Books: Poor Old John

THE QUESTION OF GREGORY (309 pp.) —Elizabeth Janeway — Doubleday ($3).

To get right down to it, the thing that broke up the Gregory marriage was the death of F.D.R. John Gregory, for ten years a devoted New Deal bureaucrat, felt "as if this death were a sword that he must take to his bosom, slowly, inch by inch." John's neglected wife Ellen suffered no such heroic tortures. A rich woman who had married John when he was a poor college instructor, she called Roosevelt "That Man." Her grief was of another kind. The Gregorys'...