Forgive me for writing of things which you know so much better than I—& which are sacred—& should not ever be touched on by a stranger. I somehow cannot feel myself to be that, & I feel strongly that you understand.
My love to your husband—and to you—Anna darling, because you are his child & because you are yourself.
I am very devotedly & with heartbroken sympathy
Lucy Rutherfurd
Anna kept Lucy’s letter in her bedside table for the rest of her life, “showing it,” her son Johnny recalled, “only on a few occasions, in privacy, to those for whom she had a special trust and care and to whom she wished to convey something of herself for which she had no words of her own. Perhaps no one other than Lucy could have confirmed the father-love she so treasured, first and to the end, and the depth of her loss.” At the same time, Anna’s daughter, Sistie, speculated, Lucy’s precious letter may have lessened the guilt Anna felt toward her mother. “Perhaps, by revealing what a fine person Lucy was, a person of such innate dignity and poise, the letter justified the quiet arrangements Anna had made to bring Lucy and her father together.”
A strain between mother and daughter lasted through the summer and into the fall. The return to Seattle in June had not been easy for Anna and John. A disagreement with publisher William Randolph Hearst led to their severance from the Post-Intelligencer, and John was having trouble figuring out what to do. His self-esteem was at a low ebb. For almost a quarter of a century, he wrote Eleanor, he had had “a flood of work” constantly ahead of him, but now he had no specific responsibilities and “he was running scared.” The death of FDR marked the end of an era for John, his son, Johnny, observed, the end of an inspired time in which he had lived in the protective shadow of his father-in-law’s position. His old feelings of inferiority now returned, creating serious tensions in his marriage.
When Anna came east in mid-October, she was worried about her husband and anxious about the future. Walking with her mother through the Big House, she was close to tears. It was the last time she would ever see the house as she had known it as a child. The government was about to take it over and begin the process of turning it into a museum. “I think it is very hard for her,” Eleanor confided in Hick. Later that night, when the conversation turned to John, Anna broke down. Her tears released the remaining tension between mother and daughter, just as Eleanor’s tears had released the strain between them two decades earlier, when Anna was an adolescent.
Eleanor assured Anna that all was forgiven between them. She had come to the realization that her daughter had never meant to hurt her, but was only trying to provide a measure of relaxation for her weary father. What is more, she had come to forgive Franklin as well. “All human beings have failings,” she later observed, “all human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another’s failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.”
• • •
For the rest of her life, her son Elliott observed, Eleanor “chose to remember only the lovely times they had shared, never the estrangement and pain.” She loved to quote word for word the things they had told one another. She kept up the traditions he had established for the family—including the picnic on the Fourth of July and the reading of Dickens at Christmas. Maureen Corr, Eleanor’s secretary during the forties and fifties, remembers her “constantly talking about what Franklin did or what Franklin said or . . . how Franklin thought about this or that. And every time she mentioned his name you could hear the emotion in her voice and see the glow in her eyes.”
In early December 1945, President Truman telephoned Eleanor in her Washington Square apartment. The first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly was scheduled to open in January in London. Would she be willing to serve as a member of the American delegation? Oh no, she said, she could not possibly do it. She had no experience or background in foreign affairs. Truman refused to be put off. He urged her to think about it for a while and assured her he had no doubt whatsoever about her capabilities. Eleanor debated her decision for days. She considered the United Nations to be the greatest of her husband’s legacies, and she longed for the job, but was terrified of failure. Finally, conquering what she called her “fear and trembling,” she accepted the position, setting forth on a new journey into the field of universal human rights that would make her “the most admired person in the world”—and an important figure in American public life for nearly two more decades.
In these first months on her own, Eleanor derived constant comfort from a little verse sent to her by a friend. “They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind. In those whom they have blessed they live a life again.” These simple lines, she wrote, inspired her to make the rest of her life worthy of her husband’s memory. As long as she continued to fight for his ideals, he would continue to live.
AFTERWORD
Harry Hopkins resigned from the government after Roosevelt died. “The time has come,” he wrote President Truman, “when I must take a rest.” In September 1945, at a White House ceremony, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for what Truman called his exceptional ability in welding the Allies together in World War II. Four months later, in January 1946, Hopkins died. He was fifty-five. “A strong, bright, fierce flame has burned out a frail body,” Churchill said on hearing the news.
Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd continued to divide her time between her estates in Aiken, South Carolina, and Allamuchy, New Jersey. In June 1945, she told her friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff that she had burned all of Roosevelt’s letters. Three years later, Lucy was diagnosed with leukemia. She died in July 1948, at the age of fifty-seven, and was buried beside her husband at Tranquility Farms in Allamuchy.
Malvina Thompson continued to work for Mrs. Roosevelt until 1953, when she died in a New York hospital from a brain hemorrhage. She was sixty-one.
Crown Princess Martha returned with her husband to Norway after it was liberated in May 1945. In June, King Haakon and the royal family were officially welcomed home with a triumphant celebration. In 1954, Martha died of a liver ailment at the age of fifty-three. The crown prince never remarried. He became king when his father died in 1957, and ruled until his death in 1991. His son, Harald, is now king of Norway.
Winston Churchill settled unhappily into his postwar role as leader of the parliamentary opposition, occupying his days with the writing of his monumental history of World War II. In 1951, the Conservatives were returned to power and Churchill became prime minister a second time. He remained in power until 1955, when ill-health forced his resignation. He suffered a massive stroke in early January 1965 and died two weeks later, at the age of ninety. He was the first commoner to be accorded a state funeral since the duke of Wellington more than a century earlier.
Lorena Hickok eventually moved to a little cottage in Hyde Park, where she remained until her death in 1968, at the age of seventy-five. In her will, she requested that her ashes be scattered among the trees along the Hudson. The funeral home, unaware of her request, placed them on a shelf along with other unclaimed items, where they remained for years, until her sister, Ruby, honored her request.
Joe Lash remained friendly with Eleanor until the end of her life. After Eleanor’s death, the Roosevelt children authorized him to write her biography based on her private papers. Published when Lash was sixty-one, the book won the Pulitzer Prize. Lash died in 1987 at the age of seventy-seven.
Anna and John Boettiger bought a newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1946. When the newspaper failed, John became increasingly depressed. In 1949, he and Anna were divorced. The following year, John committed suicide by jumping from the window of a New York hotel. Two years later, Anna married Dr. James Halsted, a clinical professor of medicine at Albany Medical College. Anna died of cancer in 1975, at the age of sixty-nine.
John Roosevelt died in 1981 of heart failure at New York Hospital. H
e was sixty-five. The only one of the Roosevelt boys who never ran for elective office, he was a businessman and an investment banker. In 1952, he became a Republican. He was married twice.
FDR, Jr., died of cancer in 1988, on his seventy-fourth birthday. He served three terms in Congress from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He ran twice for governor of New York, losing the first race to Averell Harriman, the second to Nelson Rockefeller. In 1960, he campaigned for John Kennedy and was appointed undersecretary of commerce. He was married five times.
Elliott Roosevelt died of congestive heart failure in 1990, at the age of eighty. He authored fourteen books, including three biographical works on his family, and a series of mystery novels which cast Eleanor as a detective. In 1962, he moved to Miami Beach, where he served as mayor. He was married five times.
James Roosevelt died in 1991, at the age of eighty-three, of complications from a stroke. In 1950, he won the Democratic nomination for governor of California, but was defeated by Earl Warren. He was elected to Congress four years later from the 26th district in California. He remained in the House for six terms. In 1972, he played a prominent role in Democrats for Nixon. He was married four times.
Eleanor Roosevelt remained an important political figure until her death in 1962, at the age of seventy-seven. She was a leading force behind the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948, a vigorous advocate for the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel, a prominent actor in New York politics, a supporter of Adlai Stevenson, and a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action. During her last years, she was often called “the greatest woman in the world.” Mourners at her funeral included President and Mrs. Kennedy, Vice-President Johnson, former Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Adlai Stevenson, Frances Perkins, James Farley, Sam Rosenman, and Francis Biddle. She was buried next to her husband in the rose garden at the Hyde Park estate. A plain white marble monument marks the grave. As President Roosevelt wished, it contains no decoration and no inscription except the following:
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
1882–1945
ANNA ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
1884–1962
A NOTE ON SOURCES
This book relies predominantly upon a multitude of primary materials: manuscript collections, memoranda, private letters, diaries, memoirs, office files, oral histories, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, personal interviews. The White House Usher Diaries proved an especially invaluable guide at the start of the project. These day-by-day, even minute-by-minute chronologies reveal when the president and the first lady awakened, who joined them for meals and meetings, how much time was spent with each visitor, where they went during the day, when they went to bed at night. With these daily chronologies as my base, I searched for personal diaries, letters, oral histories, and memoirs of the people who were with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at particular moments of interest. Eleanor’s daily columns also proved essential. Though they ramble from one topic to the next, and often were limited to an account of her daily activities, they do give us an insight into contemporaneous concerns and perceptions.
I treasure the details that emerged from these primary sources: an interview with the president’s daughter-in-law revealed the nightly ritual Roosevelt followed as he tried to fall asleep in the middle of the war; a talk with the White House butler produced the unforgettable image of Winston Churchill standing in his long underwear, demanding ninety-year-old brandy in his White House suite every night; an oral history provided the telling description of how the president’s face would light up when his daughter, Anna, walked into the room; a diary entry revealed the dramatic scene when the president’s mother wheeled him away from the dinner table in order to end an unpleasant discussion with Eleanor; letters to the president asking him to muzzle his wife, chain her up or, at the very least, make her stay at home with her knitting, revealed the depth of animosity felt by some toward her unusual independence.
Some of my favorite details came from the press reports of the time: the woman’s scream from the audience as she witnessed the lottery drawing for the draft and realized that her son held the first number drawn; the observation that the president’s nervousness before his press conferences resembled that of an opera singer about to go on stage; the likening of Harry Hopkins’ weary look to that of “an ill-fed horse at the end of a hard day,” the run on maps when Roosevelt announced that he wanted people listening to his fireside chat to follow along with a map spread before them; the sweat dripping from Wendell Willkie’s forehead as he delivered his acceptance speech; the trembling of Roosevelt’s hands as he stood before a Joint Session of Congress; the image of dozens of laborers working around the clock to stuff huge chunks of ice into the primitive air-conditioning in the president’s train; the spontaneous remark when a worker at the Chrysler tank arsenal realized the man in the visitor’s car was President Roosevelt—“By God, if it ain’t old Frank.”
Details such as these can only emerge from research. To remedy gaps in knowledge by fabricating details, even those which may seem inconsequential, is to shift from nonfiction to fiction and is a betrayal of the historian’s trust.
Though my story took place more than a half century ago, I was able to talk with scores of people who knew the Roosevelts and the members of their extended family personally. A list of my interviews follows.
INTERVIEWS
Winthrop Aldrich
Bernard Asbell
Carl Ally
Toinette Bachelder
William Barber
Mildred Barker
Roberta Barrows
Eleanor Bartman
Betty Bishop
John Boettiger, Jr.
Dr. Howard Bruenn
Dorothy Butturf
Maureen Corr
Barbara Mueller Curtis
Egbert Curtis
Dawn Deslie
Robert Donovan
Betty Dooley
Jim D’Orta
Dorothy Dow
Barbara Dudley
Virginia Durr
Meg Egeberg
George Elsey
William Emerson
Creekmore Fath
Lewis Feuer
Alonzo Fields
Fran Fremont-Smith
Frank Friedel
Larry Fuchs
John Kenneth Galbraith
David Ginsburg
Rosemary Goepper
Arthur Goldschmidt
Edna Gurewitsch
Kate Roosevelt Haddad
Diana Hopkins Halsted
Elinor Hendrik
Robert Hopkins
James Hymes, Jr.
Jiro Ishihara
Tama Ishihara
Barbara Jacques
Eliot Janeway
Frances Kaplan
Jan Karski
Mary Keysèrling
Mary Gaston Kramer
Trude Lash
Michael Lilly
Milton Lipson
Mayris Chaney Martin
Sara McClendon
Henry Morgenthau III
Louise Morley
Kathleen Harriman Mortimer
Robert Nathan
Verne Newton
Thomas P. O’Neill
John Pehle
Ruth Thompson Peirce
Esther Peterson
Jane Plakias
Joyce Ralph
Joseph Rauh
Curtis Roosevelt
Eleanor Wotkyns Roosevelt
Elliott Roosevelt
James Roosevelt
James Roosevelt, Jr.
Jane Scarborough
Eleanor Seagraves
Virginia Shipp
David Smith
Grace Stang
Richard Strobel
Margaret Suckley
Mark Talisman
Walter Trohan
Mary Veeder
Betsey Roosevelt Whitney
Elizabeth Wickenden
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Mary Willett
Page Huidekoper Wilson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the research help of Linda Vandegrift, my friend and colleague, who labored with me every day from the very start of the project six years ago. Her diligence in digging through archives, her love of detail, and her passion for the subject accompanied me every step along the way. This book is, in many ways, her creation as well as mine.
I wish to acknowledge at the outset my debt to the extraordinary circle of Roosevelt scholars whose histories and biographies educated and inspired me. Their books, listed in the bibliography and acknowledged in my endnotes, provided a foundation for this study. At the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, where so much of my research was done, I owe a special thanks to the former director, Dr. William Emerson. His enthusiasm for the idea of studying Roosevelt’s leadership of the home front was decisive for me in the early, unfocused months, and as the years went by, he became a mentor and friend, always willing to share so generously his vast knowledge and experience. I am grateful to the entire staff of the Roosevelt library, including its present director, my friend, Verne Newton, Ray Teichman, Bob Parks, Mark Renovitch, Paul McLaughlin, John Ferris, Nancy Snedeker, and Karen Burtis.