Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  Eleanor and I were often together. Early that year, I spent several days at the White House for some Democratic party doings, dressing up in my new black velvet gown—although Bill Dana (who was also there) later told Ella that I looked “like a royal Bengal tiger with the sulks.” In March, Eleanor and I spent ten pretty days in the Smoky Mountains (she hiked, I didn’t) and then drove on to Asheville and Charleston. We avoided tourists and the press and were almost able to recapture—or at least to remember—the romantic magic of our early months together. Then she went back to the White House and I went on the road for Hopkins.

  And there were lovely evenings in New York, where we enjoyed dinners, the theater, and opera. In October, she came to the Little House for her birthday weekend—one of our very best times together. She asked me to reconsider going with her to Val-Kill, but I refused. “There’s just no privacy there,” I told her, “too many people and altogether too much friction. Sorry, dear, but I covet my peace and quiet.”

  Later that month, Harper & Brothers published her memoir—This Is My Story—and dispatched her on a lengthy speaking and book-signing tour, with Tommy going along to help manage the practical details. When she got back, we celebrated an early Christmas together with a tender sweetness that cast a lovely halo around the holiday. As always, loving Eleanor was a work in progress.

  I had the usual professional ups and downs that year and the next, the downs mostly precipitated by the stress of office politics, but also by my health. Diabetes isn’t easy to cope with. It was harder in those days, before insulin was perfected and the emotional effects of blood sugar spikes were still a mystery. I was often prickly, swearing at the traffic, biting the heads off my colleagues, and feeling sometimes that my life wasn’t worth a helluva lot. I used my letters to Eleanor to blow off steam. As I read them now, noting my strings of whiney complaints, I can see what a difficult time I was having on the job, doing PR work I didn’t always entirely believe in, with people I didn’t always like.

  But those unhappy weeks were balanced by the restful seclusion of weekends at the Little House, the home of my heart, where I could relax and be myself. I was delighted when Eleanor promised to spend a full week with me there the next summer, and I couldn’t help hoping that the week might rekindle our dream of living together someday, somewhere. She changed the date a half-dozen times, but it finally happened in late July. We had picnics on the beach at Fire Island, dinners with Bill and Ella and Clarence and Annie, walks in the woods and along the shore with Prinz, and sunsets and sunrises and splendid weather.

  And it was just the two of us, since Eleanor hadn’t brought Tommy. I had put my foot down on this issue months before, in spite of the fact that I was very fond of Tommy. The reason is, I wrote, that when you and Tommy are together you can never forget your darned jobs for more than fifteen minutes at a time. But Eleanor fretted without her work, and especially without the telephone. “It’s like being cut off from the world,” she complained.

  We tried to laugh about it, but our time together showed both of us how hard it was for her to disconnect from her infinite succession of projects and showed me how fruitless it was to try to hold onto our old dream. If we lived together, I would have to live her kind of life. At one time, I would have said yes to that proposition and happily buried my needs in the service of hers. But I was no longer the woman who had fallen in love with Eleanor six years before, just as she was no longer the woman I’d fallen in love with. When our vacation was over, I went back to Mitchell Place and my friends and my work with a stronger sense of being my own person, still loving Eleanor but in a different, more sisterly way.

  She also had her own homes now. She kept her rented apartment on Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village, and her renovation of the Val-Kill furniture workshop was finally finished and she was able to invite friends to stay there. The Sixty-Fifth Street townhouse was rented and would soon be sold. And the White House seemed, she said, to be less like a home and more like a hotel, where she stayed when she was expected to perform her official duties. It had always been divided into two courts—FDR’s and ER’s—but now that Louis Howe was dead, the division seemed deeper and colder. Louis had connected Eleanor and Franklin, and now there was no one to bridge the gap between them. Even Harry Hopkins, who had originally been her friend, now found it politically expedient to become FDR’s man, and Missy was constantly on hand to meet the president’s every demand.

  Still, things seemed a little easier for her. She was looking forward to the end of the second term and a return, she hoped, to something like a normal life. FDR hadn’t told his advisors whether or not he would try to break the no-third-term tradition, which wasn’t embodied into law until the term limit amendment was ratified in 1951. He had told Eleanor privately, however, that he wouldn’t seek the nomination again—unless a major war broke out and he felt obliged to stay at the helm.

  But she shook her head sadly when she told me this one evening over dinner at Mitchell Place. She understood that FDR had said only that he wouldn’t seek the nomination. He hadn’t said he would refuse a draft. And whenever she looked in the direction of Europe, she could see the clouds of war, dark and ominous on the horizon.

  The headlines in those years were grim. In July 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared in the Pacific. A massive naval search was launched, but there was no sign of her plane. I heard some whispered speculation that FDR had sent her on a secret mission to spy on the Japanese, but even though I was always suspicious of his left hook, I didn’t believe it.

  But the international situation was clearly deteriorating. In the same month that Amelia was lost, Japan invaded China. Early the next year, German troops marched into Austria, and Hitler annexed it as part of the German Reich. Six months later, Italy ordered Jews to leave, and two months later, Nazi troops and civilians destroyed Jewish shops, burned synagogues, and killed Jews in a violent rampage across Germany and Austria that came to be known as “Kristallnacht,” the “Night of Broken Glass.”

  And on September 21, a hurricane swept the East Coast of the U.S. and changed the lives of everyone who lived there.

  Eleanor and I had been out to lunch that Wednesday when we heard a newsboy hawking the Daily News: a hurricane was blowing in our direction. The Weather Bureau had been predicting that it was going to hit Miami, but it had suddenly shifted to the north and was barreling up the coast. The “Yankee Clipper,” they were calling it. But like everyone else in the city, I was skeptical.

  “A hurricane in New England?” I said to Eleanor. “I don’t think so.”

  “Not very likely,” she replied, and we both agreed that we had other things to worry about. Still, I was concerned for Prinz. During the week, he stayed in the yard at the Little House, and Clarence and Bill looked after him. His kennel would keep him dry and warm in an ordinary storm, and if it got worse than that, I hoped they would remember to bring him in.

  New York City escaped the worst of the wind and storm surge. That night, there were sixty-mile-per-hour winds in Central Park and twice that on top of the Empire State Building. The storm surge was nearly nine feet at the Battery and in New York Harbor, the waters rose seven feet in thirty minutes. Still, other than street flooding and closed schools, the damage was minor.

  It was a different story across New England, where hundreds were dead, buildings were destroyed, roads were impassable, and all the wires were down. The newspapers reported that the eye of the hurricane had come ashore at Bayport, some twenty miles west of the Little House, and that the towns along the Atlantic coast of Long Island had been swept away by a tidal wave.

  I was frantic with worry but the phones were out and I couldn’t reach the Danas to find out what had happened. The fair site had been damaged, too, so it was late afternoon before I could get away from Flushing Meadows. Normally, the drive wasn’t much more than an hour, but it was slow going on the Montauk Highway, which was littered with storm debris. Trees were down eve
rywhere, the Mastic railroad station was destroyed, and sections of the Long Island Railroad tracks looked as if they had been ripped up by a bulldozer. At the entrance to the Dana estate, a huge pine tree lay across the road, and when I got out of the car, the stillness stunned me. The nights there were always filled with the sounds of tree frogs and katydids and night birds. Now, there was only silence, except for the thudding of my heart in my ears. I had covered a great many disasters as a reporter, but I had seen nothing like this.

  It took me an hour to climb over and crawl under and scramble through the downed trees to the Dana mansion, just two miles away. Twilight was falling and the farther I went, the more hopeless it seemed. If the storm had been so terrible here in the thick woods, how could anything have survived close to the shore, where the houses stood? But then I saw a light and heard the sound of a motor, and ten minutes later, I stumbled into the meadow, where a generator was running, providing electricity for Bill and Ella’s house.

  And there they all were, alive and unharmed—even Prinz. During the storm, Clarence and Annie had taken him to join Bill and Ella in the mansion, which suffered almost no damage from the wind. It was the flooding that did the most harm. The hurricane had coincided with the autumnal equinox and a full moon, producing tides as high as eighteen feet across Long Island. My Little House had several inches of water and all of its lovely old locust trees were gone, utterly gone. But my friends and Prinz, dear Prinz, were safe, and that was all I cared about.

  The very next week, that disaster was capped by another, even more devastating. In Munich, Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain and Edward Daladier of France agreed to Hitler’s demand that part of Czechoslovakia be ceded to Germany. In return, Hitler pledged not to lay claim to the rest of that country. But in England, Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard called it a “peace without honor,” and Winston Churchill thought it no peace at all. “We have sustained a defeat without a war,” he said somberly. “This is only the beginning.” Trying to convince an isolationist Congress of the threat of war, FDR replied, “Normal practices of diplomacy are of no possible use in dealing with international outlaws.” From Washington, Eleanor wrote to me: F said he’s done the last thing he can do and we can all pray.

  As the year neared its dark close, a different door opened for me—that is, it opened a crack just wide enough for me to see through. Molly Dewson, the powerhouse head of the Women’s Democratic Committee, would be leaving her post in another year. Eleanor asked if I would consider it.

  I would. In fact, there was nothing I would rather do. The Fair would be opening in April, and after that, the excitement would go out of my work, like air out of a balloon, and I’d be left with just the daily hurly-burly. But it was a good thing I wasn’t in any great hurry to make a move. It took a year for the door to fully open.

  And in the meantime, 1939 had brought nothing but gloom, for Bill Dana was dead. A heart attack, according to the New York Times obituary. But his family and friends knew that Bill—cheerful, amiable Bill, always smiling, always helpful—had put a gun to his head. He was in trouble with the IRS over a mistake his accountant had made years ago, and he owed so much in back taxes that he and Ella would have to sell both Moss Lots and the Arrowhead D to pay it off. His life insurance was enough to cover the debt, though, and until the check arrived, Ella crept around the place, pale and ghost-like. A few months later, she went out to Nevada and when she came back, she brought with her a blue-eyed cowboy, fifteen years her junior.

  I know from experience that hearts have their own will, but I had admired and cared for Bill and I was saddened that Ella could so easily forget him. When I told Eleanor how I felt, she replied archly, “I’m amused by Ella’s cowboy. She deserves to be happy, doesn’t she? Why should anyone care who she loves?”

  Eleanor may have been thinking of something else when she made that remark. For by that time, she had already begun a relationship with young Joe Lash—romantic on her part, quite practical on his. She would love Joe with as much intensity as she had once loved me, although (I think) without the physical intimacies that marked our own first years together.

  Was I jealous? Yes, certainly, although I already understood, and very clearly, that our friendship would never again be as richly passionate and consuming as it was in that first year. But my jealousy was outweighed by my concern, for I felt that loving this young man was personally and politically perilous to her, a threat to his welfare, and a hazard to both of them.

  Still, she loved him. And her love, like the irresistible storm tide that had swept across Long Island, would sweep across Joe’s world and turn it upside down. He would discover, as I had, that loving Eleanor—and being loved by her—was utterly life-changing

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  On the Record

  Eleanor met Joseph Lash on the train to Washington in late 1939. Joe, who was Jewish, was good-looking, tall, slender, and nearly the same age as her favorite son Elliott. Politically idealistic, he was executive secretary of the American Student Union, a coalition of radical youth groups that HUAC—the House Un-American Activities Committee—suspected to be communist sympathizers. Eleanor took him home to dinner and introduced him to the president. Joe visited the White House several times that winter, and as 1939 turned into 1940, she invited him to Val-Kill, where they spent hours talking beside the fire and in the woods. They met often in New York and Washington, and the next year, she took him and his youth group to Campobello for a month.

  Tommy, who rarely criticized her boss, felt that Eleanor was flinging herself into a relationship that would endanger both her and Lash. “She says her feeling is maternal,” she told me worriedly, “but she’s not fooling me one bit. And while Joe is a nice enough boy, he’s an opportunist. All this attention from the First Lady—who knows how he’ll use it?”

  I frowned. “What does Anna think?” Eleanor and her daughter were close, and Anna’s opinion might carry some weight.

  “Anna has already told her mother that this is ill-advised, and it hasn’t helped.” Tommy grew plaintive. “The Boss listens to you, Hick. Please talk some sense into her.”

  But if Anna couldn’t change her mother’s mind—or her heart, rather—I would surely fail. And what the hell could I say that wouldn’t sound like a mouthful of sour grapes? There was nothing that Tommy or I could do but hold our breaths and watch while Eleanor’s infatuation with Joe became an obsession. No matter that he was involved with someone else—a German woman named Trude who was married to a well-known New York philanthropist and who worried that she would lose her small children in a divorce. When Joe moved into an apartment in Manhattan, Eleanor sent him an expensive armchair from Wanamaker’s. For his birthday, she gave him a new Pontiac convertible. When he was at the White House, she didn’t make any secret of her affection, and he seemed to enjoy telling everyone about their friendship. Anyway, it wasn’t long before Washington society was buzzing about Eleanor and her young man.

  Official Washington had plenty of things to talk about, for 1940 was a whirlpool of international chaos and the United States was caught between a desire for neutrality and the fiery realities of European war. Backed by Hitler and Mussolini, Franco’s fascist rebels defeated the Spanish Republican government. Russia invaded Finland. Germany took Czechoslovakia and Poland. France, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand entered the war, while the United States stood on the sidelines. The British fleet was mobilized, the Royal Air Force attacked the German navy, and British mothers began sending their children out of London into the countryside, out of danger.

  The door to my new adventure opened with the new year and I stepped into the wild world of politics. I would be working for Charlie Michelson, the publicity director of the Democratic National Committee, in the DNC’s office at the Mayflower. Eleanor suggested that I live at the White House and I accepted. Living there might present a few problems, but it would allow me to give up the pricey Mitchell Place apartment. I would spend my w
eekends and holidays at the Little House, where Prinz could stay in the care of Clarence and Annie Ross.

  And, yes, Eleanor helped me land the DNC job, which was a damn good thing because employment for forty-seven-year-old women was exceedingly scarce. But I do have to say that I was exactly the right person. Charlie wasn’t quite sure how to use me at first, but he quickly figured it out and sent me on a cross-country trip to assess the voters’ feelings about the possibility of a third term for FDR.

  A third term? Both Washington and Jefferson had refused third terms, so no other two-term president had dared to consider it. Nobody was sure how the electorate would respond.

  I was quite aware of the multiple ironies. When the president was asked whether he would run, he would cast his eyes toward the ceiling and exclaim dramatically, “I am a tired and weary man”—which was very likely true but said nothing about whether he would or wouldn’t. The First Lady insisted publically that she did not want a third term (which may or may not have been true), but added that if her husband decided to run, she would support him. To me, she wrote: If FDR wins I’ll be glad for him and for the country and if he loses I’ll be glad for myself and the kids! Which put it quite succinctly, I thought. Loving Eleanor as I did, my own personal interest was clear, and everywhere I went, I listened for a chorus of opposition to the idea of a third term. But I had to tell Charlie that it looked like the president had a green light. To Eleanor, I wrote that everything I heard made FDR’s nomination seem inevitable: Darling, I’m sorry, but it’s all Third Term!