An Ever-Changing Partnership : A joint portrait of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt follows the couple through public and private crises : NO ORDINARY TIME; Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, <i> By Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster: $30; 636 pp.)</i>

“No Ordinary Time” is no ordinary book. Filled with new and exciting material, it is the first joint portrait of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during the war years. Since it is still possible, even routine, to read about F.D.R.’s presidency as if Eleanor had nothing to do with the best of Franklin’s decisions, it is welcome and refreshing to find their political partnership at the center of discussion.

I have long suspected that F.D.R.’s most earnest biographers avoided the war years because those years revealed a leader they preferred not to study: one who refused to confront many issues that have come to define the 20th Century, from race relations and Hitler’s atrocities to the dominance of what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. Goodwin’s decision to present E.R.’s moral activism, to explore the tensions it aroused and to follow the ever-changing Roosevelt partnership through significant public and private crises, transcends that problem. And she tells a compelling story.

There is something here for virtually everyone interested in public lives, history and the making of a political marriage. There is new material about F.D.R.’s friendships with the women in his life: Lucy Mercer Rutherford (the woman who almost broke up the Roosevelt marriage in 1918), Marguerite (Missy) LeHand (his secretary and companion for over 20 years) and Princess Martha of Norway. There are vivid details about America’s mobilization for war: steel ingots, ship tonnage, even the decision not to ration girdles despite the rubber shortage (at first the government proposed exercise as an alternative, but women were then wedded to girdles). Above all, there were those fabulous rubber and aluminum drives.

F.D.R. understood, Goodwin tells us, that once Americans were aroused, the war would be won on the home front. He also knew how to reassure the country with his warm, calm, reassuring demeanor. Goodwin shows how F.D.R. inspired trust, confidence and hope throughout the Depression and war.

But as united as Americans were during World War II, there was no agreement about the nature of American democracy, or the purpose for which the arsenal of democracy was forged. Today, at century’s end, the old divisions continue to haunt us. Virtually every disagreement between Eleanor and Franklin remains a vital and controversial aspect of our political life.

Goodwin’s vigorously researched journey through World War II, its aftermath and antecedents, raises provocative questions: Since F.D.R. guided a faltering domestic economy into a mighty militarized economy to meet the challenges of World War II, where does that leave us today? Trapped by the ongoing racial and ethnic hatreds that forged the world’s most violent century, what have we learned from the past? How do we write about women and men as partners in the family drama?

Filled with vivid vignettes and randy stories, Goodwin’s book addresses these issues in terms of F.D.R. the political genius and E.R. his goad and political conscience. Although one senses that Goodwin actually agrees with E.R. on many issues--including her opposition to big business’s domination of the mobilization and her opposition to racial discrimination--too often she presents Eleanor as merely a pestering thorn in the side of a brilliant politician.

When it comes to E.R., Goodwin has reified the Victorian scold: unattractive, unhappy, insecure. No wonder F.D.R. turned to other women: He was married to Eleanor. All the traditional myths so easily fortified: Marital troubles are the woman’s fault. As for Franklin’s infidelities: “The hidden springs of Eleanor’s insecurity had disrupted her marriage from the very beginning.”

It is as if the last decades of scholarship by and about women, from Virginia Woolf to Carolyn Heilbrun, have taught us nothing about writing a woman’s life.

However moody and intense, E.R. was neither lonely nor unhappy. But the folks with whom she related and felt secure are given short shrift here. Her women allies and personal friends, when referred to at all, are demeaned: Sara Delano Roosevelt allegedly considering them “unkempt, unconventional, unnatural.” Earl Miller, Eleanor’s great friend, is not even granted a walk-on here although he spent most of the war years as a naval commander posted in Brooklyn and bivouacked in E.R.’s New York City apartment.

The lively narrative leads the reader from subject to subject, confirming again: Eleanor would not leave Franklin alone. When least wanted, there she was, looking sour, with some problem to be fixed. When E.R. was insistent in her opposition to big business’s domination of the burgeoning military-industrial complex, Goodwin observes: “Eleanor was constitutionally incapable of leaving the President alone.”

It was not as if Eleanor worried about slipcovers, or cigarette burns ruining the rugs. She intruded with important realities: Jewish lives lost to Nazis; African American lives lost to lynchers; Japanese American citizens rounded up and sent to camps; migrant workers, all the neglected folk still unattended by the promise of the New Deal; housing, health care, education for all. Goodwin acknowledges E.R.’s contributions, and explains F.D.R.’s inactivity: “The President was far more cautious than his wife. While Eleanor thought in terms of what should be done, Franklin thought in terms of what could be done.”

But if we accept Goodwin’s account, and agree that F.D.R. was a great leader, how do we understand his inaction when it came to U.S. race relations and European refugees? Is American leadership enslaved by public opinion polls? Reflecting upon F.D.R.’s decision to run for a third term, Goodwin quotes a group of liberal journalists who noted: “The President could have had anything on God’s earth he wanted if he had the guts to ask for it in the open. . . . The people trust him and the people want to follow him: nobody, no matter how whole-souled, can follow a man who will not lead, who will not stand up and be counted, who will not say openly what we all know he thinks privately.”

Does that mandate of political leadership not translate to the most crying issues of state? Why, after all, did F.D.R. refuse to reach out and actually find sanctuary for Europe’s refugees? What, for example, are we to understand from Goodwin’s report of E.R.’s opposition to Breckenridge Long, the well-known Jew-hater who insisted that refugees could not be admitted because every ship “was honeycombed with spies”?

“Long had come to the unshakable conviction,” Goodwin writes, “that the admission of refugees would endanger national security, since the Germans were using visitor visas to send spies and foreign agents abroad. Every single one of the now defeated countries, according to Long, had been honeycombed with spies and fifth-column activities. There was some truth to his claims.”

Can Goodwin really mean that? She makes it even worse by her assertion that F.D.R. worked “behind the scenes to let more people in.” Alas, all the evidence we have contradicts that notion. The fact is that F.D.R. kept promoting Breckenridge Long, who had one agenda: Keep the Jews out. On Sept. 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland, F.D.R. named Long assistant secretary of state for emergency war matters. On Jan. 23, 1940, F.D.R. promoted Long again: He now supervised 23 of 42 divisions of the State Department, including the visa section, legal division, and foreign service personnel board.

Naturally, E.R. protested. Goodwin acknowledges the tragedy: “Eleanor’s failure to force her husband to admit more refugees remained, her son Jimmy later said, ‘her deepest regret at the end of her life.’ ” But this was not “Eleanor’s failure.” It was F.D.R.’s failure. And so the war between the Roosevelts intensified. Every time E.R. brought up a moral issue, F.D.R. became impatient, irritated. She was “tenacious.” But F.D.R. increasingly ignored her.

In Goodwin’s familial drama, E.R. became evermore the ethical goad. Although Goodwin illuminates many gripping moments along the painful path toward civil rights, one wants more context. After all, E.R. was the first person close to power who made the connection: segregation and white supremacy here, fascism there. And she was an activist who embraced an already established biracial political movement very much underway during the ‘40s.

The fact is that E.R. as well as F.D.R. understood that politics is not an isolated individualist adventure. She worked with a different constituency. He worked with the Dixiecrats in power. She worked with radicals committed to ending that power. The 1940s civil rights movement was not limited to E.R. and the African American leaders she admired such as Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White: It included those much maligned (and here omitted) white progressives who challenged the poll tax, segregation, white supremacy. They forged the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, and helped in fact create the New South: Lillian Smith, Virginia Foster Durr, Joseph Gelders, Lucy Randolph Mason, James Anderson Dombrowski, among many others.

Given the ongoing bitterness of America’s quest for racial justice, one craves additional signposts from the author as we walk through these critical and enduring issues. After all, Goodwin is a Democrat, long identified with the best and the brightest. Not until the end of the book do we read that Goodwin considers E.R.’s commitment to justice, civil rights, dignity for all, not only influential, occasionally “decisive,” but also “affirming.”

At the end of these pages, we discover F.D.R.’s abiding admiration for his wife. Not only did he know he needed her to win the heart of the nation, he considered her “the most extraordinarily interesting woman” he knew. This fact, however, acknowledges an even more complex partnership than the one discussed here.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “No Ordinary Time,” see the Opinion section.