Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  Truman would have agreed. “Boys,” he told a group of reporters the day after he was sworn in, “if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”

  Eleanor flew down to Warm Springs soon after Truman’s swearing in, accompanied by Early and McIntyre. It was almost midnight by the time they arrived. Lucy Mercer and Elizabeth Shoumatoff were long gone. It might have been possible for Lucy’s visit to be kept secret, at least until after the funeral ceremonies. But Laura Delano, ever the gossip, soon revealed to Eleanor that her husband had been with Lucy at the time of his death. Eleanor also learned that Anna had arranged numerous meetings.

  Once again, and more acutely than ever, Eleanor was forced to maintain a public façade that hid her private emotions. For days, weeks, and months to come, the entire nation would look upon Eleanor Roosevelt as the grieving widow of a great man. She would have to thank them all for their sympathy and agree with their hymns of praise. All the while, she would be unable to express her complicated feelings—feelings of loss, certainly, and regret for what might have been, but also of hurt and rage at Franklin’s betrayal. Anna’s recent involvement compounded the injury: it would take some time for mother and daughter to reconcile.

  Eleanor wrote later, in her memoir This I Remember, of an “almost impersonal feeling about everything that was happening.” She attributed it in part to having known for years that her husband might die at any time, and, more recently, that “some or all of my sons might be killed in the war.” But then she added that “much further back I had had to face certain difficulties until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is. . . . You can not live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be.” It was the closest she came to a public acknowledgment of the Lucy Mercer affair and its powerful effect on her life.

  Eleanor rode north to Washington on the train that carried FDR’s heavy brass casket. All night long, she lay in her berth with her shade up, watching the crowds that gathered in shock and grief along the route. Some sang, some knelt in prayer, many were in tears. All around the world, people mourned FDR and the hope he embodied.

  “It seems sure,” Dorothy Thompson told radio listeners, “that although his eyes are closed and although his golden voice is stilled, not only Roosevelt’s war is won but Roosevelt’s world will eventually triumph. . . . He saw a new world in which the labor of men and women, the resources of nature, must be organized for the general welfare.”

  “At midnight last night we heard the tragic news,” a young soldier wrote home from France. “The greatest catastrophe that I can think of for the world, for the peace, and for humanity and for him—when it seemed that things were within his grasp.” Letters poured into the White House for days and days, echoing those sentiments. Truman lent one of his secretaries to Eleanor and Tommy to help in merely opening them—there were way too many to answer. It made Eleanor understand just how much people believed in her husband, and how frightened many were about having to carry on without him.

  —

  HICK WROTE A LETTER to Eleanor as soon as she got the news—a “dazed and incoherent letter” that she decided to tear up. “No use burdening you with my bewilderment and terror.” She realized she was only feeling like millions of other people in the world. “And they’ll all be telling you.”

  Hick had planned to come to Washington and Hyde Park for the funeral ceremonies, but Eleanor talked her out of it. On the phone from Warm Springs, she told Hick, “You know what it will be like. And you, of all people, must realize what a load I am carrying now.” Hick, with her serious diabetes, would “just be another worry” if she came.

  If Hick felt rejected, she didn’t admit it, perhaps even to herself. Instead, she chose to take Eleanor’s request as a great honor. “I’ll bet there are darned few people in this world to whom she would have felt that she could be so frank,” she wrote Molly Dewson.

  In the four days after FDR died, Eleanor and Hick were in close touch. They not only talked on the phone, but they also exchanged letters each day. Since Eleanor always confided in Hick, it seems likely that she told her old friend about Lucy Mercer’s presence in Warm Springs at the time of Franklin’s death, and about Anna’s betrayal. One comment of Hick’s, the day after the event, suggests as much: “Darling,” she wrote, “sometime I may get straightened out the mixed personal and—shall I say public—feelings I have about you and your family!”

  —

  ELEANOR HAD ONLY a few moments alone with her husband’s body during the rush of events that followed his death. At Warm Springs, she sat in the bedroom for five minutes while his body lay on the bed. Then, again, after she walked on Elliott’s arm into the East Room of the White House, she asked to be left alone, with the casket lid raised, so she could see his face for a last farewell.

  Perhaps she thought then of the conversation she and Franklin had just three weeks before he died, about taking a trip together to celebrate the Allied victory in Europe. First they would visit the king and queen, then drive with the royals through the streets of London to the Houses of Parliament, where FDR would speak, then on to visit Churchill at Chequers. After that they would visit soldiers on the battlefields of Europe, pay a call on Queen Wilhelmina in Holland, and finish their tour in Paris. The trip would give them a chance to share in a great moment of victory and hope for the future.

  Now instead there was this official ceremony in the East Room. Afterward, the president’s casket was loaded onto a long funeral train, filled with mourners, for the journey north to his beloved Hyde Park, where the flag-draped casket was transferred onto a caisson and pulled by six horses up the steep dirt road from the railroad siding. It was a beautiful, sunny spring day; the lilacs were in bloom. “Taps” sounded as the casket was lowered into the ground in the rose garden. Fighter planes flew in formation overhead. Just twenty-three days later, the Allies would declare victory over Hitler’s genocidal regime.

  Eleanor went immediately from the Hyde Park ceremony to the White House to pack up. The accumulated possessions of the last twelve years filled a thousand boxes and twenty Army trucks. But by the weekend, she had turned the place over to the Trumans—with no regrets. “It is empty and without purpose to be here now,” she wrote Hick.

  “I have spent my last night in the White House,” Eleanor wrote her “My Day” readers on April 19. “I have had my last breakfast on the sun porch.”

  Hick, reading those words, must have thought of the many pleasant White House breakfasts she had shared with Eleanor over the years—in the West Hall in wintertime, down on the south veranda in summer, and toward the end on the third-floor sun porch most easily accessible to the ailing FDR.

  Eleanor thought of Hick, too, as she sorted through her thousands of belongings. Hick always drank her café au lait in a big blue-and-white willow ware cup. Eleanor kept the cup out of the boxes and gave it to her as a souvenir. Hick used it for the rest of her life.

  PART V

  STARTING OVER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SLIDING ON MARBLE FLOORS

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE FUNERAL, Hick wrote a piece entitled “Eleanor Roosevelt . . . First Lady” for the memorial edition of the Democratic Digest. “Wherever there are battles to be fought or injustices overcome,” she predicted, “wherever there are people—individuals or masses of people—who need a friend, Eleanor Roosevelt will be there somewhere, very likely in the background . . . doing her job. And so, it’s goodbye to Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady, but not goodbye to Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  Hick’s prophecy came true in spectacular fashion over the next seventeen years. It would take a little while, though, for Eleanor to shed the caution she had practiced for so long. “For the first time in my
life,” she told reporters, “I can say what I want. For your information, it is wonderful to feel free.” Then she asked that this remark be kept off the record.

  The greatest barrier to Eleanor’s finding the “active and important place” Hick wished for her was her own habit of saying yes to everything and everybody. Now that she had left the White House, the Val-Kill house and the apartment in Greenwich Village became meccas for family, friends, and petitioners. On weekends, the house was so full that “arms and legs practically stick out the windows.”

  Tommy confided to Esther Lape that she was often in despair about the crowds at Val-Kill. “No matter who is here, Eleanor pays very little attention to them and that is the reason why they all gang up in my room.” Tommy complained that children were “blowing soap bubbles all over my room and spilling soapy water on the rug.” She had to hide her typewriter because two of the numerous grandchildren around the place thought it was “a wonderful toy.” Some came for an overnight, and some, like Joe and Trude Lash, came for extended visits. Sometimes she had to kick everyone out in order to meet one of Eleanor’s numerous writing deadlines.

  Even before FDR died, Lape had urged Eleanor to be more selective about what she took on. She had a chance to use her power “for persuasion and enlightenment,” Lape advised, but using it effectively required her to make choices.

  “You spoke of a selective job,” Eleanor wrote Lape, “and that is the hardest thing for me to do, since I’ve always done what came to hand.” Saying no meant taking her position of power seriously, and that made her uncomfortable.

  Even though she was busy during every waking hour, Eleanor couldn’t block out worries about her family. “Somehow my family keep me stirred up,” she wrote Hick. She had been heartbroken when Elliott left his wife, Ruth, whom she liked, for a movie star named Faye Emerson. Recently, Elliott had been in the papers again over some questionable business dealings. Now all the children were wrangling over what to do with the Val-Kill properties and the surrounding eight-hundred-plus acres. Elliott was planning to live in Top Cottage and try his hand at farming, much to the others’ resentment. There were angry shouting matches between the brothers, with Elliott on one side and Franklin Jr. on the other. There was even talk of selling Val-Kill outright and dividing the proceeds. “I am quite shocked,” Tommy confided to Lape, “at the acquisitiveness of the children.”

  Tommy accepted her boss’s need to be in constant motion, but she wanted her to use her energy to higher purpose. “She has the heart and the courage to fight for what is good for the whole world,” she wrote Hick. “These little people who waste her time and energy will be benefitted in the long run. The letters of introduction for jobs, the supporting of piddling organizations will not mean anything if the world is shaky.”

  The world was shaky in a whole new way when the Japanese surrendered, on August 15, 1945, in the wake of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many Americans took to the streets to celebrate. But Eleanor felt, as she told her “My Day” readers, that “the weight of suffering which has engulfed the world during so many years could not so quickly be wiped out.” Also, as she confided to Anna, she missed “Pa’s voice” and “the words he would have spoken.” Increasingly, after his death, she came to appreciate how much she had relied on Franklin to shoulder the world’s problems.

  Other Americans felt the same way. Harry Truman’s public pronouncements, delivered matter-of-factly in his flat Missouri rasp, were a poor substitute for FDR’s engaging fireside chats. Critics on the right ridiculed Truman as a “model boy” thrust into a man’s job. In more sophisticated circles, he was denigrated as a small-town pol who was out of his depth. According to Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, the White House now resembled “the lounge of the Lion’s Club of Independence, Missouri,” complete with an odor of “ten-cent cigars.” Hick wondered, in a letter to Eleanor, if Truman was going to “get along with Congress by letting Congress run him.” She hadn’t fully appreciated before that “one never had to worry about the President letting anybody run him.” FDR was still the president to Hick and many others.

  Two months after she moved out of the White House, Eleanor returned there to lunch with the new president. It seemed, she wrote Hick, like an entirely different place, “bare and stiff.” With his wife and daughter out of town, President Truman seemed “the loneliest man I ever saw. . . . He’s not at ease and no one else is.”

  The contrast was striking, Hick agreed. “I’ve been sorry for them [Bess and Harry Truman] all along, both of them.” She had heard through her journalist grapevine that they were “borrowing pictures from the Corcoran gallery to decorate their own living quarters!”

  Truman might have been unsophisticated about art, but he was a clever politician. He knew he needed to form an alliance with Eleanor, the living link to the Roosevelt magic. It made sense too, given FDR’s commitment to postwar plans for peace, that Truman should ask Eleanor to join the six-person delegation to the London meeting of the new UN organization.

  As usual, Eleanor wasn’t sure at first that she was up to the task. But in January 1946 she boarded the Queen Elizabeth and sailed to England for the conference. She gained confidence as she took the measure of her fellow delegates. “When I come home,” she wrote Hick, “I’m going to give you thumbnail sketches of my playmates that I don’t dare put on paper. The Russians are hard to work with, because everything has to be decided in Moscow, but I think a little frank firmness on our part would help.”

  Eleanor was assigned to the committee dealing with human rights because the others in the delegation, who had opposed her appointment, viewed that as the place where she could do the least damage. But it turned out that Committee Three, as it was called, was asked to confront one of the most critical of postwar issues: the status of refugees. The Russians and their allies wanted all war refugees in Germany to be required to go back to their countries of origin. Many were still living in camps because they didn’t want to return to live under Communist rule. The United States and its partners argued against forced repatriation. Eleanor proved a formidable worker and speaker on the issue. When it came time for the decisive vote, she went head-to-head with the seasoned Russian diplomat Andrei Vyshinsky.

  Eleanor was “tense and excited” as she approached the rostrum to make her case. She knew the Russian tactic was to delay the vote for hours, hoping the other side would tire and leave. Because she needed to keep the South Americans at the meeting, she evoked the memory of the great Simón Bolívar and his courageous fight for freedom in Latin America. The South Americans stayed around to vote, and Eleanor won a significant victory.

  On the final night of the meetings, she returned to the hotel around one o’clock, feeling very tired. As she walked up the stairs to her room, she encountered two of her fellow delegates, John Foster Dulles and Senator Arthur Vandenberg. They told her that they had thought her appointment a mistake, but had found her “good to work with” and would be “happy to do so again.” Senator Vandenberg—an anti–New Deal Republican—was heard to say at dinner parties afterward, “I take back everything I ever said about her, and believe me it’s been plenty.”

  —

  HICK’S OWN TRANSITION into a new life was not going well. She worked hard to follow the doctor’s orders and regulate her diet. But when she visited Val-Kill that summer of 1946, Tommy reported that she looked “ghastly.” Her weight was down from 200 pounds to 138, which might have been a change for the better. But Tommy suspected she was “more sick than she knows.”

  Hick’s friends, knowing how desperately she needed money, rallied around her. Mary Norton found a part-time salary for her in the congressional budget, and Helen Gahagan Douglas, now a congresswoman, asked for her help with research. Eleanor asked her to do background work for question-and-answer columns she was writing for the Ladies’ Home Journal. Her former boss Gladys Tillett got into the act too, urging a moneyed Democr
at to find a job for Hick, who had “good common sense,” a “genius for writing,” and “loyalty and devotion.”

  Hick expressed her gratitude repeatedly to everyone, but she was anxious, as she wrote Eleanor, to “get off your payroll and Mary’s.” She thought she’d found a solution when she was hired to write articles for a syndicate: the editor heaped on praise and promised the skies. He reacted to one of her pieces by telegram: “GAWD LADY YOU CAN WRITE.” “God I’m favored by Providence!” she wrote Eleanor. “To have something to do that I know how to do—with a minimum of strain and effort. It’s wonderful.”

  But her enthusiasm was premature. Hick wrote a number of articles, including one about the new president, but the syndicate didn’t succeed in placing them. Before long, she was looking elsewhere for work.

  Hick’s relationship with Marion Harron was not going any better than her career. Marion was deeply attached to her mother, with whom she lived in Chevy Chase. Hick seems to have stayed with Marion only when her mother was out of town—a fact which suggests that Mother Harron didn’t approve of the relationship. Mary Norton, who was a good friend to both Marion and Hick, predicted “that Mother dame will never let go of her.”

  Eventually Marion did leave for her own place in Washington, but she never convinced Hick to stay there for long. “I look at your slippers, dressing gown, typewriter, and there is even a razor here,” Marion wrote, “but no you.” She wished Hick good night. “I can dream of you anyhow.” Marion spent two weeks with Hick that summer of 1945 at the Little House, but left in a huff after an argument with a neighbor—probably about politics.