![]() ![]() ![]() Ken Burns, a great burnisher of the Roosevelt name, is one of the last hold-outs, feeling, apparently, that although Teddy’s maniacal escapades in Africa and FDR’s numerous love affairs only brighten their images, Eleanor Roosevelt’s long love affair was just. Within five years, most of those historians contacted Cook privately and apologized saying, Gee, I finally read the letters. But Blanche Wiesen Cook was pilloried by other historians in 1992 for examining the facts and the letters and concluding that Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok were not just good friends, not just in love, but lovers. These are not the kind of things that I have ever said to just-a-friend, no matter how close. Please keep most of my heart in Washington as long as I’m here, for most of mine is with you!” I went and kissed your photograph instead and tears were in my eyes. ![]() “My dear, if you meet me, may I forget there are other people present or must I behave?” and “I long to kiss the south-east corner of your lips. She quotes from the letters generously, concluding that the two women were lovers. I first read about the letters, written between 1932 and Eleanor Roosevelt’s death in 1962, in Blanche Wiesen Cook’s exceptional biography, Eleanor Roosevelt (Viking, 1992). There are 3,000 letters between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, then a prominent female journalist, in 18 large, heavy boxes in the archives of the FDR Library in Hyde Park. ![]()
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