by Marc Peyser
Somehow, Alice managed to keep her relationship with the Kenne-dys from interfering with her alliance with Nixon. In fact, it gave her an unusual sort of objectivity on the 1960 election. Joseph Alsop, who was a rabid JFK supporter, had been in the studio audience in Chicago for the fateful first Nixon-Kennedy televised debate. He was certain that Nixon had done well—until he called his cousin Alice. It was 3:30 a.m., but she was awake and as sharp as ever. “Well, Joe, your man’s in, my man’s finished,” she told him. “I don’t see why they bother to go on with the election. Dick has finished himself off.”22 Over time, that became the conventional wisdom, but it was Alsop’s first inkling that image would decide the election in ways it never had before. It also reminded him about the Roosevelt women’s special skill, honed over a lifetime of watching, listening, and studying elections like some fans obsess over baseball. “I considered then, as I still consider, that the three best political handicappers of their era were the three first cousins Alice Longworth, Eleanor Roosevelt, and my mother [Corinne Robinson Alsop],” he said.23 Alice could act like a politician, too, as when she deftly conceded the defeat of her “man” while ingratiating herself with his vanquisher. “Dear Jack,” she wrote to the president-elect a few weeks after the 1960 election, “I hardly need say that I hoped Dick would win! But more I want to send you my congratulations on your election, and best wishes to you and Jackie—and to that engaging Caroline—for happy years in the White House. Yours sincerely, Alice Roosevelt Longworth.”24
In theory, Alice’s unprecedented support for and friendship with a Democrat in the White House should have aligned her with Eleanor for the first time since the days of the first president Roosevelt. But the cousins stood so far apart now—on opposite poles in almost every way—that even Alice’s willingness to consort with the enemy didn’t bring them together. In fact, Eleanor didn’t like, or trust, Kennedy very much. Alice would later say that was because Eleanor was a bigot, or at least a snob. “She didn’t like the Catholics. Partly Catholics, but also because she was old-fashioned,” Alice said. “In those times, the Irish were cops. They were of a certain class. It was a class thing, despite all she did.”25 It may sound like just another one of Alice’s inflammatory cracks, but she wasn’t the only one who felt that way. “She was worried about the influence of Cardinal Cushing in Boston and of the Roman Catholic Church in general,” said Eleanor’s grandson Curtis Roosevelt. “She was very plain about the fact that history showed that for politicians of avowed Roman Catholic persuasion this was a problem.”26
Whether that was true—and Eleanor’s support for Al Smith in 1924 would seem to undermine that theory—Kennedy had other strikes against him in Eleanor’s mind. She thought he was inexperienced (especially in foreign affairs), arrogant, and too conservative. She especially disliked that he still refused to denounce McCarthy, even after she had called him out on it years earlier. In an excerpt from her autobiography On My Own published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1958, she said explicitly that she hadn’t supported Kennedy as a 1956 vice presidential candidate because he’d never condemned McCarthy.*3 Here was another blunt contrast between practical Alice and principled Eleanor. Alice might have said she hated McCarthy, but that didn’t stop her from holding her nose and following the crowd of insiders who attended his wedding. Eleanor not only couldn’t let go of her convictions; she used them to beat Kennedy into a corner. He was eager to get Eleanor’s blessing, but McCarthy had been the well-liked boss of his brother Robert and a friend of his father, Joe senior, who invited McCarthy to stay at the Kennedy houses in both Hyannisport and Palm Beach. Denouncing McCarthy now, even a year after his death, wouldn’t be easy for JFK. “I would not, by the way, under-estimate the importance of the kind of misgiving expressed by Mrs. R.,” Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s chief adviser, warned in a letter in 1958. “You really have to meet it effectively before 1960.”27
What Kennedy really needed, if he wanted to win the election, was to meet with Mrs. R. and plead his case. At seventy-five, and fifteen years removed from the White House, she still held sway over many of Franklin’s supporters, especially the legions of black voters who adored her. In what was destined to become one of the closest presidential races in history, Kennedy couldn’t afford to have any Roosevelt Democrats sit out the election. She finally agreed to meet with him, reluctantly, and only after her beloved Adlai Stevenson refused to run for a third time. “I remember saying to her, in her sitting room in Val-Kill, ‘I don’t think you can avoid seeing him. I think you’ve got to give him time. You’ll be really criticized if you try to stay neutral but obviously not neutral by the very fact that you won’t even see him, will not receive him,’ ” said Curtis. “She looked at me, long and hard, and said, ‘All right, you can tell him to telephone.’ ”28
They scheduled a meeting for a Sunday morning in August. Kennedy was nervous enough to insist that his New York campaign coordinator make the pilgrimage to Hyde Park with him. “I want an ally with me,” he said.29 Then, to make matters worse, Eleanor’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter Sally, one of John’s daughters, was thrown from a horse while away at summer camp and died the day before Kennedy was due to arrive. Grandmère spent the night at her granddaughter’s deathbed, and when word reached Kennedy of the tragedy, he offered to postpone their appointment. True to her family’s death-be-not-proud ethos, the First Lady insisted that Kennedy come anyway, even though she had only an hour or two of sleep before he arrived. They talked for about an hour over folding tables and snacks. If she had thought him an untested, cocky politician who owed his success largely to his father’s checkbook, he was determined to grovel and flatter his way into her good graces. “A visit to Hyde Park is both a pilgrimage and a challenge,” he told the press corps waiting afterward to see if they had worked out a peace treaty. “For I come to Hyde Park not to instruct but to learn. And I think that we can all agree that Eleanor Roosevelt is a true teacher. Her very life teaches a love of truth and duty and courage.”30 That was apparently just what Eleanor needed to hear. “I liked him better than I ever had before because he seemed so little cocksure, and I think he has a mind open to new ideas,” she wrote to a friend.31 She signed on as honorary co-chair of the New York Committee for Kennedy and campaigned for him in several other states, including California, Illinois, and Indiana. She even felt comfortable enough to give the youngster a few pointers. Like Alice’s conversation with Alsop, Eleanor had a few observations about the Nixon-Kennedy debate, and she dutifully wrote JFK a letter the next day, reporting the reaction among the people who watched on TV with her. “One person said to me that he felt you spoke a little too fast and had not yet mastered the habit of including your audience at every point,” she said. “Someone else said they thought you appeared a little too confident. I did not agree with this, but I thought I should tell you.”32
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Once Kennedy settled into the Oval Office, Eleanor continued to treat him like a child in need of guidance, and he played the good son (and savvy politician). When she marched herself into the White House to complain about the paltry number of highly placed women in his administration, he created the President’s Commission on the Status of Women—and made her co-chair.*4 He appointed her a delegate to a special session at the UN and the advisory board of the Peace Corps. He fielded her assorted job-candidate recommendations and even thanked her for yet another “most thoughtful and helpful” critique of one of his speeches, in which she admonished, “I still feel there is too much strain on your throat which should be completely free. Please try to take some lessons in breathing and projection because in the long run it will be useful in saving you time and effort.”33
What neither Kennedy nor the rest of the world realized was that Eleanor Roosevelt was starting to die. Just before the election, she had been diagnosed with a bone marrow disease that slowly sapped her strength and energy. She was, of course, the last person who would accept that. “I suppose I should slow down,” she sai
d on October 11, 1961, her seventy-seventh birthday. “I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived.”34 At seventy-five, she had accepted a job as a guest lecturer at Brandeis University, which meant hauling herself to Massachusetts for classes. She traveled as far as Europe to host her ongoing PBS public affairs show, Prospects of Mankind, and continued to write her My Day column until less than two months before she died.*5 And she was still lining up new projects. “I would like to invite you to appear with me on the first program of my new series of one-hour discussions,” she wrote, in a letter dated September 21, 1962, to Martin Luther King Jr., with whom she had corresponded for many years.35 The show, scheduled to be recorded on October 23, never happened. She died at her New York City apartment, surrounded by her children, on November 7, 1962. King sent the family a telegram the next week. “Eleanor Roosevelt, as does Lincoln, belongs to the ages,” he wrote.36
Though King never got a final meeting with Eleanor, she became a magnet to friends and family eager to spend time with her as she grew weaker. “Once Eleanor invited Helen [Mrs. Douglas Robinson, her first cousin] and myself over to Val-Kill for lunch,” said Mary Morgan, another cousin and a Hudson valley neighbor. “We thought it would be a nice, small, intimate party and give us a chance to talk with Eleanor. Before we knew it, a delegation of 200 ladies arrived—colored. That was the way it was in the last years.”37
She cherished these gatherings more than ever. “To me, all goodbyes are more poignant now,” she wrote to Joe Lash.38 For her final New Year’s Eve, Eleanor invited a crowd to Val-Kill, almost like an open house. New Year’s had always been an event at the Roosevelts’. When the family lived in the White House, they would frequently follow dinner with a movie or a live dramatic performance in the run-up to midnight. (There could be so many young people among the invitees that in 1939 two Washington teenagers were able to pass themselves off as guests, sneak up to the third floor of the White House, and ask the president for his autograph. He gave it to them.)39 Typically, as the hour approached, the crowd would gather in the Oval Office, switch on the radio to check the exact time, and raise their cups of eggnog. FDR would issue his toast, “To the United States of America!” and the rest would echo him. After the president’s death, Eleanor continued the tradition, whether she was in New York City or Hyde Park. In 1961, the family gathered at a serenely snowy Val-Kill. Eleanor gave FDR’s traditionally patriotic tribute. The others in the room responded by raising their glasses to her.
Needless to say, Alice was not with Eleanor that night, though she could have been. “She invited everybody in the family, including Alice,” said Nina Gibson, one of Eleanor’s granddaughters who lived on the grounds of Val-Kill for the last decade of Eleanor’s life. “She invited Alice all the time. She never showed.” Given their history, it would be easy to chalk up Alice’s absences to cruelty or indifference. But that wouldn’t be fair. Alice had always been allergic to sentiment and especially to the conventions surrounding death. More than five years later, on June 7, 1968, she received a phone call from a woman named Marcella Comès Winslow, a well-known Washington portraitist who had been painting Alice. “Mrs. Longworth, I’m sure you don’t want to sit today, do you?” Winslow said. “Why not? What’s wrong with you?” Alice replied. “Robert Kennedy has been shot,” Winslow said. “Well, yes, what’s wrong with you?” The sitting went on as scheduled.40 (To top that off, Alice was equally incensed that Bobby was honored by being buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and at taxpayer expense. “It’s beyond anything,” she said. “Something so forced about it.”)41
So the fact that Alice didn’t say good-bye while Eleanor was alive, or at her star-studded funeral in Hyde Park (to which she was also invited), or at the memorial service in Washington’s National Cathedral two miles from her Massachusetts Avenue town house, doesn’t mean Alice didn’t care. On the contrary, she might have cared too much. “It might have been that she felt so strongly that she didn’t want to be seen in public, wrestling with her emotions,” said Kristie Tankersley Miller, close friend of Alice’s granddaughter, Joanna. “By then there was this very strong narrative about their being rivals. It would have been impossible to go to anything like that without having everybody scrutinize you. That’s a no-win situation.”42
Which isn’t to say that Eleanor’s death didn’t affect Alice. Up to this point, she had limited her candor largely to politics. She had never agreed to interviews of any length. When she wrote about herself or her family in magazines, newspaper columns, or even her own autobiography, the results were defanged to the point of mush. After Eleanor died, she gleefully started spilling her guts, opening the door and her mouth to almost anyone with a notebook. As one of the few Roosevelts from her generation still alive, she took the opportunity to give her take on the past without fear of rebuttal. One reporter, Michael Teague, got enough from her to turn his chats into a book, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, in which Alice calls Eleanor’s insecurity about Franklin “pathetic” while she praises Lucy Mercer as “beautiful, charming, and an absolutely delightful creature.”43 When she turned eighty-five, the television newsmagazine 60 Minutes profiled Alice for the first time (it came back again when she turned ninety), and she again trotted out her Franklin-and-Lucy stories. This time she added that cruel explanation for having encouraged their affair: “He deserved a good time because he was married to Eleanor.”44 With the cameras rolling and only a momentary stab at diffidence (“Oh, I don’t think I ought to!”), she proceeded to share her infamous imitation of the First Lady with America. With her lips pulled tight and wide over her teeth, her chin pitched down toward her chest, and her eyes squinting and wild, she looked a bit like one of those toy monkeys that clap cymbals, only dressed in a conservative brown tweed suit.
But Alice and Eleanor’s eight-decade relationship was nothing if not complicated, and Eleanor’s death shook some surprising responses from her cousin. For one thing she became uncharacteristically complimentary. “Dame Rebecca West was rather funny once about Eleanor’s tendency to treat this country as a giant slum area, and it is true that she could be both a prig and a bore,” Alice told an interviewer. “But that does not detract from some of her really remarkable achievements. She had an extraordinary career. Of all the Presidents’ wives, none used her position in quite the same effective way that Eleanor did.”45 It’s tempting to say that Alice was mellowing with age, and that might have been part of it. In 1964, she even voted for Lyndon Johnson, the first time she’d ever pulled the lever for a Democrat. (She thought that Goldwater was “too mean.”) But it’s also true that without Eleanor—or her parents, her aunts, her brother Ted, Borah, and most of the family to whom she felt closest—she was free. She had spent much of her life creating her bad-girl persona. It was a sort of shield against the expectations and reputations of her uniquely accomplished family. “I’m the old fire-horse. I just perform. I give a good show—just one of the Roosevelt show-offs,” she said in 1969.46 Now that they were gone, she could afford to drop the mask on occasion and give Eleanor and Franklin their due. Her first public overture came in the spring of 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of FDR’s death. A seven-ton block of Vermont marble was placed in front of the National Archives building that day, inscribed simply, “In Memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882–1945.” Among the smattering of relatives, friends, and politicians who attended (including President Johnson) was Alice. She paid her respects again in 1967, when the Johnsons invited her to the White House for the unveiling of a portrait of FDR—by Madame Shoumatoff, the artist who was painting FDR at the behest of Lucy Mercer when he died.
Alice didn’t play nice for all that long. The next time she came to the Johnson White House, in 1968, she gleefully performed her Eleanor imitation, along with an equally biting version of Nellie Taft. “I like her tremendously,” Lady Bird
wrote in her diary that day, “although I always have the feeling that I must gird my armor, not so much as to do battle but to be ready, alert, at least.”47 Lady Bird was right: you can’t teach an old dowager many new tricks, and for a long time now malice had been Alice’s calling card. It’s what kept her relevant, socially more than politically, well into her eighties. She was eighty-two when she slapped on a thirty-five-cent checkerboard mask and walked through the doors of New York’s Plaza hotel for Truman Capote’s “black and white” ball. By ninety, she was still in high demand. Her annual birthday party attracted enough fanfare to be featured on the national news. President Nixon was drowning in Watergate and would resign only six months later, but he still showed up at Alice’s place, along with Pat, a music box with the presidential seal, and two tins of caviar, direct from the shah of Iran. Alice, in turn, was good enough to hide the Watergate banner she’d hung up in her house in the name of “good, unclean fun.” “After he left, she took it out with great glee and delight,” said her nephew Kermit.48
