No Ordinary Time

“Everything is spotlessly clean,” Eleanor marveled. The people worked on their whitewashed barracks constantly, and “you can see the results of their labors.” Handmade screens created a sense of individuality and privacy amid rows of residential blocks that otherwise looked exactly alike. “Sometimes there are little Japanese gardens, sometimes vegetables or flowers bloom. Makeshift porches and shades have been improvised by some out of gunny sacks and bits of wood salvaged from packing cases.”

  Considerable ingenuity had also been used, Eleanor observed, in planning schools. There were nearly thirty thousand Japanese-American children of school age in the ten centers. Establishing schools for them amid hostile local school authorities had been a major undertaking. Requests to the University of Arizona for library books and faculty lectures had been regularly rejected. “We are at war,” University of Arizona President Alfred Atkinson said, “and these people are our enemies.” Yet, despite all these problems, a complete school system had been established. In the absence of school buildings, different barracks had been set aside for a nursery school, an elementary school, a high school, and a library. Other barracks, their walls decorated with paper flowers and paintings, had been turned into laundry rooms and recreation centers and mess halls. The food was adequate, Eleanor noted, though the evacuees were in no way being “coddled,” as some newspapers charged.

  From a superficial point of view, the daily life at Gila seemed bearable. The evacuees had decent shelter, sustenance, and work. But Eleanor had learned from long practice to look below the surface in order to understand the inner life of the institutions she inspected. What was not bearable, she recognized, was the loss of freedom: the barbed-wire fences and the armed guards in sentry towers surrounding the camp; the regulations confining everyone to barracks by nine with lights out by ten; the orders given to the guards to shoot anyone who approached within twenty feet of the fence.

  No matter how hard the WRA tried to make the camp look like an ordinary community, it was a penitentiary, imprisoning people who had never been convicted of doing anything wrong. No matter how enthusiastic the teachers, it was impossible to teach the principles of American democracy to citizens and residents whose fundamental rights had been taken away. “To be frank with you,” sighed Mrs. Jones, an elementary-school teacher appointed by the WRA, “it embarrasses me to teach them the flag salute. Is our nation indivisible? Does it stand for justice for all? Those questions come up to my mind constantly.”

  Beyond the loss of liberty, Eleanor recognized, was the breakdown of the traditional family structure. With thousands of people assembled together, parents were unable to exercise the strict control they had once had over their children. “With everyone eating in mess halls,” one Gila resident explained, “the family eating pattern was broken up completely. Table manners were forgotten. Conversation was impossible.”

  In the topsy-turvy world of the camps, the Nisei held the upper hand. “We hold the advantage of numbers,” young Charles Kikuchi recorded in his diary, “and the fact we are citizens. Many of the parents who would never let their daughters go to dances before do not object so strenuously now. There can no longer be conflict over types of food served as everybody eats the same thing—with forks. The Nisei as a whole rejoice that they no longer have to attend Japanese language school.”

  “For the young people, it was an adventure,” high-school student Jiro Ishihara observed. “But for the older people it was intolerable. I understood this only much later, when I became a parent myself and realized how hard it must have been for my parents to wake up one day and know that every ritual their life depended upon had been taken away.”

  “Feel sort of sorry for Pop tonight,” Charles Kikuchi wrote shortly after arriving at the camp. “He had his three electric clippers hung on the wall and Tom has built him a barrel chair for the barber seat. It’s a bit pathetic when he so tenderly cleans off the clippers after using them. He probably realizes he no longer controls the family group.”

  The split between the generations had been unwittingly aggravated, Eleanor came to understand, by the War Department’s decision on January 28, 1943, to allow the American-born Nisei to enlist in a special unit in the army to be trained for combat. Though the new policy had been enthusiastically embraced by Nisei who rushed to sign up, the despair had deepened on the part of Issei, who were not allowed to volunteer, contributing to the decline in morale Harold Ickes had noted.

  Henry Ebihara spoke for many in a poignant letter to Stimson. “I was very happy when I read your announcement that Nisei Americans would be given the chance to volunteer for active combat duty. But at the same time I am sad—sad because under your present laws I am an enemy alien. I am 22 years old, American in thought, American in act, as American as any other citizen. I was born in Japan. My parents brought me to America when I was only two years old . . . . Please give me a chance to serve in the armed forces. How can a democratic nation allow a technicality of birthplace to stand in the way when the nation is fighting to preserve the rights of free men?”

  The only answer, Eleanor determined, taking into account all the reasons for the declining morale in the camps, was to relax the exclusion order and allow the Japanese to return to their homes, “to start independent and productive lives again.” Dillon Myer agreed. Now that military necessity could no longer be considered a viable rationale, he argued that the time had come to open the doors of the camps.

  “To undo mistakes is always harder than not to create them originally,” Eleanor observed, “but we seldom have foresight. Therefore we have no choice but to try to correct our past mistakes.”

  The president listened carefully to Eleanor’s report. Though he did not admit that the original decision had been a mistake, he agreed with her that “normal American life is hardly possible under any form of detention” and that “the best hope for the future lies in encouraging the relocation of Japanese Americans throughout the country.” But at the same time, he was hearing from Stimson that if he moved too quickly a massive public outcry would result. It was the opinion of the War Department that the recent decline in morale could be traced to the activities of “a vicious, well-organized pro-Japan minority group to be found at each relocation project.” The first step, Stimson argued, was to remove these agitators to a separate camp at Tule Lake; then, and only then, could steps be taken to clear the remaining evacuees for release.

  The president backed Stimson’s decision to segregate the troublemakers, but he promised Eleanor that he would meet with Myer and figure out ways to relax the order so that exit permits could be issued to individual Japanese who had work to do and a place to go. The process was slow and cumbersome, but by the end of 1943, between those who had joined the army and those who had received work permits to leave, nearly one-third of the evacuees had left the camps.

  CHAPTER 17

  “IT IS BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS”

  By 1943, Washington was pretty much like any other boomtown during the war—its population had nearly doubled since 1940, decent housing was impossible to find, uniforms were everywhere, gasoline was scarce, buses were overcrowded, and living costs were high. Most of the newcomers were women, searching for jobs as typists and clerks in the burgeoning federal bureaucracy, which had spread its offices into every available space, into ugly temporary buildings, old schools, apartments and homes, gymnasiums and skating rinks. They were called GGs, or government girls; they came on buses and trains with their suitcases in their hands, to live in huge dormitories specially erected for them; and with their help, journalist David Brinkley wrote, “the federal government created more records in the four years of war than in its entire previous history.”

  The 11th of May was a soft spring day in Washington. Couples sauntered along the banks of the Potomac; strollers circled the Reflecting Pond. In weather like this, the president would ordinarily have taken the time to enjoy a leisurely ride through the hills of Virginia, but since Prime Minister Churchill was due to arrive that ev
ening for a two-week visit, Roosevelt was forced to spend the entire day at his desk, cleaning up correspondence.

  The one break in the day came at 2:30 p.m., when he received an off-the-record visit from the Russian artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff. Madame Shoumatoff had come to paint a portrait of the president, at the request of Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Considering the impact Lucy had had on his marriage, and the promise he had made to Eleanor never to see her again, Roosevelt decided to keep Shoumatoff’s visit a private matter.

  Shoumatoff had met Lucy Rutherfurd six years before in Aiken, South Carolina, when Lucy’s stepdaughter, Alice Rutherfurd, had commissioned her to do a portrait of Lucy. Meeting Lucy for the first time was “quite impressive,” Shoumatoff recalled. “Very tall, like the rest of her family, exquisitely lovely and gracious, she impressed you not so much by her striking appearance as by the shining quality in her features, particularly in her smile.” An acute observer, Shoumatoff noticed that the clothes Lucy wore made her look older than she was, “as if deliberately diminishing the thirty-years difference between herself and her husband.

  Winthrop Rutherfurd was seventy-five years old and in frail health when Shoumatoff first met him. Though she had come to draw a portrait of Lucy, Lucy asked her to paint her husband first. “Winthrop Rutherfurd, in spite of his advanced years,” Shoumatoff later recalled, “was one of the handsomest men” she had ever painted, “and certainly the most aristocratic.” He looked like “an English peer with his chiseled features, sharp eyes, and a sarcastic expression around his mouth.” Curiously, Shoumatoff observed, “there was something about his face that vaguely resembled FDR.”

  Observing the daily routine in the Rutherfurd household during that first meeting, Shoumatoff was struck by the unflagging attention Lucy gave to her husband. “Everything whirled around him; their life was governed by his invalid regime. She never went out in the evenings and completely devoted her existence to making him happy and comfortable.” Through nearly two decades of marriage, Lucy had mothered Winthrop’s five children (a sixth had died on the eve of their wedding) and given birth to a daughter of her own, Barbara Rutherfurd. Barbara was fourteen, a student at the fashionable Fermate School for Girls in Aiken, when Shoumatoff first met Lucy. Watching Lucy with her extended family, Shoumatoff remarked that she had “seldom seen a mother more beloved and respected than was Lucy by her stepchildren.”

  For the Rutherfurds, as for most residents of the Aiken winter colony, the social season stretched from mid-October until after the Easter holidays. During these months, the calendar was filled with charity balls, bazaars, and sporting events, including the annual hunt breakfast, the point tournament at the Palmetto Golf Club and the thoroughbred races at the Aiken Mile. Through the twenties and thirties, Winthrop and Lucy Rutherfurd were regulars at all these events; the Rutherfurd name frequently appeared in the society pages of the Aiken Standard & Review. Since Winthrop’s illness, Lucy had led a quieter life, but the comings and goings of the Rutherfurd children were regularly noted in the local paper. There were stories of athletic achievement—all four boys, Winthrop Jr., John, Hugo, and Guy, were outstanding athletes, champion golfers, tennis players, and scull racers—while Alice and Barbara excelled at horseback riding. There were descriptions of social engagements and debutante balls. The sheer variety of activities the children enjoyed was impressive.

  Lucy had been so pleased by the first portrait that she asked Shoumatoff to come to their summer estate, in Allamuchy, New Jersey, to paint a second picture of her husband, with his fox terriers. It was in Allamuchy, Shoumatoff recalled, on a moonlit evening as she and Lucy were driving along the woodland roads, that Lucy first talked of Franklin Roosevelt. Shoumatoff had heard rumors that Lucy and Franklin had enjoyed a romance before Lucy was married, but on this occasion Lucy simply talked about his leadership qualities, “his extraordinary ability to work, his dynamic approach to anything he undertook.”

  It was not until the spring of 1943, when Shoumatoff was back in Aiken for a series of additional portraits, that the conversation returned to Roosevelt. “You should really paint the President,” Lucy told her friend. “He has such a remarkable face. There is no painting of him that gives his true expression. I think you could do a wonderful portrait. Would you do a portrait of him if it was arranged?” Delighted and daunted by the challenge, Shoumatoff was stunned when Lucy called the following morning to say she had telephoned Washington and the president would sit for a portrait in two weeks, on May 11. “I did not understand how the whole thing could have been arranged so quickly,” she admitted.

  The answer lay in the affection Roosevelt still held for the woman he had once loved. If little by little passion had been extinguished by absence, regret smothered by routine, the memories were still there. The man who had disciplined himself nearly a quarter-century ago to give Lucy up must have felt he had a right to indulge the legitimate wishes of an old friend.

  The exact shape of Franklin’s friendship with Lucy over time is not easy to fix. Through the twenties and thirties, the only evidence that they ever saw one another is the oft-told tale that Lucy attended Roosevelt’s first inaugural as his special guest, half concealed in a limousine on the edge of the crowd. The only other recorded contacts through these two decades are a couple of chatty letters Lucy wrote in 1927, the first congratulating Roosevelt on becoming a grandfather with Anna’s first child, the second describing a summer holiday in Europe with the children. As long as Winthrop Rutherfurd was healthy and strong, as long as Missy LeHand guarded the gates to the White House, the risks of further association must have seemed tremendous.

  The first hint of a personal meeting is contained in the handwritten version of the White House usher diary for Friday, August 1, 1941. In addition to the typed list of official appointments on the president’s schedule each day, a handwritten diary was kept which filled in his movements both before and after the scheduled appointments: his trips to the doctor’s office, his exercise time in the pool, his sojourns in the map room, his off-the-record guests. At eight-forty that night, the handwritten diary records a visit by a Mrs. Paul Johnson. “Mrs. Johnson,” according to Roosevelt’s Secret Service agent, William Simmons, was a coded name for Lucy Rutherfurd. Though we cannot say for sure that the Mrs. Johnson who visited the president on the first of August was indeed Lucy Rutherfurd, the fact that she met with him alone and stayed with him until 11 p.m. and then returned for dinner the following evening and did not leave until nearly midnight underscores that she must have been somebody special in Roosevelt’s life.

  The timing of the first meeting makes sense. Winthrop Rutherfurd had recently suffered a stroke and was a bedridden invalid. Early in his illness, when he was desperately sick, Lucy had contacted Roosevelt for help, perhaps to gain admission to Walter Reed. The friendship had been renewed. During these same months, Lucy’s mother had been placed in the Waverly Sanitarium, in Rockville, Maryland, and her only sister, Violetta, had moved to D.C., giving Lucy other reasons to come to Washington. On Roosevelt’s side, the timing was also right. Missy was still in the hospital recovering from her stroke, and Eleanor was in Campobello for the final session of her summer leadership institute.

  “Mrs. Johnson” returned to Washington three months later, on November 9, accompanied by her daughter (presumably Barbara Rutherfurd). The two women took tea with the president in the late afternoon, and then Mrs. Johnson dined with him alone in his study. Eleanor was in New York at the time. In December, young Barbara visited the White House on her own, to eat dinner with Harry Hopkins and the president in Roosevelt’s study. The following spring, Mrs. Johnson showed up twice for dinner, and then, in October, when Eleanor was en route to England, she returned once more, dining with him one day and taking tea with him the next. Nothing specific is known of the conversation they shared. If the infatuation of their earlier days was still alive, it is not likely that either allowed the other to know.

  When Shoumatoff arrived at the president?
??s office that day in May 1943, he greeted her with such friendliness that his hand, she later wrote, seemed to stretch across the entire room. “How is Mrs. Rutherfurd? And how is Barbara?” he asked. Throughout the sitting, he was “very cheerful,” talking at length about the royal refugees in the U.S. and the recent visit of the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Maxim Litvinov. As Shoumatoff finished her sketch, she commented that his gray suit and blue tie were too drab for a painting. The president laughed and then suggested that he put on his favorite navy-uniform cape. Perfect, the artist replied, and the portrait was completed. A week later, she returned to Aiken and presented the handsome painting to a “delighted” Lucy.

  • • •

  Churchill arrived in Washington the evening of May 11, just as the Allied operation in North Africa was coming to a successful conclusion. Two days earlier, the Axis forces in Tunisia had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.

  It had been a long struggle for the Allies, longer than expected. After the first flush of victory in French North Africa, the Allied drive on Tunis had come up against the fierce resistance of reinforced German forces under the leadership of the great “Desert Fox,” German General Erwin Rommel. On February 20, at Kasserine Pass, inexperienced American forces had encountered their first blitzkrieg attack by German tanks, artillery, and dive-bombers. Though the Americans fought bravely, they were outmaneuvered by the seasoned German troops: their defense of the pass was ill-conceived, their tanks were under-armed, their equipment was inferior, their training for the removal of mines was inadequate, and their air-ground communications were faulty. The Germans broke through the pass, destroyed a large cache of weapons, and took thousands of American prisoners.

  Two weeks after the battle at Kasserine Pass, a telegram addressed to Mrs. Mae Stifle on Corning Street arrived at the Western Union Station in the small town of Red Oak, Iowa, population six thousand. “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son Daniel Stifle . . . is missing in action.” Fifteen minutes later, a second telegram arrived, telling Mrs. Stifle that her second son, Frank, was also missing in action. A few minutes later, Mrs. Stifle’s daughter, Marie, received word that she had lost her husband, Daniel Wolfe. As the evening wore on, the telegrams kept coming until there were twenty-seven. The Gillespies on Second Street had lost two boys—Charles, twenty-two, and Frank, twenty. Duane Dodd and his cousins, the two Halbert boys, were missing.