I am also grateful to the scores of people I interviewed over the years who gave of their time and their memories without asking anything in return. Several members of the Roosevelt family were especially helpful, including James and Elliott Roosevelt, who are no longer alive, Eleanor Seagraves, and Curtis Roosevelt. Particular thanks to Trude Lash, Henry Morgenthau, Robert Hopkins, Eleanor Seagraves, and Harold Ickes for permission to quote from various letters and papers. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to the University of Southern California for permission to publish excerpts of oral histories of Dan Condren, Frankie Cooper, Shirley Hackett, Dellie Hahn, Sybil Lewis, Larry Mantrell, and Inez Sauer. The University of Southern California retains exclusive ownership of all copyrights to the interviews. I am also grateful to Columbia University for permission to quote from the oral histories of Frances Perkins and Samuel Rosenman and to Yale University for permission to quote from Henry Stimson’s Papers. I want to thank Jeanine Derr for conducting research in the National Archives in Washington, Andrew Blankstein for searching through old newspapers at the Library of Congress, and Lulie Haddad for researching the oral histories at Columbia University.
A number of friends and colleagues sustained me in various ways over the long course of this book, including Alfred Checchi, Phyllis Grann, Arnold Hiatt, Michael Rothschild, and Janna Malamud Smith. And I owe a special debt to my agent, Sterling Lord, who was there when I needed him, as he has always been.
At Simon and Schuster, I owe thanks to Lydia Buechler, Terry Zaroff, Frank and Eve Metz, Victoria Meyer, and Elizabeth Stein. In the course of the last six months, as all the pieces of the book were being put together, I relied on Liz Stein for so many things, talking to her nearly every day, that I can hardly imagine doing a book without her warmth, humor, and support. From beginning to end, I was fortunate once again to have Alice Mayhew as my editor. At every stage of the writing, I benefited greatly from her critical intelligence and her broad, penetrating knowledge. She seems to understand intuitively when to leave a writer alone and when to intervene, when to offer criticism and when to simply encourage. She is, as every one of her authors knows, the best there is.
My husband, Richard Goodwin, has been at my side through all my writing life. This book would not be what it is without him. He shared in the shaping of the story, helped me to articulate the larger themes and spent weeks of his time editing the final manuscript. He is my best friend and my most loving and constructive critic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN is the author of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She is a political analyst for “Nightline,” “Today,” “Good Morning America,” and “CBS Morning News.” She lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with her husband, Richard Goodwin, and their three sons.
PHOTO CREDITS
PHOTOS IN TEXT:
Page 13
© 1940 by The New York Times. Reprinted by permission.
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AP/Wide World Photos
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UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos
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Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
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Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
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Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
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Government of New Zealand/FDRL
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The Philadelphia Record
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Ed Clark, Life Magazine © Time Warner
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Courtesy of The White House
All photos not credited below are from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library:
SECTION I
UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos 1, 6, 14, 20, 23, 24, 29
Courtesy Margaret Suckley/FDRL 7
Thomas McAvoy, Life Magazine © Time Warner 9
Percy T. Jones/FDRL 15
J. T. Holloway/FDRL 28
SECTION II
UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos 4, 17, 27, 28, 29
Courtesy Margaret Suckley/FDRL 21, 22
Photos from FDR’s Unfinished Portrait by Elizabeth Shoumatoff (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990) 25, 26
Photographs
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in a rare moment of relaxation on the south porch of the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park (1).
Eleanor was unlike any girl Franklin had met. She was serious and intelligent, free from affectation, and wholly uninterested in the world of debutante balls. The young couple is shown here on the beach at Campobello shortly after their marriage (2) and with their first child, Anna (3).
When Eleanor discovered a packet of love letters from Lucy Mercer (4) in 1918, the bottom, she said, dropped out of her world. Three years later, Franklin contracted polio. During his convalescence he lived for months at a time on a houseboat in Florida with his secretary, Missy LeHand, here to his left along with Maunsell Crosby and Frances Dana De Rahm (5), while Eleanor remained in New York.
Three generations of Roosevelt women: Anna, Eleanor, and Sara listen to Roosevelt accept the Democratic nomination for a second term (6).
Roosevelt with Harry Hopkins in the second-floor study, the president’s favorite room in the White House (7). It was here that he read, played poker, sorted his beloved stamps, and conducted most of the business of the presidency. A door at the rear of the study led to the president’s bedroom next door (8).
After breakfast, pushed along in his wheelchair by the White House usher, the president headed for the Oval Office (9).
Eleanor occupied a second-floor suite adjacent to the president’s bedroom. Keeping the smaller room as her bedroom (10), she turned the larger room into a sitting room, where she greeted guests and handled her voluminous correspondence (11).
The Roosevelt White House during the war resembled a small, intimate hotel. The residential floors were occupied by a series of houseguests, some of whom stayed for years. Harry Hopkins, here with his daughter, Diana, and his wife, Louise, occupied a suite in the southeast corner of the second floor.
Missy LeHand, pictured here with Roosevelt, lived in a cheerful room with slanted ceilings on the third floor.
From the first moment the president saw Martha, the crown princess of Norway, he was entranced by her good looks and her lively manner. Here Martha is shown with Eleanor, her husband, Crown Prince Olav, Sara and Franklin at Hyde Park (14), and in a procession with Franklin shortly after her arrival in the United States, where she remained throughout the war (16). Her son, Prince Harald, who is now the king of Norway, plays with Fala (15).
Eleanor had her own entourage, including her secretary, Malvina Thompson, here with Eleanor in England, and her friend Lorena Hickok, who lived in the White House for four years during the war, occupying a room across the hall from Eleanor’s suite.
Hick, as she was called, is shown below with Eleanor and Governor Paul Pearson of the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Knowing that his mother disapproved of his wife’s women friends, Franklin built Eleanor a fieldstone cottage of her own on the grounds of the Hyde Park estate. Though Eleanor stayed at the Big House whenever Franklin and the children were at Hyde Park, she considered Val-Kill, here the site of a National Youth Administration Conference, the only real home she had ever known (19).
One friend recalled that whenever the president’s daughter, Anna, here with her father and her second husband, John Boettiger (20), walked into her father’s study, the president’s whole face lighted up. The world’s problems stopped for a few minutes; he just adored her.
All four Roosevelt boys were in the service during the war. Elliott, top left, was in the Army Air Corps; James, top right, was in the marines; while FDR, Jr., bottom left, and John, bottom right, were in the navy (21).
There was an extraordinary bond between the president and his mother. “Nothing,” Eleanor observed, “ever seemed to disturb the deep underlying affection they had for each other.” Here Sara is driving with Eleanor to Campobello in the summer of 1941 (22), accompany
ing Franklin after a speech in the U.S. Capitol (23), and standing between Franklin and Eleanor at St. John’s Church in 1940 (24).
“All that is in me goes back to the Hudson,” Roosevelt liked to say. Time and again Roosevelt confounded his staff by the ease with which, even in the darkest hours, he managed to shake off the burdens of the presidency upon his arrival at Hyde Park. Here are Franklin and Eleanor on the porch of Eleanor’s house Val-Kill in 1943 (25); the front of the big house in winter (26); Roosevelt speaking to the Roosevelt Home Club at the home of his tenant farmer, Moses Smith, while Eleanor holds their grandchild, Elliott Jr., and Harry Hopkins listens (27).
After he had polio, Franklin built a cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, where spring water came out of the ground at a soothing eighty-six degrees, winter and summer, providing therapy for crippled patients and relaxation for vacationers. The simple cottage became known as the Little White House (28).
Although it was difficult for Roosevelt to maneuver his leg braces in the narrow pews, he still attended church whenever he could. Franklin and Eleanor leave church after Easter services, April 13, 1941 (29).
Shortly before 5 p.m. on Sunday night, December 7, 1941, the president called his secretary, Grace Tully, to his study and began dictating the message he wanted to give to Congress the following day. He signed the declaration of war, which both chambers decisively approved with only one dissenting vote, the same day. (1)
In September 1942, the president and first lady undertook a two-week inspection tour of factories and army camps. The first stop was the Chrysler tank arsenal, the largest arsenal in the world devoted completely to the production of military tanks. In the car with Franklin and Eleanor to the far right is Donald Nelson, War Production Board chief (2). Later that afternoon, at Ford’s Willow Run bomber factory, the president spoke with two midgets working high up on the tail section of a bomber where persons of normal height were unable to fit (3). The first shift enters the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California (4).
As more and more married women entered the work force, the president, at Eleanor’s urging, approved the first government sponsored day-care center. Before the war’s end, nearly $50 million was spent on day care. Here Eleanor visits a group of children at a center in Greensboro, North Carolina (5).
For the first time in the history of many companies, women worked on the assembly line as riveters, welders, blueprint readers, and inspectors. “If I were of a debutante age,” Eleanor said, “I would go into a factory—any factory where I could learn a skill and be useful.” At the Douglas aircraft plant in Los Angeles, California, women made up nearly 60 percent of the work force (6,7).
Under Henry Kaiser’s leadership, the average time to deliver a ship was cut from 355 days in 1940 to 194 days in 1941 to 69 days in early 1942. At top, the president’s daughter, Anna, receives a gift from a Kaiser official after christening a merchant ship, the SS Joseph Teal, in 1942 (8).
Construction of the ship is shown (9).
The miracle of shipbuilding allowed weapons and supplies to reach Europe and Asia. Lend-lease, Churchill once said, was the “most unsordid act in the history of any nation.” The boxes of gunpowder above represent the tiniest fraction of the millions of tons of weapons and supplies shipped to Britain and Russia during the war (10). In 1943, American troops began pouring into Europe. Roosevelt inspects U.S. troops with General Eisenhower in Sicily.
Though Admiral William Halsey was initially opposed to Eleanor’s visit to the South Pacific in 1943, he ended up expressing admiration for her dedication and commitment. “It was a sight I will never forget,” he said after watching her lean over gruesomely wounded soldiers at the base hospital, a warm smile on her face (12). Below, she addresses Negro troops at Penrhyn Island (13).
The accustomed rhythms of daily life were disrupted in every factory, business, and home by the institutions of rationing and price control. The motion picture industry contributes to the war bond drive with a premiere (14). A woman presents her ration book to the grocer in order to buy sugar (15).
Nineteen forty-three was the year of conferences. Roosevelt celebrates his sixty-first birthday with Harry Hopkins and Admiral William Leahy as he returns from his meeting with Churchill at Casablanca (16). Roosevelt talks with Russian Premier Joseph Stalin at the Teheran Conference, where Stalin publicly thanked the U.S. for lend-lease for the first time (17). Roosevelt and Churchill view the Pyramids in Egypt on their way to Teheran, Iran (18).
The second Quebec Conference in 1944, Lord Ismay observed, “was more like the reunion of a happy family” on holiday “than the gathering of sedate Allied leaders for an important conference.” Mrs. Churchill is seated between Roosevelt and Churchill; Eleanor talks to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King (19).
Returning from the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt talks to Ambassador to England John Winant, while Secretary of State Edward Stettinius confers with Harry Hopkins (20).
Despite widespread worries about Roosevelt’s health, the 1944 campaign proved, as one reporter said, that “the old master still had it.” By 10 p.m. on election night, the trend was clear: the people of the U.S. had returned FDR to the White House for a fourth term. In these pictures, Roosevelt, adhering to ritual, receives his Hyde Park neighbors on the terrace of his home, as Eleanor and Anna stand behind him (21, 22).
“The days flowed peacefully by,” Margaret Suckley recalled of the president’s last trip to Warm Springs. In the mornings, he would work on his papers at the table before the fireplace (23).
In the afternoons, he would work on the terrace with Grace Tully (24).
Unable to accompany her father to Warm Springs in April 1945, Anna made arrangements for Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd to visit him the second week of his stay. Lucy is shown here with FDR in pictures taken the day before Roosevelt died (25, 26).
On April 12, 1945, Roosevelt was sitting for a portrait by Elizabeth Shoumatoff (27) when he suddenly said, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” and slumped forward. He never regained consciousness.
The president’s coffin was carried by train from Warm Springs to Washington to Hyde Park, where he is buried in the green hedged garden of his boyhood home. Anna and Eleanor are pictured here at the end of the service. Elliott, in uniform, is partly hidden on the right (28).
The riderless horse behind the cortege is the traditional symbol of the fallen leader (29).
After Roosevelt died, Eleanor found unexpected comfort in the president’s dog. Fala accompanied Eleanor on her walks through the woods at Val-Kill, sat beside her chair in the living room, and greeted her at the door when she came home (30).
ALSO BY DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
THE FITZGERALDS AND THE KENNEDYS
LYNDON JOHNSON AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
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NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES
AB
Anna Boettiger*
AH
Anna Halsted*
ER
Eleanor Roosevelt
FDR
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
HH
Harry Hopkins
JL
Joseph Lash
LH
Lorena Hickok
MLH
Missy LeHand
SDR
Sara Delano Roosevelt
WC
Winston Churchill
WW
Walter White
AM
Atlantic Monthly
BEA
Boston Evening American
BG
Boston Globe
CB
Current Biography
CR
Congressional Record
LHJ
Ladies’ Home Journal
MD
“My Day” (Eleanor Roosevelt’s column)