Instead, as Roosevelt was settling in, the Soviets anxiously reported to the Americans that their intelligence services had discovered an assassination plot against some or all of the leaders at the conference. The Soviet NKVD, forerunner of the KGB (state security committee), claimed that thirty-eight Nazi paratroopers had been dropped inside Russian territory around Tehran; only thirty-two were now accounted for, yet six remained missing, and these had a radio transmitter. Was this a genuine concern, or was it fabricated by the Soviets? That was unclear. In any event, to prevent a problem, Stalin offered Roosevelt a suite of rooms at the heavily guarded Soviet complex for the remainder of the time in Tehran. This was actually Stalin’s second such invitation. The first Roosevelt had politely declined through an envoy. This time the president accepted. The following day he moved his personal staff to the large Soviet complex. Outwardly, Roosevelt displayed little concern; not so his Secret Service. Very much worried about the apparent German threat, the Secret Service agents lined the entire main route with soldiers and then sent out a heavily armed decoy convoy of cars and jeeps. As soon as this cavalcade had departed and was slowly making its way through Tehran’s central streets, Roosevelt was hustled into another car with a single jeep escort and was sent “tearing” through the ancient side streets of Tehran to the Soviet legation. Roosevelt was highly amused by what he called the “cops and robbers stuff,” but his protection agents, who knew better, were terrified.
Once inside the Soviet compound, the American Secret Service agents quickly discovered that they were very much outnumbered. Across Tehran, some three thousand NKVD agents had already been deployed for Stalin’s personal protection. And nowhere was this more apparent than inside the Soviet residence. “Everywhere you went,” agent Mike Reilly noted, “you would see a brute of a man in a lackey’s white coat busily polishing immaculate glass or dusting dustless furniture. As their arms swung to dust or polish, the clear, cold outline of a Luger automatic could be seen on every hip.” Actually, even Scotland Yard had sent far more protection for Churchill than the Americans had sent for Roosevelt.
FINALLY, THE TEHRAN CONFERENCE of the Allied powers could open. In the next few days, the three leaders and their military men would do no less than chart the Allied course for the remainder of the war, as well as begin to define the outlines of the peace. Yet like the Americans’ security arrangements, the summit was to be almost entirely improvised. The Americans had arrived without even a provision for keeping the minutes of the high-level meetings. To address this glaring oversight, four soldiers with stenographic skills were hastily plucked from the nearby American military camp and assigned to take dictation after each session. But there were still no schedules, and there was no one who had been told to organize the meetings or handle the logistics. As a result, the head of the American Joint Chiefs, General George Marshall, actually missed the first meeting; he had misunderstood the start time and had instead gone sightseeing around the city.
The president had also arrived in Tehran without any position papers, the bureaucratic lifeblood of Washington. In short, the conference was vintage FDR. As always, he had no use for rules or regulations when they did not suit him. His plans were simple: improvise, follow his own instincts, and pursue his own agenda. He had come to Tehran in large part to work his legendary, Prospero-like magic on Stalin. His overarching goal was to make a friend and ally of the Soviet leader, to bring him, as he had brought so many others, into the fold.
It was what Roosevelt had been doing for a lifetime.
FEW MEN IN AMERICAN history brought to the presidency such a combination of prodigious political talents and formidable leadership skills as Franklin Roosevelt. By nature he was a dissembler, a schemer, a deceiver. But he also had an unconquerable will and an ingrained sense of immortality. Too easily forgotten is that when Roosevelt was first elected to the White House, there was sober talk of a revolution, and the American political system seemed to be on the verge of dissolution from within, so great were the strains of the Great Depression. But through improvisation and adjustment, buoyed by his legendary oratory and constant experimentation, Roosevelt managed to uplift a dispirited nation.
Now, as the Allies’ fortunes on the far-off battlefields were changing, the world was looking to him to do the same in the war.
How does one even begin to describe him? No one on the global stage was neutral about him, and he was sui generis in every sense of the word. An astonishing blend of political genius and inspired ambition, he was an aristocrat like Thomas Jefferson, a populist like Andrew Jackson, a crafty politician like Abraham Lincoln, and a beloved figure like George Washington. He was as extravagant as he was original, as formidable as he was cosmopolitan, as mercurial as he was flamboyant, and as provocative as he could be puzzling. And he was tall, a fact obscured when polio cut him down: he was six foot two, the nation’s fourth-tallest president, taller than either Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Actually, when he had walked, his gait was bowlegged.
Were there any inklings that he would rise to historic greatness? He was born late in the evening on January 30, 1882, “a beautiful little fellow,” to enormous wealth and privilege; and he was an only child. With impressive foresight, one relative described him as “fair, sweet, cunning.” His doting mother, Sara Delano, became the dominant influence in his life; still, Franklin worshipped his father, James, a lawyer, already in his mid-fifties when Franklin arrived. Reared on the family estate in Hyde Park, New York, he was, in effect, the center of the universe. Roosevelt was homeschooled by tutors and governesses, and fussed over by all sorts of domestic help, all under the watchful eye of Sara. From an early age he was drilled in the finer points of penmanship, the dreary particulars of arithmetic, and the searing lessons of history. And with the benefit of a Swiss teacher, he became fluent in German, French, and Latin. He also absorbed a sense of social responsibility—that the more fortunate should help the less fortunate.
His mother read to him every day—including his favorites, Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson—while his father took him riding, sailing, and hunting. It was a pampered, secure existence. When he was a little boy his mother kept him in dresses and long curls; then she dressed him in Scottish regalia. Eventually, at the age of seven, he wore pants—short pants that were part of miniature sailor suits. Evidently, before age nine he had never taken a bath by himself. He had few friends as a boy; most of his time was spent around adults, often illustrious ones. Indeed, he was five when he met President Grover Cleveland. Cleveland wrapped his hand around Franklin’s head and said, “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States.”
The Roosevelt family traveled extensively, sojourning annually in Europe; wintering in Washington, D.C., where the family rented the opulent townhouse of the Belgian minister on fashionable K Street; and summering at Campobello, a gorgeous sliver of an island off the rugged coast of Maine, where Franklin fell in love with the water and developed a lifelong passion for sailing. He had a twenty-one-foot boat there, New Moon, which his father gave him as a present. It was also there that Roosevelt began to fantasize about a naval career.
He learned to ride at an early age as well. At the age of two he was already cavorting about with a pet donkey and by the age of six with a Welsh pony. However much he was pampered, his parents sought to instill a sense of responsibility in the young Franklin. How? By giving him dogs to watch over: first a Spitz puppy, then a Saint Bernard, then a Newfoundland, and finally a gorgeous red Irish setter. At the same time, he became an avid collector of stuffed birds, which hung on his walls; of naval Americana, which as an ardent sailor he cherished; and, from the age of five, of stamps, another lifelong interest. Eventually, he would fill more than 150 albums and compile a collection totaling more than 1 million stamps.
When Franklin was nine, his father suffered a mild heart attack, and although James survived for a decade more, he became markedly feeble. For Frank
lin, who adored and idolized his father, this was nothing less than devastating. Five times over the next seven years the family sought out the warm mineral baths at Bad Nauheim in Germany, believed to have curative powers for ailing heart patients. James fervently embraced the restorative powers of the baths. So did Sara. And, predictably, so did the young Franklin, who would later seek the mineral waters at Warm Springs, Georgia. How did Roosevelt cope with his father’s illness? As with everything else, surprisingly serenely. Here, though he was discreet about it, his sheet anchor was in part his Episcopal faith. He believed then, as he quietly would believe for the rest of his life, that if he put his trust in God, all would turn out well.
At the age of fourteen, he entered Groton, then the most prestigious prep school in the nation; tuition was exorbitant, affordable only by the very rich. The purpose of the school was more than to cultivate intellectual development; it was also to foster “manly Christian character,” moral as well as physical, among America’s most privileged boys. “Character, duty, country” was the daily creed; a monastic existence was the daily life. Roosevelt was bright and able to quickly absorb his studies—he would win the Latin prize. He was also a skilled debater. That was as far as it went, though, for he was neither an original thinker nor particularly introspective. But the school’s founder, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, a charismatic minister, would become a profound influence on Roosevelt, more so than anyone else except for, as Franklin would one day put it, “my father and mother.”
For Peabody, who embodied the ethic of muscular Christianity, the clash of sports was as central to the education of Groton boys as the classes themselves. Consequently, having grown up in the comfort and seclusion of Hyde Park, Roosevelt was a misfit; he had never before played a team sport and wasn’t much of an athlete. It showed. Not surprisingly, he was put on a football squad reserved largely for misfits; it was the second-worst team. Baseball was little better; this time he played on the worst squad. However unremarkable he was, though, his passion never waned; by dint of enthusiasm, he even achieved a letter on the baseball team, not for his play, but because of his efforts as the equipment manager.
By the time he prepared to attend Harvard in the autumn of 1900, the ideals of Groton had become second nature to him: work hard and reap the benefits, plunge into competition, and embrace effort as the key to success.
In the autumn of 1900, Roosevelt enrolled at Harvard, America’s most elite university, then under the leadership of its legendary president Charles W. Eliot. If Groton was where Roosevelt, the pampered only child, developed the social habits of mingling with his peers, Harvard was where he cultivated the ability to guide them. Still, he hardly shed the ways of the idle rich. His was the world of well-connected, sophisticated bons vivants; of mint juleps and polo matches; of riding with the hounds and in crosscountry steeple chases; and of tennis at Bar Harbor and sailing at Newport. As for Roosevelt himself? He lived off campus on Mount Auburn Street in a luxurious three-room corner suite (for the extravagant sum of $400 a year), owned a horse, and was a regular during the busy social season: almost weekly he attended the hunt balls, lavish black-tie dinners, and the endless debutante coming-out parties. When Porcellian, the most illustrious of Harvard’s clubs, turned him down, he was crestfallen. However, he was chosen for Hasty Pudding, where he served as librarian, and for the fraternity Alpha Delta Phi. Moreover, he was elected to the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, ultimately becoming its president, a great honor. His duties at the Crimson were extensive and often taxing—“the paper takes every moment of time” he wrote to his mother—but he acquitted himself admirably, all the while developing an understanding of the inner workings of the media, which would later serve him well when he entered the political arena. Academically, he coasted through, without challenging himself very much. Thanks to his education at Groton, he was able to skip the mandatory freshman curriculum. As to the electives, he eschewed theoretical courses like philosophy; instead, he gravitated toward history, government, and economics, a subject about which he would later remark, “Everything I was taught was wrong.” And as at Groton, he won no academic honors, although his grades were solid.
During the late autumn of his freshman year, he received word that his father had suffered one more heart attack, then another. The family rushed to New York so that James might be closer to the specialists, but this did little for his worsening condition. With his loved ones collected at his bedside, he died at 2:20 a.m. on December 8, 1900. Though it was a great loss emotionally, the family would never want for anything material. Two years earlier, when her own father died, Sara had inherited an amount equivalent to roughly $37 million today. Upon James’s passing, he left Sara and Franklin an estate that would be worth more than $17 million today.
Grief stricken, the family coped by traveling. Rather than going back to Campobello that summer, Franklin and Sara spent ten weeks abroad in Europe: first on an elegant cruise liner that took them through the majestic fjords of Norway and around the arctic circle, where they met Kaiser Wilhelm II. They then went on to Dresden, where Sara had gone to school as a girl, followed by time on the shores of Lake Geneva where they could breathe the crisp air. Finally, they went on to Paris, where they learned that President William McKinley had been assassinated. Their lives would never again be the same. They were not simply rich, but suddenly political royalty: the inimitable Theodore Roosevelt, their cousin, was now president.
That first winter without James was a difficult transition. Sara found life without him barren. She did her best to keep busy, supervising the estate’s many workmen and overseeing its frequently intricate if not chaotic business affairs. But she soon prepared to focus her unwavering attention upon her son.
As the new year opened, Franklin spent three whirlwind days in Washington, D.C., in honor of his cousin Theodore’s daughter Alice, at the White House; it was her coming-out party. The president also invited Franklin for a private talk over tea, twice. “One of the most interesting and enjoyable three days I have ever had,” he wrote to his mother.
Shortly after Roosevelt returned to Harvard, his mother moved to Boston to join him. Rattling around in the house by herself, she found life at Hyde Park unbearable without her husband; she now wanted to be with Franklin. She moved into an apartment, made new friends, and joined the cloistered, elite world of Boston Brahmins. She also became a constant in Roosevelt’s life, and far from resenting it, he enjoyed having her there. Not infrequently, he asked his mother to approve his dates.
Roosevelt loved the company of women. For a decade and a half he had scarcely any contact with the opposite sex and, in part due to the era of Victorian restraint, he had not much more once he arrived at Groton. Harvard was a different story. He fell in love with the lovely Frances Dana, though he was talked out of marriage by his mother because Frances was a Catholic, and the Roosevelts and Delanos were Protestants. Then there was Alice Sohier, the daughter of a distinguished North Shore family who lived in an elegant town house in Boston. He and Alice discussed marriage. An only child, Roosevelt exuberantly confessed he wanted six children. Alice balked at the prospect, confiding to an intimate, “I did not wish to be a cow.” In the autumn of 1902, she backed out of the relationship and went instead to Europe. That was when he met Eleanor, a tall, “regal,” “coltish looking” blue-eyed young woman, who was his fifth cousin once removed, and the orphaned daughter of his godfather, Elliott Roosevelt. Eleanor and Franklin’s courtship was, in a sense, carefully choreographed.
Creatures of elegant New York society, they attended the premier horse show that autumn at Madison Square Garden, perched in the family box. Later, they lazed together on the manicured grass at Springwood, under the watchful eye of a chaperone. They took a dinner cruise aboard Roosevelt’s motorized sailing yacht, the Half-Moon. And that New Year’s Day they were in Washington as part of the inner circle as Theodore—who was her uncle as well as Franklin’s cousin—stood in the East Room of the White Hou
se, warmly greeting long lines of supporters; soon, amid the polished silver and glittering candelabras, they dined with Theodore himself in the state dining room. But Franklin’s mind was far away from politics. “E is an angel,” a smitten Roosevelt wrote in his diary.
Eleanor’s world was even more sheltered than Franklin’s—and more tragedy-laced. When Eleanor was eight, her mother, Anna Rebecca Hall, who was often debilitated by migraines and bouts of dark depression, died of diphtheria. Two years later, her father, Elliott, died. A charming playboy who had dropped out of high school, he suffered from numerous inner demons, and his excesses knew no bounds: he was a dashing philanderer, and when he wasn’t taking morphine or laudanum, he was drinking heavily, up to half a dozen bottles of hard liquor daily. One night he was even too drunk to tell a cabbie where he lived. Another time, he almost jumped from his parlor window. And on August 13, 1894, he lost consciousness, alone; he was dead the next evening.
From then on Eleanor lived with her maternal grandmother at their elegant brownstone on West Thirty-seventh Street or their estate on the Hudson—or she attended boarding school at Wimbledon Park in England. Hers was a solemn existence. Frequently surrounded by cooks, butlers, housemaids, laundresses, coachmen, and tutors, she had few friends and virtually no opportunity to meet other children, except for Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice. Unlike Franklin’s mother, Eleanor’s grandmother was a strict disciplinarian. Eleanor’s life became an exercise in self-improvement: piano, dance class, lawn tennis, shooting, and riding. Like Franklin, she was also tutored in German and French, and she became fluent in French. Just as Roosevelt could chat easily in German, she could conduct extensive conversations in French. In time, she also excelled in Italian.