John Roosevelt Boettiger | A Grandson's View from the White House | Sound Legacy #16

Our guest today is John Roosevelt Boettiger, psychologist, author, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. He is also one of the very few living people who spent his childhood inside the Roosevelt White House, where his grandfather Franklin was busy running the free world, and his grandmother Eleanor was traveling it.While John is the grandson of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, he’s also the son of Anna Roosevelt and John Boettiger, a Chicago Tribune reporter who fell in love with the president's daughter on the campaign train in 1932. His book, "A Love in Shadow," tells the story of their marriage, and of his own long journey to understand a father changed by war and lost far too soon.In this conversation, John shares witty, warm, and deeply personal stories from his years inside the wartime White House, including memories of Churchill, of Eleanor, and of the man he simply called Papa. We talk about his father's moral injury, his mother's quiet courage, and the complicated grace of growing up a Roosevelt. We also talk about John's years as a civil rights activist, his time in Selma, and what it means to carry that history forward into a political moment like this one. It is a remarkable life. We are lucky he wrote it down, and luckier still that he came in on a Sunday to share it. Find John's book "Love and Shadow" here.