As problems go, winnowing down a lifetime of knowledge into a mere 14 hours ranks a tough one.

“I could have done a hundred hours,” says Geoffrey C. Ward, laughing.

The seven-time Emmy winner has written nearly every documentary renowned filmmaker Ken Burns has produced, including “The Civil War,” “Baseball” and “Jazz.” Ward has also written three books about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his second winning nearly every book award there is, as well as being a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Burns’ and Ward’s seven-part series “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History” kicks off Sunday on Rocky Mountain PBS.

“You know, he’s very hard to know,” Ward says of FDR. “I think one of the reasons I’m endlessly interested in him is that you never quite get there. In the end, you keep going back because you hope that you can just get a little more. … Like Lincoln, I think he was unknowable”

Burns and Ward work closely – deciding, for instance, who should be interviewed for each project. Ward “basically tries to tell the story” without worrying about how the other elements might be pieced together. “You wouldn’t find anything unexpected that way.”

Perhaps Ward’s greatest contribution to “The Roosevelts” came from Daisy Suckley, FDR’s close companion during his turbulent time as president. Suckley, in fact, gave Franklin his famous terrier Fala. She was also one of only a handful of people who knew the extent of FDR’s poor health at the end of his life.

“There was a little piece of him that he allowed her to see that no one else saw; that included saying that his braces bothered him and saying that he sometimes tired of being the center of attention. … He secretly told her the date of D-Day.”

He pauses, as if to let the scope of the act to settle in. “I think that was an act of treason.”

Ward met Suckley, who was in her late 90s, after she contacted him about his first book, “Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882-1905.” Suckley approved of how he portrayed the “Hudson River world,” Ward says.

On one visit, Ward prodded her about whether she kept a diary during those pivotal years.

“She said, ‘what would make you think I would keep a diary?’ Her eyes twinkled. The people who inherited, as a trust, her incredible house in Rhinebeck called after she died. They looked under her bed and found a case. Inside was her diary and 38 letters from FDR.”

Suckley’s reflections as well as FDR’s letters, shed new light on the only four-term president, his life and relationships.

Ward was the first historian to access the material, which he edited and annotated. Asked how it felt, he started with “It was the greatest historical …” paused and restarted: “I love doing archival history and nothing like this had come about before. I’m there reading something that no one has read before. Amazing.”

Ward speaks about FDR in “The Roosevelts,” his first on-camera appearance in a Burns film. “I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it,” he says. “But I did. He’s a very good interviewer. I went in saying that I was not going to be emotional and he got me on the third question.”

At that point, he’s talking about FDR’s battle with polio, which Ward contracted as a child. “That’s why the fourth show is focused on it. I really wanted people to understand what it took to get through the day, let alone to be the president four times”

T.D. Mobley-Martinez, 
The Gazette