Damon Root: What Ken Burns’ New Film Gets Right—and Wrong—About the Roosevelts

In
his new film, which premiers this Sunday night on PBS,
documentarian Ken Burns examines the tangled lives of Theodore,
Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt. “It was not our intention to make
a puff piece,” Ken Burns told Senior Editor Damon Root in an
interview this week, “but a complicated, intertwined, integrated
narrative about one hell of an American family.” Root reports that
Burns was just partially successful. At its best, Root writes,
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History offers a warts and all
portrait of the family. But at its worst, the film ignores
historical details and underplays the family’s abuse of political
power.

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