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F.D.R.’S Truculent Optimist : RIGHTEOUS PILGRIM The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952<i> By T.H. Watkins (Henry Holt: $35; 1,024 pp.; 0-8050-0917-5) </i>

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<i> Brownstein is a national political correspondent for The Times</i>

So many careers in American politics leave behind only words. But when Harold L. Ickes stepped out of public life almost 45 years ago--as belligerent as the day he bulled his way in--he could touch and feel and smell his legacy: the national parks he preserved and expanded as Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, the hospitals and city halls, the schools and bridges, the dams and highways that he built in small towns and large cities and across the hard empty spaces in between as the hand at the helm of the New Deal’s Public Works Administration. Though his name, like so many of the glittering New Deal names, has faded with time, few public officials have left such a lasting mark on America’s physical landscape.

But as T.H. Watkins demonstrates in “Righteous Pilgrim,” his elegant and exhaustive new biography of Ickes, nothing came easily to this stubborn and veiled man. As a child, he was forced to fill the place in his family left vacant by a distracted and irresponsible father; to support himself during high school and college, he was compelled to take on so many jobs that he barely had time to study. He did not marry his college sweetheart until he was in his late 30s--after she had divorced her first husband. By then, much of their own passion was extinguished.

For most of his life, political success proved as elusive as personal happiness. After a brief career as a journalist in turn-of-the-century Chicago, Ickes became a stalwart in local and national progressive politics, joining with Jane Addams, William Allen White and Hiram Johnson in epic struggles against the trusts, the slums and the reactionaries in his own Republican Party. But the reform mayoral candidates for whom he worked so hard almost always lost, and the Bull Moose presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt that he joined with such high hopes in 1912 ended in disappointment.

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During the 1920s, it appeared that Ickes’ time had already passed. He found himself increasingly isolated within a Republican Party that had reduced its mission to banal boosterism. As the progressives dispersed--some making peace with the GOP’s reigning powers, others retiring from the fight--Ickes “remained throughout the decade as solidly, unquestionably progressive in his instincts as he had been when he had first discovered them a quarter of a century before,” Watkins writes. “He refused to flex with the times.”

That rigidity provided his political salvation. Ickes never moved, but the times rolled back toward him, like a returning tide. As early as 1924, he predicted to Hiram Johnson that American politics was destined to realign along ideological grounds--with the Democrats emerging as the liberal party and Republicans the conservative. It took eight more years for the Democrats to reach Ickes, but when Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated for President in 1932, Ickes abandoned dreary Herbert Hoover to lead the Western Independent Republican Committee for Roosevelt.

With Roosevelt’s victory, Ickes’ luck finally changed. He decided to seek appointment as commissioner of Indian Affairs--largely to placate his wife, who had become passionately concerned with the plight of the Indians during trips to New Mexico. But gradually Ickes raised his sights--first to assistant secretary of the Interior, and then to the top job itself--secretary of the Interior. Improbably enough, after Roosevelt’s first two choices had turned him down, the President-elect offered the job to Ickes. At age 58, Ickes finally found his stage.

Ickes remained in the Cabinet for the next 13 years--powerful, difficult, demanding and often intransigent. He gleefully accepted the description of curmudgeon and did his best to live up to it. A fierce partisan of the President, he had a gift for stiletto oratory and a taste for political combat; it was Ickes who tagged Roosevelt’s estimable 1940 Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, as “a simple barefoot Wall Street lawyer.” When Gifford Pinchot, his old ally in the progressive movement and the most respected name in forestry, opposed Ickes’ efforts to transfer the Forest Service from the Agriculture to the Interior Department, the secretary uncharitably and inaccurately said Pinchot had spoken because the Administration had not backed him for a Senate seat.

Yet it is the great strength of Watkins’ work that he shows the insecurity and loneliness behind that imposing facade. Using primary sources (such as the diary Ickes religiously maintained through most of his life) with great sensitivity, he provides an astonishingly intimate portrait of a public man--his pinched upbringing, unhappy marriage, unhappy affairs and the frequent depressions that he fought with demonic commitment to his causes.

“Work would save him,” Watkins writes. “Work would fill the emptiness that lay within, would hold off depression, would shore up self-esteem, would numb physical and psychological pain, would stifle insecurity and camouflage an emotional life so stunted and unfulfilled that it left him prey to his own worst instincts.”

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And it is the work by which we remember Ickes, if we remember him at all. Watkins describes him as one of the three Interior secretaries (along with Stewart Udall and Cecil Andrus) who truly appreciated wilderness for its own sake, and national park land more than doubled during Ickes’ first seven years in office. In an Administration that perpetually hesitated to extend the New Deal to blacks, he stood firmly for civil rights; when the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the great black singer Marian Anderson from appearing at Constitution Hall in 1939, Ickes instead opened the Lincoln Memorial for her performance--and delivered the introduction himself. At the PWA, Ickes supervised an agency that, incredibly, reached into virtually every county in the nation.

In some ways, Ickes might fit the mold of a George Bush Republican. Like the President, he was committed to public service as an ideal and a trust, not as a shortcut to greater riches in the private sector. But he had too much of an agenda to fit into the Bush Administration--too much drive, too much will, whatever the wallet.

Ickes’ career--like the New Deal itself--was founded, Watkins writes, on “a strain of optimism that was as old and as durable as the Republic itself, a conviction that men and women somehow could take hold of their government and shape it to great ends, great deeds. . . .” Above all, this book is a reminder of how much that optimism has corroded in the years since. The sheer ambition of Ickes’ public agenda underscores the muffled aspirations of our own era.

The book’s flaws are in its own ambitions. Watkins, editor of The Wilderness Society magazine Wilderness, is a wonderfully skillful writer. But in his effort to chronicle Ickes’ times as thoroughly as his life, he sometimes loses sight of his subject. Ickes periodically disappears for long stretches while Watkins discursively wanders through the political landscape of the Progressive and New Deal eras.

Some of these rambles--a concise history of the Interior Department, for example--are both relevant and entertaining, but a biography of an Interior secretary, even such a partisan one, hardly needs extended discussion of such familiar stories as Roosevelt’s campaign against Willkie and the maneuvering that led to Henry Wallace’s replacement as Vice President with Harry S. Truman in 1944.

Strangely, the book loses some steam once Ickes arrives on the national stage. Watkins provides a compelling portrait of Roosevelt as a canny and duplicitous figure. But much of the book’s final 500 pages concentrates on Ickes’ interminable bureaucratic battles with Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace and the legislative maneuvering that led to the creation of individual national parks. Though these stories all are well told, the paper war over control of the Forest Service lacks the sweaty immediacy of the hand-to-hand combat that characterized Ickes’ early years in municipal Chicago politics.

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Ickes left public life in 1946 as truculent as ever, resigning in a dispute with President Truman over the appointment of a politically influential California oilman as Navy secretary. Still angry years later, Truman wrote a friend (in a letter he never sent) that Ickes “was never for anyone else but Harold.”

Truman’s temper blinded him. As Watkins powerfully demonstrates in this rewarding and illuminating work, Ickes had no shortage of ego--but his real fuel was conviction, burning at an octane hardly ever seen in Washington any more.

Book Mark For an excerpt from “Rightous Pilgrim’, see the Opinion section, Page 4.

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