LESS THAN A YEAR after graduating from Harvard, FDR married Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, his fifth cousin once removed, the orphaned daughter of his godfather, Elliott—a tall, striking young woman variously described by an adoring New York press as “beautiful,” “regal,” and “magnificent,” with “greater claim to good looks than any of the Roosevelts.”1 Franklin was an impressionable twenty-three. Eleanor was twenty: the same age her mother had been, yet still innocent of the birds and the bees. As she later informed her son James, the kiss she and Franklin exchanged at the close of the wedding
...more
