In a letter to FDR, Jr., written shortly after her return, Eleanor admitted that her trip was “emotionally disturbing” and that she was now preoccupied with the thought of bringing the war to a speedy end. “I know and understand your obsession to see the end of this war,” young Franklin replied. “But Mummy, we’ve got to see it through completely this time.”
But if Eleanor’s eyes had seen too much of war, the roots of her depression were grounded in deeper soil. “I think,” Lash wrote Trude, “another and larger part of it has to do with a great inner loneliness.” Eleanor’s encounter with death and dying had served notice on the life she was leading, the hours wasted in polite conversation, the endless rounds of social obligations. Though she was tied to her husband in a thousand ways and was devoted to Anna and John and to Joe and Trude, she was still the outsider looking in.
• • •
As she had so many times before in her life, Eleanor sought to escape her sadness through unremitting work, through a redoubled effort to ensure that the world that emerged in the postwar era was worthy of the lives that had been lost. “I think the things one dreads sometimes tend to be forgotten as quickly as possible,” she wrote, “but this time . . . we must remember the dreadful things and try to see they don’t happen again.”
In her columns that fall, she spelled out her hopes for the future: legislation to provide education for returning veterans; a governmental agency to deal with the conversion of industry from war to peace; a permanent international organization that could build on the present cooperation between the United Nations; a relief agency to help people all over the world get back on their feet; an interchange of young people among the various nations as a step toward better understanding.
On previous occasions when Eleanor had tried to get her husband to focus on postwar concerns, she had been unable to attract his attention. To the commander-in-chief it seemed presumptuous, even reckless, to ruminate over the challenges of peace while the Axis powers were winning the war. But now, with the turn in the tide, he found himself willing to look toward the future, both at home and abroad.
In the third week of October, Roosevelt asked Congress for early action on a massive program of education and training for returning GIs—an unprecedented program that would later be known as the GI Bill of Rights. The president’s message called on the federal government to underwrite the college education of returning veterans for a period of one to four years. “Lack of money should not prevent any veteran of this war from equipping himself for the most useful employment for which his aptitudes and willingness qualify him,” Roosevelt said. “I believe this nation is morally obligated to provide this training and education.”
In the weeks that followed, Roosevelt called for additional measures to ensure a smooth transition for every returning veteran. He proposed mustering-out pay on a monthly basis to cover the period of time between discharge and the finding of a new job; unemployment insurance if no job could be found; credits toward social security for time in the service; hospitalization and rehabilitation. Taken together, these measures promised American servicemen more support and more opportunity than any other country had ever given its veterans.
Eleanor was pleased. “I’d like to see us pass all legislation for veterans as soon as possible,” she told reporters. “It would add to the confidence of the men to have such legislation an accomplished fact.”
The president took another forward-looking step that autumn, when he appointed Bernard Baruch to head a newly created unit under War Mobilization Director Jimmy Byrnes to deal with postwar adjustment problems and the conversion of industry from war to peace. The appointment of Baruch was a master stroke. Had anyone else been put in charge of planning the peace, the conservatives on Capitol Hill, who considered the very word “plan” a communist invention, would have had a field day. But so revered was Baruch by Republicans and Democrats alike that all controversy was suppressed. Once again, Eleanor’s delight was palpable. “Baruch is still the most comforting person I know,” she exulted. Though the structure of the new unit failed to capture the broad-gauged vision of the Peace Production Board proposed by Walter Reuther, it did promise to bring a unified governmental approach to the conversion process.
The autumn of 1943 also witnessed significant progress in planning an international body to organize the peace. In the past, fearful that public debate on the shape of the postwar world would stir up isolationist attacks and undermine the unity necessary to prosecute the war, Roosevelt had vigorously opposed a detailed discussion of how the Allies would organize the peace. His change of heart could be traced to the phenomenal success of Wendell Willkie’s book, One World. No book in American publishing history had ever sold so fast. Within two months of its publication, sales had reached a million copies. Based on Willkie’s travels through Russia, China, and the Middle East, the book was an eloquent plea for international cooperation to preserve the peace. Unless Roosevelt took the lead, Democratic colleagues warned, the Republicans stood poised to capture the postwar issue in the next campaign.
The president found his opening in the Conference of Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Moscow that fall. With Roosevelt’s encouragement, Secretary Hull engineered a Four Power declaration pledging the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China to continued cooperation in a great international organization to be established at the earliest practicable date. Though no details were determined, the assurance of postwar unity provoked rejoicing on the part of the American public.
The president hosted an elaborate ceremony in the East Room in early November to commemorate the signing of an international agreement for a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to feed, clothe, and house the world. “The representatives of 44 nations sat around a long table with the President,” Eleanor happily observed. “Behind them were their flags. I watched each man go up to represent his country and thought how interesting it was that, before the end of the war, we have the vision this time to realize that there is much work to do and that preparation by the peoples of the United Nations is necessary . . . . It was impressive and F[ranklin]’s short speech clear and good. I feel in the end something great may have begun today.”
• • •
The first week of November 1943 found the president and the first lady at Hyde Park. The weather was clear and invigorating, Eleanor exulted, “with a sky so blue” that the stars at night were shining as brilliantly as they did in the real winter months. Basking in the beauty of the cool autumn days, the president finished his work in the early afternoons to allow time for picnics at Top Cottage, motor rides through the countryside, and dinners at Val-Kill.
“Good news comes in from every battlefront,” William Hassett recorded on November 1. In Italy, after a successful landing on the mainland to the north of Reggio on September 3, the Allied forces were slowly working their way north up the instep of the Italian boot. The fighting was tougher than expected. Though the new Italian government had surrendered on the first day of the invasion, Hitler’s troops were fighting furiously every step along the way. The battle for Salerno had been, army historians contend, “one of the bitterest battles of the war.” But by the end of October, Allied forces had seized both Palermo and Naples and were only ninety miles from Rome. In the South Pacific, the U.S. landings on Bougainville, the next hop toward Rabaul, had begun. And in the Eastern front, the Red Army was moving forward again toward Kiev after having been driven back halfway to the Dnieper by a German counterattack.
But for Roosevelt, the most encouraging news of the day was Stalin’s agreement, at long last, to meet the Allied leaders at a summit conference in Teheran at the end of November. The first leg of the journey would take the president to Cairo to meet Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. From there, he and Churchill would journey together to Teheran to join the Russian leader.
As soon as Eleanor heard about the meeting with Stalin, she pleaded with Franklin to bring her along. Never once
had she been present at a summit conference, though her sons Elliott and FDR, Jr., had been invited to both Argentia and Casablanca. “Mrs. R wanted very much to go,” Trude reported to Joe. “But the Boss just put his foot down. Absolutely no women.” Besides, he had already asked Elliott, FDR, Jr., and John Boettiger to join him, and that was plenty of company. Eleanor was crushed, not simply by the decision itself but by the insensitivity of her husband’s attitude. But, in characteristic fashion, she deflected the argument from her own disappointment to the wisdom of dragging FDR, Jr., off his ship, which was leaving for Gibraltar in several days, to return to the United States for repairs after a torpedo attack. Feeling strongly that it would hurt her son’s relationship to his men to leave his ship, she was furious when the president insisted that he needed both boys and that was that. An argument followed. “The OM sat all over her,” Anna reported to John, “and hurt her feelings.”
When Anna heard about the trip, she, too, begged to go, “not just because of the interest of the occasion itself,” she told her mother, “but because he’ll be seeing my John.” Eleanor urged her to send a special-delivery letter asking if she could go. “I’ll read him your desire,” she promised, “but I fear all females are out.”
“The answer was, of course, no!” Anna reported bitterly to John. In no uncertain terms, Roosevelt told his daughter that, under navy rules, no women were allowed on shipboard, so there was no way she could come. “Pa seems to take for granted that all females should be quite content to ‘keep the home fires burning,’ and that their efforts outside of this are merely rather amusing and to be aided by a patronizing male world only as a last resort to keep some individually troublesome female momentarily appeased.”
In the days that followed, Anna’s irritation toward her father deepened. In long phone calls with her mother, she worked herself into a fury at the thought that her brothers would be attending their third conference in two years but her only request had been flatly denied. Mother, Anna told John, “goes along very strongly with me in our feeling that OM is a stinker in his treatment of the female members of his family. She pointed out that even though I couldn’t have gone with him in the ship that it would have been perfectly possible for me to fly. Of course the uniform angle (lack of it) is obvious; but a R[ed] C[ross] uniform and mission could have solved that!”
Anna’s sense of injustice was compounded by fear that John was suffering an emotional breakdown in North Africa. Though his early letters revealed a genuine excitement about taking part in “the big show,” his recent letters were filled with self-pity at not having been given anything important to do, despite the assurances he had been given before he arrived that he was really needed. Suddenly he had decided that he could no longer go it alone, that the only way he could contribute to the war effort was if he and Anna could work together as one, either by her obtaining an assignment abroad or his coming home.
In frenzied letters to both Anna and Eleanor, John pleaded for help to come home. “Tell me darling if you can,” John asked Anna, “what made me do this thing? Why should I, with YOU, with us and with real and patriotic responsibilities at home, tear off to what at this stage gives smaller promise of real usefulness . . . . What could I possibly gain to weigh against the job I left vacant on the homefront and the pain I bring to you. Has what I have done to us impaired your love for me in any way? So please my beloved, don’t try to banish us from your thoughts.”
“Neither of us is giving to the war effort separately what we could give jointly,” John wrote Eleanor, “and I fully realize now what a tragic error it was in every way to attempt anything different . . . . If amends can be made I will be ever so grateful . . . . I hope you won’t think too badly of me.”
The problem, Anna explained to John, was that, though her mother was sympathetic to his desire for a transfer, she did not expect her father would understand. Nor could she think of anyone “among the higher ups in Washington who would give serious help and consideration to anything suggested by me or LL. I believe they would be nice and kind and put us both off, believing we were just two sentimental females—this one hungry to get her mate back.”
The only hope, Anna believed, was for the two of them to get together somewhere so she could restore his confidence and bring him back to his senses. Otherwise she feared he might do something stupid in his obsession to come home. That was why the trip to Teheran mattered so much to her, and why her father’s peremptory refusal hurt so badly.
As Anna’s anxiety about John deepened, her own fragile confidence wavered; her pride and pleasure in her work at the paper vanished. She found herself unable to cope with the increasingly bitter political struggles over editorial policy. Sensing her daughter’s pain, Eleanor wrote to her almost every day. “I realize how desperately lonely you must be dearest and it worries me for you.” Why not, Eleanor suggested, think of coming east for Christmas? The family was intending to spend the holidays at Hyde Park, and it would be wonderful if Anna could join them.
When Eleanor invited Anna to come east that winter, she had no way of knowing that her daughter’s visit would lead to her taking a permanent position in the White House as her father’s hostess, a move that would nearly destroy the powerful bond between mother and daughter that had been forged over a period of twenty years.
• • •
At 10:30 p.m. on November 11, 1943, a cold and rainy night in Washington, the president boarded the Potomac for the first leg of his journey to Cairo and Teheran. “I just saw Pa off with Admiral Leahy, Admiral Brown, General Watson, Dr. McIntire, Hopkins,” Eleanor told Anna. “I hated to see Pa go and yet I think it will do much good.” The next morning, the president was transferred to the battleship Iowa to begin the long voyage through the heavy seas of the Atlantic.
“Everything is very comfortable and I have with me lots of work and detective stories and we brought a dozen good movies,” Roosevelt wrote Eleanor the first day of the trip. “Weather good and warm enough to sit with only a sweater as an extra over an old pair of trousers and a fishing shirt . . . It is a relief to have no newspapers! I am going to start a one page paper. It will pay and print only news that really has some relative importance!”
After nine days at sea, the Iowa pulled into the naval base at Oran. There the president was greeted by Elliott, FDR, Jr., and Eisenhower. “The sea voyage had done Father good,” Elliott observed; “he looked fit; and he was filled with excited anticipation of the days ahead.” As it turned out, only Elliott was going on with his father to Cairo. After a week of agonizing, FDR, Jr., had finally decided that he had best go back with his ship. This was, of course, what Eleanor had wanted him to do all along, and she was glad that he had the sense of responsibility to know what was right. She should never have gotten so worked up, she admitted to Joe Lash, “for things always turn out this way.”
For security reasons, Eisenhower recommended a night flight from Tunis to Cairo. The president was disappointed. He had wanted to follow the road the battle had taken from El Alamein. But once the plane was in the air, he was excited at the prospect of seeing the Pyramids. He asked the pilot to circle the banks of the Nile at sunrise so he could have a good view. “He was thrilled by the monuments, the Sphinx and the Nile,” Secret Service chief Mike Reilly recorded. As he looked at the Pyramids, he observed that “man’s desire to be remembered is colossal.”
In Cairo, Anna’s husband, John Boettiger, and Hopkins’ son Robert joined the presidential party. Churchill had arrived the night before, accompanied by his daughter Sarah; Chiang and his wife were settled in a villa nearby. No women allowed, Roosevelt had told Eleanor. Yet here, in plain view for all the photographers to see, were Sarah Churchill and Madame Chiang. Roosevelt must have realized at once that Eleanor would be furious.
She was. No sooner had the first pictures of the conference appeared than she fired off a sarcastic note to her husband. “I’ve been amused that Madame Chiang and Sarah Churchill were in the party. I wish you ha
d let me fly out. I’m sure I would have enjoyed Mme Chiang more than you did though all the pictures show her in animated conversation with you and [Chiang] wears a rather puzzled look as Winston chews his cigar.”
The Roosevelts had hosted the temperamental Madame Chiang at the White House the previous spring. Though Eleanor had grown to like her, the president had found her difficult. “In a queer way,” Eleanor told Anna, “I think the men (including FDR) are afraid of her. She is keen and drives her point and wants to nail them down and they squirm.” To the Secret Service and the White House staff, she was an insufferable prima donna with an unfortunate habit of clapping her hands whenever she wanted something.
In asking Chiang Kai-shek to Cairo, Roosevelt was less interested in China’s military contribution to the Pacific war than in aligning China to the Allied cause in the years ahead. “This will be very useful 25 to 50 years hence,” he said, “even though China cannot contribute much military or naval support for the moment.” Though Roosevelt was under no illusions about Chiang’s ill-trained, ill-equipped troops, he believed it essential to keep China in the war against Japan and was willing to make a number of promises to ensure that result. The sessions were not easy; Chiang, with his wife interpreting, was stubborn and demanding, making promises one day only to reverse himself the next. The British and the Americans were at odds on several points.
“I’m sorry things only went pretty well with Chiang,” Eleanor consoled. “I wonder if he, Mme or Winston made trouble. The questions are so delicate that the Sphinx must be a relief . . . . I loved your quip about the Congress and the one page paper.”
On Thanksgiving Day, troubles and misgivings were cast aside as the president hosted a dinner for Churchill and his daughter, Hopkins and his son, Elliott and John, Anthony Eden, Lord Moran, and Pa Watson. “Let us make it a family affair,” he said as he sat high in his chair, carving two enormous turkeys which he had brought from home. “I had never seen the President more gay,” Churchill noted.