The Roosevelts
Page 39
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Eager for Mrs. Roosevelt’s approval, the Democratic presidential nominee, John F. Kennedy, lunches at Val-Kill, August 10, 1960. She endorsed him, and afterward wrote a reassuring letter to several fellow Stevenson supporters: “I gather that [Kennedy’s] understanding of the difficulties of the campaign that face him have matured him in a short time.… I liked him better than I ever had before because he seemed so little cocksure, and I think he has a mind that is open to new ideas.”
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Campaigning in Manhattan with Kennedy and his running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, the evening before election day
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A Good Deal of My Uncle Theodore
On Mrs. Roosevelt’s seventy-seventh birthday in 1961 someone asked her if she should slow down. “I suppose I should,” she said. But “I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.”
But in fact she was beginning to slow down. In July of 1962, she was hospitalized for a time with intermittent fever and infections. David Gurewitsch diagnosed aplastic anemia, a rare condition in which the body fails to produce enough new blood cells.
Later that summer, she, David, Edna, and Maureen Corr, made a trip to Campobello, the island where she had had the first home she considered truly her own, and where Franklin had taught his children to sail. But it was also the place where during the Great War she had fretted over his closeness to Lucy Mercer, and where she had watched helplessly as infantile paralysis ravaged his body.
She was too frail to walk very far, but her friends helped her make it to her favorite picnic spot. She loved the island in the daytime, she said, but after dark the memories flooded back. “The night,” she said, “has a thousand eyes.”
She was hospitalized again when they got back to the city and grew steadily worse despite everything the doctors tried to do. When Dr. Gurewitsch told her she could still be saved, she shook her head. “David,” she said, “I want to die.” Life for her without being able to be useful was not worth living.
She insisted on being taken home to her apartment—and worried after she got there that she’d failed to be sufficiently grateful to the men who’d carried her stretcher.
Eleanor Roosevelt died in her own bedroom on November 7, 1962. She was seventy-eight years old.
Mrs. Roosevelt in her bedroom on East Seventy-fourth Street, 1962. Pictures of friends and family members cover the wall and dresser; correspondence and articles marked for reading lie heaped on nearly every surface.
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With Edna and David Gurewitsch, picnicking on Campobello Island, August 1962. She had to be helped to stand, David remembered, but never complained and, “though her strength was rapidly dwindling, … was full of plans for the autumn and winter.”
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Cutting marigolds to fill the vases in her guest rooms at Val-Kill
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The Great Organizer
The funeral was to be held in Hyde Park. David Gurewitsch would accompany her casket up the Hudson River. Edna Gurewitsch watched from the window as the hearse moved west on Sixty-fourth Street. When it reached the corner and stopped for a red light, she recalled, “I was amazed because I couldn’t believe the traffic lights were still working.”
President and Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and former Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower all watched alongside her children, her friends, and her neighbors as she was buried next to her husband in the heart of her mother-in-law’s rose garden, just as Franklin had wished her to be.
It had rained all morning, Edna Gurewitsch remembered, but as everyone gathered for the final rites, “suddenly it stopped raining. There was a burst of sunshine. All of us looked at each other and smiled because we knew why that happened. And just at the close of the service, it began to rain again. And we all said the same thing, ‘the Great Organizer.’ Mrs. Roosevelt was ‘the Great Organizer.’ ”
Not long before she died, Eleanor Roosevelt was asked if she believed in an afterlife. “I don’t know whether I believe in a future life,” she said. “I believe that all that you go through here must have some value.… I think I am pretty much of a fatalist. You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.”
Eleanor Roosevelt is laid to rest next to her husband in the Springwood rose garden, November 10, 1962. A week later, her friend Adlai Stevenson spoke at a memorial service in Manhattan: “We pray that she has found peace, and a glimpse of sunset. But today we weep for ourselves. We are lonelier, someone has gone from one’s own life who was like the certainty of refuge, and someone has gone from the world who was like the certainty of honor.”
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Three presidents and a president-to-be were among the mourners: (left to right) Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Harry and Bess Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and, over his shoulder, Margaret Truman Daniel.
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The dune called Cooper’s Bluff at Oyster Bay, as the Roosevelts remembered it
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Epilogue
One hot August afternoon back in 1939, the White House press corps crowded into FDR’s tiny office at Springwood. The war was then still weeks away, and there wasn’t much news. The sheikh of Bahrain was coming for a visit. The president was glad that the Supreme Court had seemed more reasonable lately. The opposition in Congress was being shortsighted about national defense.
Eleanor Roosevelt happened to be there too, and she and Franklin began to reminisce about visits with Theodore Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill that each had made when they were children.
When they went swimming, Eleanor remembered, Uncle Ted always insisted that all the children run down the dune to Oyster Bay.
“It was awfully steep,” FDR said, “the sand went down with you and you were darned lucky if you didn’t end [up] halfway down, going head over heels.”
And climbing back up, Eleanor recalled, you slipped down one step for every two you took. But you kept at it, and eventually the fear was worn away.
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to two great historians of the Roosevelt era, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and William E. Leuchtenburg.
In 1982, when I first set out to write about the young FDR, I wasn’t at all sure I was up to the job. I’d been an editor, not a writer; had been trained as a painter, not a biographer. Arthur would have none of it. He welcomed me into the Roosevelt world, took me to lunch again and again to see what I’d uncovered lately, and then asked me shrewd questions that sent me back in search of answers. The memory of his generosity with his time and his boundless enthusiasm for the subject we shared still astonishes me.
Bill Leuchtenburg, whom I first got to know thirty-one years ago when Ken Burns asked me to try my hand at writing a film about Huey Long, has been an adviser on every project we’ve worked on together since. He is omniscient about the Roosevelts and their America—and pretty nearly omniscient about everything that happened here before and after them, as well. But more than an adviser, he’s been a friend to all of us, filled with an infectious belief that history matters and full of good ideas on how to make our work better.
I’ll always be grateful to both of them.
On this project, I want first of all to thank Ken, who saw right away that something fresh could be done by interweaving the stories of the three greatest members of the Roosevelt clan. He remains creatively the least easily intimidated person I know, and I count myself fortunate that his willingness to take on challenging topics has allowed me to become engaged with so many of them, too.
I’m also profoundly grateful to my two teammates on this project: Maggie Hinders, who came up with the book’s novel and inviting design, laid out the pages, and endured without complaint more changes of mind
than I can count; and Susanna Steisel, whose tireless enthusiasm provided us with more than twenty thousand images of the three Roosevelts and their worlds upon which to draw, and then, when she wasn’t satisfied with what we had on hand, took it upon herself to track down still more.
It’s been a joy to work with my old friends Paul Barnes and Pam Tubridy-Baucom, coproducers of our film series. Their affection for all three Roosevelts now rivals my own. Both were tireless in their efforts to do justice to our subjects, and I owe a special debt to Paul, a master chef as well as a masterful film editor, who generously offered me sustenance and shelter during any number of New Hampshire’s winter storms.
We are grateful as well to Evan Barlow, Brian Lee, and Dan White—all of Florentine Films—for their help in improving vintage images without altering them and for helping us to isolate never-before-published stills from newsreel footage.
As someone who has worked at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library off and on for a very long time, it gives me special pleasure again to thank its extraordinary staff for all the help they gave us—Lynn Bassanese, Robert Clark, Michelle Frauenberger, Matthew Hanson, and Herman Eberhardt. We also want to give special thanks to Michelle Balos, Tara McGill, and Bill Urbin at the Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Site.
Susanna and I want to acknowledge a number of other individuals who went above and beyond the call of duty in answering our requests for illustrations and information: Allida Black, Heather Cole, and David Remington at the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard University; Andrew Conti and Ann Hartman at Corbis; Robin Glass at the Little White House State Historic Site; Steve Laise at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace; F. Kennon Moody in Hyde Park; Lisa Smith at AP Images; Gesine Stross at Getty Images; Amy Verone at the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site; and Linda and Duane Watson at Wilderstein.
We’d also like to express our gratitude to our invaluable interns: Carrie Hall, Megan Ruffe, Ali Scattergood, and Sam Vail.
I’d like to thank everyone at Knopf who first gave us permission to create a different kind of book and then brought to it the care and attention to detail for which they are so deservedly famous—Kevin Bourke, Kathy Hourigan, Andy Hughes, Sonny Mehta, and Andrew Miller.
Finally, I’d like to thank Carl Brandt, my agent and dear friend of more than thirty years, who did not live to see this book. I hope very much that he would have liked it.
—Geoffrey C. Ward
A Word About Sources
This book represents more than three decades of thinking and writing about the Roosevelts. It draws upon hundreds of books and thousands of documents read or consulted over that time, far too many and too various to cite here. But it could never have been written without the work of a host of other writers, including Jonathan Alter, Bernard Asbell, James McGregor Burns, Blanche Weisen Cook, Robert Dallek, Kathleen Dalton, Kenneth S. Davis, Frank Freidel, John Gunther, Edna Gurewitsch, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Joseph Lash, William E. Leuchtenburg, David McCullough, Jon Meacham, Edmund and Sylvia Morris, Patricia O’Toole, Carleton Putnam, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert E. Sherwood, and Edward Wagenknecht.
—G.C.W.
The morning fog lifts on Campobello Island
ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Credit Daniel J. White
A portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., overlooks his son’s study at Sagamore Hill
A vase of Safrano roses, the favorite flower of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.’s, photographed at the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace on Manhattan’s East Twentieth Street
Stuffed birds shot by the young Franklin Roosevelt and proudly displayed by his mother in the foyer of Springwood, her Hyde Park home
The view of the Hudson from Eleanor Roosevelt’s bedroom at Oak Terrace, her grandmother’s home at Tivoli, New York
Hunting trophies line the walls of Theodore Roosevelt’s library at Sagamore Hill
TR’s desk at Sagamore Hill
The desk at which FDR worked at his stamp collection in the Springwood parlor; the photograph is of his half brother, Rosy
Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s cottage at Hyde Park
The chair in which FDR suffered his fatal hemorrhage in the Little White House at Warm Springs
Index
Numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Adams, Henry, 2.1, 2.2
Aetna Life Insurance, 2.1
Africa
TR’s safari in, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4
African Americans, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 3.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1
New Deal programs targeted for, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
in WWII
Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 5.1, 5.2
Air Service, U.S.
Alabama, 1.1
Alaska
Aldrich, Nicholas W., 2.1
Allen, Robert S., 5.1
Allenswood School, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 4.1
Allotment Commission
Alsop, Joseph, Jr., 2.1, 4.1, 6.1
Amador, Manuel, 2.1
Amazon expedition, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5
America, SS, 6.1
America First Committee, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3
American expansionism
American Friends Service Committee
American Liberty League, 5.1, 5.2
American Museum of Natural History, 1.1, 3.1, 5.1
American Peace Award, 4.1, 4.2
Americans for Democratic Action
Amsterdam
Amsterdam News, 5.1
Anderson, Charles A., 6.1
Anthracite Coal Commission, 2.1
Antietam
Antiquities Act
Arizona, USS, 3.1
Army, U.S., 4.1, 6.1
Arno, Peter, 4.1
Arnold, Henry “Hap,” 6.1
Arthur, Chester A., 1.1
Arthurdale community, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
Astor, Vincent, 4.1, 4.2
Atlantic Charter, 6.1, 6.2
atomic bomb
Attlee, Clement
Attu
Augusta, USS
Austro-Hungarian Empire
B-24 Liberator, 6.1, 6.2
Bad Nauheim (German health spa)
Baer, George F.
Bainbridge Island, 6.1
Bankhead, William B., 5.1
Bank of the United States, 5.1
banks, banking, 3.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3
Barclay, McKee, 3.1
Barkley, Alben, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3
Barnes, William
Baruch, Bernard M., 7.1, 7.2
Bataan Peninsula
“beef bonanza”
Belleau Wood, Battle of
Berle, Adolph, Jr.
Berlin
Berryman, Clifford, 2.1, 2.2, 5.1
Bethesda Naval Hospital, 5.1
Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard, 6.1
Bethune, Mary McLeod, 5.1, 5.2
Biddle, Anthony Drexel, 6.1
Biddle, Francis
“Black Thursday,” 4.1
Blaine, James G., 1.1, 1.2, 3.1
Block, Laurens, 1.1
Boettiger, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (FDR’s daughter), 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6
Boettiger, John, 5.1, 7.1, 7.2
Bogotá
Bohlen, Charles
Borah, William
Boston Committee of Public Safety, 3.1
Botts, Fred, 4.1
Bourke-White, Margaret, 3.1
Boy Scouts, 3.1, 4.1, 6.1
Bradford, Gamaliel
Breckenridge, Henry S., 3.1
Breton National Wildlife Refuge, 3.1
Brisbane, Arthur
British Admiralty, 3.1
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 5.1
Brooklyn Navy Yard, 3.1
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
Browder, Earl, 5.1
Brown, Edward S., 5.1
Brown, Lathrop, 2.1
Brown, Norman H., 4.1
Browning, Robert, 1.1
&
nbsp; Brown’s Hotel (London), 2.1, 2.2
Brownsville incident, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
Bruenn, Howard G., 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5
Brussels, 3.1
Bryan, William Jennings, 1.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3
Bryce, James, 3.1, 3.2
Buffalo, N.Y.
“buffalo soldiers,” 2.1
Bulge, Battle of the, 7.1, 7.2
Bullitt, William, 6.1
Bull Moose Party, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1
Bulloch, James, 1.1
“bully pulpit”
Bunau-Varilla, Philippe
Burck, Jacob, 6.1
Burroughs, John, 2.1, 2.2
Byrd, Richard E., 4.1
California
Camp David
Campobello Island, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 5.1, 7.1, 7.2
Canada, 1.1, 5.1
Canal Zone, 2.1, 2.2
Cannon, Joseph G.
Caribbean
Carter, Ledyard and Milburn
Cartier watch, 1.1
Casablanca
Casablanca Conference, 6.1
Catholics, Catholicism, 4.1, 5.1
Catt, Carrie Chapman, 4.1
Cermak, Anton, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3
Ceylon, 2.1
Chamberlain, Neville
Chaney, Mayris, 6.1
Charlotte, N.C.
Chartran, Théobald, 2.1
Cherrie, George, 3.1
Chicago Daily Times, 6.1
child labor, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2
Chimney Butte Ranch, 1.1, 1.2
China, 5.1, 6.1
Chrysler
Churchill, Winston, 3.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 6.10, 6.11, 6.12, 6.13, 6.14, 6.15, 6.16, 6.17, 6.18, 6.19, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6