by Marc Peyser
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Loss didn’t exactly unite Alice and Eleanor, at least not in any permanent way. They had both grown too much of a hard shell to let grief eat at them for very long. It was politics that lit their fires, and it was politics that connected them, albeit on their usual opposing sides of the battlefield. Alice spent much of the election of 1940 continuing to bray against the unspeakable doom that would follow a third term for her cousin. He was simply a power-monger—charismatic, of course, but when the public allows itself to be fooled by a smooth-talking wannabe dictator, “what you get in the end,” Alice insisted, “is your Fuehrer, your Duce, your Rex.”51 (Note the initials of those three leaders’ titles.) Alice even argued that it was Eleanor who deserved much of the credit for FDR’s achievements. “It is very generally admitted by everyone who is capable of an ounce of detachment that Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt’s journalistic and speaking activities are one of her husband’s greatest assets,” she said.52
Perhaps it was easier for the FDR camp to wave away Alice’s attacks given her own chosen candidate in 1940: the Ohio senator Robert Taft, son of her father’s successor and 1912 rival, President William Howard Taft. Alice herself sounded somewhat indifferent about the younger Taft in a lengthy article she wrote for the Saturday Evening Post that spring. She obviously thought she was endorsing Taft, but urging voters to support your candidate despite his ample weaknesses isn’t a great strategy:
He may make some poor speeches, but at least they are his own ideas or words…Take that Gridiron speech of his—concededly a flop. A good many people have been at a loss to explain why, on such a brilliant occasion, Bob should have made so feeble an effort. I have my own theory about that. It is this: Unfortunately, perhaps, for him, Bob was not properly impressed with the importance of the occasion. He did not grasp the fact that this was the most critical audience in the country; that, in addition to all the high-ranking politicians, there were present all the big-shot journalists and editors of the land, and that here, if anywhere, was the moment for a candidate to do his best…It was a mistake, but the fact that he underestimated the importance of his audience, rather than overestimated it, is, it seems to me, rather endearing than otherwise…The recovery of Bob from this debacle—because that was what it was—is just about as good an illustration of the man as you could want.53
Taft’s team was so shocked by Alice’s barrage of friendly fire they wondered if in fact “the estimable lady is a Trojan mare,” secretly trying to avenge her father’s 1912 Bull Moose goring.54 Taft lost the GOP nomination, to Wendell Willkie. When her cousin Joe Alsop suggested that Willkie had grassroots support, Alice replied with yet another of her career-piercing epithets: “Yes, the grass roots of 10,000 country clubs.”55 Franklin handily won an unprecedented third term. Once again, Alice’s candor, her inability to resist playing the Capitol court jester, gave her cousin Franklin an unintended boost.
Naturally, Eleanor let bygones be bygones. “Neither Franklin nor I ever minded the disagreeable things my cousin Alice Longworth used to say during the various campaigns,” she said. To prove it, she invited Alice to the White House again and again, and Alice didn’t just accept the invitations; she hogged the spotlight. “She finished that evening,” the Associated Press reported in March 1941, “by taking a half hour of the President’s time. People were waiting to greet him. But there sat Alice with her ‘fifth cousin,’ as she has called him, whispering to him. He chuckled several times.”56 The cousins’ ability to compartmentalize their relationship, to wall off their political differences, baffled many in Washington. When the 1941 social season kicked off just after the campaign, the Roosevelts invited her to the annual diplomatic reception as usual. There was no way she would show her face, said General “Pa” Watson,*4 Franklin’s aide. Hadn’t she just likened the president to Hitler and Mussolini? Franklin was so sure that Alice would waltz through the portico as always he and Watson made a bet on it. On the night of the reception, when Alice was announced, Franklin looked at Pa with a grin and said in a loud voice, “Pa, you lose!”57
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The cousins did erect one Maginot Line, one area that was off-limits to sniping. They rarely criticized each other’s children in public, and there was plenty to pick on. When the Franklin Roosevelts moved into the White House, their youngest son, John, was at Groton, Franklin junior was about to enter Harvard, and the older three—Elliott, James, and Anna—were just starting their adult lives. At first, their behavior was typical of spoiled kids with too much time and money and too little guidance from their type A parents. John made headlines for a drunken assault on the mayor of Cannes in 1937, Franklin junior liked to pummel photographers out to catch a snap of the misbehaving Roosevelt boys, and they all seemed a little too fond of wild parties, fast cars, and even faster women (except for Anna, who married a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker named Curtis Dall when she was twenty, chiefly, she admitted, to get away from her parents). The gossip columns and the scandal rags loved them.
Rather than outgrow their rambunctiousness, they traded up to more adult scandals, primarily romantic ones. At a time when divorce, not to mention garden-variety public infidelity, was still scandalous, the Roosevelt children jumped into—and out of—relationships with stunning frequency. It was a rare year in the long FDR presidency that at least one of his children was not getting either married or divorced. It took a world war—with all four sons serving abroad—to bring a temporary halt to the marital bedlam. The final tally would be seventeen marriages among the five children.
Over the years, the White House became a kind of way station between marriages. Anna arrived just after the first inauguration in March 1933, fleeing with her two children, Buzzie and Sistie, from her marriage to Dall. She had actually held off filing for divorce until after the election, for fear of costing FDR votes among conservatives.*5 Elliott did her one better, dumping his estranged wife, Elizabeth, and their new baby at the executive mansion just days after the inauguration, then disappearing for several months on a westward journey. Inspired by his great-uncle Theodore, Elliott had a romantic notion of the American West as a place where men could discover themselves through a connection with nature and the landscape. Instead, Elliott discovered the Texas socialite Ruth Googins. He was good enough to telephone his parents and wife about the new love in his life. He then proceeded to Reno to get a divorce in July and, just days later, to Iowa to get married to Googins. When Eleanor’s oldest son, James, started working at the White House as his father’s assistant in 1937, his wife, Betsey, also edged her way into FDR’s inner circle, planning social occasions, playing hostess, and regularly whispering advice in her father-in-law’s ear. The fact that Betsey’s maneuverings usually put her at odds with her mother-in-law wasn’t her worst problem; Franklin couldn’t resist the flattering attentions of smart, pretty women. Her downfall came from a different kind of misstep: she had married one of the Roosevelt children. By 1938, they had separated, and Betsey found herself packing her bags. James had met the woman who would be wife No. 2, his nurse at the Mayo Clinic where he had gone for treatment of severe stomach problems. (Betsey departed with considerably less fanfare than James’s third wife, Irene, who stabbed him in the back in 1969 after a quarrel. He survived, but the marriage didn’t.)
If their love lives made great copy for the gossip pages, their business lives often pushed them onto the front pages. Both Roo sevelt presidents were lousy businessmen, so the next generation came by its failures semi-honestly. That said, during the years when their father was in the White House, the list of the Roosevelt children’s employers read like a rogues’ gallery of early-twentieth-century predator capitalism: Joseph P. Kennedy and his distilleries, William Randolph Hearst and his anti–New Deal newspapers, Howard Hughes and his lucrative wartime aircraft company, Samuel Goldwyn and his Hollywood studios, along with a barrelful of Texas oilmen. The kids were certainly bright; all of them but Elliott went to Ivy League colleges, mostly Harvard. Still, they we
re remarkably naive about their primary qualification for most of these jobs: their connection to Dad. Many a dubious deal was clinched by one of the Roosevelt kids because it was implied that the president would look favorably upon it. FDR’s intervention helped his children get jobs, cut through government bureaucracy on behalf of his or her employers, get loans—and get them forgiven. In one case, when a Mr. George Washington Hill and an associate were visiting Warm Springs, James requested that his father’s secretary “take especially good care of both of them because it is important in a business way to me.”58 This was just months after he had sold Hill a $2.5 million insurance policy. When James was hired at the end of 1938 as a vice president of Samuel Goldwyn’s Hollywood movie studio, he couldn’t explain to the assembled press just what his job would entail. “I will do whatever Mr. Goldwyn says,” he reasoned.59 Like his Oyster Bay cousins’ jobs in the oil industry just before Teapot Dome, the eldest Roosevelt son couldn’t imagine that his employer wanted him on his payroll simply because of his last name.
Alice did fire an occasional shot at Eleanor and Franklin’s boys, but only when she was desperate to draw political blood. In her notorious Saturday Evening Post quasi endorsement of Taft, she seemed to take aim at the boys’ assorted scandals. “Whether it has become accepted procedure, as now sometimes seems to be the case, for children of public men to engage in enterprises which, like kissing, can only come by favor, I cannot conceive of the Taft boys ever cashing in on any further eminence their father may attain.” (The irony of Bob Taft’s profiting from his father’s legendary political career seemed to be lost on Alice, but then again so did her brother Ted’s riding on TR’s coattails.) Her general reticence about the younger Roosevelts might have come from her sense of honor; like civilians in warfare, relatives were innocent bystanders and generally off-limits. Her greater concern, however, might have been even more personal. To turn her spotlight on Eleanor’s children would undoubtedly have invited attention for Paulina, and it was becoming painfully obvious that she would have wilted under that kind of searing scrutiny.
Paulina’s life had been nothing like her Hyde Park cousins’. Unlike Eleanor’s children, who were born when their parents were relatively unknown, Paulina was the daughter of a world-famous power couple. The public couldn’t get enough of “Baby Valentine.” The newspapers were filled with pictures of little Paulina on display: at the zoo, bouncing on her father’s knee, strolling on the streets of Washington, going to school in Cincinnati. What was harder to find was a picture of her with a smile. In virtually every photograph, Paulina seems serious to the point of misery. Perhaps she sensed that she had been something of a disappointment from the start. “The baby was born by half past ten,” her grandmother Edith wrote to Aunt Bye. “Such a satisfactory baby—apart from its sex.”60
After attending elementary school in Cincinnati and living at Nick’s family home there, Paulina attended the prestigious Madeira School in Virginia and then Vassar in 1942. She left college after only one year—or, more precisely, Vassar asked her to leave. Not long after she was expelled, Alice invited her brother Kermit’s son, also named Kermit, to dinner. His staccato description of the evening in his diary is a stark portrait of an unhappy young woman: “Dinner Auntie Sister. Paulina was there—now become less attractive. Expelled from Vassar for taking an overdose of sleeping pills—suspected suicide attempt. She told me so herself—wonder if she was.”61
If Eleanor’s children suffered from an absent mother, Paulina had the opposite problem: Alice suffocated her. Relatives and friends said Alice could be domineering, constantly bearing down upon her cowed, intimidated daughter. “She would never let Paulina be,” said Kristie Miller, the granddaughter of Ruth Hanna McCormick, Alice’s closest friend. “She just overwhelmed her.”62 Paulina developed a stutter, and Alice developed the habit of finishing her sentences for her. Having failed at college, Paulina would next look to marriage as an escape.
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As adept as they were at breaking down gender barriers, Alice and Eleanor had precious few models for balancing career and motherhood, as their unhappy children proved with every failure. Their husbands, though both affectionate fathers, were too busy to be much help. That tension between traditional and modern women’s roles only intensified with the ultimate call to duty: the war. Throughout their lives in and around politics, no issue had obsessed the cousins like the question of America’s role on the world stage. It was the centrifugal force that connected and divided them, allowing them to circle each other without breaking apart altogether. With the approach of World War II, the push-pull of that schism only intensified.
For Alice, that meant doubling down on her growing commitment to isolationism. Theodore Roosevelt might have been a red-meat interventionist (with San Juan Hill and a Nobel Prize to prove it), but that was the one segment of her father’s doctrine that Alice renounced. She believed that greed and stubborn continental hatreds were seeding Europe’s war clouds. Why should the United States get pulled into that, especially because she was convinced that Franklin’s own motivation was entirely selfish: he wanted war to distract the country from the failures of the New Deal. “I’m fascinated by Franklin’s note to the Polish President and Hitler,” she had written in 1939 to her brother Ted, who shared and encouraged his sister’s mistrust of the president’s motives. “To use the phraseology of the L. of N. [League of Nations] to Hitler! Clanking the ball and chain of the Versailles treaty, which is Hitler’s red flag, bloody shirt—the reason with a big R for everything he does. It must have been deliberate. ‘Needling’ the Fuhrer. It’s proof that Franklin’s trite pieties mean nothing. That he wants war. That he realizes that war is the only way he can retrieve his power which has been slipping away so rapidly—that only war can divert attention from his sweeping failures.”63
Whether she was blinded by her personal stake or just gravitated toward noisy and dramatic gestures, by September 1940 Alice had joined forces with the America First Committee (AFC) as the honorary chairman of the Cincinnati chapter. At the time, America First was essentially an umbrella antiwar organization that collected the likes of Gerald Ford, Joseph Kennedy, a young Gore Vidal, and even the actress Lillian Gish. But within the year, the group’s overall tone grew increasingly shrill and partisan. “The real motive behind many of these new committees with high-sounding names is not to promote patriotism or preserve peace but to continue the barrage against Pres. Roosevelt,” wrote the editors of the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. “There are always a number of dupes who lend their names to such committees, but really running the show will be found the chronic Roosevelt haters who organize outfits like the ‘America First Committee’ in order to spread their anti-Roosevelt venom.”64 The paper then printed a list of its chief suspects, among them Alice, who the paper said “would join any organization that would snipe at Pres. Roosevelt.”65
The sniping soon turned into something darker, for America First and for a certified American hero. Charles Lindbergh, the country’s premier aviator, had become the organization’s chief spokesman. Lindbergh had what might have been politely called an image problem with regard to Nazi Germany. Although most of his trips to Germany throughout the 1930s were officially sanctioned—he reported back to the U.S. government on several occasions regarding German industry and air capabilities—he had a lousy sense of timing and imagery. He sat within spitting distance of Hitler in the stands during the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, but apparently the only thing that came from his mouth was a smile. Two years later, he accepted the Silver Cross of the German Eagle from the Luftwaffe head, Hermann Göring. The ceremony took place just days after the Nazi occupation of the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia and just four weeks before the anti-Semitic fury of Kristallnacht.
It was Lindbergh’s extensive knowledge of Germany’s military-industrial complex that cemented his isolationist tendencies. Hitler’s war machine seemed invincible, and Lindbergh feared that it would destroy any
potential opponent, including the United States. In his mind, Lindbergh was just being practical. The problem was his delivery. In Oklahoma on August 29, 1941, he made a curious claim: do not trust the British. “England may turn against us, as she has turned against France and Finland…If you question my words now, I ask only that you read a history of the relationships between the United States and England during the last hundred and fifty years.”66 Many Americans naturally started to turn against Lucky Lindy. A furious White House aide called him “Hitler’s mouthpiece.” But rather than explain or deny or even defend their leader, the America First movement merely trotted out the impeccably patriotic credentials of its members, including the daughter of a president and widow of a Speaker of the House. “Does any one believe General Robert E. Wood*6 or Hanford MacNider*7 or Alice Longworth…capable of representing the interest of so unspeakable a system as that of the Nazis?” asked the AFC.67
Two weeks later, Lindbergh seemed to answer that question in the worst way possible. Egging on the faithful at an America First rally in Des Moines on September 11, 1941, he now accused three groups of pushing the country into war: the British, the Roosevelt administration, and the Jews. Lindbergh insisted he didn’t hold the Jews’ alleged pro-war stand against them. “The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race,” he said. But then Lindbergh crossed the line from empathizing with the Jews to deploring their dangerous influence on American politics and culture: “It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them…Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their interests, but we also must look out for ours.”68
