First Mother: Washington Sleuth : A Roosevelt Scion’s Mysteries are Set in the F.D.R. White House

Her energy was boundless, her intelligence keen, her compassion infinite, but solving crimes was not one of the gifts attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt in her lifetime.

It remained for her son Elliott to imagine his mother as a sleuth, and by now, he has led her through seven mysteries.

The most recent, “Murder in the Rose Garden” published late last year by St. Martin’s Press, begins with the discovery of the body of a well-known Washington hostess in the very shadow of the White House.

A suspect is close at hand. But it is a sacred truth of mysteries that the obvious suspect is never guilty. Mrs. Roosevelt, equally concerned to protect the innocent and to discover the murderer, soon nudges a Secret Service detective and the Washington cops toward the lurid truth.

Another presidential descendant, Margaret Truman, also has turned to mystery-writing. Hers are set in contemporary Washington and enriched by her familiarity with the workings of that peculiar environment. Harry Truman himself has retired to history in his daughter’s work, although in “Murder in the CIA,” his testy remarks about the agency are quoted at length as a kind of posthumous vindication of his wisdom. (The two authors, Roosevelt says, have never compared notes.)

Elliott Roosevelt’s mysteries are set in the White House of the F.D.R. years, 1932-45, and the considerable charm of the books resides in the son’s sketches of his mother and father, of Missy LeHand, Harry Hopkins and the other historical figures from those days, and of small details of daily life on Pennsylvania Avenue.

In “Murder in the Rose Garden,” for example, F.D.R. complains about the quality of the cooking in the White House. All too true, Elliott Roosevelt said the other day. Now 79, he moved not long ago from Palm Springs to Scottsdale, where he and his wife Patty live.

“You couldn’t get a good meal in the White House,” Roosevelt said. “Neither Mrs. Nesbitt, who’d come down from Staatsburg, N.Y., . . . to be the housekeeper, nor Mother had an idea of what a gourmet meal was.”

Food was simply not one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s priorities, and that makes a funny submotif that only someone who was there could have known about and written.

Roosevelt has a long if intermittent history as a writer. A licensed pilot since 1928, although he has not flown in five years, he was aviation editor for Hearst Newspapers for a time starting in 1933.

In “Murder in the Rose Garden,” Mrs. Roosevelt mentions that Elliott is interested in flying to Europe in a dirigible. True, he says now. “I was very much taken with the possibilities of the dirigible for transportation.” It’s another of the small echoes between fiction and reality that give the Roosevelt mysteries their curious mix of credibility and make-believe.

Roosevelt, who has come to look more and more like his father as the years have gone by, has had a hand in several other books, starting in 1946 with “As He Saw It,” his account of his travels to wartime conferences, including Yalta, as an aide to F.D.R.

He also edited four volumes of his father’s letters, and, with James Brough, co-wrote four books about the Roosevelt family. The first of those, “An Untold Story” in 1973, brought down upon him the wrath of his siblings, and many critics, for its revelations about F.D.R.’s private life, notably his relationship with Lucy Mercer, who was with the President when he died at Palm Springs.

Missy LeHand, also mentioned in “An Untold Story,” is prominently featured in “Murder in the Rose Garden” as well, having a quiet dinner off a tray at the President’s bedside while Mrs. Roosevelt is entertaining the black leader, Mary McCleod Bethune, more formally elsewhere in the White House. (Missy’s testimony about the departure of a visitor to F.D.R. crucially indicts one suspect and clears another.)

The bedside supper is deeply affectionate, if not romantic, but the author says the get-togethers were both customary and innocent. “It wasn’t the kind of romantic interlude you might think,” Roosevelt says. “Missy had a very strong relationship with my mother, as well. She had her own quarters on the third floor, like a member of the family.” She died in 1941.

Roosevelt’s last book before the mysteries began in 1984 with “Murder and the First Lady” was “The Conservators.” It appealed, he says, “to the delving mind. It was a think book that involved a lot of research and took me two years to write.” There appears to have been an insufficiency of delving minds, and Roosevelt says wryly that a friend told him it was the greatest book to cure insomnia he’d ever found.

“I had to do something livelier,” Roosevelt admits. He considered romance novels but his wife pointed out that his track record in that area was not terrific. He has been married five times, although the fifth, to the former Patricia Whitehead, has now lasted 30 years. (Overall, the five Roosevelt children had 19 marriages among them.)

Mysteries were a logical next choice. His father, Elliott Roosevelt remembers, read one almost nightly to get himself to sleep, and admired Dashiell Hammett. F.D.R. even wrote a mystery himself, his son says, for Liberty Magazine, which invited readers to contribute their own solutions. F.D.R. varied the mysteries with Westerns and read much of Zane Grey’s voluminous output.

Having opted to try his hand at mysteries, why Eleanor Roosevelt as his sleuth? Because, her son says, “She was the most perceptive person and had the most analytical mind of anyone I’ve ever known. She had all the attributes of a first-rate detective.”

He adds, with a grin, “There was nothing I did that she didn’t ferret out before I even had a chance to tell her the truth.”

The plots have come so easily that he is now three books ahead: two more will be published later in 1990 and a third in 1991. He already has begun writing a new series, with a different protagonist, but in the same time frame, he says.

He is also working with a Phoenix author, Dean Smith, who wrote a biography of the Goldwater family and hopes to do a biography of Elliott. Of the Roosevelt children, only James, now 81 and gravely ill in Southern California, and Elliott remain, although there are large numbers of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Elliott is still called on to defend his father’s memory from the enduring F.D.R.-haters. Only a few weeks ago, a Phoenix newspaper ran a piece reiterating the old charges that a weakened Roosevelt was out-bargained by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta. The son wrote a stinging retort, which at last reports had not been published. “Contrary to what was said about (F.D.R.’s) being weakened and his judgment impaired, he was extremely sharp at Yalta,” Elliott Roosevelt says. “He wasn’t subject to being browbeaten.”

F.D.R. had been hard hit by the death of his close friend and military adviser Maj.-Gen. Edwin (Pa) Watson. He had lost his political confidant from Albany days Louis Howe in 1937 and Missy LeHand in 1941.

It also was true, he admits, that F.D.R. aged rapidly after the 1944 campaign. He had caught a bad case of bronchitis while campaigning in New York in an open car in freezing weather; the bronchitis became a siege. The President was rarely seen in public in a wheelchair, but, addressing Congress after Yalta, he chose to sit rather than stand.

“He himself always believed he would live to see the end of the war and accomplish the things he wanted to do after finishing his presidency,” including writing of his own, probably in the field of American naval history, about which F.D.R. was a well-informed student, his son says.

The son does his work in the morning. “My mind works better in the early hours,” he says. He dictates into a tape recorder, deciding on characters first (real and fictional), then working back from the solution, dividing the story into chapters and figuring, he says, how many red herrings to drag across the trail. “If you’re not careful,” he says, “you can get too enthusiastic about red herrings. You have to be sure you don’t overload it.”

There are some tricky problems in the series; not the least of them is getting his mother involved with the crimes, the settings and the police without straining credibility.

The mysteries, he thinks, are a good way to get people interested in history, who, essentially, aren’t interested in history at all. “They don’t want to read a history book but this is a good way to tell stories and catch their attention.”

Being the son of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt was a blessing as mixed as blessings get, not unlike being a film star, Elliott Roosevelt ruefully admits, adding that it took him a while to realize that the flattery was often deceptive and sometimes expensive. “People would talk about your skills, your knowledge, your abilities, but they were just hoping to use you as an entering wedge.”

At one point, he was under investigation by a congressional committee in complex matters involving stolen securities and an attempted assassination of a governor of the Bahamas. In the end, he was exonerated, but that fact, he says fatalistically, “made one paragraph on the obituary pages.” The selective attention was another aspect of being a Roosevelt.

Roosevelt has done many things in his life, including being, in his 20s, a rodeo contestant, an outgrowth of childhood summers on a dude ranch in Wyoming. He competed under the alias “Robertson” after he was identified “as the nephew of another great Westerner, Theodore Roosevelt.” Later, he owned a cattle ranch in Colorado, and still later, lost his shirt in a uranium enterprise.

His mysteries have not yet enjoyed a blockbuster break-through, although one made a brief appearance on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list; “Murder in the Oval Office” went through several printings. All the earlier books are in print in Avon paperbacks.