Those words confess the tragic diminishment of the Roosevelts’ marriage as they neared the end of their lives together. For me this sad fact makes the First Lady’s struggle to uphold her ideals immensely—heartbreakingly—touching. After Pearl Harbor, when a hysterical Congress stampeded the President into rounding up Japanese Americans and confining them in camps far from the West Coast, the First Lady went out of her way to pose for a picture with four young Nisei. Afterward she visited these unhappy people in their desolate camps to express her regret for the government’s action.
In spite of what she described as “an almost violent argument with FDR and Elliott,” Eleanor decided to become assistant director of the Office of Civilian Defense. She wanted to help bring more women and local volunteers into this vital home-front program. FDR predicted she would make herself a political target, and he was soon proved right. The Hearst papers raked the First Lady’s liberal appointments as “pinkos and commies,” and other papers savaged her choice of an old friend, dancer Mayris Chaney, as an assistant in the physical fitness program, calling her unqualified for the post. After several months of this sort of abuse, Eleanor resigned.
Another major effort that added to Mrs. Roosevelt’s sense of wartime displacement and failure was her losing struggle to persuade Congress to admit generous numbers of refugees—-Jewish fugitives from the Nazis as well as war-orphaned children of other creeds and nationalities—into the United States. But Congress was adamantly hostile to the idea, and FDR, always the politician, hesitated to antagonize them. One Republican congressman, perhaps heady from the success in driving the First Lady from her OCD job, sneered he was not going to let the President’s wife tell him what to do. Eleanor’s proposals died in committee.
More successful were her visits to GIs on all the fighting fronts. She wore out military aides as she plodded through miles of wards full of wounded. Invariably she returned to the White House with notebooks bulging with names and addresses and telephone numbers of wounded men and spent hours calling or writing their parents or wives.
On Guadalcanal, she reportedly told one of the few jokes I have seen attributed to her—a story that got a huge laugh and reveals she was well aware of the violent antipathy many people felt for her and FDR. She said she had heard one of the Marine cooks had persuaded his commanding officer to let him go to the front with a rifle because he yearned to shoot at least one enemy before the war ended. The next day the man came back very discouraged. He said he had met an enemy and could not kill him. “He yelled, ‘To hell with Roosevelt,’” the cook said. “I couldn’t shoot a fellow Republican.”
Wonderful as she was in the wartime White House as a spokesperson for a caring government, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to see her husband largely as a personage, a man to prod and lecture. FDR grew more and more disenchanted with his First Lady’s style. Once a White House visitor remarked that Eleanor would be very tired when she returned from a trip to the South Pacific. “No,” FDR snapped. “But she will tire everybody else.”
Not only was Eleanor unable to recognize her husband’s need for a zone of peace within the White House but she inflicted on him the worst imaginable housekeeper, a New Yorker named Henrietta Nesbitt. Later, for a few awful months, the Trumans inherited this creature. From the start Mrs. Nesbitt made her regime synonymous with atrocious cuisine. Once she served mutton and boiled carrots at a cabinet dinner, washed down by a New York State champagne which FDR pronounced the worst he had ever tasted.
During the wartime years, with state dinners and almost all other official functions canceled in the name of national austerity, Mrs. Nesbitt’s menus became even more abominable. She almost gloried in their badness—as if indigestion were her contribution to the war effort. If the President criticized a dish, he got it again and again. At one point FDR said he was eating chicken six times a week, and when he complained Mrs. Nesbitt gave him sweetbreads six times a week. She repeatedly served him broccoli, even though he said he detested it. For months she served him oatmeal for breakfast, until he was reduced to sending her advertisements for cornflakes and Wheaties.
Some books on the Roosevelt White House have tried to make Mrs. Nesbitt seem amusing. Having dealt with this dragon in skirts, I disagree. This sort of aggravation was the last thing a very sick President needed.
Even in the final year, with the war roaring to a climax on a dozen fronts and FDR’s health so precarious—at least six times he toppled to the floor of his study and had to be lifted back into his wheelchair by one of his Secret Service men—the First Lady persisted in playing his social conscience. She would invade his cocktail hour with sheaves of memos pushing her various causes, insisting on immediate decisions. Once, Anna Roosevelt recalled, “Father blew his top. He took every single speck of that whole pile of papers, threw them across the desk at me and said, ‘Sis,’ you handle these tomorrow morning.’” A humbled Eleanor apologized—but several weeks later, when she asked to accompany FDR to the last summit meeting of the war at Yalta, he coldly refused—and took Anna instead.
Inevitably, FDR sought love from other women—notably his beautiful secretary, Marguerite (Missy) LeHand, until she collapsed from the strain of trying to combine overwork and adoration. In the last two years of his life the still beautiful, still devoted Lucy Mercer, now the widowed Mrs. Winthrop Rutherfurd, returned—with the tacit collaboration of Anna Roosevelt.
A few of Lucy’s visits were in the White House. Most were at Warm Springs, the Georgia rehabilitation center which FDR had found when he was struggling to recover from polio. Mrs. Rutherfurd had an estate in nearby Aiken, South Carolina. During a particularly felicitous stay in late 1944, Lucy told Anna of a marvelous hour she had just spent with FDR, sitting in his car on a nearby mountaintop, listening to him talk about the problems of the world, interspersing global concerns with lively anecdotes about his years as a visitor to that part of Georgia. Anna realized, “Mother was not capable of giving him this—just listening.”
Anna’s brother Elliott agreed: “What he [FDR] missed more and more was a woman’s warm inspiriting companionship, which Mother by her very nature could not provide…. She was no kind of company when he wanted to relax without listening to her voice of conscience.”
When Eleanor Roosevelt learned that Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd had been sitting with FDR, watching him having his portrait painted, at the moment of his death on April 12, 1945, the deep-buried pain of the primary wound erupted in terrible rage at her daughter. In Washington, DC, she demanded an explanation of how she could have let “that woman” above all others return to her father’s inner circle. Anna told her mother that she was only trying to comfort a very sick, very lonely man.
Eleanor Roosevelt was unquestionably a great First Lady. Her pioneering in behalf of woman’s rights, African-American rights, and a dozen other causes is beyond comparison with any other woman of her time. But her achievements as a symbolic personage have to be assessed against her tragic limitations in the private role of loving counselor, companion, protector—in a word, wife.
Chapter 6
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PARTNERS
IN PRIVATE
I HAVE ALWAYS SYMPATHIZED WITH ANNA ROOSEVELT’S ATTEMPT TO help her father. I saw at first hand how the White House can tear apart a couple. Yes, it almost happened to that seemingly perfect White House marriage of Bess and Harry Truman—and for a while I, like Anna, was a daughter trapped in the middle. There was, thank goodness, a happier ending, but the experience still left a few scars.
My mother did not want my father to become President—especially through “the back door,” as he himself called it—moving up from vice president. She had read her history books, and knew that almost every one of these accidental Presidents had a miserable time in the White House. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, almost got impeached. John Tyler, William Henry Harrison’s successor, was a President without a party. Chester Arthur, James Garfield’s successor, was considered a joke.
/> Bess Truman also loved being a senator’s wife. For her it was a perfect combination of being near the center of the political stage while remaining more or less anonymous to everyone but a circle of chosen friends. Harry Truman, after his tremendous achievements as head of the Truman Committee, which saved billions of dollars by uncovering waste, mismanagement, and corruption on the home front during World War II, was guaranteed his Senate seat for life. Why give it up for something as clouded with portents as vice president to a dying President?
There was another, deeper reason why my mother did not want to become First Lady. She saw the ferocious press scrutiny Eleanor Roosevelt received and dreaded that similar treatment would exhume a family tragedy which would cause her and her brothers and above all her mother a great deal of pain. When Bess was eighteen, her handsome father shot himself in the bathroom of their Independence home. Unable to support his wife in the style she had acquired as the daughter of the wealthiest man in town, David Willock Wallace had sunk into depression and finally into suicide.
Bess’s mother never recovered from that trauma. Madge Wallace became a recluse for the rest of her long life—and mostly her daughter’s responsibility. The thought of some Hearst papers “sob sister” spreading this story across the pages of their seven-million-copy Sunday supplement, The American Weekly, forerunner of today’s supermarket tabloids, or the front pages of all the papers in their huge chain, horrified my mother. But she found herself outflanked and overruled in her struggle to persuade my father to reject the vice presidency. Too many major voices in the Democratic Party practically ordered him to run to avoid the disaster of the incumbent vice president, Henry Wallace, becoming President.
Piling irony on irony, Henry Wallace was Mrs. Roosevelt’s ardently supported choice to succeed her husband. I wonder what she would have thought, had she known that Bess Truman was her secret ally in this subterranean struggle.
Henry Wallace represented Eleanor Roosevelt’s boldest venture into the politics of the presidency—what you might call politics with a capital P. The secretary of agriculture in FDR’s cabinet, Wallace was not close to the First Lady at first. Like many other cabinet officers, he resented her intrusions into his bailiwick. Their alliance did not take shape until FDR proposed him as his vice president in 1940.
Most of the delegates to the Democratic National convention did not want Wallace. They thought another liberal added nothing to the ticket. They wanted a moderate or a conservative like the outgoing vice president, “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas. For a while it looked as if Wallace was beaten. Fearful of being labeled dictatorial, FDR hesitated to insist on him as his one and only choice. Instead, he sent the First Lady to give an unprecedented speech to the delegates, which persuaded them to swallow Henry, though little more than half voted for him.
In her newspaper column, “My Day,” a pleased Eleanor Roosevelt wrote: “Secretary Wallace is a very fine man and I am sure will strengthen the ticket. I have always felt in him a certain shyness that has kept him aloof from some Democrats. But now that he will be in close touch with many of them, I am sure they will soon find in him much to admire and love.”
Alas, to know Henry Wallace was not to love him. He was, quite simply, an inept politician. He did not know how to schmooze, unbend, fraternize. His idea of communication was a press release. The notion that he was FDR’s chosen successor went to his head. He picked turf fights with prominent Democrats in and out of Congress and infuriated the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, by speaking out on foreign policy in semimystical terms, calling on Americans to export the New Deal to the entire world to achieve “the century of the common man.” In her column and among her friends, Mrs. Roosevelt continued to back Wallace enthusiastically. But the harder she pushed him with FDR, the more antagonistic the President became.
There are some historians and biographers who suggest that FDR’s alienation from Eleanor in the last years of his presidency changed the course of history. Unquestionably, her attempt to make Henry Wallace President of the United States backfired disastrously and, by ironic coincidence, helped make Senator Truman his replacement. After telling Wallace he was his “personal choice,” FDR, warned that large sections of the party would revolt rather than nominate him again, told Harry Truman he had to take the job or risk breaking up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war.
Both the incumbent First Lady and her soon-to-be successor watched with dismay as the Democratic Convention beat off an attempt by Wallace supporters to stampede the delegates and nominated Harry S Truman. When a rhapsodic crowd engulfed us as we left the Chicago convention center at the end of that sweltering July night, my mother exclaimed: “Are we going to have to put up with this for the rest of our lives?” That negative reaction acquired ominous momentum nine months later, when FDR’s death catapulted us into the White House.
Bess Truman underwent a terrific inner struggle to overcome her deep aversion to becoming First Lady. She was still worried about the Wallace family secret and as my father’s longtime political partner, she was deeply concerned about how he could cope with the enormous responsibility that had descended on him. “This is going to put a terrific load on Harry,” she said to one of their close friends. “Roosevelt has told him nothing.”
Never has any President in American history had to learn more about the problems facing him—and make world-shaping decisions about them faster—than Harry S Truman. Between that fateful April 12 when he took the oath of office in the Cabinet Room of the White House and September 2, he presided over the close of the war against Germany, supervised the opening of the United Nations, and ended the war with Japan by ordering atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this avalanche of decisions and events, Bess Truman played little part. More and more, she began to feel that the presidency had virtually dissolved the political partnership that had been at the heart of her relationship with her husband for so many years.
For the rest of that tumultuous year 1945, my father worked at the same frantic pace, trying to stabilize a war-ravaged world, deal with a steadily more hostile Russia, and solve a dozen domestic crises. My mother struggled to give some shape and coherence to her role as First Lady in the shadow of her famous predecessor. At first she announced she would hold a press conference, but the closer she got to it, the more the idea horrified her. She canceled it at the last moment and said she would only answer written questions, submitted in advance. That left the White House press corps underwhelmed, to put it mildly.
Their sniping comments about her inaccessibility only deepened Bess’s resistance. When a reporter called to inquire what Mother was wearing to a reception, she was blunt: “Tell her it’s none of her business.” Her secretary managed to stutter out something about the First Lady being undecided for the moment.
Bess’s letters to friends in Independence became a lament about how homesick she was. This from a woman who had spent most of the previous eleven years in Washington. Bess was suffering from the White House blues. She told someone that her favorite First Lady was Elizabeth Monroe—primarily, I suspect, because of her success at virtually disappearing from the White House for most of her husband’s two terms. She may also have been identifying with a First Lady who succeeded the media icon of her era, Dolley Madison—as Mother had succeeded Eleanor Roosevelt.
It got worse—as things tend to do in the White House. Bess was invited to a DAR tea in her honor at Constitution Hall. The moment she accepted, New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell went for her jugular. He claimed his wife, the gifted jazz pianist Hazel Scott, had been banned from playing at Constitution Hall because of her race. He wired Bess that “if you believe in 100 percent Americanism, you will publicly denounce the DAR’s action” and refuse to attend the tea.
Congressman Powell aroused Bess Truman’s stubborn streak. She had accepted the invitation, hundreds of DARs were coming to the tea, and she had no power to change their policy of banning blacks from performing in the hall. She
wired a response along these lines to Congressman Powell, who promptly released it to the press with another denunciation. When Bess went to the tea anyway, he called her “the last lady” and reminded everyone of Eleanor Roosevelt’s stand on Marian Anderson’s right to sing in the hall.
Bess’s White House mood went from blue to black. She had been compared with her famous predecessor, and even her friends had to admit the result was not in her favor. But she refused to back down or apologize. She also refused to resign from the DAR, as several friends urged, and stuck to her argument that Bess Truman had no power to change their policies. Mother was still trying to deny that she was public property. She was also still very angry at her political partner, the overworked President, who had gotten her into this mess.
True to her instincts for privacy, Bess waited until she got back to Independence to explode. She and I went home to our wonderful old house on North Delaware Street on December 18, 1945. My father, embroiled in negotiations with the Russians, did not leave Washington aboard his plane, The Sacred Cow, until Christmas Day. He flew through weather that had grounded every commercial airliner in the nation and arrived to be confronted by a glowering wife. “So you’ve finally arrived,” Bess said. “As far as I’m concerned you might as well have stayed in Washington.”
I was having too much fun with old Independence friends to detect the chill in the air. But I noticed a certain lack of warmth when Mother said good-bye to Dad on December 27 as he rushed back to Washington to deal with yet another crisis, this one with a runaway secretary of state.
Back in the Big White Jail, Dad wrote Mother the most scorching letter of his life and mailed it special delivery. He then spent the night worrying about it rather than sleeping. The next day he called me in Independence and told me to collect the letter at the post office before it was delivered and burn it. “It’s a very angry letter,” he said. “I don’t want your mother to see it.”
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