Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  Hick celebrated two pre-Christmases in 1943—one with Eleanor as in the past, and one with Marion Harron at the Hay-Adams Hotel. Afterward, Marion sent Hick a postcard of the Hay-Adams with an arrow pointing to a sixth-floor window. “X marks the spot,” she wrote on the front of the card, adding, “I will always remember the pleasant and happy hours of last evening.”

  The Roosevelt family celebrated Christmas at Hyde Park, with seven grandchildren in attendance, for the first time since FDR became president. Joe Lash and his messmates on Guadalcanal spent Christmas surrounded with lighted bayberry candles Eleanor had sent. Each one of them had a stocking of his own, also courtesy of the First Lady.

  The greatest gift of all that Christmas came in FDR’s fireside chat on Christmas Eve. “At last,” he told Americans at home and around the globe, “we may look forward into the future with real, substantial confidence that, however great the cost, ‘peace on earth, goodwill toward men’ can be and will be realized and ensured. . . . Last year I could not do more than express a hope. Today I express—a certainty.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  WINNING WITH THE WOMEN

  AFTER SHE RETURNED from the South Pacific, Eleanor became listless for a time—worrying Hick, Tommy, and others who knew her well. The horror of war had come home to her in a new way on her travels. She was also distressed by congressional criticism of her junkets as costly and unnecessary, criticism which grew so strident that FDR told her she shouldn’t take any big trips for a while. Her frustration was compounded when FDR refused to take her along on his trip to Tehran to meet with Stalin. Anna had petitioned to go as well. “No women,” FDR ruled, even though she would later discover that Churchill had invited his daughter, Sara. Nothing bothered Eleanor more than feeling hemmed in and “useless.”

  Finally, in March, she was set free to travel once more—this time to visit troops in the Caribbean and to continue on to South America. “Have a good trip dear,” Hick wrote. “I’m sure you will do a grand job.”

  Eleanor wrote Hick from Puerto Rico on the tenth anniversary of their visit there together, remembering the birthday picnic they had shared on top of a mountain.

  “I too have thought a lot about you starting out over the route we covered ten years ago this Spring,” Hick replied. So much had happened since then. It was “a beautiful trip,” she wrote, but she wished she had been “more mature, more stable.”

  Both Eleanor and Hick had fond memories of their times together, but they couldn’t find their way back to them. Hick’s jealousy in Puerto Rico a decade earlier had been both personal and professional: she had resented the fact that what was to be her field trip turned into a distracting media event. And she had resented, as always, the public life that made intimacy with Eleanor nearly impossible. Eleanor had moved on: if she had any romantic longings at that point, they were for Joe Lash, who was in love with someone else. Eleanor seems to have preferred these three-way attachments, where she could love without being expected to risk all of herself, to unlock that something that was “locked up inside.” Her relationship with Hick had been the one exception.

  For Hick, there were no such restraints. She would surely have dropped everything to give herself entirely to Eleanor, even then, if that were possible. But she had found substitutes. At fifty-two, she was enjoying the warm and caring company of other women more than ever before, both in and out of work. Because rationing made it impossible for Democratic women to travel to large meetings, Gladys Tillett traveled around the country making serial speeches to small groups, sometimes with Hick at her side. From Michigan they wrote a mischievous joint letter back to the office: the adventures of “Heecock” and “Tilletts”—names one of their hostesses gave them.

  Many speeches were required at every stop—in Lansing, in Detroit, in Chicago, where the duo entered the Stevens Hotel with Tilletts “dripping with corsages down to her knee-cap.” The hotel clerk asked the two of them if they were there for the DAR convention. “Heecock almost drops typewriter,” says the letter. In Iron Mountain, Tilletts was relieved that the band concert, given in her honor, would give her time to “think up the three or four more speeches which will no doubt be needed.”

  The question, concluded the letter to the office, was whether Tilletts and Heecock could “get out of Iron Mountain without thinking they’re God Almighty or Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

  If there was more laughter in Hick’s life, it was partly because of Marion Harron, who was wholeheartedly in love with her. Unlike Eleanor, Marion held nothing back. “Do you know,” Marion wrote Hick after a four-day interlude together, “that your mirth is as light and bright as sunshine, and as warm.”

  Harron was a serious thinker who had written her J.D. thesis on the dissenting opinions of Justice Louis Brandeis. But she loved the borscht belt humor of George Jessel and frequently made her friends laugh. When Hick had to go to an obligatory event—one of “those huge God-awful affairs” where you stand around “on tired feet” and “shout inanities at the top of your lungs”—she recovered at dinner with Marion, “who was very, very funny about Washington society!” Hick and Marion both liked good food and drink.

  Hick’s side of the correspondence with Marion hasn’t survived, but some comments suggest her letters were less fulsome than Marion’s. “Your letters are short,” Marion wrote, “but they mean so much.” Marion was clearly the pursuer, longing for more than Hick was giving. Marion’s intensity seems to have caused Hick to back off and shut down, just as Hick’s passion had with Eleanor.

  Once, after a happy time together, Marion wrote that she was a “little dog,” but one “going along on two feet. . . . My name is Butch—or Bo—and I always come when you whistle—lie flat when you say ‘flat’—and lick your cheek as well and as much as . . . those four-footed-furry dogs.” Right now, she wrote, she had her “chin on one paw and my ears are drooping.”

  The letter was signed, “All my love dear—today and all through the year. Marion. Butch.” She drew a paw print after the signature and added, “And I lick your cheek—madame! Good night and sweet sleep.” Marion delivered this letter to Hick at the White House.

  —

  BY THE TIME ELEANOR RETURNED to Washington from South America that spring, there was one thing on nearly everyone’s mind: the cross-Channel invasion called Overlord, announced by the Big Three in Tehran the previous November. “We don’t know when an invasion of Europe will begin,” Eleanor wrote in “My Day” on Easter 1944, “but we do know that when it does begin it will be the great test.”

  At first military planners hoped for a May landing, but in the end, despite worries about rough weather, D-Day was finally launched on June 6, 1944. “You are about to embark on a great crusade,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower told his assembled troops, “toward which we have striven these many months. . . . The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”

  At midnight Washington time, twenty-four thousand British, Canadian, and U.S troops began to wade through the rough waters of the North Atlantic onto the beaches of Normandy. The largest amphibious operation in history was under way.

  Eleanor had been too nervous to sleep, knowing the invasion was starting. So when word came in of the landing, the switchboard called her first. She woke Franklin, who had somehow managed to sleep. He sat up in bed, put on his sweater, and began to take phone calls.

  “Some of our landings were desperate adventures,” FDR reported to the American people, “but from advices received so far, the losses were lower than our commanders had estimated would occur.” The worst loss of life was at Omaha Beach, where twenty-four hundred died. But by the end of the first day, thirty-four thousand troops had landed on the beaches of northern France. Within three weeks of D-Day, one million had been put ashore. It would be another two and a half months before the Allies liberated Paris from the Nazis, and another seven
months of brutal warfare before the war ended in Europe. But the end was now in sight.

  Under the circumstances, there seemed little doubt that FDR was going to have to run for a fourth term in 1944, so that he could, as the campaign posters put it, “stay and finish the job.” It was not what Eleanor wanted, of course, although she understood that it was probably necessary for the good of the nation. A fourth term was not even what Franklin wanted. “All that is within me,” he wrote the chairman of the Democratic Party, “cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River.” But he had “as little right to withdraw as the soldier has to leave his post.” His nomination, at the 1944 Democratic convention in Chicago, had to be.

  Anyone who saw photographs of FDR in this period—gaunt and slack-jawed, with dark circles under his eyes—suspected he was ill. Under the circumstances, the vice presidency assumed new importance. Eleanor wanted Franklin to stick with Henry Wallace as vice president, both as a matter of loyalty and also because Wallace shared her liberal views. But Hick, as early as March, was convinced the Democrats were going to opt for a more centrist candidate. “There’s quite a boom on for Senator Truman for vice president,” she reported to Eleanor. “Personally, I very much prefer Truman to [Speaker of the House] Sam Rayburn, who, I think is one of the weakest men in politics.”

  FDR played his old games, promising Wallace he would support him but insisting at the same time he didn’t want to dictate the outcome. “Hard position when you don’t want to be a dictator but you want your own way,” Eleanor wrote Hick. FDR let it be known that he would accept either William O. Douglas or Harry Truman.

  In the end, the convention nominated Truman, a Democrat who began his political career as a creature of Tom Pendergast’s Democratic machine in Kansas City but established a reputation for independence as a senator investigating irregularities in the World War II defense industry. Truman had grown up on a farm, served in World War I, and run a clothing store for a time in Kansas City before going into politics; he didn’t have a college degree. He was, in short, a man with whom Roosevelt had very little in common. But FDR accepted the will of the convention, for the same reason he accepted the nomination. Political squabbling would distract from winning the war.

  In 1944, for the first time in American history, the majority of voters in a presidential election would be women. The Women’s Division, under the leadership of Hick and Gladys Tillett, worked hard to press that advantage by dramatically increasing the participation of women at the convention. Campaign schools for women were held for the first time and attracted overflow audiences. According to the New York Times, “every possible method of communication with a war-harried public was discussed briefly by Mrs. Charles W. Tillett and other Democratic women.” Tillett told her students that this was “not like any other school you will ever attend.” There would be no grades and no diploma. The only thing that mattered in this school was the “final exam.” And that exam took place on election day, November 7, 1944.

  The female star of the convention was Helen Gahagan Douglas, who gave a rousing speech to the delegates in which she declared that the Democrats were the “true conservative” party because they had “conserved hope and ambition in the hearts of our people” and “saved millions of homes and farms from foreclosure.” The Republicans, who had chosen New York governor Thomas E. Dewey as their standard-bearer, had “no contact with the people or with the realities of their wants and needs.” Their program, Douglas told the true believers at the convention and Americans listening on the radio, was “a nightmare of muddle and confusion.”

  “Helen’s speech was superb,” Marion wrote Hick after hearing the broadcast from Chicago. “Her voice and delivery were excellent.” In general, Marion noted, “the convention has done alright by the ‘wimmin.’”

  Post-convention, an exhausted Hick celebrated by spending two days with Marion, who was in the process of moving out of her mother’s house into an apartment that she was painting and fixing up for two. She was “praying to the gods that you’ll be here often and long,” she wrote Hick. “You see, my dear, this is your apartment.” In August, she and Marion spent two weeks together at the Little House. “A perfect vacation,” Marion wrote.

  Back in D.C., Marion found Hick’s letters from the Little House a “great comfort and joy,” and added that writing helped ease the pain of separation. “I miss you more than I can tell you dear,” she wrote.

  But a strain in the relationship was obvious by the end of summer, when Hick wrote offering to pay for some peonies Marion had contributed to the Little House garden. “You see,” Marion wrote poignantly, “a day will come, I feel all too certain, when I may not be in your garden myself—and I will be pleased if a peony or two is there in my place. . . . I know, better than you think, the wisdom of cherishing the present.”

  Hick was beginning a process of withdrawal: from Marion and from her work at the Women’s Division. When Eleanor wrote in September asking if she would need a skirt and coat, she wrote back that “I’ll be spending a good share of next year down in the country.” While she knew she would have to work for the rest of her life, she explained to Eleanor, she was tired. It was “a kind of cumulative fatigue that has been building up for a couple of years.” She believed her working life would be prolonged by a good, long rest. “So I’m going to take it. Six months anyway. Longer if I can swing it financially.” She planned to stay only through the inauguration.

  Eleanor was wary of this plan for good reason, since she knew of Hick’s tendency to retreat to solitude at the Little House. “I think I would resign Jan. 1st if you really feel completely exhausted,” she wrote. “I doubt however whether you will need or want more than 3 months rest and I’d try to get the future job lined up before you leave.” It was good advice, which Hick unfortunately didn’t take.

  —

  NEITHER ELEANOR NOR FRANKLIN gave in easily to physical ailments. FDR, after all, had spent half of his adult life proving that his handicap didn’t get in the way of his career. At Warm Springs, he called himself “Old Doctor Roosevelt” and invented new exercises for the other “polios.” When asked by reporters in late 1943 if the New Deal programs were over, he spun out an elaborate analogy in which he was again the doctor, coming to the rescue of a sick patient, the United States. When he first came into office, FDR explained, the country was suffering from a “grave internal disorder.” So they sent for the doctor, Dr. New Deal, who prescribed numerous remedies: the SEC, PWA, WPA, CCC, NYA, among others. It took several years for the remedies to take hold. But in time, the patient got better.

  Then on December 7, 1941, the patient had a bad “smashup”: broken hip, legs, arms. “Some people didn’t even think he would live.” Dr. New Deal didn’t know how to fix broken bones, so he called in a specialist: Dr. Win the War. “And the result is that the patient is back on his feet. He has given up his crutches. He has begun to strike back.” FDR, and the entire nation, needed to believe that Dr. Win the War was strong, healthy, and in charge—at least until the war was won.

  “The President,” Eleanor reported in “My Day,” “has had bronchitis and he has been weary, but I think it is probably as much the weariness that assails everyone who grasps the full meaning of war, as it is a physical ailment.” When it came to illness, Eleanor and Franklin thought alike: just ignore it and it will go away.

  Fortunately, another member of the family thought differently. Early in 1944, Anna Roosevelt moved back to Washington and into the White House along with her husband, John Boettiger, and family. It wasn’t planned that way: Anna had come for a brief visit at Christmas. But now that Harry Hopkins had moved out with his wife, Louise, his bedroom was available. John was working nearby at the Pentagon.

  It soon became obvious that FDR loved having his daughter around. She was vivacious and capable. A friend recalled being in the president’s study when Anna walked in wearing her riding boots: “His whole face
lighted up. . . . He just adored her.” She laughed at her father’s stories and had some stories of her own to tell. Eleanor, who had felt usurped in the past by some of Franklin’s companions, gave her blessing to Anna’s role as assistant to her father. Soon, FDR was saying “ask Anna to do it” on a regular basis.

  Anna, unlike her parents, sensed that something more was wrong with her father than bronchitis. She also suspected that Dr. Ross McIntyre, the ear, nose, and throat man who served as family doctor, didn’t know what he was talking about. At her urging, McIntyre reluctantly agreed to recommend a thorough going-over. On March 28, 1944, Roosevelt was wheeled into the office of a young cardiologist named Howard Bruenn at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  Bruenn suspected something was terribly wrong as soon as he saw him. “His face was pallid and there was a bluish discoloration of his skin, lips and nail beds. He was also having difficulty breathing.” Bruenn concluded that FDR was suffering from congestive heart failure, but did not share his diagnosis with his patient.

  True to the Roosevelt style, FDR chatted genially throughout the exam and ended it with a smile and a handshake. “Thanks, Doc,” he said. He asked no questions. Later that day, he told reporters that he was on the mend. A week later, Dr. McIntyre backed him up: he told the press that “for a man of 62 we had very little to complain about.” McIntyre was of the school that believed it was better for patients not to know the extent of their illness—a view that dovetailed nicely with the Roosevelts’ own propensity for denial. At McIntyre’s insistence, FDR was told nothing of his serious heart condition.

  Fortunately, FDR’s ignorance didn’t keep him from changing his diet, limiting his smoking and drinking, and taking digitalis. He also went off, on doctors’ orders, to spend a month at Hobcaw, the plantation of Bernard Baruch in South Carolina. There he had plenty of time to rest in beautiful surroundings. Also, while he was there, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd came to visit. Lucy’s situation had changed that March, when her husband died after a long illness. She was now a widow, free to spend time with the man she admired and adored. FDR returned to Washington in May, looking and feeling better.