The President, the cousin he was having an affair with, the cousin he was married to, and her girlfriend

Michael Rogin

• Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles by Irwin Gellman
  Johns Hopkins, 499 pp, $29.95, April 1995, ISBN 0 8018 5083 5
• Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley edited by Geoffrey Ward
  Houghton Mifflin, 444 pp, $24.95, April 1995, ISBN 0 395 66080 7
• No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War Two by Doris Kearns Goodwin
  Simon and Schuster, 759 pp, £18.00, June 1995, ISBN 0 671 64240 5
• The End of Reform by Alan Brinkley
  Knopf, 371 pp, $27.50, March 1995, ISBN 0 394 53573 1

On a drive through the family estate in 1935, the married President, Franklin Roosevelt, starts up a romance with his cousin. The two imagine moving after he leaves office into a cottage he is planning to build on what they affectionately call ‘Our Hill’. The President’s secretary, who lives at the White House (and has lived with the President since he was Governor of New York), thinks her boss will be moving into the cottage with her. The President’s wife, another cousin, stays in her own fieldstone cottage on the estate when she is there without her husband. At his Inauguration she wore the ring given to her by the woman with whom she is in love, the woman she will later install in a White House bedroom across from her own. The First Lady’s passionate attachment to her woman friend has cooled, however, supplanted by her feelings for a radical student leader young enough to be her son. When the President’s wife meets her young man at a Chicago hotel during his furlough from the Army, the Counter-Intelligence Corps bugs their adjoining rooms; video technology would have provided pictures of her stroking his forehead while he slept.