by FDR
Nancy Cook and Eleanor became fast friends almost immediately, and through Nancy, ER soon met Marion Dickerman, the first woman to run for legislative office in New York. Cook and Miss Dickerman had been partners since their days as graduate students at Syracuse in 1909 and shared an apartment in Greenwich Village. Ardent feminists and committed pacifists, they had served as Red Cross volunteers at a London hospital during the war. After the war ended, Cook managed Dickerman’s campaign for the legislature.51
Cook was short, athletic, and excitable, with close-cropped hair and expressive brown eyes. One biographer described her as “dashing and roguish, flirtatious and irreverent.” Dickerman, by contrast, was tall, calm, steady, and soft-spoken—a woman of “rhythmic regularity.”52 When ER met them, Dickerman was dean of New Jersey State College in Trenton and taught English at Bryn Mawr during the summer; Cook was assistant director of the women’s division of and an indefatigable organizer for the New York Democratic party. Eleanor, who sometimes lamented her lack of a university education, rejoiced in the company of these professional women. During the next dozen years, she, Nancy, and Marion would become almost inseparable.53
At Franklin’s urging, Eleanor devoted as much time to Dutchess County politics as to her work with the state committee. FDR recognized that an upstate Democrat had to secure his base if he were to be effective statewide. He also believed that the dismal showing of the Democratic party upstate was the result of poor organization and neglect.54 Franklin directed the local effort from his sitting room at Hyde Park, and Eleanor and Howe became his eager lieutenants.* ER recruited several friends and set out to organize and register the women in the county. She spoke frequently to various civic groups. Initially, Howe accompanied her, sat in the back of the hall, and monitored her performance. When her hands shook, he told her to grip the lectern; when she felt nervous, he told her to breathe deeply. Howe was especially critical of ER’s penchant to giggle inappropriately. It sent the wrong message. His advice was terse: “Have something to say. Say it. And sit down.”55
In the autumn, Franklin returned to the city. “I am just back in New York after a very successful summer at Hyde Park,” he wrote defeated presidential candidate James Cox, now titular head of the Democratic party. “The combination of warm weather, fresh air and swimming has done me a world of good.” To his friend and sometime hunting companion Richard E. Byrd he wrote, “By next autumn I will be ready to chase the nimble moose with you.” To General Leonard Wood he boasted that his leg muscles “were all coming back.”56
ON OCTOBER 9, after an absence of fifteen months, FDR returned to the offices of Fidelity & Deposit on Lower Broadway. Franklin was determined to walk from the car across the sidewalk, in the front door, and through the lobby to the bank of elevators at the far end. As he heaved himself across the sidewalk, his chauffeur at his side, a crowd of passersby gathered to watch. Someone opened the door. Others stood aside to let him through. Drenched in sweat, Roosevelt began to crutch himself across the highly polished floor of the marble lobby. Suddenly his left foot gave way and he began to fall. The chauffeur reached out but was unable to hold him. Franklin crashed flat on the marble, his crutches clattering down beside him. Onlookers rushed in, then drew back, uncertain what to do.
With an enormous effort Roosevelt wrestled himself into a sitting position. He laughed reassuringly. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he told anxious spectators. “We’ll get out of this all right. Give me a hand there.” Two muscular young men stepped forward and with the help of the chauffeur lifted Franklin to his feet. His crutches were restored and his hat was replaced on his head. “Let’s go,” he said. The spectators opened a path and watched breathlessly as FDR hauled himself across the marble floor, smiling and nodding, one laborious step after another, his knuckles white on the handles of his crutches.57
Describing the day to his friend Livingston Davis, Franklin said only that he’d had a “Grand reception at 120 Broadway where I lunched and spent 4–5 hours.”58 In the future, FDR allowed himself to be whisked in by wheelchair. He initially came two days a week, then three, then four. But Roosevelt did not return to his law firm. “The partners are dear, delightful people,” he wrote Van Lear Black, “but their type of law business is mostly estates, wills, etc., all of which bore me to death.” Instead, Franklin decided to organize a new firm “with my name at the head instead of at the tail as it is now.”* This, he told Black, would benefit F & D, “as our connections would be the type of corporations which would help in the bonding end of the game.”59
One of the men who helped pull Franklin to his feet in the lobby at 120 Broadway was Basil O’Connor, a young red-haired attorney whose office was next door to Fidelity & Deposit. A live-wire graduate of Dartmouth (voted “most likely to succeed” by his classmates) and the Harvard Law School, O’Connor was exactly the type of energetic partner FDR was looking for. He had developed a successful one-man practice handling a variety of international clients in the oil and gas industry and thought nothing of working fifteen-hour days for weeks at a time.
The two men hit it off instantly. Franklin respected O’Connor’s aggressiveness and dedication; O’Connor admired the way Roosevelt handled his affliction—his grace under pressure—and saw the advantages that would flow from identifying himself with so illustrious a name. They agreed to form a partnership. The firm would be called “Roosevelt & O’Connor.”60 FDR would be the front man and provide “general legal advice” at a salary of $10,000 a year. O’Connor would do the work.
As with Louis Howe, it was a case of opposites attracting each other. O’Connor’s father had been an impoverished tinsmith in Taunton, Massachusetts, and Basil had worked his way through Dartmouth playing violin in a dance orchestra. He and FDR became lifelong friends, and their partnership endured until Roosevelt’s death. The president often used O’Connor to transmit messages he did not wish to entrust to political associates—a confidential conduit he knew he could rely on. The fact that during the 1920s their law office was adjacent to Fidelity & Deposit made it easy for Franklin to dovetail both callings.
FDR kept close watch on the Democratic political scene. In December 1922 he counseled against the search for a charismatic figure to lead the party out of the wilderness. “Personal candidacies so rarely develop into anything tangible,” he wrote Byron R. Newton of the New York Herald. “In our own Party for the last 50 or 60 years the nomination for the Presidency has been nearly every time a matter of luck, or some eleventh hour opportunity boldly seized upon.” What was important, said Roosevelt, was “to make the nation understand again that Republican rule means government by selfish interests and powerfully entrenched individuals.”61
Friends and acquaintances bombarded FDR with home remedies. In February 1923 an old friend in England sent a new elixir that she was certain would effect a cure. “It may be monkey glands or perhaps it is made out of the dried eyes of the extinct three-toed rhinoceros,” Franklin wrote Dr. Draper. “You doctors have sure got imaginations. Have any of you thought of distilling the remains of King Tut-Ankh-Amen? The serum might put new life into some of our mutual friends. In the meantime, I am going to Florida to let nature take its course—nothing like Old Mother Nature anyway.”62
Roosevelt rented a sixty-foot houseboat, the Weona II, for $1,500 and planned to spend several months cruising off the Florida Keys. Eleanor accompanied him for the first few days but did not enjoy herself and returned to New York. “I had never considered holidays in winter or escape from cold weather an essential part of living,” she remembered. “I tried fishing but had no skill and no luck. When we anchored at night and the wind blew, it all seemed eerie and menacing to me.”63
Franklin, on the other hand, had a rollicking good time. Old friends came down to visit—Livingston Davis; Lewis Cass Ledyard, Jr., and his wife, Ruth; Henry and Frances De Rahm; and John Lawrence and his wife, Lucy. Ledyard had been an intimate friend of FDR since their clerkship days at Carter, Ledyard & Milbu
rn; De Rahm was a Harvard classmate, and Frances, née Dana, had been one of Franklin’s early heartthrobs; Lawrence, another classmate, was now a prosperous New England wool manufacturer.
Except for Franklin, the men began each day with a swim au naturel. Frances De Rahm evidently went skinny-dipping too on occasion. As she jauntily wrote in the ship’s log:
A female went swimming—she was far from a peach.
She was as the Lord made her, so what could she do
But call herself, gaily, a true 32.
Louis Howe brought down some paperwork that needed FDR’s attention and spent a few days on board. Like Eleanor, he had little luck fishing; unlike ER, he gladly took refuge in the illicit rum that flowed freely. As Howe put it:
Colder, colder grew the night, we really suffered pain.
We’d sat and sat with rod and reel and fished and fished in vain.
And that we thought was reason fair to take to rum again.
In Miami, former presidential candidate James Cox came aboard for a visit. “Jim’s eyes filled with tears when he saw me,” FDR recalled years later. “I gathered from his conversation that he was dead certain that I had had a stroke and that another one would completely remove me. From that day on Jim always shook his head when my name was mentioned and said in sorrow that I was a hopeless invalid.”64
Cox to the contrary, the voyage worked wonders for Franklin’s morale. “I am sure this warmth and exercise is doing lots of good,” he wrote his mother on March 15. “I am sunburned and in fine shape. My friends have been dear and look after me all the time. They are great fun to have on board in this somewhat negligée existence. All wander round in pyjamas, nighties and bathing suits.”65 When the cruise ended at the end of March, FDR felt that his legs had improved so markedly that he might soon walk simply with a cane or crutches. “Except for the braces, I’ve never felt better in my life,” he wrote Virginia senator Carter Glass.66
Kathleen Lake, Franklin’s physical therapist, examined him shortly after he returned and found him “immensely improved, looking at least ten years younger.” But the improvement was short-lived. The hectic pace of FDR’s life in New York soon wiped out the gains from the Florida trip. “If only his wife could be persuaded that he does not need urging on all day and entertaining all evening,” Mrs. Lake wrote Dr. Lovett. “He himself begins to understand how the city affects him … but he is so surrounded by family, all giving him advice and ordering him round that he gets quite desperate.”67
In May 1923 FDR traveled to Boston for a final examination by Dr. Lovett. The doctor told Eleanor he was satisfied that Franklin “handles himself better than he ever had” but there was no improvement in his condition. His arms and neck were normal. So were his bowel, bladder, and sexual functions. Yet he remained paralyzed from the waist down. He was unable to flex his hips; there was no motion in his hamstrings and very little in his toes.68 Six months later Dr. Draper confirmed Lovett’s diagnosis. “I am very much disheartened about his ultimate recovery,” wrote Draper. “I cannot help feeling that he has almost reached the limit of his possibilities. I only hope that I may be wrong on this.”69 FDR refused to accept the medical judgments as final. He continued to search for miracle cures, devoting himself increasingly to swimming and exercise, but other than improving his ability to get around, his efforts effected no change in his condition.
Roosevelt believed that cruising the warm waters of the Florida Keys held the secret to recovery. “The water got me into this fix,” he was fond of saying, “and the water will get me out.”70 Shortly after returning from his 1923 trip, he convinced John Lawrence to join him in purchasing a secondhand houseboat, the Roamer, for which they paid $3,750. They renamed it the Larooco—a contraction of Lawrence, Roosevelt, and Company—and planned to sail off the Florida coast each winter.
FDR went aboard for the first time on February 11, 1924. The Larooco was seventy-one feet long and according to John Lawrence looked like a floating tenement. The paint was peeling, the bulkheads leaked when it rained, and power was provided by two recalcitrant 35-horsepower engines that looked as though they might have been invented by Robert Fulton. “A great little packet,” Roosevelt proclaimed, believing that the boat simply suffered from “lots of bad luck.”71
Franklin’s stateroom, with an adjacent bath, was on the port side. Across a narrow passageway were two smaller cabins for guests, each with two beds. On the deck above was a large stateroom that doubled as wheelhouse. Above that was a broad deck, shaded by a ragged canopy. The ship’s crew consisted of an elderly couple from Connecticut, Robert and Dora Morris, who were paid $125 a month. Robert Morris sailed the ship; Dora did the cooking and housekeeping. They were assisted by George Dyer, a young mechanic who labored to keep the engines running.72
Before FDR went south, Louis Howe presented him with an elegant black leather logbook embossed in gold letters: “Log of the Houseboat Larooco, Being a More or Less Truthful Account of What Happened (Expurgated for the Very Young).” It was dedicated to St. Ananias and St. Sapphira, “the patron saints of liars and fishermen.” Not to be outdone, Livingston Davis sent Franklin his old ensign as assistant secretary of the Navy. “A million thanks for the old astnav flag,” Roosevelt replied. “I will take it south with me and some day … ‘hist’ the old rag to the mast-head and salute it with 17 rum swizzles.”73*
Franklin was accompanied on that first voyage by his Negro valet, LeRoy Jones, and Missy LeHand. Jones played a vital but unsung role in FDR’s life. He woke him in the morning, bathed him, dressed him, and took care of his most basic needs—a gentle caregiver without whom Roosevelt could not have functioned. Missy was FDR’s personal secretary and already a member of the family. She was totally devoted to the Roosevelts and they to her.
Marguerite A. LeHand, twenty-five in the winter of 1924, stood five feet, seven inches tall. She was warm and attractive, with ink-blue eyes, black hair already turning gray, and an engaging, throaty voice. She was also modest, well mannered, exceptionally capable, and thoroughly organized—“a compound of cunning and innocence forever baffling,” in the words of the author and editor Fulton Oursler. A native of Potsdam, New York, Missy had grown up in Somerville, Massachusetts, the third child of an Irish gardener. It was at Eleanor’s suggestion in 1921 that she left her employment with the Democratic National Committee to work full-time for FDR, clearing up his correspondence after the vice presidential race. In the three years since, she had become indispensable, not only managing Roosevelt’s office, screening his visitors, and keeping track of his varied interests but doing so with such charm and courtesy that even those turned away felt placated. In New York, she stayed with a relative on the East Side so she could reach the Roosevelt home at any hour and became almost as ubiquitous as Louis Howe.74
Missy often accompanied FDR to Hyde Park for working weekends, and over the years she allowed her life to be taken over by his, assuming his likes and dislikes, his favorite drinks and games, even his turns of phrase. She called him “F.D.”—a name no one else dared use—and, like Louis Howe, she always leveled with him and said exactly what she thought. “She was one of the very, very few people who was not a yes-man,” remembered Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. “She told [the president] not what she knew he wanted to hear, but what were, in fact, her true views and convictions.”75
What is most remarkable is that Eleanor was completely supportive and solicitous of Missy. As her friend and biographer, Joseph Lash, noted, ER “was grateful to the young woman. She knew that lack of mobility made the daily routines of life cumbersome and difficult for Franklin, and Missy’s presence freed him from housekeeping anxieties and enabled him to stay in touch with the political world through a vast political correspondence, while it eased Eleanor’s sense of guilt because she was unable to do more for him.”76
Aboard the Larooco, Missy served as combination hostess and secretary, doing her utmost to ensure Franklin enjoyed himself. That was not always easy. “The
re were days on the Larooco when it was noon before he could pull himself out of depression and greet his guests wearing his lighthearted façade,” she tearfully told Frances Perkins many years later.77 Missy entertained graciously, encouraged FDR to tell his favorite stories, went fishing with him—though she sunburned easily—and was accepted naturally by Roosevelt’s many acquaintances. Once that spring she was called away suddenly by the death of her father and was gone almost two weeks. When Missy returned, Eleanor wrote Franklin, “I haven’t told Mama that Missy is back because she has more peace of mind when she doesn’t know such things.”78
It was a unique arrangement.* Franklin, Missy, and LeRoy Jones went back again to the Larooco in the spring of 1925 and again in 1926, after which FDR decided he had had enough. “The sharks make it impossible to play around in the deep water for any length of time, and the sand beaches are few and far between.”79 After the 1926 cruise, Larooco was laid up at the Pilkington Yacht Basin on the Fort Lauderdale River while Roosevelt and Lawrence attempted to sell her. A September hurricane swept the boat upriver, where it came to rest high and dry at the edge of a pine forest, a mile from the nearest water. FDR tried to sell the boat as a hunting lodge, but there were no takers, and in 1927 Larooco was scrapped. “So ended a good craft with a personality,” he wrote Sara.80
Franklin went back to New York toward the end of April 1924. The presidential campaign was heating up, and Al Smith, fresh from his overwhelming reelection as governor, was angling for the Democratic nomination. His principal opponent was Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law (and former secretary of the Treasury) William Gibbs McAdoo. McAdoo was dry, Protestant, and old-stock American. Because of his support for Prohibition he enjoyed the support of Bryan and the rural wing of the party and had become the darling of the Ku Klux Klan, a potent force in national politics following the Red Scare of 1919–20.† Smith was none of the above. Almost by default he became the candidate of the urban, progressive wing of the party, and FDR announced his support early on. “I have always supposed that if I went to the next Convention I would, in common with the rest of the [New York] delegation, be for Al,” he told the New York Post in January.
