Hissing Cousins

by Marc Peyser

  Perhaps his most controversial deal, as far as his brothers and sister were concerned, came in 1947, when ER agreed to let Elliott edit a collection of Franklin’s private papers. The other siblings hated that one brother would have the power of the pen to introduce and characterize their father’s personal letters without their approval. And they didn’t appreciate that Elliott would get 50 percent of the royalties while the other four and ER would split their 50 percent—minus Elliott’s advance. Anna wrote to Elliott and demanded to know just how much his expenses would be and why he was receiving so much more of the money than the rest. He went running to his mother. “Elliott gave me your letter to him to read & I hardly think you realize what a critical & almost hostile letter it sounded like,” Eleanor wrote to Anna.60 Elliott himself insisted that he had already spent $12,000 researching and preparing the book but his advance was only for $10,000. “So you can readily see that I am not riding a free gravy train as your letter implies,” he told Anna.61

  There were similarly heated discussions when Columbia Pictures and the director Stanley Kramer approached the family wanting to make a film about FDR’s life, and less heated ones when Eleanor agreed to host a radio program with Anna in 1948 and another with Elliott in 1950. On those rare instances when she pushed back, it was when the children wanted to go into the family business—politics. As a protective mother, she was leery of her sons being compared with their legendary father. As a proud wife, she guarded FDR’s legacy, and the boys didn’t always embrace their father’s ideals. (John, the only one of the four Roosevelt boys who never ran for office, actually became a Republican after his father’s death and actively supported Eisenhower for president in 1952, even though his mother was the primary force behind his opponent, the Democrat Adlai Stevenson.) It didn’t help that James and Franklin junior were unremarkable politicians, as they were the first to admit—about each other. “He had a dreadful record in Congress,” James said about Franklin junior. “He was smart, but not smart enough…He coasted instead of working at his job, considering it beneath him, while he aimed for higher positions.”62 They were both elected to Congress for a few terms (James from California, Franklin junior from New York) on the strength of the family’s golden coattails, but they lost more contests than they won over time. Eleanor would warn them against jumping into a potentially losing race. She was convinced that James’s front-page marital troubles in 1954 would kill his congressional career. (He ran anyway and won.) She told Franklin junior he would never defeat the Democratic machine if he went after the nomination for governor of New York in 1954. (He did anyway and failed.) But she played the good soldier and stumped for them when they asked, such as James’s ill-fated campaign for California governor in 1950. “[He] insists that I come out to speak for him and for Helen*2 which seems a mistake to me but I have agreed to go,” she wrote to Anna in 1950.63 Jimmy’s way of expressing his gratitude, along with his independence, was to act as if his mother had been no help at all. “She never told me to run, not to run, what to emphasize, what issues to talk about. I can never remember her really giving me any overall advice,” said James. “I felt I had to be my own person and that I shouldn’t rely on running on her reputation or father’s reputation or anything. So I made a conscious effort to be there on my own.”64

  * * *

  *1 Agnes Meyer, whose family owned the Washington Post.

  *2 Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was running for Senate with James on the Democratic ticket.

  Chapter 11

  MONUMENTS

  For all her acclaim as a human-rights champion, Eleanor had almost as much success advocating for a completely different kind of person in need—Democratic politicians. In 1934, she became the first First Lady to actively campaign for a congressional candidate: Caroline O’Day, one of the merry pranksters on the singing teapot a decade earlier, who went on to serve four terms as an at-large congressman from New York. Women in Connecticut, Maryland, and Oregon all owed their congressional careers, in part, to Eleanor’s campaigning. She supported men too, most famously Adlai Stevenson, the vacillating, Hamlet-like governor of Illinois who ran for president twice, in 1952 and 1956. ER advised him on his stump speeches, helped plan strategy, and, most crucial of all, jetted around the country to drum up supporters, especially among the African-American and female voters with whom she was hugely popular. “I have been running around so madly speaking for Adlai that I had forgotten that I was a grandmother, and a great-grandmother at that!” she wrote back to her friend (and future New York congressman) Allard Lowenstein, after he had wished her Happy Mother’s Day in 1956.1

  Though Stevenson lost both times, there’s little question that without Mrs. Roosevelt (as he always referred to her) his candidacies would have been fiascoes rather than merely noble defeats. He might not have even stayed in the race in 1956. Just before the Democratic convention, former President Truman finally announced that he would endorse Averell Harriman, not Stevenson. Adlai and Eleanor had flown to Chicago together for the convention, and as they sat in the backseat of a cab on their way into town, his attitude took a turn toward the desperate. “There are many people who could wage this campaign just as well as myself,” Stevenson said. “I don’t know that I’d be the right candidate. I don’t think I should carry on as the standard bearer.” Eleanor replied like the mother she was: “You are the only one who can possibly do it, and you will do it.” Stevenson’s childlike response: “But I’m not sure I want to.” Eleanor: “Oh yes you do!”2

  As the longest-serving and most influential First Lady in history, it’s not surprising that Eleanor reigned as a kind of Washington king-(and queen-) maker. She not only had her own passionate following; she stood guard at the door to FDR’s substantial legacy, allowing access only to an ideologically select few. But the Republicans had an equal and opposite female force—Alice. She might not have incited the same grassroots loyalty as Eleanor, but she had been her party’s éminence grise for far longer than her cousin. Vetting candidates, advising politicians, plotting strategy, even telling her side to man up had been Alice’s obsessions for decades. “I can hardly recollect a time when I was not aware of the existence of politics and politicians,” she wrote decades before as the first line of Crowded Hours.3 She, too, held the keys to her half of the vaunted Roosevelt kingdom.

  So the cousins’ duels continued into their sixties, only now they clashed largely via politicians to whom neither was related. They didn’t back a candidate merely to foil the other, but their natural differences tugged them toward rival camps. Stevenson was a persistent thorn for Alice, who again backed Taft in 1952 before casting a wan glance toward “probably the dullest man I’ve ever known”—Dwight Eisenhower.4 Alice didn’t know Stevenson well, but she managed to dispose of him with an observation that, classically, was both laughably shallow and crushingly on target. “A ridiculous name—Adlai. How silly,” she said. “Can you imagine someone with a name like Adlai as president?”5 Beyond his name, the epithet that came to symbolize the essence of Adlai’s effete snobbery was “egghead.” It was coined by the Washington columnist Stewart Alsop (Alice and Eleanor’s first cousin, once removed), who wondered, in the wake of Nixon’s defiant Checkers speech, if Stevenson’s cerebral coolness would stand up to the brawny general Eisenhower and the GOP’s warriors. “Sure, all the egg-heads love Stevenson,” Alsop wrote, “but how many egg-heads do you think there are?”6

  Of all the politicians backed or bucked by the cousins in their last decade of sparring, the biggest, and baddest, was Richard Nixon. Alice had been an admirer since 1948, when he made his mark as the freshman congressman who brought down Alger Hiss in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. While Nixon’s brand of jugular slashing clearly appealed to her, in most ways he didn’t seem to be her type. She favored politicians either with towering intellects (such as Borah) or with larger-than-life personalities (Longworth). Her father had them both. Nixon had neither. “He’s a level-headed fellow, an
d I think he does know more about what goes on in the world,” she explained about Nixon in 1970. “I think he’s a very able man.”7 His one superior trait—the ability to survive—seemed merely tactical, worthy of respect rather than devotion. Not to Alice. She gravitated to him precisely because he was an outsider fighting to get in. Despite her seat near the head of the Republican table, there was a part of Alice that viewed herself as the cast-off Roosevelt daughter who never fit the mold of her family. If establishment Washington disdained scrappy Dick Nixon, that made him all the more appealing to her. “There was always a stubborn, persistent quality about him which some people admired and others couldn’t stand. They minded him so, even long before Watergate,” she said.8

  The less obvious aspect of Nixon’s appeal to Alice was that he needed her more—and cultivated her favor more—than other politicians. In that sense, Nixon was Alice’s own Adlai Stevenson. He relied on her access and advice, and he made sure the rest of Washington knew it. It was Alice, Nixon said in his memoir, who persuaded him to consider the vice presidential slot in 1952 if Eisenhower offered it to him. “If you’re thinking of your own good and your own career you are probably better off to stay in the Senate and not go down in history as another nonentity who served as Vice President,” she told him over dinner one night a few weeks before the Republican National Convention. “However, if Eisenhower gets the nomination, someone will have to go on that ticket who can reassure the party regulars and particularly the conservatives that he won’t take everyone to hell in a handcart, and you are the best man to do it.”9 When her advice paid off, he kept coming back for more. They became regular lunch and dinner partners, often with his wife, Pat, in tow, and he usually dropped by her house on her birthday and on election nights. In late September 1955, Eisenhower had a heart attack while on vacation in Denver, and on the morning of October 2, Vice President Nixon received his first presidential intelligence briefing. But he was out of the office for four hours later that day, because he and Pat were having lunch at Alice’s. In 1956, Nixon named Alice one of the sixteen official American delegates to the inauguration of the Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek, in part as a nod to TR and Kermit’s Amazonian jungle adventures of four decades earlier.

  Not surprisingly, ER was hard-pressed to find much about Nixon to admire. Politically, he was as far to the right as she was to the left, though she sometimes accused him of borrowing liberally from the liberals, such as when he began to embrace the idea of a nuclear-test-ban treaty during the 1960 campaign. “He will forget that he ever opposed it or that Adlai Stevenson advocated it in the campaign four years ago,” she wrote in her My Day column.*1 “Mr. Nixon never has anything but hindsight.”10

  But she had crossed Nixon’s path long before he became a perennial opponent of her man Stevenson, and he, a rotten egg in the making, left a putrid aftertaste. The case involved Nixon’s political mauling of her good friend Helen Gahagan Douglas. In the 1930s, Melvyn and Helen Douglas were becoming one of Hollywood’s golden couples. They had met while acting in a Broadway play called Tonight or Never, then moved to Los Angeles. Tall and dashing with a pencil mustache, Melvyn worked opposite Claudette Colbert, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford and ultimately won two Oscars (Hud and Being There). Helen had an earthy, square-faced beauty, like a poor man’s Myrna Loy, and she debuted in a 1935 sci-fi movie called She with Randolph Scott. But she hated the glacial pace of filmmaking. She did a smattering of theater, got pregnant, appeared in a Smiles of Lady Lux soap ad, and more or less retired. She never made another film.

  Yet Helen, like Eleanor, wasn’t good at sitting still. Shocked by the poverty she’d seen driving west from New York, she helped found the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Organization in 1938 and joined the California branch of the National Youth Administration (NYA). Melvyn helped establish the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and became involved in the state Democratic Party. Before long, their work for liberal causes caught the eye of Aubrey Williams, the national director of the NYA, who invited the Douglases to meet Mrs. Roosevelt in Washington.

  The Roosevelts and the Douglases quickly became close friends and allies. When Eleanor would travel to California, she often stayed at the Douglases’ seventeen-room mansion on the edge of the Wilshire Country Club, an outrageously lavish base for Helen and ER’s daytrips to Southern California’s migrant-worker camps, one of Helen’s favorite causes. The Douglases were likewise frequent guests at the White House, though they never did get used to the stodgy custom of having married couples sleep in separate rooms. (One night Melvyn snuck into the Lincoln Bedroom to be with his wife, then in the morning went back and mussed up his own bed so it looked as if he’d slept in it.)11 In 1940, Melvyn became the first A-list actor to serve as a delegate to a national political convention. Helen was an alternate and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the opening session.12 Four years later, when the Democrat Tom Ford retired from the House, the president turned to Helen. By then she was knee-deep in Democratic Party politics as a vice-chairwoman of the California State Democrat Committee. But she didn’t know if she was ready for Congress. Eleanor, with her usual dose of tough love, made sure she was. “You mustn’t let Franklin influence you, Helen,” she said. “He thinks it would be nice to have you in Washington. Don’t you run for Congress unless you’re very sure you’ll be elected.”13 She was sure, and she won.

  In 1950, after she had served three terms in Congress, Helen decided to run for the Senate. Her opponent: Congressman Nixon. That was the same year that Eleanor’s son James chose to run for governor of California (against his mother’s advice), so she had a front-row seat to what is still considered one of the nastiest campaigns in history. Because Nixon’s great success had been his evisceration of Alger Hiss, he made fighting communism the center of his Senate campaign. Douglas was hardly a communist, but in the hands of a master manipulator her liberal voting record could easily be twisted into a more sinister shape. First, Nixon began to call her the “Pink Lady.” Lest anyone think “lady” was too polite to scare anyone, he added that she was “pink right down to her underwear.”14 Then his campaign printed a flyer highlighting her most liberal votes and describing them as “Against Loyalty and Security Legislation” and “Communist-Line Foreign Policy Votes.” Most damning of all, Nixon’s hatchet men printed the flyer on pink paper—the “Pink Sheet,” as it came to be known. Douglas was forced to spend much of her time rebutting Nixon’s accusations (along with innuendo about Melvyn’s Jewish background and the fitness of female politicians).15 Her campaign faltered. In desperation, she began to fling her own mud, and she hit upon what has become Douglas’s most enduring contribution to American politics. She was the first person to call Nixon “Tricky Dick.”

  Yet the trick that hit closest to home for Eleanor didn’t involve Red-baiting. Nixon and Douglas didn’t campaign face-to-face very often—she knew he’d skin her alive at a debate—but in May 1950 they shared the stage for a pair of speeches at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. Nixon spoke first, and as he stood up at the podium he pulled a telegram from his pocket. It was, he said, an endorsement letter from none other than Eleanor Roosevelt. The Republicans in the audience roared. “Of course I was shocked,” Douglas recalled. “Eleanor Roosevelt had endorsed me and we were friends.” Helen was so bewildered, she couldn’t think straight for the rest of the evening, which was evidently part of Nixon’s scheme. Her mind racing, she could only come up with one possible explanation. “I [was] not sure whether Mrs. Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, was ever called anything but Alice Longworth…because the telegram was sent from Long Island—Oyster Bay or Oyster someplace else.”16 In fact, the telegrammed endorsement was legitimate, and it did come from Eleanor Roosevelt—Ted’s widow, Eleanor. Very tricky indeed.

  —

  Alice would have been delighted to be implicated in one of Nixon’s schemes. She proudly claimed that he was one of the two “trickiest politicians I’ve known—and I like trick
s.” Her other favorite rascal was Robert F. Kennedy. For a die-hard Republican, Alice had a curiously close relationship with the Kennedy family. Politically, they weren’t all that far apart, especially their fervently anticommunist views on foreign policy. It’s worth noting that both Alice and JFK were invited to, and attended, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s big church wedding to one of his staff members in 1953, when McCarthyism was at its brutal height and Robert Kennedy worked alongside McCarthy on the House Un-American Activities Committee. Alice insisted she had no real use for the Red-baiting senator. To prove it, she liked to tell a story about a party they both attended in 1950, where he walked up to her and planted his arm around her like an overeager teenager with his girl. “With a kind of yokel jocularity, he brayed, ‘Ah, here is my blind date. I’m going to call you Alice,’ ” she recalled. She turned her blue-eyed death stare on him full force. “No, Senator McCarthy, you are not going to call me Alice,” she said. “The truckman, the trashman, and the policeman on my block may call me Alice but you may not.”17

  Yet the Kennedys’ main attraction for Alice wasn’t political. She liked their style, their energy, their sprawl. They resembled her own ample and rambunctious family. “The Kennedys were a fascinating, incredible outfit. There hasn’t been anything like them since the Bonapartes,” she said.*2, 18 Alice was a regular visitor to the Kennedy White House; she was especially delighted to be there when eighty-four-year-old Pablo Casals performed in 1961, having met the legendary Spanish cellist during his first White House visit in 1904, when she was nineteen and her father was president. She spent a lot of time with Bobby, too, both at his Hickory Hill estate and at her own dinner parties. “You are a temptress—our Eve of the New Frontier,” Ethel Kennedy wrote to her. “It’s always jolly eating meat on Friday.”19 Alice enjoyed both brothers but in different ways. “I see Jack like a nice little rosy-faced old Irishman. Bobby was brooding. Bobby could have been a revolutionary, very Sinn Fein,” she said.20 Their affection for the grande dame of the Republican Party was a tonic for Alice in her sunset years. “The Kennedy administration added a new high point to her career. She was by then eighty, but the young president and his still younger wife and brother Bobby all adored ‘Mrs. L,’ as they, too, called her,” wrote Joseph Alsop. “She was better company than ever, and it always used to entertain me, watching all the young beauties grow green with envy because this woman of eighty managed to be surrounded by all the most admired men in the city.”21 In 1962, the president gave Mrs. L. the perfect token of his friendship: he invited her to attend the ceremony renaming the “new” House Office Building. Thanks to JFK’s signature on Public Law 87-453, it was now called the Longworth House Office Building.