If his name is unfamiliar, it may be because George M. Elsey is the last Washington aide infected with what Franklin D. Roosevelt archly called "a passion for anonymity." Mr. Elsey is certainly among the last men living who worked in the Roosevelt White House, as a young Naval reservist in the top-secret Map Room, transmitting communications and tracking troop positions in World War II.

Now 87 and preparing to leave Washington after more than 60 years to be closer to relatives in California, Mr. Elsey has at last put down in his own words some of the stories he has been quietly telling historians and documentary filmmakers for years. His newly published memoir, "An Unplanned Life" (University of Missouri Press), is full of revealing glimpses of a vanished Washington - and implicit lessons for some of today's less self-effacing officials.

"I've had lots of interesting experiences and so on," Mr. Elsey said the other day, his face crinkling into a squint as the last rays of November sunlight filtered into his half-packed living room a few blocks from the Potomac River. "But it never occurred to me that this was a book."

Mr. Elsey finally began writing at the urging of a friend, the Truman scholar Robert H. Ferrell, who told him it was past time to let others keep telling his tales in books and films.