Man who played in White House as a boy dies

A man who played in the White House as a boy - the grandson of Franklin D Roosevelt - has died aged 86.

Curtis Roosevelt, who lived in the residence of US presidents when his grandfather was in the job, died of a heart attack in Saint-Bonnet-du-Gard in southern France last week, it has been revealed.

He never achieved the heights of success of his grandfather or grandmother, but worked for two decades at the United Nations, where he was a respected diplomat.

But he and sister Anna became famous in the media as youngsters when they were regularly photographed with their grandparents.

Curtis later wrote a book, Too Close To The Sun, describing how, as the country's First Grandchildren, he and his sister were known as "Sistie and Buzzie".

He was three at the time his grandfather became the 32nd US President in 1933 and remained with them at their Washington residence, relatively shielded from the difficulty of the era, for several years.

Pictures show Curtis and Anna playing on climbing frames on the White House lawns and sitting on their grandparents' knees in 1930s-era cars.

Franklin Roosevelt, commonly nicknamed FDR, went on to win a record four presidential elections, including those during the Second World War.

Curtis Roosevelt went on to work as a teacher and political reformer in New York, before going to work at the UN from 1964 to 1983, where he liaised with non-governmental organisations.

In 2005, Curtis Roosevelt joined the grandsons of Soviet leader Josef Stalin and wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill in a debate over the legacy of their grandfathers' historic summit at Yalta.

The summit, in 1945, preceded the post-war division of Europe and the Cold War.

He said, with the Soviet army being three times bigger than that of the US in Europe, his grandfather had no choice but to accept the emerging reality because the United States had entered the war late.