Indeed, Cook spent a good part of the book countering the popularly held notion that ER was sexually dysfunctional, citing especially the passionate intensity of her feelings for her longtime bodyguard Earl Miller and for Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok. In either case, Cook said, in effect, good for Eleanor. Just as prominent a subject in that first volume, however, was ER's triumph over depression and terrible insecurity to become a viable social and political being, and it is that self-invented public woman who makes the second volume of Cook's ongoing biography such a valuable addition to the literature of the New Deal. She built alliances diligently, manipulated bureaucrats and politicians artfully, pestered her husband privately and in company, became an official and unofficial adviser on legislation, scolded and cajoled the brilliant, hardworking drones of the New Deal, and even became something of a bureaucrat herself, as when she helped to create the planned village of Arthurdale, W. Va., a model for how small-town America could hope to live. There was of course, one enormous failing in ER's public life, and Cook addresses it with painful honesty.
Silence is the ultimate collusion.
ER's love affair with Lorena Hickok, introduced in the first volume of the biography, here becomes a persistent and sometimes distracting subtext, as Cook uses correspondence and other evidence to trace in exquisite detail the ups and downs of the relationship as it evolved from the white heat of initial passion to one increasingly constrained by the exigencies of ER's position and her growing commitment to a world outside herself. It is all fascinating stuff, certainly, and it does help give ER's complex personality depth and definition, but in the end there is just too much of it. That said, Cook's portrait of a woman in the thick of things during the hardest of hard times likely will stand as definitive.