Hyde Park on Hudson trivializes FDR

After writing a series of movie critics for the movie Lincoln, I may be busy again defending FDR as Hyde Park on Hudson is coming to the theater to us and may be to you, too.

The movie was based on the diaries of Margaret (Daisy) Suckley who was the 6^th cousin, once removed of FDR.  She was actually closer (4^th cousin) to Eleanor Roosevelt.  The diaries, along with 38 hand written letters FDR wrote her, were discovered in a suitcase under her bed when she died at aged of 100 in 1991.

Based on Geoffrey Ward’s “Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley” or FDR biography written after 1991, Suckley was indeed a very close and intimate friend, a confidante of FDR.  The movie has an R rating, leading me to suspect that it may add color and action to increase the box office sale.

It is difficult to define the relationship between FDR and Margaret Suckley, but it is certainly not an affair in the conventional sense.  FDR did have one affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd around 1916-1918 when he was the assistant secretary of Navy.  But, this is apparently not the focus of the movie.

Both Lucy and Margaret were with FDR the moment when he died of cerebral hemorrhage (4/12/1945).  Lucy had to leave in a hurry before Eleanor (Mrs. Roosevelt) came and yet Margaret stayed to comfort Eleanor and gave her a report.

I am often critical of the extramarital affair of a powerful politician, I even wrote a letter to the editor in John Edwards’ case.  This is not the issue of the sanctity of marriage, but an immoral and powerful politician is a dangerous thing.

Let me paraphrase Leo Tolstoy's opening line in his Anna Karenina that all happy marriages are alike; each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way.  I am only critical when the cheating heart is also immoral.

FDR is a giant in history; a visionary man with great foresight.  The movie doesn’t touch the greatest courtship of last century—the ‘love affair’ between FDR and Churchill—that saved the democracy and civilization from evil Nazi. 

I’ll write a series of posts to detail the relationship between FDR and Margaret Suckley and that of FDR and Lucy Rutherfurd.  To read a man one has to know him intimately by knowing his soul and heart.