Books: Cheese On a Round Table

THE CATOCTIN CONVERSATION (283 pp.) —Jay Franklin—Scribner ($3).

Even a Shakespeare—or a Norman Corwin—might shrink from the task of putting Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Bernard Baruch and Harry Hopkins into a room together and making them converse on Plato, Thomas Jefferson, tariffs and Joseph Stalin. But Columnist ("We, the People") Jay Franklin has done precisely that.

He has also written in parts for himself and Dr. Ernst ("Putzi") Hanfstaengl, onetime Hitler aide, who speaks in defense of the Germans. The scene of this symposium (which Author Franklin unnecessarily assures the reader is "entirely imaginary") is a Virginia hunting lodge; the time is...