Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  She had told Margaret Fayerweather that she was quite willing to hand over all that she was doing to someone else, but that reflected her yearning to step out of the public spotlight, not a readiness for a career of idleness. This was made clear in a reaction she expressed after a long day of seeing petitioners: “I was wondering yesterday when I leave the White House what my value will be in any of these things & what people will still be around!”20

  That was April 6. Soon she would discover that the tasks she discharged as ombudsman were self-imposed, rooted in her sense of duty and her need to be of service, not in her position as the wife of the president. The week end of April 8 she and Tommy went to Hyde Park to unpack cases and barrels of china and glass. “We ache from our unwonted exercise,” she wrote her husband, “but we’ve had fun too! In May I’ll finish the job.” She had seen Franklin Jr.’s wife, Ethel: “I think she’d be very pleased if you asked her to come & bring Joe [Franklin III] to San Francisco.” She did not feel sleepy, her letter went on, so she had written “James, Elliott, & Frankie, Elinor Morgenthau [who had had a heart attack in Florida], Rommie & Sisty” She asked to be remembered to Margaret Suckley and Laura Delano. “I’m so glad you are gaining, you sounded cheerful for the first time last night & I hope you’ll weigh 170 pounds when you return. Devotedly, E.R.” That was the last letter between them.

  On the morning of April 12 Eleanor had her regular press conference. She was asked about San Francisco, and some of the questions seemed to assume that the power of decision lay in the hands of the United States alone. “We will have to get over the habit of saying what we as a single nation will do,” Eleanor said, once again using her news conference as a school for the country. “When we say ‘we’ on international questions in the future, we will mean all the people who have an interest in the question. A United Nations organization is for the very purpose of making it possible that all the world’s opinion will have a clearing place.” Her luncheon guest that day was Nila Magidoff, a lecturer for Russian War Relief, whose excited crossbreeding of Slavic phrases with English was such a delight to listen to that Eleanor persuaded Anna to forsake her little Johnny at the Navy Hospital to come to lunch to meet her. Afterward she saw Malcolm Ross of the Fair Employment Practices Commission.

  At three o’clock Charles Taussig, an adviser to the U.S. delegation to San Francisco, was ushered into her sitting room. He wanted her help in ascertaining the President’s wishes on trusteeships. She would call the President, she said, and try to find out. At this point Tommy signaled her urgently to take the phone. It was Laura Delano calling from Warm Springs to say the President had fainted and had been carried to his bed. Eleanor asked a few questions guardedly, in order not to alarm Taussig, hung up, and, ending the interview immediately, spoke with Dr. McIntire. He was in touch with Warm Springs, he said, and although he gave her the impression that he was not alarmed, he suggested that they fly down to Warm Springs later in the day. She should not cancel her next engagement, the annual benefit for the Thrift Shop at the Sulgrave Club, he advised her, since to do so and then depart for Warm Springs would inevitably set the rumors flying. So she drove to the Sulgrave Club and made her little speech. The entertainment had just begun when she was called to the telephone. “Steve Early, very much upset, asked me to come home at once. I did not even ask why. I knew in my heart that something dreadful had happened.” But the amenities had to be preserved, so she went back to the party, made her apologies, and left. “I got into the car and sat with clenched hands all the way to the White House. In my heart of hearts I knew what had happened, but one does not actually formulate these terrible thoughts until they are spoken.”21

  “When she came back,” Early later was to tell the press, “Admiral McIntire and I went to her sitting room and told her the President had slipped away. She was silent for a minute and her first words were: ‘I am more sorry for the people of this country and of the world than I am for ourselves.’” Although later Eleanor could not remember that she had made this statement and doubted that she had, it was characteristic of the selflessness and self-command with which she responded to the news of her husband’s death. “A lesser human being would have been prostrated by the sudden and calamitous tidings,” the Times wrote, “but Mrs. Roosevelt at once entered upon her responsibilities.” Her first thought was of others and what had to be done. She sent for Vice President Harry Truman. Her cable to her sons—

  HE DID HIS JOB TO THE END AS HE WOULD WANT YOU TO DO

  —became the order of the day for a stricken people and their government. She asked Steve Early to hold up the announcement of the president’s death for fifteen minutes so that Henry Morgenthau could have a doctor break the news to his wife because she did not want her ailing friend to hear the news over the radio. She arranged to fly down to Warm Springs with Early and McIntire.22

  The vice president, who did not know why he had been summoned to the White House so urgently, soon arrived and was ushered into Eleanor’s sitting room. Anna and John Boettiger were with her, as was Early. Eleanor came forward and placed her arm gently on the vice president’s shoulder.

  “Harry,” she said quietly, “the President is dead.”

  For a moment a stunned Truman could not bring himself to speak. Finally, finding his voice, he asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He would never forget, he later wrote, her “deeply understanding” reply.

  “Is there anything we can do for you?” she asked. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

  As the arrangements went forward to swear in the vice president, he asked Eleanor whether there was anything she needed to have done. She told him she would like to go to Warm Springs at once and asked if it would be proper for her to make use of a government plane. He agreed immediately, and minutes after the new president was sworn in, she left for Warm Springs. As she walked, tall and erect, to the White House limousine, a group of newspaperwomen were standing beneath the portico. “A trouper to the last,” one of them whispered.

  She was completely composed when she arrived at Warm Springs just before midnight. She swiftly embraced Laura Delano and Margaret Suckley and kissed Grace Tully, who murmured how deeply sorry she was for Eleanor and the children. “Tully, dear,” she replied, “I am so very sorry for all of you.” She sat down on the sofa and asked Laura and Margaret to tell her exactly what had happened. She listened quietly, exchanged a few words, and then went into the bedroom where her husband lay. She closed the door and remained inside for about five minutes. “When she came out her eyes were dry again, her face grave but composed,” Grace Tully wrote.23

  She then heard from Laura that Lucy Rutherfurd had been there when the president had died. She had come on April 9 from Aiken, bringing with her Mme. Shoumatoff to do a portrait of the president. Mrs. Rutherfurd, she also learned from Laura, had been to dinner at the White House, when Eleanor was away. Anna had been present as hostess, and Laura and Daisy had been there too.24

  How did she respond to that bitter discovery? Was it another dark night of the soul for her? She gave no outward sign of anger or hurt, and she did not mention Mrs. Rutherfurd’s presence at Warm Springs when she came to write her account of the White House years in This I Remember. And yet the concluding paragraphs of her book unmistakably refer to it. She was accounting for the “almost impersonal feeling” that she had during the days after Franklin’s death; she could not think of it as a personal sorrow: “It was the sorrow of all those to whom the man who now lay dead, and who happened to be my husband, had been a symbol of strength and fortitude.” Partly it was a protective device. From the time the war began she had been schooling herself to the thought that some or all of her sons might be killed and that her husband might die.

  But that did not wholly explain her feelings, she went on:

  Perhaps it was much further back I had had to face certain difficulties until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is, circumstances for
ce your children away from you, and you cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be.

  All human beings have failings, all human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another’s failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves. If at the end one can say: “This man used to the limit the powers that God granted him; he was worthy of love and respect and of the sacrifices of many people, made in order that he might achieve what he deemed to be his task,” then that life has been lived well and there are no regrets.

  He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical. That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in some other people. Nevertheless, I think I sometimes acted as a spur, even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcome. I was one of those who served his purposes.25

  As the funeral train moved north to Washington, she remained alone for most of the long, sad journey. Even after darkness fell,

  I lay in my berth all night with the window shade up, looking out at the countryside he had loved and watching the faces of the people at stations, and even at the crossroads, who came to pay their last tribute all through the night.

  The only recollection I clearly have is thinking about “The Lonesome train,” the musical poem about Lincoln’s death. [“A lonesome train on a lonesome track / Seven coaches painted black / A slow train, a quiet train / Carrying Lincoln home again . . . ”] I had always liked it so well—and now this was so much like it.26

  In Washington the funeral cortege with the black-draped caisson drawn by six white horses moved in slow, solemn processional toward the White House. When it arrived under the portico, a squad of service men lifted the coffin from the caisson and carried it up the steps into the White House. Immediately behind it walked Eleanor, alone, leading her children. And at the funeral service in the East Room, reporters noted that she was wearing one piece of jewelry on her widow’s weeds as she walked down the center aisle followed by her children. It was the small golden pin shaped like a fleur de lys that her husband had given her as a wedding gift.

  Was she still in love with him? She told friends that she had not been, not since her discovery of the Lucy Mercer affair, but that she had given her husband a service of love because of her respect for his leadership and faith in his goals. “That is what she told me,” Esther Lape said. “That was her story. Maybe she even half believed it. But I didn’t. I don’t think she ever stopped loving someone she loved.”27

  And then Esther, unaware that her old friend had once responded to Franklin’s proposal of marriage with the same lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, recited from memory:

  Unless you can think when the song is done

  No other is left in the rhythm;

  Unless you can feel when left by one,

  That all men else go with him;

  Unless you can know when upraised by his breath,

  That your beauty itself wants proving;

  Unless you can swear, “For life, for death!”

  Oh, fear to call it loving!

  * A statement issued at the White House in Roosevelt’s name said:

  Memories of more than a score of years of devoted service enhance the sense of personal loss which Miss LeHand’s passing brings. Faithful and painstaking, with a charm of manner in speech, by tact and kindness of heart, she was utterly selfless in her devotion to duty. Hers was a quiet efficiency, which made her a real genius at getting things done.

  How much Roosevelt valued Missy was shown by his will when it was filed for probate after his death. It provided that Missy’s medical expenses should be taken care of out of the income from his estate up to 50 per cent, the remainder going to Eleanor.

  † David Lilienthal recorded in his diary in 1953 a discussion about Yalta at J. J. Singh’s where Eleanor was a guest, as were Lin Yutang, Anne O’Hare McCormick, Louis Fischer, and Walter White. “When Franklin came back from Yalta,” Eleanor began, and, noted Lilienthal, the whole chattering table immediately grew quiet,

  I told him how disappointed I was, and rather shocked, that Esthonia, Lithuania, and Latvia had been left with the Soviet Union, upon Stalin’s insistence, instead of being given their independence and freedom.

  Franklin said—now mind you I don’t say he was right or wrong, but this shows the reasoning he had in his mind—Franklin said (and I can still see his face as he said it) he had thought about this for a long time. He asked me: “How many people in the United States do you think would be willing to go to war to free Esthonia, Latvia, and Lithuania?” I said I didn’t suppose there would be very many. “Well,” he said, “if I had insisted on their being freed I would have had to consider what I would do to back up that decision, which might require war. And I concluded that the American people did not care enough about the freedom of those countries to go to war about it.”

  Illustrations

  Eleanor (right) with her father and two brothers, Elliott and Hall, taken about 1892.

  After her parents’ deaths, Eleanor lived with her grandmother, Mrs. Hall, at Tivoli overlooking the Hudson. Here she is shown with her Aunt Maude, youngest of the beautiful Hall sisters.

  The headmistress of Allenswood, Mlle. Souvestre, was at home in the worlds of high politics and high culture, and under her tutelage Eleanor blossomed.

  In 1903 Eleanor and Franklin became secretly engaged. Here they are sitting on the porch of Sara’s house at Campobello during Eleanor’s visit in the summer of 1904.

  Eleanor with Franklin’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, a daunting and remarkable woman. About 1904.

  Honeymoon photograph taken in the Italian Alps.

  Eleanor and Franklin on the steps at Hyde Park. Their first child, Anna, was born in May 1906.

  Anna, now a one-year-old, with her delighted parents. The dog’s name was Duffy. 1907.

  Four generations—Grandma Hall, Mrs. Stanley Mortimer (Aunt Tissie), Eleanor (standing), and Anna, who is looking at a copy of Theodore Roosevelt’s magazine, the Outlook. About 1913.

  Eleanor (right) loved to go on picnics. This is one at Campobello, August 1913.

  Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt reviewing the Victory Fleet on its return from Europe, December 26, 1918. Eleanor is second from the left.

  The notification ceremony at Hyde Park, August 9, 1920, after FDR had been nominated for vice president. At Eleanor’s right are Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, the McAdoos, Homer Cummings, and Governor and Mrs. Alfred E. Smith.

  Family picture, 1920. Elliott sits just below his father. Franklin Jr. and John are in front with Chief, Anna’s dog. Sitting on Eleanor’s left is James, and in front of them, Anna.

  Campaigning for Alfred E. Smith in 1924. A meeting at Eleanor’s Sixty-fifth Street house in New York. Eleanor sits facing Louis Howe.

  Nancy Cook, at Eleanor’s right, and Marion Dickerman, at her left, became Eleanor’s closest friends. Together they built a cottage and operated a furniture factory at Val-Kill. Marion ran Todhunter School where Eleanor was vice principal. Nancy Cook was director of the women’s division of the New York State Democratic Committee, in which Eleanor became the key figure.

  A Roosevelt family portrait on Hyde Park Terrace on September 15, 1931. (Left to right: Sara, FDR, Sistie, Anna, Buzzie. Back left to right: John, Betsy, James, Eleanor, Elliot, Curtis Dall, and Franklin Jr.)

  The swimming pool at Val-Kill. From the left: FDR, Missy LeHand, and Eleanor.

  New York City’s ebullient Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, director of the Office of Civilian Defense, with Eleanor, after he had appointed her assistant director, calling her “America’s No. 1 Volunteer.”

  Journey to the South Pacific, 1943. “She went into every ward, stopped at every bed, spoke to every patient.”

  FDR, August 1944.

  Bibliographical Note

  I HAVE INDICATED
AT THE APPROPRIATE PLACES in the following footnotes the manuscript collections which I consulted in the writing of this book. There are at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, in addition to the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt papers, an important group of family letters and materials, sometimes referred to as the Halsted Collection because it was Anna Roosevelt Halsted who saw to it that they were deposited at the library for safekeeping. The family retains control over access to these papers. The diaries of Helen Roosevelt Robinson are in the private possession of her daughters. The diaries of Caroline Drayton Phillips, to which references are made in this book, were supplied to me by her son Christopher.

  The transcripts of the interviews conducted by the Oral History Project at Columbia University were an invaluable source, as was the New York Times’ collection of clippings on Eleanor Roosevelt, which I was able to consult through the kindness of John B. Oakes. A. H. Raskin and Thomas Lask helped me to identify some lines of poetry that turned up in Eleanor Roosevelt’s papers. Herman Kahn of the Yale University Library helped me to verify quotations from the diary of Henry L. Stimson, and the George Gallup organization in Princeton, New Jersey, permitted me to consult their files on public attitudes toward Mrs. Roosevelt.