John Roosevelt Boettiger is a retired professor of psychology and the son of Anna Roosevelt Boettiger and her second husband, John Boettiger.
Background
He is the grandson of United States. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. As a child, he lived with his mother in the White House during World World War II while his grandfather was president His parents divorced in 1949, and his father committed suicide the following year.
His mother remarried James Addison Halsted on November 11, 1952.
Career
He lives in northern California. He served as national president of the Collegiate Council for the United Nations from 1958 to 1960. Boettiger served for 20 years as 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 professor of psychology and dean of student affairs at the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco and Berkeley, California. From 2007 to 2010 he was professor in the Research Institute of Modum Bad Psychiatric Center in Vikersund, Norway.
He is chairman of the board and president of the Christopher Reynolds Foundation, on whose board he has served for nearly 40 years. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in clinical and developmental psychology, for which his principal mentor was Erik H. Erikson of Harvard University.
Earlier in his career, Boettiger wrote on educational and political themes, including two books on United States policy in Vietnam.
More recently he published a monograph, "A Resource for Healing and Renewal," about Modum Bad, a community and psychiatric hospital in Vikersund, Norway (Modum Bad, Vikersund, Norway, 2007). Boettiger edits and writes an online journal, "Reckonings: a Journal of Justice, Hope and History".
Membership
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 Research and Development Corporation, and briefly served as a desk officer at the United States Department of State.