The Past Master : Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin believes an awareness of then helps us understand now. So she examines the lives of Presidents, mostly recently FDR--and his wife, Eleanor.

The First Lady’s not for burning. Or is she?

Several weeks ago, a group of tobacco farmers torched a straw dummy of Hillary Rodham Clinton at a rowdy demonstration in Kentucky. Angered by her campaign to crack down on smoking, they cheered as she went up in flames.

It was a satisfying moment for those who detest America’s First Lady. For others, it was a vulgar display. Either way, it was hardly without precedent.

Fifty years ago, America and the world were bitterly divided over the activities of Eleanor Roosevelt, perhaps the most famous First Lady to occupy the White House. While many equated her in stature with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, others could not abide her independent spirit.

“Mrs. Roosevelt is shooting her mouth off around the country,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for Adolf Hitler, in his diary. “If she were my wife, it would be a different story.”

Back home, enemies circulated a fake 1944 handbill in which the President told his wife: “You kiss the Negroes and I’ll kiss the Jews, and we’ll stay in the White House as long as we choose.”

It was a different world, but not without similarities to our own, and Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates it brilliantly in her new book, “No Ordinary Time” (Simon & Schuster). Blending provocative stories of the Roosevelt White House with a portrait of the U.S. home front during World War II, she serves up a bracing chronicle of public history and private lives.

“You can’t be unaware of the parallels between then and now, and that’s one of the key roles of history, to make our own times more understandable,” says Goodwin, flopped on a sofa in her rambling, two-story house near Boston.

“The wartime years were amazing . . . they were a time of tremendous growth and change for America. And I wanted to tell this story in a very human way.”

Almost like a soap opera, in fact. Forget the caricature of Eleanor Roosevelt as an awkward do-gooder, or the image of FDR as some latter-day saint. Goodwin breathes new life into these and other characters in a big, sprawling book that highlights the personal as much as the political.

Most notably, she challenges the myth that Franklin and Eleanor’s marriage deteriorated into a chilly partnership. To be sure, historians have shown that Eleanor Roosevelt’s extraordinary public career was triggered in part by her husband’s infidelity and the freedom of action it gave her. Yet despite their increasingly separate worlds, Goodwin insists, the First Couple still loved each other.

“I wanted to show that more than anything,” says the author, whose previous works include “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys” (Simon & Schuster, 1987) and “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream” (Harper and Row, 1976). “Yes, Franklin had betrayed her with another woman. But up until the end, they were still reaching out for each other, trying somehow to reconnect.”

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Could there be a lesson here for Bill and Hillary? Goodwin, 54, declines the role of marriage counselor, but like many historians she finds lessons for the present in the past. And lately, there’s been no shortage of material.

Before President Clinton sank in a quagmire of partisan politics, Goodwin suggests, he might have taken a lesson from FDR’s playbook and pushed for major changes such as health-care reform early in his first term--when he had the wind at his back--rather than on the eve of midterm elections.

The media also have lessons to learn. At a time when the world’s most powerful man talks about his underwear on MTV, Goodwin yearns for the less judgmental press of Roosevelt’s day. Back then, reporters gave a President room to breathe on vacations and avoided questions about personal hanky-panky.

“Obviously times have changed, and that innocence won’t return,” says Goodwin, who has become one of America’s most prominent presidential experts. “But you have to admire a man who led this country through the Depression and World War II. History has a way of reminding us of what we’ve lost.”

It’s a tough message to sell in a culture where Americans get more basic knowledge from “Jeopardy” than from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But along with a handful of other historians, Goodwin has made the leap from printed page to prime-time punditry, and she now reaches an electronic audience of millions.

Call her an intellectual with mass-media credentials, someone who offers viewers a rare brush with historical perspective. The numbers make it all worthwhile: It’s a safe bet, for example, that more folks will ponder “No Ordinary Time” when it’s featured on a PBS special about Roosevelt next month than will actually read the book.

Goodwin’s following may grow even more, since CBS purchased the rights to her latest work for a miniseries. Elsewhere, she’s featured in Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on baseball, airing this week and next. She’s also a historian-in-residence for breaking news. Hours after Jackie Kennedy died, the historian appeared on ABC-TV’s “Nightline,” memorializing a First Lady whom so few really knew.

“It’s great, all this television work, because once you’ve done it, it’s over,” says Goodwin, a small, frail-looking woman who nonetheless bursts with energy and speaks rapidly. “But basically I see myself as a writer.”

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Weighing in at a hefty 609 pages, “No Ordinary Time” reads like a novel and presents split-screen history, blending the simultaneity of great events with the minutia of everyday life. In one moment, the Germans are flattening Europe. Meanwhile, back in Washington, FDR can’t get a decent meal. He’s forever battling a cook who insists on serving him food that he hates.

On a night when the Roosevelts enjoy a quiet winter dinner, London is brought to its knees by the worst aerial bombing of the war. While thousands of Russians die in Leningrad, Americans protest higher coffee prices.

“Nobody is equating these things,” Goodwin says, “but life is filled with great, serious moments and silly moments. It just happens that way.”

Drawing heavily on White House ushers’ diaries, fresh interviews and other sources, the author explores an Administration where key players shared adjoining bedrooms. You need a score card to follow the action, and it’s no accident that “No Ordinary Time” opens with a floor plan showing who slept where during the war years.

There are unforgettable moments: When Winston Churchill arrives for a visit, he instructs a butler to bring him French wine in the morning, Scotch in the afternoon and brandy at night. He wants no whistling in the halls, takes afternoon naps and exhausts Roosevelt with all-night discussions.

Some might argue that the book has too many factoids, but many of them are irresistible. When the White House urges Americans to donate rubber for the war effort, for example, Mrs. Meta Kirkland of Santa Ana chops up her girdle and sends it to Roosevelt, writing: “I hope I may claim the privilege of being the first to donate personal wearing apparel for the good cause.”

Back in the White House, “No Ordinary Time” draws vivid, evenhanded portraits of the women in Roosevelt’s life. Eleanor emerges as an engaging, flesh-and-blood champion for blacks and the poor, decades ahead of her time. Although she fails to move her husband on key issues--such as the need to rescue European Jews from Hitler--her ability to prick FDR’s conscience and roil the political waters is generously detailed. Goodwin presents a gifted, complex woman who has the President’s ear but also enjoys a rich life of her own.

Besides Eleanor, the cast includes Missy LeHand, the President’s longtime secretary; his daughter, Anna; Crown Princess Martha of Norway, an FDR confidante, and Lucy Mercer, the woman with whom the President once had a passionate affair, nearly wrecking his marriage to Eleanor in 1918.

Did the First Lady have affairs of her own, especially with Lorena Hickok, an Associated Press journalist? The question arose in a recent biography, but Goodwin suggests that “there is no way we can answer with certainty. The far more absorbing question, and the one that can be answered, is what role the precious friendship played in each of their lives at that particular juncture.”

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Buoyed by positive early reviews, Simon & Schuster has taken out newspaper ads filled with praise for “No Ordinary Time” from historians such as James MacGregor Burns, Stephen E. Ambrose, Nicholas Lemann, David McCullough, Ronald Steel, Alan Brinkley, Stanley Hoffman and Justin Kaplan.

“You find yourself caught up in these wonderful personal stories,” says Walter Isaacson, who wrote “Kissinger.” Yet Goodwin’s book reaches an even higher level, he adds, “because it connects everything to the world stage.”

It’s a formula that worked well in her previous books, but on occasion the author has been skewered with the same personal scrutiny she’s used to dissect historical figures. When Goodwin wrote her book about Lyndon Johnson, for example, much was made of her unusual access to the former President.

There was gossip that the two were romantically linked--a charge Goodwin emphatically denied--and highbrow speculation that her role as a former White House political aide had compromised her integrity as an historian.

Those charges escalated when Goodwin wrote her next book about the Kennedys, aided in part by unprecedented access to family documents. How could she write dispassionately about the Kennedys, some critics said, when her husband, former JFK aide Richard Goodwin, remained so close to them?

Goodwin answers that the book contained unflattering revelations and says her intent was not to praise or condemn the family. It was only to record the truth as best she could, and let readers decide for themselves.

In her case, the work of history began early. As a girl growing up in Long Island, N.Y., Goodwin listened to the radio and kept track of Brooklyn Dodgers games. She gave her father the box score when he came home from work at night.

“I never made the connection in my mind until now that this is where history probably started for me,” she says. “I was only 7 and I thought that without me, my father would never have known what happened.”

A bright student, Goodwin became a White House fellow at 24. In a heralded news story, she danced with President Johnson at a 1967 state dinner during the very week the New Republic ran an article she’d written entitled: “How to Dump LBJ in ’68.” It was the beginning of a long, complex relationship between the two, culminating in her biography of him in 1976.

By then, Kearns had received a doctorate in government from Harvard University and become a professor of political science. She married Goodwin and the couple now live in a Boston suburb with their two sons. Looking back, she says each of her three books has had a personal impact on her life.

With Johnson, Goodwin explains, “I witnessed his demise, and he was very lonely at the end of his life. He had no real family foundation, and I decided that I would never want to go into public life without a family behind me.”

Turning to the Kennedys, the author says she was struck by the intricate family rituals that Joseph and Rose Kennedy used to keep their brood together. Goodwin tried to emulate Rose’s habit of writing lengthy letters about public affairs to her sons at summer camp--but with disastrous results.

“I wrote them about Oliver North and the Iran-Contra hearings and they died,” she says with a laugh. “They said, ‘What about our dog, Mugsy? What movies have you seen? What is this stuff?’ ”

As her sons got ready to leave for college, Goodwin grew depressed about life in an empty nest. Then Eleanor Roosevelt rode to the rescue.

“Her example gave me hope, thinking that somehow there would be a chance to re-invent my life again,” she explains. “Eleanor was constantly able to do that in her life . . . and she helped me through that whole period.

“You come to realize that life is just one transition after another. As a historian, I think, that’s one of the most basic lessons you learn.”