Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  In the Cook Island group, her next stop, after she had made her rounds she wrote, that “there seems to be no trouble anywhere out here between Southern white and colored. They lie in beds in the same wards, go to the same movies and sit side by side and work side by side.” But at Aitutaki, as she wrote Tommy, a different picture was given to her by the officer in command:

  The Colonel, regular army, Mass. Republican, and snobby was not pleased to see me. I’m sure he would sleep with a Maori woman but he told me he does not believe in mixed marriages, and he would like some Army nurses because some of his younger officers want to marry some of the native girls. He has both white and colored troops and is much worried since he has some white Southerners and he is afraid some day a white boy will find his native girl that he went out with last night is off with a colored boy the next night and then there would be a shooting and a feud would start between white and colored troops. He thinks we should have all colored or all white on an island, but he owns that the colored have done very good work so he just prays hell won’t break loose.4

  The colonel regarded her as a “do-gooder,” and she was determined to show him there was nothin effete about this particular reformer. He drove her in his jeep to the island’s radar station: “I have never seen a steeper road but since I was sure he took me to see if I would be afraid, I summoned all my experience with Hall and tried to behave as tho’ I usually drove over such roads!” In the Fijis she enjoyed a real mattress for the first time since leaving the United States; an Army cot, she wrote, “would not be my permanent choice for a bed.” More should be done for the men’s recreation. Phonographs and needles—and women—were needed. “Two commanding generals have now spoken to me about the fact that seeing no white women had the effect of making officers and men forget that certain kinds of intercourse with the natives was not desirable, and when it is safe to let women on duty come to these areas I think it will be a very good thing.” The absence of wine and beer was bad: “last night four men died from drinking distilled shellac.” She visited two hospitals in the Fijis, one with 903 patients, the other with 843. “Malaria [is] more of an enemy than combat though there were some serious wounds.” The boys were “plenty hardboiled,” she wrote as the plane winged on to New Caledonia and Admiral William F. Halsey’s headquarters in Noumea, “but as far as I can tell my being here is giving them a kick.”

  She was anxious about her meeting with Admiral Halsey. Most of the men in the hospitals in the Fijis were casualties from the great battles that had taken place in the Solomons. Her heart was set on going to Guadalcanal, which for her was the symbol of the war in the South Pacific and of all the hardships and suffering to which American boys were being subjected. How could she look wounded men in the eye in the future and say she had been in the South Pacific but had not been to Guadalcanal? She felt as strongly about going there as Franklin had about going to the front in the First World War when he had insisted on visiting a battery of 155s under fire, and even firing one of its guns. But he had been unwilling to give her a firm “yes” and left the decision up to Halsey.

  The conqueror of the Japanese fleet in the South Pacific also classed Eleanor Roosevelt as a “do-gooder” and “dreaded” her arrival. What were her plans, he asked almost as soon as she had stepped from the plane. “What do you think I should do?” she countered, hoping to get her way by subordinating herself to his wishes. But the admiral was wise to that feminine tactic.5

  “Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said, “I’ve been married for thirty-odd years, and if those years have taught me one lesson, it is never to try to make up a woman’s mind for her.” He suggested that she spend two days in Noumea, proceed to New Zealand and Australia, and then return to Noumea for two days on her way home. She agreed, and the admiral began to relax when she produced a letter from the president that said he had told his wife that he was “leaving the decision wholly up to the Area Commanders” as to where she should go. “She is especially anxious to see Guadalcanal and at this moment it looks like a pretty safe place to visit,” the president concluded.

  “Guadalcanal is no place for you, Ma’am!” Halsey brusquely responded.

  “I’m perfectly willing to take my chances,” she said. “I’ll be entirely responsible for anything that happens to me.”

  “I’m not worried about the responsibility, and I’m not worried about the chances you’d take. I know you’d take them gladly. What worries me is the battle going on in New Georgia at this very minute. I need every fighter plane that I can put my hands on. If you fly to Guadalcanal, I’ll have to provide a fighter escort for you, and I haven’t got one to spare.”

  Eleanor looked so crestfallen that Halsey found himself adding, “However, I’ll postpone my final decision until your return. The situation may have clarified by then.” He thought this cheered her up, but she wrote to the president:

  Ad. Halsey seems very nervous about me, the others I can see think I could safely go to Guadalcanal, he says on my return I may go to Espiritu Santo & he will then decide, conditions may be more favorable. I realize final responsibility is his but I feel more strongly than ever that I should go & I doubt if I ever go to another hospital at home if I don’t for I know more clearly than ever what it means to the men. . . . I won’t get near any dangerous spots in Australia either. In some ways I wish I had not gone on this trip. I think the trouble I give far outweighs the momentary interest it may give the boys to see me. I do think when I tell them I bring a message from you to them, they like it but anyone else could have done it as well & caused less commotion!6

  But she had a job to do, and early the next morning she started her round in New Caledonia. By the time she departed for New Zealand Admiral Halsey had become her most ardent partisan in the theater:

  Here is what she did in twelve hours: she inspected two Navy hospitals, took a boat to an officer’s rest home and had lunch there, returned and inspected an Army hospital, reviewed the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion (her son Jimmy had been its executive officer), made a speech at a service club, attended a reception, and was guest of honor at a dinner given by General Harmon.

  And, the admiral might have added, pecked away at her typewriter in the dead of night, doing a column. Halsey’s report continued:

  When I say that she inspected those hospitals, I don’t mean that she shook hands with the chief medical officer, glanced into a sun parlor, and left. I mean that she went into every ward, stopped at every bed, and spoke to every patient: What was his name? How did he feel? Was there anything he needed? Could she take a message home for him? I marveled at her hardihood, both physical and mental, she walked for miles, and she saw patients who were grievously and gruesomely wounded. But I marveled most at their expressions as she leaned over them. It was a sight I will never forget.7

  Her itinerary in New Zealand was much the same as it had been on the atolls—hospitals, Red Cross clubs, and camps, in addition to official receptions and visits to war factories where girls who were filling explosives, running lathes, and turning out precision parts paused to give her a resounding cheer. “I did the important broadcast tonight so that is behind me. Tomorrow night we leave and go to receive a Maori welcome.” The racial issue was never far away, and her response to it was impulsively honest. From the moment that she touched foreheads with her Maori guide in the Maori style of greeting, the tribesmen were enchanted by her simplicity and friendliness. They christened her “Kotoku,” or the “White Heron of the One Flight,” which according to Maori tradition is seen but once in a lifetime. But back in the southern United States the photographs of her “rubbing noses” with her Maori guide were advanced as further proof of the First Lady’s “nigger-loving” propensities.

  She received a radio message from the president that the reaction to her trip so far was favorable—“but he never reads the unfavorable people,” she advised Tommy, “so I’m anxious to hear from you. I wonder if I ever will!” To be without news from home, to feel cut off from the
people she loved was almost unbearable—“I feel a hundred years away as though I were moving in a different and totally unattached world”—and she asked Tommy to send messages to her special people. That night they flew to Canberra, and Major George Durno, a former newspaperman who had been assigned to her by Air Transport Command, sent Tommy a batch of unanswered letters and telegrams. “For your information,” he added, “Mrs. R. literally took New Zealand by storm. . . . She did a magnificent job, saying the right thing at the right time and doing a hundred and one little things that endeared her to the people.”8

  A letter to Tommy written on the way to Australia sounded a more prosaic note:

  I drew a check today for two hundred dollars. Since I am counted royalty I have only spent money on tips but they are very high and the one hundred and sixty I left with will be spent by tonight. I dread Australia for thirteen days but they will come to an end. Even the British trips couldn’t touch these schedules.

  “My being ‘social & polite’ day is over,” she wrote the president after a hectic round of official activities in the Australian capital. “Yesterday was busy & wearying—however, I like Mr. Curtin [Australian prime minister] very much & I hope you will ask him to come to the U.S. again.” She thought the government people were “very happy” that she had come, but nevertheless she was discontented. Russia and China were still on her mind. “Last night both the Chinese & Russian representatives pressed me to know when I was going to visit their countries so hurry up with your meetings Sir!” As for Australia, “Truth to tell however, I very much doubt that these trips have any real value & they certainly put our high-ranking officials to much trouble & travail of spirit!” But Nelson T. Johnson, the U.S. minister in Canberra, felt quite differently, as he wrote to her later:

  The authorities expected the stiff formality which through the years has characterized the visits of members of the royal family. You gave to Canberra and Australia not only the thrill that comes from a visit of royalty but the intellectual thrill of realizing they were meeting a very fine woman with a very warm personality of her own. . . . The success of your visit to Canberra was due very much to yourself and to the warm informality which you gave to the proceedings everywhere.9

  “I have walked through miles of hospital wards,” her diary read shortly after she began her tour of Australia. In Melbourne, she mounted a platform in the largest American hospital in Australia, facing tiers of wounded and hospitalized men. She brought them the president’s greetings and went on to talk about the postwar world, saying that all veterans deserved what she had come to know they expected: “Jobs at a living wage and the knowledge that the rest of the world is getting things worthwhile so your children may live in a world at peace.” She did not mind the strenuous hospital schedules, and when she learned that Franklin had cabled to Australian officials suggesting that “she should not do so much,” she wrote Tommy to tell the president that “if I wasn’t busy I’d go crazy or go home tomorrow.”10

  She wanted to go to New Guinea but, as she wrote sardonically to Doris Fleeson, “General MacArthur was too busy to bother with a lady.” Her letter to Franklin was irate:

  Word came last night from Gen. MacArthur that it would require too many high-ranking officers to escort me in Port Moresby & he cld not spare them at this time when a push is on. This is the kind of thing that seems to me silly. I’d rather have a Sergeant & I’d see & hear more but I must have a General & I’m so scared I can’t speak & he wouldn’t tell me anything anyway. Generals Eichelberger & Byers & Ad. Jones are dears but I’d much rather be unimpeded. The papers here complain that I see none of the plain people. Neither do I really see any of the plain soldiers. I have an MP escort everywhere that wld do you credit. I have all the pomp & restriction & none of the power! I’m coming home this time & go in a factory!

  The weather is fine, the days full, & I feel fine & I’m not doing anything which couldn’t better be done by Mr. Allen of the Red + who could go see their people nearer the battle front & should come out here now.

  I grow fatter daily since we eat at every turn.

  Much love

  ER.11

  General MacArthur would not be bothered with her, and the staff aide whom he detailed to escort her in Australia was anything but pleased when the assignment was first handed to him. However, like Admiral Halsey, the aide, Captain Robert M. White, came away a changed man. In an article he later wrote for the Christian Advocate he said:

  As far as I was concerned, Mrs. Roosevelt or anybody else could come and go, but what I didn’t like was to leave my post to accompany them. I traveled 10,000 miles to find Japanese and do what I could do to end the war, not to travel around with brass hats. . . . But wherever Mrs. Roosevelt went she wanted to see the things a mother would see. She looked at kitchens and saw how food was prepared. When she chatted with the men she said things mothers say, little things men never think of and couldn’t put into words if they did. Her voice was like a mother’s, too. Mrs. Roosevelt went through hospital wards by the hundreds. In each she made a point of stopping by each bed, shaking hands, and saying some nice, motherlike thing. Maybe it sounds funny, but she left behind her many a tough battletorn GI blowing his nose and swearing at the cold he had recently picked up.12

  She talked with the men in the military hospitals, carried her tin tray down the chow line in mess halls, and sat chatting with the enlisted men after meals. She rode with them in jeeps and was forever answering their questions. On the north coast of Australia the hospitals were filled with wounded from New Guinea, and outside Townsville she came upon troops in battle dress, heading for the front. She insisted on walking down the road, which was scarred with rocks, to tell each truckload good-by and wish the boys good luck. At one point her voice quavered, but she quickly recovered and continued on down the line.

  Film actress Una Merkel was one of a group of entertainers who toured the Southwest Pacific shortly after Eleanor’s trip, and she later told John Golden, the producer, what it was like to follow the First Lady. “How’s Eleanor?” the boys often yelled, and Gary Cooper would reply, “Well, we saw her tracks in the sand at one of the islands where we stopped, but we couldn’t tell which way they were headed.” Miss Merkel also heard at one hospital that the First Lady had been brought to the bed of a young boy whose stomach had been pretty well shot to pieces and who was being kept alive with blood plasma and tubular feeding. Eleanor had leaned over and kissed the boy gently and lovingly, and with that, Miss Merkel was told, “the will to live revived somehow.”13

  As her tour of Australia ended, Eleanor was still furious over being protected by admirals, generals, and MPs who treated her

  like a frail flower and won’t let me approach any danger. The boys last night all asked if I wasn’t coming to New Guinea & I feel more strongly than ever about their restrictions. . . . I’ve never been so hedged around with protection in my life. It makes me want to do something reckless when I get home, like making munitions!14

  But the next day when she arrived in Noumea, the world turned brighter, for Admiral Halsey, the New Georgia campaign finished, consented to let her visit Guadalcanal. “I feel happy to-night for we are going to Guadalcanal. . . . I left Australia friendly & happy I think. For the rest I only hope it was a good job. I know I should have gone to New Guinea.”

  With the visit to Guadalcanal ahead of her, Eleanor’s energy returned and she wore down her escort touring New Caledonia. “Listen, Hi,” a member of a Medical Base Detachment on the island wrote an anti–New Deal Republican at home, “do you think it is a cinch to come over here, and especially a woman? It’s dangerous and tiresome and it’s a wonder a person her age could stand it.” And if Eleanor’s home-front critics complained that her trip cost too much and used some gasoline, “as far as our bunch is concerned we would all be willing to turn over our pay for the rest of the war to help compensate you fellows on the home front for any inconvenience you suffered by Mrs. Roosevelt’s trip.”15

>   At 8:00 A.M. the flight north began. Miss Colette Ryan of the Red Cross, a friend of Admiral Halsey’s, accompanied her. They landed first at Efate, on which some of the biggest hospitals were located, and again she toured acres of hospital beds with something to say to each boy. In the afternoon they flew further north to Espiritu Santo, headquarters of the Navy Air Force; there they dined with the admiral, went to an outdoor movie where Eleanor made a little speech, and got to bed at 11:00 P.M. Two and a half hours later she was called for a 1: 30 take-off.

  Eleanor and Miss Ryan perched on two little seats over the bomb bay as the plane took off in the darkness. It became cold, and a “youngster” handed them blankets and later brought them cups of coffee. Landing on Guadalcanal after the three-hour flight through the darkness was for Eleanor the most exciting moment of the trip. They breakfasted at the airfield with General Nathan Twining, the commanding officer of the Thirteenth Air Force, and then the Army came to get her. Trucks loaded with Seabees were arriving at the field as she drove off, and when she leaned out to wave her presence created a sensation. “Gosh, there’s Eleanor,” one boy shouted. The commanding officer was horrified that she should be treated with such levity, but she felt it was a great compliment: “They were evidently so pleased to see women there one had to laugh and go on waving.” To some her presence was not such a surprise; it had been announced at the movies the night before that no man would be allowed to walk around the following day without shirt or shorts.

  She toured the island, went through the hospitals, visited the cemetery, experienced an alert, and saw a Negro boy, Cecil Peterson, in whom she was interested. The following is an account of her visit written by the author, who was then stationed on Guadalcanal: