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Zusatztext Burke Wilkinson The Washington Times The best page-turner of the season. Informationen zum Autor Peter Collier is the author, along with David Horowitz, of The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, The Kennedys: An American Dream, The Fords: An American Epic, and Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties. He also wrote Downriver: A Novel and The Fondas: A Hollywood Dynasty. He lives in Nevada City, California. Klappentext In the first joint portrait of the Oyster Bay and Hyde Park Roosevelts, Collier and Horowitz explore in compelling, often startling detail the familial rivalries that influenced the private and public lives of presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, their wives and children, and the political life of our nation. Photos. Chapter 1 A remarkable photograph in the Theodore Roosevelt collection at Harvard´s Houghton Library shows Abraham Lincoln´s funeral procession passing through New York on the way to the train that would complete the long journey home to Illinois. The shot, taken as the procession moved through the Union Square area, captures both the formal solemnity of the occasion and the life of the street. The caisson carrying the coffin has not yet come into view, but an honor guard of infantry in blocky formation follows a straggling line of riders up ahead. People dressed in black line both sides of the street four or five deep. A few of the spectators, hoping to secure a better vantage, have climbed up onto ledges beneath the recessed windows of a commercial building. There were probably other shots of this scene taken at about the same moment. But in this one the anonymous photographer also captured an arresting accidental detail: two tiny heads poking out of the second-story window of an elegant brownstone. They are six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt and his younger brother, Elliott, four, looking down at the scene below. Their faces are framed by the shutters of the window in a way that suggests a depth of field, thus inviting the eye to enter the dark room behind them, the private world of the Roosevelts. The brownstone belonged to the boys´ grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, a great-grandson of Johannes, one of the two founding brothers of the Roosevelt clan, and at the time of Lincoln´s death the most prominent member of the family. He was a short man with reddish hair and a large head. (One acquaintance had said of him, "His appearance suggested to me a Hindoo idol roughly carved in red porphyry.") His eyes magnified by thick spectacles, C.V.S., as he was known, was a man of few words whose face wore the stern and inquiring look of a bookkeeper with power. The look was one that had settled on him as a result of a life devoted to the art of the bottom line, but it was probably also congenital. The one moment of frivolity anyone recalled from his childhood occurred one Sunday in his youth when C.V.S. was going home after attending his second church service of the day. He came upon a party of pigs, which ran free in the streets of New York in those days, and on a whim he mounted a huge boar that promptly turned and bolted, carrying him back at full tilt directly into the outraged members of the congregation gathered outside the Dutch Reformed Church he had just left. Those who did not move quickly were bowled over. Afterward, C.V.S. moved steadily through life establishing a record as a conservative man, thrifty and enterprising. As far as anyone knew, his only other unusual act was becoming the first Roosevelt of his line to marry a non-Dutch woman, a Quaker named Margaret Barnhill. When they were first engaged, he wrote her, "Economy is my doctrine at all times, at all events till I become, if it is to be so, a man of fortune." It was couched as a caveat emptor, but it became a prophecy, the underlined words indicating the emphatic nature of the wish. C.V.S. took the family ...
