SOURCE: "The Inner FDR," in The Style's the Man: Reflections on Proust, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Vidal, and Others, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994, pp. 37-45.

In the following essay, Auchincloss speculates on Roosevelt's elusive inner character.

Along the walls of the main hall of the classroom building of Groton School were hung, in chronological order, the framed autographed letters of the presidents of the United States. Since Theodore Roosevelt, whose sons had attended the school, these letters had all been addressed to the headmaster. As a fourth-former in the winter of 1933, I eagerly awaited the hanging of the letter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Groton '00. Would he write that he had been inspired by this same collection in his student days to become in afterlife the great statesman that he had become? What a climax!

But when the letter arrived, it seemed, at least to a fifteen-year-old, rather an anticlimax. The...