Elliott Roosevelt - Historical Controversy

Historical Controversy

While all FDR’s sons attracted public controversy, James and Elliott were scandal-plagued throughout their lives. When (in 1946) Elliott Roosevelt published his defense of his father’s foreign policy, As He Saw It, he triggered a long-standing historiographical dispute over the truthfulness of his recollections of the wartime summits. Many historians were very dubious of the strident anti-British and pro-Soviet tone, and some (including the FBI) thought Elliott used a ghost writer, who “was a communist.” A young Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. opined that other memoirs would have to confirm Elliott’s accounts before they could be taken at face value. When Winston Churchill published his history of the war five years later, he pronounced Elliott’s stories “rubbish.” Still, the frequent absence of detailed minutes leads historians to rely considerably on As He Saw It, and even the official Foreign Relations of the United States (Foreign Relations Series) sometimes fills in the gaps with Elliott’s details.

The controversy was rekindled when Elliott’s trilogy about the FDR years came out in the 1970s, even though Elliott again used a professional writer and many of the anecdotes were clearly drawn from secondary references. The row was exacerbated by Elliott’s frank writings about his parents’ sex lives, although these accounts were also not news to historians.

Elliott Roosevelt’s wartime recollections became demonstrably more dramatic and heroic as the decades passed. Thus, shortly before his death he wrote in Remembering War (Keyssar, Posner, 1990) that he had been shot down three times, had been taken captive by the Germans and, after a week, escaped riding a burro; that a Russian pilot mistakenly shot him down, and that the Russian was promptly shot; and that he negotiated the shuttle-bombing project directly with Stalin in May 1944. None of this is supported by official records. However, some of these things did happen to pilots under his command.

Most famously, Elliott claimed that he nearly lost his life when flying through the fireball of the explosion that killed Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. in August 1944. Air Force records show that a Mosquito photographic airplane did indeed suffer this dramatic fate, but its crew was a pilot and a photographer under Roosevelt’s command, and Elliott’s participation is unmentioned in official accounts.

Elliott’s New York Times obituary claimed that he had been twice wounded, and his widow had written (I love a Roosevelt, 1965) that he had received four purple hearts (“for each of the four times he was wounded”). His discharge papers explicitly state that he was not wounded (although he had close calls in aircraft). Consequently, the Veterans Administration rejected his disability claims.

The question of Elliott’s veracity in his wartime conference memoirs belongs in context with the many other scandals and controversies he was involved in throughout his career. Congress investigated Elliott numerous times: for the attempted sale of bombers to the USSR (1934); for allegations of broadcast industry corruption (1937-45); for the Blaze affair (his dog’s travel on emergency war priority, 1945); for his promotion to general, demanded by his father (1945); for the Hartford loan scandal (1945); for his denunciation of U.S. foreign policy during a visit to the USSR (capped with a visit with Stalin) (1946); for the Hughes F-11 purchase (1947); and for involvement with organized crime and securities fraud in Miami and the Bahamas (1973). Of Elliott’s wide-ranging activities, many others attracted political or law enforcement interest, but charges were never referred to the Justice Department.