John Roosevelt Boettiger

John Roosevelt Boettiger was born on March 30, 1939. He is the son of Anna Roosevelt Boettiger and her second husband, Clarence John Boettiger. He is a grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, and Eleanor Roosevelt, former First Lady of the United States. Boettiger resides in northern California.

During his childhood, Boettiger lived in the White House with his mother while Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. Following his parents' divorce in 1949, his father committed suicide in 1950. In 1952, his mother married James Addison Halsted. Anna Roosevelt Boettiger passed away on December 1, 1975.

As a college student, Boettiger attended Amherst College. During this period, he lived and traveled with his grandmother Eleanor Roosevelt and participated in her efforts related to the United Nations. He served as the national president of the Collegiate Council for the United Nations from 1958 to 1960 and was a member of the board of the American Association for the United Nations.

Professionally, Boettiger served as a professor of human development at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he was a founding faculty member. He created and chaired Hampshire’s interdisciplinary Human Development Program. Later, he transitioned to graduate education in clinical psychology, holding positions as professor of psychology and dean of student affairs at the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco and Berkeley.

Between 2007 and 2010, he was a professor at the Research Institute of Modum Bad Psychiatric Center in Vikersund, Norway. He is currently the chairman of the board and president of the Christopher Reynolds Foundation, on whose board he has served for nearly fifty years.

Initially trained as a political scientist at Columbia University, Boettiger later shifted to psychology. His academic background includes a Ph.D. in developmental and clinical psychology, with Erik H. Erikson of Harvard University serving as his principal mentor. Early in his career, he authored works on educational and political issues, notably two books addressing United States policy in Vietnam.

Boettiger has an interest in social history, memory, narrative, family dynamics, and life cycle human development. These themes are reflected in his biography of his family's history titled *A Love in Shadow*, published in 1978 by W.W. Norton. More recently, he published a monograph titled *A Resource for Healing and Renewal*, focusing on Modum Bad in Vikersund, Norway, a psychiatric hospital and research community.

Since 2000, Boettiger has edited and authored content for *Reckonings: a Journal of Justice, Hope and History*, an online publication. He also continues to oversee research papers related to clinical and psychological research at Modum Bad. Additionally, he serves on the Advisory Board of The Living New Deal in Berkeley, California.

His personal life includes four marriages. His first marriage was to Deborah Ann Bentley on August 20, 1960; they had two children, Adam John Boettiger (born 1966) and Sara de Noyelles Boettiger (born 1968). His second marriage was to Janet Roslyn Adler on July 21, 1971; they had two children, Joshua Adler Boettiger (born 1973) and Paul Woolf Adler Boettiger (born 1977). Boettiger married Nancy Smalley in June 1989; all three marriages ended in divorce. His most recent marriage was to Leigh McCullough, a clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Research Institute at Modum Bad; she passed away in 2012. Boettiger has eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.