John Roosevelt Boettiger (born March 30, 1939) is the son of Anna Roosevelt Boettiger and her second husband, John Boettiger, and is grandson of United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. He lives in Modum, Norway and Massachusetts.[1]
As a child, he lived with his mother in the White House during World War II with President and Mrs. Roosevelt, his grandparents. His parents divorced in 1949, and his father committed suicide the following year. His mother remarried Dr. James Addison Halsted on November 11, 1952.
Later, as a college student (Amherst College), he lived and traveled with his grandmother Eleanor Roosevelt and joined her in work on behalf of the United Nations. He served as national president of the Collegiate Council for the United Nations from 1958 to 1960.
Boettiger served for 20 years as a professor of human development at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, 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, he was a professor of psychology and dean of student affairs at the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco and Berkeley, California.
He is chairman of the board of The Christopher Reynolds Foundation, on whose board he has served for over 30 years. Trained as a political scientist at Columbia University before moving to a career in psychology, he 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 United States Department of State. He holds a Ph.D in clinical and developmental psychology.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Boettiger wrote on educational and political themes, including two books on United States policy in Vietnam. He has an interest in the intersections of social history, narrative and psychology, themes explored in his biography of his parents' lives: A Love in Shadow, published by W.W. Norton. Grandfather, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was 32nd president of the United States with first lady, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.
He lives in Norway and consults at Modum Bad Psychiatric Center in Vikersund, Norway. He has four children
and seven grandchildren. He is married to Leigh McCullough, Ph.D, who is Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Research Institute, Modum Bad Psychiatric Center, Vikersund, Norway.