanor--a combination of smugness, vulnerability, obtuseness, not to speak of an ability to absorb emotional pain--that made an individual like Alice [Roosevelt Longworth] want to punish her."

In stark colors, Collier portrays Franklin and Eleanor's deficiencies as parents, describing how FDR "mistakenly assumed" that his daughter and sons "would not feel entangled in the dark undergrowth of emotion that characterized his relationship to Eleanor." This "made the family, in Tolstoy's formulation, unhappy in its own distinctive way." FDR is shown as "a blithe spirit and a figure of tremendous power, yet paradoxically unable to protect [his children]--not from tyrannical nannies, not from their mother's painful deficits, and not from his own relentless desire to pretend everything was fine, his way of conserving the core of privacy he had won with such difficulty."

Collier renders the TR branch's antagonism toward FDR as president ("What they had been saying for almost twenty years" was that "the Hyde Park branch was not just an inferior copy of the original, but a forgery") as partially political, partially a sense of dethronement. He writes that the TR side felt that their name "was being degraded by the financial misdeeds and especially by the marital failures of those other Roosevelts." Those failures in marriage and commerce are presented here in full. As in Collier's earlier books, the most memorable passages in The Roosevelts concern the striving of later generations to defeat or conform to the standards set by the patriarch, usually falling short in both.

In this retelling, the descendants of TR trailed off: "It was always a matter of living with the memory of a man who seemed to ask them...what they had done with their lives and why they hadn't managed to be as happy and productive as he had been." The decline and fall of the FDR side was more fabulous. For instance, after bravery during World War II, son Elliott, trying to be a "big man," went through a number of wives, panhandled his mother and other family members for cash, wrote questionable "memoirs" about his parents with invented dialogue--making profits while cutting them down to size--then put his name on a series of cheap ghost-written "Eleanor Roosevelt Mysteries." (Of his books on his late mother, Elliott joked, "See, she's still supporting me after all these years.") In 1965, he vainly ran for mayor of Miami Beach and was rumored to be close to the gangster Meyer Lansky.

Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. is perhaps an even better emblem of the collapsed ambitions of the FDR line. Elected to Congress from New York City in a special election in 1949, endowed with his father's magnetism, looks, and voice, he was considered to be an almost certain future presidential nominee. Instead, lack of discipline and tactical skills killed his career in New York politics so that by 1960 he was reduced to exploiting his family name to help John Kennedy overcome the skepticism of West Virginia primary voters. As Charles Peters, the editor of this magazine, wrote in his autobiography, "Roosevelt had become a drunk, and now Kennedy was fulfilling FDR Jr.'s once bright promise."

While The Roosevelts lacks the grandeur and depth of the Collier-Horowitz treatments of the Rockefellers and Kennedys, it benefits from Collier's considerable intelligence and research skills. More than his earlier books, it demonstrates the strange paradox of political dynasties in a democracy: We long to give office to the descendants of great figures and then are somehow startled to discover that the offspring of self-absorbed and power-seeking figures do not always have the instincts and talents that leadership requires.