Elliott Roosevelt
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Elliott Roosevelt (September 23, 1910 – October 27, 1990), World War II hero and an author, was the son of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor Roosevelt.
On 16 January 1932 he married Elizabeth Browning Donner, daughter of William Henry Donner. They had one son, William Donner Roosevelt, in 1932, and the marriage was annulled in 1933.
On 22 July 1933 in Burlington, Iowa he married Ruth Josephine Googins. They had three children, Ruth Chandler Roosevelt (b. 1934), Elliott Roosevelt (b. 1936), and David Boynton Roosevelt (b. 1942), and were divorced in March 1944. Ruth Googins Roosevelt died in 1974.
On 28 February 1934 he and Anthony Fokker each received an excessive half a million dollars for selling fifty military planes to the Soviet government. Elliot and Fokker were able to receive such a large commission because Elliot had close connections to the U.S. Import-Export Bank through his father, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
On 3 December 1944, at the Grand Canyon in Arizona, he married actress Faye Margaret Emerson. They were divorced on 17 January 1950. She died of stomach cancer in 1983 in Spain.
On 15 March 1951 at Miami Beach, Florida he married Minnewa Bell Gray Burnside Ross. They were divorced in 1960. Minnewa died in 1983.
In November 1960 at Qualicum, British Columbia, Canada he married Patricia Peabody Whitehead. Her four children, James M. Whitehead, Ford Whitehead, Gretchen Whitehead, and David Macauley Whitehead all adopted Roosevelt as their surname. The couple's only child together, Livingston Delano Roosevelt, died as an infant.
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Early Life
Elliott was the fourth of Franklin and Eleanor's six children, (their third child died in infancy about a year before Eliot's birth). Sara (Eleanor's mother-in-law, Franklin's mother) chose nannies for the children and told both Eleanor and the children that Eleanor was "only the one who bore you: I am your real mother." (Source: http://www.nps.gov/fdrm/er/debutante.htm)
This might have caused some problems growing up.
Most of Elliot's early biography might be discernible by looking for info on his famous parents.
War Record
Colonel Elliot Roosevelt was a pilot in the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) during World War II. He flew a P-38 Lightning in the North Africa campaign of November 1942. (Source: P-38 article)
During World War II, he accompanied FDR as a military aide to the Casablanca meeting of 1943 and the Cairo-Teheran Conference of 1944. As an Army photo reconnaissance pilot, he and the men in his unit also played a key role in the D-Day landings.
Writing
He was the author of numerous books including a bestselling mystery series.
Source
- John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, (New York: Devin-Adair, 1948)