by Marc Peyser
The reaction was swift and nearly universal. “The most articulate isolationist group in the U.S. last week faced a crisis,” wrote Henry Luce’s conservative Time magazine. “The America First Committee had touched the pitch of anti-Semitism, and its fingers were tarred.”69 Alice’s brother Ted, a longtime friend of Lindbergh’s who had joined in his sister’s enthusiasm for America First, publicly resigned from the group, lest he be dragged under by Lindbergh’s bigotry. “The fact is that we hurt ourselves—the United States—more by persecuting Jews than we hurt the Jews. If we persecute any racial or religious group we are committing a grave offense against our concept of government,” Ted said.70
And Alice said—nothing. Instead, she joined a group of eleven AFC national committee members in a private meeting in Chicago to plot their group’s reply. Once again, they decided to back their hero and blame their accusers: “Colonel Lindbergh and his fellow members of the America First Committee are not anti-Semitic. We deplore the injection of race issue into the discussion of war or peace. It is the interventionists who have done this.”71 Alice never spoke publicly about America First. Surrender just wasn’t in her vocabulary. But Eleanor wasn’t going to let the matter fade away: “There is no such thing as isolation. We desire peace for the protection of our people from the horrors of war, but we cannot cut ourselves off from the conditions which prevail in other nations. What they suffer, we must feel one way or the other.”72 In fact, when she took up the issue in her My Day column, she could have been speaking right to Alice. “I want to see all the nations of the world reduce their armaments. Mr. Chamberlain has suggested it, but I have seen no acquiescence on the part of Mr. Hitler. Have you? Who is taking a belligerent attitude in the world today? The American people cannot afford to consider this as a partisan question and use it as such, and the women, above all, must think clearly on this subject for the future of those whom they love may depend upon their influence.”73 Her fatalism proved to be both prescient and personal. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, all of Eleanor and Franklin’s boys and Alice’s three surviving brothers (and a bunch of their sons) enlisted and were soon headed to the far-flung battlefronts of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
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“War does not determine who is right,” said Bertrand Russell, “only who is left.” Yet Russell was the most pragmatic of philosophers, and when the Battle of Britain brought Hitler to his own backyard in 1940, the famous pacifist had a sudden change of heart. It’s safe to say that Americans of every political stripe experienced a similar conversion when photographs of flaming battleships arrived on their doorsteps with the morning papers in December 1941. Four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the America First Committee voted to disband, the folly of its head-in-the-sand philosophy having been blown to pieces by the Japanese. Ted junior had already reported for duty with his old unit from World War I. His wife, Eleanor, “the other Eleanor Roosevelt,” also immediately volunteered, returning to her work with the Red Cross she had begun during World War I. She was now a fifty-three-year-old grandmother.
By October 1942, the First Lady herself ventured overseas, accepting Queen Elizabeth’s invitation to see the British women mobilized for war and at work in hospitals, soup kitchens, factories, and beyond. Not since Dolley Madison fled the White House moments before the British arrived to burn it in 1814 had a First Lady found herself so close to a war front. Eleanor spent three weeks in Britain, where she also toured army barracks and air bases and had a chance to spend time with her son Elliott, now in uniform. She visited wounded and bereaved civilians, chatted with American soldiers who were on the verge of their first battle, and offered encouragement to the pilots of the Royal Air Force. This being Eleanor, she naturally slipped a political statement into her itinerary where she could, such as when she made a point to visit with—and write about—units of segregated “colored” troops. Once again Eleanor had become Franklin’s personal reporter—“his greatest asset,” as Alice had conceded. Only now she was also reporting back to the entire country. Her My Day column became a sort of travelogue, “disaster tourism” before it became fashionable, bringing the grim yet noble reality of war to Americans who hadn’t all been sure they wanted to go there:
I was in no way prepared for such great areas of destruction. When buildings such as the fine old Guildhall, and many beautiful old churches are destroyed, they are a loss to the whole world, I think. So much skill and artistic ability, not to speak of historic interest have simply been swept away and the whole world is poorer. But even more poignant is the destruction that we viewed a little bit later in Stepney. Here a crowded population lived over small shops and in rows of two-story houses. Today there is only one-third of the old population left and each empty building speaks of a personal tragedy…It seemed to me as I walked through the brick compartments of that shelter that I learned something about fear, and the resistance to total destruction which exists in all human beings. How could people be herded together like this, night after night without some epidemic being the result and yet it was done and the spirits of kindness and cheerfulness pervaded, and those who had lost so much still managed to smile.74
Eleanor’s trip also offered an opportunity for a mini–Roosevelt reunion. On her way to visit Queen Mary at Badminton House in Gloucestershire one afternoon, the First Lady—“burning many gallons of gasoline on her jaunts around the British countryside,” snorted one paper—dropped in on Ted’s wife, Eleanor. She had been in England for a few months, living and working for the Red Cross in a derelict, hundred-room, eighteenth-century mansion she’d procured and converted into a recreation center for American soldiers in the town of Tidworth, about eighty miles west of London.75 Ted’s Eleanor, dressed primly in her blue-gray Red Cross ensemble, met the First Lady at the front door and took her on a tour. She asked about the family back home, especially Edith, who had developed a series of cardiac-related ailments. Then the two Eleanor Roosevelts listened to a group of soldiers perform “Home on the Range,” which Franklin’s Eleanor said was her husband’s favorite song. Finally, the First Lady let the soldiers go back to relaxing with their donuts and magazines and moved on to dinner with the queen. The First Lady praised her cousin’s “magnificent work” and her “incredible energy and persistence.”76 In her My Day column, Eleanor gave a brief shout-out to her cousin: “There is no other place for the boys to go near by, so the movies and dances and ‘eats’ offered by the Red Cross are very much appreciated.”77 The papers reported that the gathering of the Eleanors was a grand success, even though several reporters along for the visit asked if the two kinswomen had discussed politics. “It was their first meeting since six months ago in New York,” said the Chicago Tribune, “and each said she was delighted to see the other.”78
One of the Eleanors might have begged to differ. Though it had been almost two decades since the singing teapot helped take the steam out of her husband’s campaign for governor, Ted’s wife never stopped resenting the First Lady’s self-proclaimed “rough stunt.” In Day Before Yesterday, her 1959 memoir, Eleanor Butler Roosevelt was still complaining about the teapot. In fact, her telling of the teapot story includes the only reference to her cousin in the entire book. There is no mention of her years as the most famous First Lady in history, nor of their well-publicized afternoon together at Tidworth. Curiously, Ted’s Eleanor does go into great detail about a visit to the Red Cross canteen only days earlier from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. She describes him as reacting with an almost comic, Gilbert and Sullivan–worthy arrogance when the soldiers barely looked up from their magazines to greet him. “Mr. Morgenthau finished the story by saying incredulously, ‘None of them had ever heard of me.’ ”79 Was it a coincidence that the person who paid for the teapot stunt was none other than Elinor Morgenthau, the wife of the officious secretary? Eleanor Butler also complained about an official government edict ordering the press to omit Theodore Roosevelt Jr.’s name from any battlefi
eld reporting. The directive, which also prohibited mentioning Vice President Wallace’s son as well as Ted’s nephew Quentin, was likely intended to prevent the enemy from targeting a trophy soldier. Though she never pointed her finger at anyone in particular, Ted’s Eleanor clearly believed that someone very high in the chain of command—perhaps someone who shared her last name—was conspiring to cheat her husband out of his share of glory. Even Alice didn’t go that far. “They all said that Franklin wanted it, thought Ted would gain prestige from the war and might come in [to elective office] again. I don’t believe it,” she said. “I think it was someone who wanted to curry favor with Franklin.”80
So while the war managed to unite most Americans under the same patriotic cloak, the extended First Family carried on its own uncivil skirmishes. Even Franklin, who always seemed to laugh off Alice’s disloyal opposition, joined the Roosevelt scrum. In later years, Alice would claim that she suddenly found herself disinvited from the White House in the run-up to the war. “They dropped me like a well-known hot potato on any occasions that were historic,” she said. “They didn’t like it because I laughed and I was doing a thing in the paper at that time and saying mean things about them. And when he was elected the second time, I said he’ll be up for a third term next time. I could see that was in the cards.”81 She exaggerates a bit—FDR won that bet that she would show up in 1941—but the president did seem to target his cousin-tormentor during one particular press conference in January 1942. At the time, Washington was being overrun by the influx of defense workers arriving to crank up the war machine. The president was lamenting the lack of housing in the capital to the press corps when he hit upon an idea: Why not write stories suggesting that the less-essential residents leave town? He even offered a headline: “Are You a Parasite?” Parasites, FDR explained, were “people who had no real duties in the nation’s capital but came here because they enjoyed the social life or liked to have their children educated in local schools…and those who had twenty-room houses on Massachusetts Avenue.”82 Several publications noted that one of the few large mansions still in private hands was at 2009 Massachusetts Avenue. It was the home of Alice Longworth. Needless to say, she didn’t leave town.
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As dirty deeds go, Franklin had already dealt Alice a doozy. After the Germans invaded France in May 1940 and Paris fell six weeks later, the president received an urgent visit from René de Chambrun, the son-in-law of the former French premier Pierre Laval. The de Chambruns were a prominent noble family and direct descendants of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French general who fought under George Washington in the Revolutionary War. René had dined with Franklin, Eleanor, and Alice in 1934 during the centenary commemorations of Lafayette’s death and was actually both a French and American citizen.*8 He had himself fought bravely on the front lines against the Germans in the brief period before the French army collapsed, so when his government was desperate to persuade FDR to end American neutrality in the months before Pearl Harbor, Laval’s son-in-law, René, seemed as strong an emissary as anyone—even if he went by the nickname Bunny.
However willing the president might have been to help France in 1940, he knew that de Chambrun’s real task was to win over hard-core isolationist politicians on the Republican side such as Senator Taft. Taft wasn’t likely to open his door to de Chambrun on FDR’s request, especially on this topic; the two men were jockeying to run against each other in that year’s presidential election, and the war was the main issue. But Franklin knew someone who might help de Chambrun: Alice. She was Taft’s confidante and greatest booster. Even better in this remarkably inbred world of power, she was Bunny’s aunt.
De Chambrun’s mother was Nick Longworth’s sister Clara, who had moved to France after marrying Count Adelbert de Chambrun in 1901. Though Clara and Alice never got along—like all the Longworth women, Clara didn’t much like sharing Nick with the president’s glamorous daughter*9—René and Alice were very close. “She has always been, and would remain until her death…my favorite aunt on both sides of the Atlantic,” René said.83 The first lawyer admitted to the bar in both New York and France and a friend of both Henry Luce and General John J. Pershing, he had grown up to become just the kind of dashing, well-connected man Alice enjoyed. She and Paulina had traveled to Paris in 1935 to attend his wedding to Josée Laval, whose father had just become premier for the second time.
What made steering René to Alice so devious was that FDR realized it would put her in a bind. The president knew that the old Irreconcilable would sooner quit smoking, gambling, and sleeping late than lend a hand to a Frenchman looking for American support in the war. On the other hand, FDR understood that Alice’s “tribal feelings” would make it impossible for her to resist at least chatting with de Chambrun. Political conviction versus family loyalty—which would she choose? De Chambrun wasn’t sure it would be him. “Neither Taft nor Alice had any liking for Britain, and I was going to plead her cause, as a kind of spokesman for Franklin Roosevelt for whom neither had particularly fond feelings,” he said.84 Alice did agree to have a private lunch with her nephew, and after he made his case, she arranged one of her famous dinners, with Taft as the guest of honor. When René gave FDR an interim progress report, the president was delighted, but he warned, “Those two will be hard nuts for you to crack!”85
At an intimate dinner at Alice’s house a few nights later, René got to make his pitch. He also got a ringside seat to the Roosevelt family circus. Only Bob and Martha Taft were there, along with fifteen-year-old Paulina: “The hors d’oeuvre of the meal was a stunt that I remember to this day,” de Chambrun said. “Paulina was training a very young fox terrier and had taught it to do its business on a newspaper…As a curtain raiser to the evening, young Paulina put down in the middle of the drawing room floor a magazine with the picture on the front page of the President of the United States, all smiles and slightly prominent teeth. The little dog immediately performed as expected and disappeared into the kitchen.”86
Still, naughty Aunt Alice helped to arrange more meetings for René with key members of Congress. She made the rounds with him at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia and even tutored him on what to say to whom for maximum effect. Later that summer, he went on a lecture tour in the Midwest in an attempt to boost public opinion for a U.S. role in Europe. Though it was too late for France, René’s efforts did help get additional war supplies shipped to the U.K., for which the British ambassador expressed his gratitude to him directly: “Almost alone, you have been able to change official public opinion in favor of my country. Your amazingly energetic action during the dark days of June was a godsend and an inspiration for everyone. You were able to find at exactly the right moment those arguments and those words which convince the highest authorities of the United States of America and American Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.”87 Alice’s tutoring had paid off. To the Allies, de Chambrun was starting to resemble his famous ancestor, General Lafayette.
And then he made a stunning political about-face. A few months after the Germans had installed a puppet government run out of the southern city of Vichy, de Chambrun published a best-selling book titled I Saw France Fall. Rather than mourn the loss of his country’s sovereignty, he celebrated it, arguing that France had been morally bankrupt before the war, but the new Vichy leaders were “capable and far-sighted” stewards.88 Perhaps he was swayed by the fact that the new Vichy leaders were none other than Marshal Pétain, René’s eighty-four-year-old godfather, and Pierre Laval, his father-in-law.
With Laval now in regular consultations with Hitler and his henchmen, de Chambrun had begun to stake out the morally ambiguous swamp of collaboration. On November 10, 1940, René announced his plans to leave the United States and return to German-occupied Paris “to reopen his law practice.”89 Although he studiously avoided any official appointments or posts, he became a key intermediary between and counselor to Laval and Pétain. By August 1942, René’s friend Henry Luce includ
ed him on a “Blacklist” of collaborators in Life magazine. “Since Count de Chambrun’s return to the office of his father-in-law he has played an important part. It is said in Vichy, ‘If you want anything from Pierre [Laval], see Rene first,’ ” said the New York Times.90 Under the Vichy government’s watch, the Germans were allowed to round up and deport tens of thousands of foreign-born Jewish men, women, and children. They also took an active part in the brutal battle against the French Resistance. A year earlier, René de Chambrun had received personal advice from the president of the United States on how to save his country. Now he had become counselor to two of the most loathed men on the planet.
Neither history nor the Allies were kind to de Chambrun’s circle. His parents had stayed in Paris until the end: Clara, a renowned Shakespeare scholar, took over the leadership of the American Library there; Adelbert managed Paris’s other big American institution, the American Hospital. After V-day, they were both arrested and their house was looted by Resistance fighters, but their connections on both sides of the Atlantic won them a grudging clemency from Charles de Gaulle. Pétain and Laval weren’t as lucky. Both were sentenced to death. Pétain’s sentence was commuted, on account of his age and his having been a hero of World War I. Laval was granted a short and chaotic trial, attempted suicide, and was ultimately shot as a traitor just south of Paris at Fort Châtillon in October 1945.
