President's Grandson: Growing Up In The White House

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MICHEL MARTIN, host:

I'm Michel Martin, and you're listening to Tell Me More from NPR News. As President-elect Obama prepares to make that big move to a certain residence on Pennsylvania Avenue, much attention is already being paid to his daughters, ten-year-old Malia and seven-year-old Sasha. They will be the youngest residents of the White House since Amy Carter, who moved to the White House when she was nine. They'll have everything available to them, from a private pool to pastry chefs, but the perks also come with a tabloid-level public scrutiny that often follows the president's children.

Curtis Roosevelt knows a thing or two about that. He is a grandson of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and lived or spent extended time at the White House during the whole of that administration. He talks about that experience in his new memoir, "Too Close to the Sun," and he's kind enough to join us in Washington now. Mr. Roosevelt, thank you much for speaking with us.

Mr. CURTIS ROOSEVELT: Well, I'm happy to be here.

MARTIN: You actually moved into the White House just after the inauguration when you were three. Why did you and your sister move there?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: My mother was separated from my father, and in fact, we had been living in the family house in 65th Street in New York City. She, I think - although you'll never find this for the record - I think she wanted to move to the White House too. I didn't know what it was all about. As far as I was concerned, it was some big house that was painted white and quite surprised to see it, indeed, it was painted white. Anyway, when my sister and I moved in, my mother rather coyly said, well, we needed a roof over our heads.

MARTIN: You paint a very vivid description of the life there - the rooms, the staff. Did you remember it all that keenly or did you need some help to refresh your memory?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: Well, there's no way to refresh my memory. I remember them. I'll tell you why. The staff was totally different. Nobody talks today about the fact that it was an all - as it was then said - all-Negro staff, at their request. Nobody talks about that. Furthermore, as far as the rooms are concerned, many of them on the first floor are the same. But the White House has been quite renovated since I lived there.

The White House I described is the White House of the 1930s. When you got to World War II, because of it being a war, there were no changes. Do you remember my description of the old, creepy elevator coming up? It should have been replaced quite a long while back but my grandmother couldn't and wouldn't until the end of the war.

MARTIN: People these days talk about helicopter parents and the over-scheduled child and so forth, but you describe a very - how can I put this - regimented existence as a child there, just about every minute of your day accounted for. Was this a function of what was just supposed to be in children's best interest at the time or was there something about being at the White House that dictated that?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: Life was very, very different. The reason my sister and I were scheduled was yes, keeping us busy. But we had a nurse, and we would have had not quite as precise a schedule up at Hyde Park in the family diggs(ph), the family house. It was just the routine that your nurse took charge. You had more or less given time with your parents, and in our case, with our grandparents.

MARTIN: It seems rather - if you don't mind my saying - lonely.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: Having never experienced anything else, I had no way to know whether I was lonely or whether I wasn't lonely.

MARTIN: There was this one picture of the birthday party. It was almost as if children were assigned as friends. Does that sound right?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: Well, I never knew the kids who came to my birthday party because I never saw them between one occasion for a party or not. And it was such an occasion that the guests at my birthday party were recorded in the New York Times the next day. So that really is absurd. No, I think probably the Obama children will have a slightly different scene. They will be in school. I saw a picture of the Obama children, in fact, having their first day in their new classes, and I just hope it works out. Security today is overwhelming. Security in my day in the White House was fairly strict. The Lindbergh child had been killed, kidnapped, killed.

MARTIN: This is, for those who don't know and some may not, that the son of Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator, was kidnapped for ransom, yes?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: Yes.

MARTIN: And was killed by his kidnappers. It was a terrible national tragedy.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: So needless to say, we were - our families and the Secret Service more than a little disturbed by this. Still, it was a fairly loose rein compared to what I'm sure the Obama children will face.

MARTIN: What effect do you think it had on you? You write about this in the book, the effect you think it had on you to grow up under that kind of scrutiny. And of course, there were a lot of things at work here. Some of it was just the outsized personalities of both of your grandparents. But what effect do you think it had to grow up the way you did?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: It had a very substantial effect upon me. You would look at me and see, oh, it's really beating him down, and you would look at my uncles and observe, well, they've obviously lived it up and enjoyed it. I finally fought my way out from being too close to the sun. They never did.

It was a real burden. I would walk in. When I came back to New York City as a young adult seeking work and so forth, people would greet me with, hello, Buzzy(ph). I mean, you know, that's who I was. I wasn't another personality. I was just that. I would hope the Obama children are just a little bit older to have acquired a personality of their own. And I would think the kind of parenting that one can observe in the few minutes you see them on television with Michelle and Barack Obama, they have it.

MARTIN: But is the issue that you think the constant attention, the sense that you're special, that everything you do is marked and commented on, was that the difficult piece? Or was is it also the fact that as you describe in the book, your mother, your grandmother, your father - your grandfather, of course, President Roosevelt, seems like quite a lively and warm character, but it does sound, though, as you describe your mother and grandmother in the book, there was a certain lack of intimacy. They were never able to really connect. They obviously cared for you but they were never able to really connect. And so I guess what I'm asking you is what do you think the critical factor was in making you feel that you were such an object? Was it growing up under such scrutiny or was it something about the personalities of the people?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: It was both. The scrutiny was complicated by the fact that both mother and grandmother and joined by my sister would say, we don't like to have our picture taken. We don't court the press. And yet you look at those pictures, say, for example, the one that my sister and I on the either side of my father walking into a hotel lobby and obviously facing a battery of photographers. Well, there is my sister toeing the party line, looking demurely down, and there is me, up, smiling brightly. And I got hell for that.

In fact, one of the things that my sister could throw at me was you like your picture taken. Well, you're talking to a small kid, small boy, who was up for it. You know, that's as simple as I can put it. And then the major factor that you point to - but you know, which would not be just me. All of my uncles complained about this, that their mother, who would be my mother's mother, as well...

MARTIN: Eleanor Roosevelt.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: Eleanor Roosevelt, didn't quite have that capacity to give of herself. And one of the odd things is, of course, the image we have of Eleanor Roosevelt is somebody who gave of herself across the country. The family - that is, my uncles, mother - would actually talk about this in sly tones, sort of (unintelligible). You know, she gives of herself to the world - and then the eyebrows would be raised - you know, not to us was implicit. And I suppose if you look at my grandmother's background, she didn't have any intimate love either. So how do you give intimate love if you've never experienced it? That would be the pretty standard response. I think there's an element of truth in there.

MARTIN: She wasn't a huggy, kissy grandma?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: We always hugged and kissed, but it was a formality. There wasn't any feel in it, connection in it. It's like being plugged in without the connection.

MARTIN: If you're just joining us, you're listening to Tell Me More from NPR News. Our guest is Curtis Roosevelt. He's a grandson of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He's the author of "Too Close the Sun." It's his new memoir about growing up in and around the White House during the Roosevelt administration.

You describe in the book the ways in which - this sort of dichotomy in your existence. On the one hand, your grandparents, Eleanor Roosevelt in particular, took pains to be sure that you were aware of what was going on outside of the White House gates. On the other hand, you had this very different existence inside. Could you talk a little bit about that? And how did you feel about her kind of - I don't know if it's OK to use the word dragging you around to see what was happening in the rest of the city.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: Well, she didn't need to drag me around. I was very keen to go out and see. Sure, I learned that those shantytowns had a nickname, Hoovervilles(ph), which was very unfair. However, I liked to see her working. She taught me how to be an observer, and from a very early age, I was able to absorb a great deal of what she was saying. You don't always understand intellectually as a kid, but if you want to you can absorb the reality of what you're looking at.

And I listened to individual people as they would talk to my grandmother about their problems, including really heart-wrenching stories of well, until I got a job last week, we didn't have anything to eat, and I used to listen to my children crying at night from hunger. Well, we haven't quite reached that stage, at least broadly so, but I see no sense in this country of real grasp of just how serious the economic situation is. That's going to be a very real problem for Obama.

He, in contrast to FDR, where everybody was just waiting for him to do something - yes, certain groups - the more aware groups - are waiting. But I don't sense a general feeling of awareness and joining the rest of the American people in getting on with the problem.

MARTIN: Many people are drawing parallels between the circumstances confronting Barack Obama as president and those confronting FDR. Just one more question on the family side of it, though. What was the best thing about growing up in the White House and what was the worst?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: Well, the best thing was that there was always something going on. You never had to go out and have fun. All the fun was right there. I was easily excited. Buzzy is getting overexcited, is something my sister would say. Well, I wasn't modest. Well, I had to be. Anybody from the outside would have said, you know, he's very modest, but actually I was hiding somebody who would have liked far more recognition. I just don't know what was the best scene. I think - what was the worst scene? I don't know really. I dreaded disapproval, so I toeed the line, and the line I've already described was one of, I would say, excessive and quite unreal modesty.

MARTIN: People are making the comparison between the circumstances faced by FDR and those faced by President-elect Obama, given the fact that the country's fighting two wars, the fact that we are currently in an economic downturn, the economic circumstances are very challenging. Do you buy that analogy?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: Well, yes. Not necessarily the two wars, which I would - being around in World War II and knowing what that was about, I wouldn't call either of them a war. But anyway, that's a...

MARTIN: You're speaking about the scope of the fighting.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: The scope of it.

MARTIN: The fact that there was something like 20 million people killed during World War II, yes.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: It was a world war. OK. As also we knew who our enemies were and why we were fighting. Ask the average American why we are in Iraq and you'll get a lot of mumble. But the Depression - when we moved into the White House, it was the Great Depression. And as you see, the more intelligent of the economists are saying, it wasn't quite the same. But I would say in many ways it was the same.

It is a predominant issue. I suspect it was a predominant issue in Obama's winning against Senator McCain. I think this is going to be his major concern, as I think it should be. People are hurting.

And if I may draw a difference. That was Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt's focus: where people are hurting, where people are in need. Only very recently have we heard real noises from this administration about perhaps altering the mortgages, ease the payment where people are hurting. Well, we should have been doing this six months ago. What was our major thrust? To alleviate the banks and the financial institutions. And that's where we pumped in the money, and of course, I just read very recently where...

MARTIN: I just want to point out that that sound was you're flipping over a newspaper, and you don't seem very happy about what you're reading in it.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: I don't because what I see is this big insurance company says that it will issue $503 million in deferred compensation for its senior executives using the money given to them. You know, this is taxpayers' money, and there's no sense of joining in the problem. Whereas in FDR's time, Wall Street financial banking institutions were quite ready to give FDR dictatorial power. It was that bad. Now nobody is mentioning that, as far as Obama is concerned.

MARTIN: You've been very generous with your time, and I appreciate your taking the time to visit with us. But I did want to ask, if you don't mind my asking, you live overseas now.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: I do.

MARTIN: Most of the time you live in Provence.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: It's close to Provence, yes.

MARTIN: Why do you live overseas? I guess I was wondering whether part of it was so that living overseas is the only place you get to be Curtis as opposed to Curtis Roosevelt.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: I don't think so, although you may have a point. I just hadn't thought about it very much. I don't know. After all, it was only when I - oh, say, 15 or 18 years ago that I really felt I had established an identity of my own. And by that time, indeed, I was living in Spain.

MARTIN: Do you have any advice for the Obama's as they begin this phase of their lives, bringing their children to the White House and raising them in this hot-house environment where, as you described, the media environment is so intense, the security environment is so intense? Do you have any words of wisdom for them to help them raise those girls in such a way that they can have as normal a life as possible?

Mr. ROOSEVELT: I would have no advice for them, quite frankly. I just would note, if we were conversing about such a thing, is that it is inevitably going to mark the children as it is inevitably going to mark them as president and first lady. So they've got to face the fact that they are in a goldfish bowl, whether they like it or not. And I don't care how mature they are, what a cohesive family they are, they are going to be affected, and it's best to recognize that.

They have got to find - and this is a little bit of theoretical - they've got to find a balance between giving those kids a chance to show off just a little bit with the public, which would be quite natural, but at the same time understand that it's in their best interest to maintain their own identities, and this can be done only by maintaining a certain amount of privacy in the White House.

MARTIN: Curtis Roosevelt is the oldest grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. He's the author of the new book, "Too Close to the Sun," which is available now in most major bookstores. He was kind enough to join us in our Washington studio on a visit to the United States. Mr. Roosevelt, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Mr. ROOSEVELT: Thank you very much.

MARTIN: And that's our program for today. I'm Michel Martin, and this is Tell Me More from NPR News. Let's talk more tomorrow.

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