John Roosevelt Boettiger

John Roosevelt Boettiger, PhD, served for 20 years as Professor of Human Development at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, of which he was founding faculty member. He created and was chairman of Hampshire's interdisciplinary Human Development Program.

Leaving Hampshire to work with graduate students in clinical psychology, John was Professor of Psychology and Dean of Student Affairs at the California School of Professional Psychology in Berkeley and San Francisco.

He is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Christopher Reynolds Foundation, on whose board he has served for 38 years. Trained as a political scientist at Columbia University before moving to further training and a career in psychology, John taught at his alma mater, Amherst College, was a consultant to and member of the Social Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and briefly served as a desk officer at the U.S. Department of State. His Ph.D is in clinical and developmental psychology.

Earlier in his career, John wrote widely on educational and political themes, including two books on U.S. policy in Vietnam. He has an interest in the intersections of social history, narrative and psychology, themes explored in his book, A Love in Shadow, published by W.W. Norton.

From 1999 to 2005 he edited two online journals, "Reckonings" (precursor of the present blog) and "The Daily Reprobate," a journal of social commentary, pith and vinegar, whose history may extend to its founding in San Francisco by a young journalist named Mark Twain in 1866. (The mystery of The Reprobate's pedigree is matched by the mystery of its current whereabouts.)

John continues to write and speak on issues of child and adult development, narrative, psychology, religion, politics, poetry and prose.

John Roosevelt Boettiger is the son of Anna Roosevelt and John Boettiger, and grandson of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. As a child he lived in the White House with his mother and grandparents in the last years of his grandfather's presidency during World War II. Later, as a college student (Amherst College '60) and young adult, he lived and traveled with his grandmother Eleanor Roosevelt and joined in her work on behalf of the United Nations. She was, he says, "my first and most influential mentor." From 1958 to 1960 he was national president of the Collegiate Council for the United Nations.

He has four grown children - Adam Boettiger, Sara Boettiger, Joshua Boettiger and Paul Boettiger - eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild. He returned recently to the United States from living in Norway, where he served as consultant to the Modum Bad Psychiatric Center, of which his wife Leigh McCullough was director of research as well as Clinical Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School. John currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Write him at john@reckonings.net.