Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  That was when FDR began to nurse what everyone called his “great secret baby,” the idea of an invasion of Vichy-held northwest Africa, with American troops in the lead and British forces following along behind. Roosevelt believed that this would be an effective way to take the Germans, who were better prepared for a mainland assault, by surprise. It would also buy time for a later assault on the mainland, perhaps in 1943 but ultimately, as it happened, in the spring of 1944.

  Stalin, whose troops were holding off the Germans at Stalingrad at an enormous human cost, was desperate for an invasion that would draw the Nazis into battle on a second front. Churchill and U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman went to Moscow to present FDR’s plan to the surly dictator, who listened warily. Churchill used a vivid analogy to explain the strategy to Stalin. Rather than attacking the head of the crocodile, with all its teeth and armor, the Allies would go after the “soft underbelly” of the beast in North Africa.

  Stalin had been furious and rude to the messengers at first, when he learned that the cross-Channel invasion was off. But once he understood that the decision had been made, he reluctantly gave his blessing to their new proposal. “May God help this enterprise to succeed,” the Communist leader told Churchill and Harriman as they went on their way.

  FDR’s own generals and secretary of war were adamantly opposed to his plan, which was given the name Operation Torch, and tried desperately up to the last minute to talk him out of it. Secretary of War Henry Stimson feared that American troops would be mired in a stalemate in Africa. “We are all very blue about it,” he wrote in his diary. The generals wanted to pour all their planning and energy into a cross-Channel invasion. They even proposed that the plans for a first major strike shift to the Pacific. General George C. Marshall called the plan “a dreadful thing.” General Dwight D. Eisenhower declared that the day Operation Torch was chosen was the “blackest day in history,” especially given the distinct possibility of a Russian defeat.

  Eventually, FDR got his way. He had hoped Operation Torch could take place before the midterm elections, but weather considerations made that impossible: there were only a few days in November when the seas were calm enough to allow an invasion. So in the end, the largest amphibious landing in American history—involving over a hundred ships and one hundred thousand men—took place five days after the election, on November 8, 1942.

  FDR was at Shangri-La, the rustic camp on Catoctin Mountain that had become his retreat, hiding out from curious reporters who might sense that something was up. There were constant phone calls all through the day. But the call FDR had been waiting for, from his chief of staff, Admiral Bill Leahy, came to him in his bedroom that evening. FDR’s secretary, Grace Tully, was on hand when Admiral Leahy called with the news.

  Never in his entire presidency had Franklin Roosevelt’s judgment, and his legacy, been put to a greater test than at that moment. Would he be vindicated in his decision to pursue his “secret baby”? Or would his military advisers, who had fought his decision every step of the way, turn out to be right that Torch was a tragic mistake?

  FDR’s hand was shaking, Grace Tully noticed, as he picked up the phone. He listened in silence for several minutes. “Thank God. Thank God,” was his first response. Smiling broadly, he put the phone down and announced, “We have landed in North Africa. Casualties are below expectations. We are striking back.”

  —

  IT TOOK ELEANOR A WHILE to find her role in the changed landscape of the nation at war. In the beginning, her efforts to set an example for the country sometimes backfired. When she learned that sugar might be rationed, for instance, she announced that she was cutting back on sugar at the White House, substituting corn syrup and other sweeteners. But since official rationing hadn’t occurred, this prompted the hoarding of sugar all around the country.

  Eleanor was indignant about such behavior. “It never crossed my mind that you couldn’t tell the American people the truth and count on them to behave themselves accordingly.” It was this sort of comment that made her seem out of touch.

  If you were an admirer of Eleanor, you might applaud her willingness to make sacrifices—to substitute cotton stockings for nylon and to ride her bicycle to save on fuel. But if you weren’t already in her camp, you might resent her high-mindedness. When coffee rationing was proposed, Eleanor said she didn’t mind drinking tea or even hot water instead. But other people weren’t so casual about cutting back on their morning coffee.

  Eleanor could be surprisingly insensitive in her “My Day” column as well. She began one column by quoting a letter from a father whose son had been killed, and who was convinced from reading the death lists that only “inconspicuous people” were dying in the war. Prominent people, he wrote, were being given special protection. Eleanor assured the grieving father that this was untrue, and that many high officials in Washington had also lost sons. Her column ended with the news that Elliott had just been “invalided home” from the South Pacific and would be with his family for a few days. “These are days in which one grasps every joyous moment and savors it to the full,” she wrote. She may have intended this as evidence that her sons too were engaged in the fight. It was true: the Roosevelt sons were exposed to danger and served with distinction in the war. But to this bereft father, it must have looked like proof of his thesis. The First Lady was able to have a “joyous moment” with her son. He wasn’t.

  There was a difference, however, between the Eleanor Roosevelt of public pronouncements and Eleanor Roosevelt in person—in Hick’s words the “personage” and the “person.” And the “person” had a unique ability to connect with people one-on-one. Her physical presence made an enormous difference to people: they saw real interest in the way she listened and in the expression on her face, especially in her eyes. Her tirelessness, a frequent subject of press coverage, bore witness to her genuine sympathy. Nowhere was that more true than during her wartime inspection tours—in England in 1942 and the Pacific in 1943.

  The London of Eleanor’s happy girlhood years, when she was a student at Allenswood, had undergone an unspeakable ordeal in the two years before her visit. Hitler’s bombing operation had destroyed grand historic buildings and modest neighborhoods alike. Night after night, Londoners had hurried into bomb shelters and underground rail stations, carrying their bedding and hoping to survive the Blitz. Over forty thousand British citizens had died while America watched from the sidelines. Now, at last, the United States had joined the fight; Eleanor’s visit signaled that Great Britain was no longer alone. Columnist Raymond Clapper wrote that “because of . . . her own personal warmth and genuine qualities of frankness and sympathy, Mrs. Roosevelt can if anybody can, convince the people of England that they are not isolated from us in spirit.”

  For nearly a month, while FDR and his generals were working out plans for the landing in North Africa, Eleanor staged an invasion of her own, visiting with both the ruling class and the ordinary men and women who were carrying on the fight. The Secret Service gave her the highly appropriate code name “Rover.”

  She had to begin properly, of course, with a visit to the king and queen at Buckingham Palace. She wrote Hick on palace stationery: “This is to impress you.” Her room was so vast, she wrote, that she felt “lost in space,” and she wondered what the maid must have thought, unpacking her modest wardrobe: one evening dress, two day dresses, one suit and a few blouses, one pair of day and one pair of evening shoes.

  The royal couple took her first to meet the “faithful watchers,” who slept at St. Paul’s Cathedral so they could immediately battle the fires that the nightly bombings set off. With the king and queen, she got her first real look at the devastation: blocks upon blocks of rubble. In a neighborhood called Stepney, where people lived in close quarters over their shops, the death toll was especially high. “Each empty building speaks of personal tragedy,” she wrote in “My Day.”

  Eleanor seemed to enjo
y her visit with the king and queen, whom she thought “a young and charming couple.” Not surprisingly, she felt less at home at Chequers, the official country residence of Prime Minister Churchill. Americans in general found Chequers uncomfortable in winter: Harry Hopkins used to hole up in the bathroom when he visited because it was the warmest room in a very cold house. But Eleanor and the PM simply rubbed each other the wrong way.

  At dinner one evening, Eleanor raised the topic of the Spanish Civil War. Why couldn’t something have been done to help the Loyalists? she asked. Churchill told her that she and he would have been the first to lose their heads if the Loyalists had won. To which Eleanor replied that she didn’t care whether she lost her head or not. “I don’t want you to lose your head and neither do I want to lose mine,” answered Churchill. Mrs. Churchill, hoping to make peace, suggested that Mrs. Roosevelt might be right. But the PM declared, “I’ve held certain beliefs for sixty years and I’m not going to change them now.”

  The other anecdote about Churchill Eleanor included in her diary involved his grandson, who was “a sweet baby” and looked “exactly like the PM” when the two of them were playing together on the floor. Churchill reported to FDR that “Mrs. Roosevelt is winning golden opinions here for all her kindness and her unfailing interest in everything we are doing.” He had advised a “reduction in her programme” to no avail. She “proceeds indefatiguably.” He added, “I only wish you were here yourself.”

  Eleanor was happiest when she could mingle with ordinary soldiers and war workers. At the Red Cross club in London she watched “boys” at leisure—“a boy playing the piano and many boys sitting around talking, lounging, reading the papers. . . . Boys were in the snack bar; boys were upstairs in the library.” Eleanor’s manner put them at ease. There were shouts of “Hi, Eleanor” from various parts of the crowded room. One GI yelled out, “How’s Poughkeepsie?”

  The boys felt comfortable enough to register several complaints—among other things, they were getting blisters because their socks were too thin. Eleanor promised to take action. The next day, she spoke with General Eisenhower, who checked with his quartermasters and discovered that there were a half million pairs of woolen socks in warehouses that could be distributed at once.

  Nothing pleased Eleanor more than producing such concrete results. But she understood as well that her mere presence made a difference. “Every soldier I see is a friend from home,” she wrote in “My Day,” “and I want to stop and talk with him whether I know him or not. When I find we really have some point of contact, it gives me a warm feeling around the heart.” Within weeks, many of these “boys” would be fighting a life-and-death battle in North Africa.

  Women warriors and workers were Eleanor’s special focus throughout her trip. A frustrated pilot herself, she especially admired the women who flew planes from one airstrip to another around the country, to outsmart the German bombers. She visited model nurseries run by women as well as clinics and hostels for women workers. She asked hard questions about the frequency of venereal disease and—intriguingly—what she called “abnormal sex cases.” Clearly she was referring to lesbians among the women soldiers. “They take refuge in subterfuge,” she wrote in her diary, “and do not discharge for this reason if it is necessary to do so [i.e., discharge].”

  Eleanor visited women of the “land army”: former hairdressers, typists, and housewives who were learning to drive tractors, tend cows, and thatch houses while the men were off at war. One night toward the end of her stay she talked, as midnight approached, with eight hundred women workers on the night shift at a Rolls factory.

  “Darling,” Hick wrote Eleanor from Washington, “I am thrilled about you—and worried.” Hick fretted when she learned that the Germans had bombed Canterbury Cathedral just after Eleanor was there. But Hick was delighted to read all the positive commentary about the trip being published in American newspapers, especially after Eleanor’s humiliating experience at the Office of Civilian Defense. “Your press over here is wonderful,” she wrote. Two of the most admired commentators, Edward R. Murrow and Drew Pearson, had weighed in with enthusiasm. “You are doing a good job, dear,” Hick wrote. “The kind of job you can do better than anyone else I know.”

  Before her tour was over, Eleanor had walked so many miles on her inspection tour that she had worn holes in her day shoes. The head usher at the White House sent her a replacement pair by diplomatic pouch. On the Sunday before she left, church bells rang out all over England, celebrating initial victories in North Africa. It would take seven months, and cost many lives, to finally defeat the Axis powers in Africa. But as Eleanor wrote in “My Day,” there was now a feeling everywhere in Great Britain that “we are fighting together.”

  Eleanor was pleasantly surprised to find Franklin’s car and entourage waiting to greet her at the airport in Washington. “I really think Franklin was glad to see me back,” she scratched in pencil in her diary. At lunch, and again at dinner, she recounted to him all that she had seen and done, and she was pleased to discover that he had read her day-by-day account of the trip as well. It was an affirmation that he valued the work she was doing.

  Before the trip, Secretary of War Stimson had worried that Eleanor might stir up race issues during her visits to the troops in England, where Negro units were segregated from white ones. Already, some white southerners were uncomfortable with the mixed dating that went on more easily among blacks and whites in England. Stimson urged FDR to tell his wife to go easy. Eleanor seems to have heeded the warning: although she visited a Negro unit, she made only positive comments about their accommodations. That didn’t mean, however, that she was going to let the subject drop. Both before and after the trip to England, she waged a persistent battle against racism in the military.

  In March 1941, a photographer captured a special visit. Eleanor is seated in the cockpit of a tiny plane, behind a black pilot named Charles “Chief” Anderson. Much to the chagrin of the Secret Service, she is about to take off on an hour’s flight over the airfield at Tuskegee University, where black pilots were training in preparation for war. She is wearing a little saucer hat with flowers on it, a ruffled blouse, and pearls, and she is grinning from ear to ear.

  The visit and the airplane ride were just a first step. Long after the Tuskegee Airmen were ready to fly combat missions, the war department kept them out of action. Air Force general Henry “Hap” Arnold claimed that he couldn’t use Negro pilots because they would be placed above white enlisted men, “creating an impossible social situation.” Eleanor joined other voices in protest. Finally, in April 1943, the Tuskegee Airmen were deployed as bomber escorts and went on to serve with great distinction.

  Around that same time, a black soldier named Henry Jones wrote Eleanor a letter describing segregation at recreational facilities at military bases. Negroes were often confined to a few seats in the last row at lectures and concerts, he wrote, and were never certain of access to post exchanges and other privileges. The letter, with 121 signatures attached, sent Eleanor into action. The numerous letters of protest to General Marshall forced him to reassign clerical staff, and eventually to make a change. On March 10, 1943, a directive was issued prohibiting all segregation in recreational facilities. It was not a complete victory, but it was a beginning.

  “Never get into an argument with the Missus,” FDR had once told Hick, only half in jest, when they shared a rare dinner for three. “You can’t win. You think you have her pinned down here (thumping the table with his forefinger) but she bobs right up away over there somewhere! No use—you can’t win.” Several generals would have heartily agreed.

  —

  FOR THE FIRST TIME in ten years, Eleanor and Hick made no effort to get together at Christmas in 1942. Hick spent the holiday at the Little House, sharing a “kind of Community Christmas dinner” with her neighbors. The two exchanged gifts, of course—Eleanor sent a box of “lovely handkerchiefs,” along with
a turkey. Eleanor always sent a turkey from Val-Kill at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and Hick always raved about how delicious it was. But even this ritual was complicated by the war: trips to the post office from the Little House had to be drastically reduced because of gas rationing, so the turkey sat in wait for some time.

  For Eleanor, at the White House, the Christmas celebration was much better than it had been in 1941, when she had been blindsided by the arrival of Winston Churchill and his entourage. Also, there had been no grandchildren around the previous year. So 1942 was an improvement. “It is a pleasant thing to have some children around who can be completely joyous over this Christmas season,” Eleanor wrote in “My Day.”

  Still, it was difficult to be joyous in December 1942. While American soldiers were dying in combat in the Pacific and in North Africa, it became clearer than ever that atrocities were occurring on a massive scale in Europe. Early in December, Stephen Wise, eminent Reform rabbi and president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote his “old friend” FDR requesting a meeting to discuss “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history [which] has befallen the Jews in the form of the Hitler mass-massacres.” It was “indisputable,” Wise wrote, that “as many as two million Jews had been slain.” A few days later, Eleanor wrote of her “horror” in learning that two-thirds of the Jews living in Poland had been slaughtered. On December 13, Edward R. Murrow described “a horror beyond what imagination can grasp” and concluded that “concentration camps” had become “extermination camps.”

  After the grandchildren opened their stocking gifts, Eleanor went off to visit soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital who had been wounded in the African campaign. She encountered one young man on the ward that day whose severe burns made it difficult for him to speak. He had been a pianist, Eleanor learned, but his hands were so damaged that he feared he would never play again.