Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  I read that more than once and thought that it contained a lesson in loving Eleanor: loving and letting go.

  In late November, weary to the bone from the constant push and shove of the campaign and the election, I took some vacation time and went up to Long Island. Howard had married his Molly and they had a place of their own, so the Little House was all mine now. The New England autumn had been lovely, but as winter came on, the weather turned blustery. It was never too cold or windy for me, though. I loved to walk with Prinz along the shore, feeling the chill sting of salt mist on my face and listening to the roar of the wild Atlantic surf and the shrill cries of the seabirds. Back indoors, I would build a fire in the library and curl up in my favorite chair with a book or work at my typewriter at the walnut Val-Kill desk that Eleanor had given me. Evenings were the best, as the silvery twilight fell across the ocean and the old house stood sturdy against the winter wind.

  Marion came up to join me the first weekend in December, bringing Ernest Hemingway’s new novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, an excellent pinot noir, and a cherished pound of Brazilian coffee, so hard to get. On Saturday, I baked a chicken with dressing and Marion made her famous double chocolate cake, and we invited Clarence and Annie for supper—Ella, too, alone now, for money was scarce and the cowboy had moved on to greener pastures. On Sunday morning, I drove over to Mastic for the Times, and Marion and I were lazy and contented all morning. We had chicken soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and were washing the dishes when Clarence came running with the terrifying news. He had heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.

  Marion and I stared at one another. At last, in a voice very unlike her own, she said, “This is it, Hick. It’s finally happening.” She put her arms around me. “War.”

  We clung together, each feeling the other’s heart beating against the fear, against the darkness and death on the other side of the world, where war had become a fiery tide that would engulf all of us. I knew it would change our lives in ways we couldn’t imagine. But it would change Eleanor’s life even more, and I knew that the pain in my heart was nothing to the pain she must be feeling.

  That night, listening to the radio, I heard her voice, her familiar voice, whose every lilt and dip and cadence I knew as well as I knew my own. She was speaking, live, before her regular prerecorded Sunday night broadcast. The next day, the president would speak to the Congress and the nation. But tonight, she was speaking for all Americans, rather than to us, saying the words that each of us, all of us needed to say for ourselves.

  “We know what we have to face,” she said quietly, “and we know that we are ready to face it. We must go about our daily business more determined than ever to do the ordinary things as well as we can. When we find a way to do anything more in our communities to help others, to build morale, to give a feeling of security, we must do it. Whatever is asked of us, we can accomplish it.”

  Whatever is asked of us, we can accomplish it—words that rang with a confident certainty, inspiring that same confidence in every listener. Somewhere, Louis Howe must be smiling down on the reluctant First Lady who had proved herself a master strategist, always able to find the words that would bring people together and move them to do what had to be done. It was an inspired message, and by the end of it, I was overwhelmed with pride. Marion put her arm around me and gripped my hand, as if to hold me to her. But my heart was reaching out for Eleanor, loving her still, loving her always.

  By the time I got back to the White House, the halls were filled with steadily purposeful activity. The cabinet was in continuous meetings, congressional leaders were coming and going, and State Department and military officers were in and out. The president’s advisers were receiving continual reports about the damage to U.S. installations, ships, and planes in Hawaii, and newspapers all over the country were putting out special editions. Just after noon on Monday, the president went to Capitol Hill to address a joint session of Congress and the nation, asking for a declaration of war against Japan. It was five a.m. in London, but hundreds of thousands of Britons heard his address. A few hours later, as a gray twilight fell outside the Oval Office, FDR signed the declaration of war. A little later, he wired Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “Today all of us are in the same boat with you and the people of the Empire and it is a ship that cannot and will not be sunk.”

  Brave words on the first day of a long, bleak week. On December 9, the Japanese seized Guam. On December 10, four thousand Japanese troops landed on the Philippine Islands, and Japanese aircraft sank the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse.

  And on December 11, Germany and Italy declared war against the United States.

  Overnight, everything changed. At the White House, blackout curtains went up and, at the order of the Secret Service, some windows were painted black. A machine gun was installed on the roof of FDR’s swimming pool, and soldiers armed with high-powered rifles were stationed on the roof of the White House. People left their offices after work and hurried home without stopping to shop. The lights were turned off on the Capitol dome, all the streetlights went dark, and the streets were silent and eerily empty. But all night long, I could hear the clanking and hissing of a giant steam shovel, digging a bomb shelter in the area between the White House and the Treasury Building.

  Winston Churchill arrived on December 22, landing on the White House like a grenade. Eleanor had to find room for the prime minister and his large staff on the second floor. I set up a cot in Lillian’s third floor sewing room for the duration, took most of my meals out, and tried to be invisible. That wasn’t hard, for Churchill dominated all affairs for the three-and-a-half weeks he stayed at the White House. He rarely went to bed before three in the morning, slept until eleven, and took two hot baths and a long afternoon nap every day. He gave Alonzo Fields, FDR’s butler, a standing drink order: a tumbler of sherry before breakfast, a couple of scotch and sodas before lunch, and brandy and French champagne before bed—in addition to the usual cocktails in FDR’s study and wine at dinner.

  On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, some twenty thousand Washingtonians came to watch the commander in chief light the nation’s Christmas tree, a living, thirty-foot Oriental spruce planted on the South Lawn of the White House. After the usual carols, we heard from the president and the prime minister. Wrapped in his overcoat like a great wooly bear, Churchill wished that at this Christmas season, “each home throughout the English-speaking world should be a brightly lighted island of happiness and peace.” I wondered why those who didn’t speak English shouldn’t be happy and peaceful too, but it didn’t seem the time to quibble. On Christmas Day, Churchill’s holiday was marred by a telegram. The British forces in Hong Kong had surrendered to the Japanese.

  Washington was getting ready for war. In the basement of the White House, the president commandeered the ladies cloakroom and turned it into his map room, staffed twenty-four hours a day. At the Library of Congress, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were bundled up and secretly transported, via the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, to Fort Knox, where at 12:07 p.m. on December 27 (everything at Fort Knox is exactly recorded), they were locked up in the vault where they would remain until the war’s end. And out on the old Hoover Field across the Potomac, a huge building had begun going up, a monstrosity, people said, the goddamnest thing anybody ever saw. It was constructed in five wedge-shaped sections, with seventeen and a half miles of corridors and 150 stairways. Construction began on August 11, 1941, and moved with the speed of imagination. On April 29, 1942, three hundred employees from the Ordnance Department sat down at their desks in the new Pentagon.

  April also brought the first good newspaper headlines of the war: Tokyo Bombed! The city was so far from any Allied airbase that everyone was astonished. Where had the planes taken off? How far had they flown? FDR, who ordered the raid, said teasingly that they had taken off from Shangri-La, the fictional Himalayan paradise—and the name of the presidential retreat. A co
uple of weeks later, we learned that the daring daylight raid had been led by Brigadier General James Doolittle and that the raiders had flown from the aircraft carrier Hornet, nearly seven hundred sea miles from Tokyo. American morale shot up. If FDR’s chief aim had been to prove to the nation that the capital of Japan was in striking distance, he had succeeded beyond question.

  April was also the month that Eleanor’s friend, Joe Lash, put on his Army uniform. She had tried to get him a commission in the Naval Intelligence Service, but when the newspapers began to claim that the First Lady was attempting to install a “former Communist organizer” in an American military spy service, she had to drop her efforts. It would have been best if he had been able to go quietly off to basic training. Instead, Eleanor gave him an extravagant going-away party at the Brevoort Hotel in New York, with an eight-piece orchestra and a lavish menu and an eight-piece orchestra. Joe, Tommy said, was “terribly embarrassed” by the sendoff.

  All over the country, the newspapers were cruel to her that year, and I cringed when I read the savagely critical stories. I didn’t like to think what the administration’s publicity people were saying about the president’s wife, and Tommy kept shaking her head as she read, muttering “I try and try to tell her that young man is dangerous, but she just won’t listen.”

  I’ll admit to some resentment and perhaps even jealousy, but for the most part, I felt sorry for Joe. When he met Eleanor, he was very young and under attack by powerful forces, trying to find a place for himself in a world that challenged his political ideologies and cast him as an outsider. He must have been overwhelmed by her friendship, seeing it both as a refuge and as an opportunity. But I often wondered whether he felt that loving Eleanor—and being loved by Eleanor—was too great a burden to bear.

  On the home front that year, the war meant getting used to shortages.

  The military needed guns and ammunition, but before anything else, it needed uniforms—64 million shirts, 229 million pairs of trousers, and 165 million coats—which meant that there wouldn’t be a lot of material left for civilian clothing. There would be restrictions on fabric, dyes, zippers, and even buttons. To reduce the amount of fabric needed, the War Production Board came up with a new “Victory” suit for men, with narrower lapels and cuffless trousers. For women, hems and belts were restricted to two inches and cuffs on sleeves were eliminated. Skirts rose alarmingly above the knee. Box pleats were out (too much fabric) and kick pleats were in. Patch pockets were replaced by smaller slash pockets.

  And nylons? Forget it! DuPont, the only producer of nylon in the United States, stopped making hosiery and started making parachutes. You could sometimes find pre-war stockings on the black market for $20 a pair, or you could learn to use leg makeup and paint dark seams down the backs of your legs. If you were a shoe fancier, though, you were really out of luck. You could buy only one pair a year.

  We women might be prepared to shorten our skirts and paint our legs, but when the rubber shortage threatened our girdles, we rebelled. The girdle companies came up with a “Victory Girdle” that had no stays, no rubber, and no silk, but nobody bought it. The War Production Board suggested that women should grow their own “muscular girdles” through exercise, but the idea never caught on. At last, after the women’s magazines raised a nationwide hue and cry, the WPB hung out the white flag. Foundation garments would be considered an essential part of a woman’s wardrobe and would continue to be manufactured and sold, no matter how much rubber they took.

  Getting used to shortages meant getting used to rationing. Every American civilian—even the children—got a book of stamps containing forty-eight “points” per month that could be spent on rationed goods, including meat, butter, sugar, shoes, and other scarce commodities. At the White House, Mrs. Nesbitt confiscated stamps from all the residents, including the president and the First Lady, and used them to buy groceries.

  The phrase “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” was on everybody’s lips, especially when you tried to buy cigarettes, which were being sent to “our boys overseas” by the shipload. One afternoon I heard that a drugstore at 15th and H Street had cigarettes, but after a half hour in line, what I got at the counter was a chocolate bar—also scarce and welcome enough, but not as satisfying as a pack of Pall Malls. When I joined Marion for drinks before dinner, she offered me a few puffs of the pipe she was smoking. But I had learned to roll my own cigarettes when I worked in the newsroom, so I pulled out my fixings and went to work. It didn’t do much for my reputation, but I could smoke when others couldn’t.

  With tires and gasoline rationed, everybody learned to walk again. Government employees walked to work rather than wait for standing-room-only buses. Taxies were as rare as good cups of coffee, so Embassy Row diplomats took to their heels. In bars, beer was rationed, so beer drinkers got used to moving from bar to bar in the evening—walking fast or slow, depending on their thirst.

  But the First Lady always walked with her long, swinging stride, with Tommy, steno pad in hand, trotting wearily behind, taking the dictation that the Boss tossed back over her shoulder. She spent three weeks touring England and another six visiting the troops in the Pacific—including a visit to Joe on Guadalcanal—as well as dropping in, unexpectedly, on military installations in the U.S. From Puerto Rico, where she was inspecting the troops, she wrote, Hick dearest, I have thought of you so much ever since I arrived, reminding me that it was almost ten years since our trip there together. Ten years? It seemed a century. A few days later, she wrote again as she flew over the Amazon River. Gosh, I replied wistfully, remembering that I had once wanted to go to war-torn Spain, I’d like to go to South America sometime. But the war kept me at home, as it sent her abroad.

  The tone of our letters changed in those years, not because I loved her less but because our lives were taking each of us in different directions. She was Eleanor Everywhere, and her heart was set on Joe. I was in Washington for the duration, and so (most of the time) was Marion, who was a passionate partner in our relationship. Her office was just a few blocks from the White House, and she got into the habit of dropping off little notes with the White House sentries on her way home at night. Both of us enjoyed gardening and wrote about it often. Marion planted a dozen lilacs and swamp maple saplings at the Little House, and together we put in some peonies. When I took a week’s vacation to work in the garden, she wrote: I can’t tell you how much it means to me to look forward to the weekend with you. I wish so much that I could be there all of this week with you. Some of our friends may have honeysuckle in their yard but we have our own trellis and vines, roses in summer and burning pine in the winter. I think we’ll make out very well… All my love darling—and a kiss.

  For Christmas in those years, we gave each other practical presents: from me to Marion, two pairs of black-market nylons, a pre-war latex Living Girdle, and a new tire for her car; from her to me, a sweater and a ton of “black diamonds,” coal for the Little House, which was the devil to heat in the winter. When I was in Chicago for the DNC, she sent me a postcard with a photograph of the Hay-Adams House at 16th and H Streets, with a hand-inked arrow pointing to a third-floor room that we had once shared. X marks the spot, she wrote on the back. Let me go on the record to say “wish we were here,” m’dear. When she was in Louisville, hearing a tax case, she wrote, sweetly, amusingly poetic: Hick, darling, I love to hear you laugh and see you smile. Do you know that your mirth is as light and bright as sunshine, and as warm?

  But there wasn’t a lot to be mirthful about in those days. It wasn’t until late 1942 that we had more good news about the war, when the Allied landing in North Africa went off as planned. But it was well into 1943 before the Germans were routed. After that, Sicily and then Italy, a long, weary battle. And then months and months of silence as the Allies prepared for D-Day, June 1944. In the Pacific, the victories were even slower in coming, and the casualties mounted alarmingly.

  I read the newspapers with great attention, especially when
I spotted the names of women correspondents who were covering the war. My friends from FERA days were there: Martha Gellhorn and Margaret Bourke-White. Janet Flanner of the New Yorker, Helen Kirkpatrick of the Chicago Daily News, Marguerite Higgens of the New York Herald Tribune. I thought back to the day in 1917 when I’d been told that females didn’t cover wars and glowed with pride at their work. I often thought longingly of joining them, but I had to be realistic. Given my diabetes, it was physically difficult to do my job for the DNC in wartime Washington. I couldn’t have done a reporter’s job in wartime Europe or North Africa or the Far East. That was a landmark realization for me, and not a happy one.

  I often saw Eleanor’s name in the newspapers, too, especially in connection with the “Eleanor Clubs” that were supposedly being organized by Southern black servants who were demanding better pay and fewer hours. The First Lady heard so often about these clubs that she finally asked the FBI to find out whether they actually existed. J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t Eleanor’s friend, and I was sure he would’ve been glad to hand her a long list of clubs. But the FBI couldn’t find even one. The report concluded that Mrs. Roosevelt—who had been arguing for better treatment of household help—was being blamed for the fact that Negro cooks and maids were leaving their white employers for higher pay in the wartime factories.

  Eleanor was also taking plenty of flak for her energetic support of Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers’s bill to create the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. “Shame, shame, Mrs. Roosevelt!” the conservative newspapers cried. “Women don’t belong in uniform!” And on the floor of the House, a congressman warned, “If Mrs. Roosevelt has her way and the women go into the armed service, there will be no one left to wear the apron—to do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the many humble homey tasks to which every woman has devoted herself.”