No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. “The Decisive Hour Has Come”

  2. “A Few Nice Boys with BB Guns”

  3. “Back to the Hudson”

  4. “Living Here Is Very Oppressive”

  5. “No Ordinary Time”

  6. “I Am a Juggler”

  7. “I Can’t Do Anything About Her”

  8. “Arsenal of Democracy”

  9. “Business As Usual”

  10. “A Great Hour to Live”

  11. “A Completely Changed World”

  12. “Two Little Boys Playing Soldier”

  13. “What Can We Do to Help?”

  14. “By God, If It Ain’t Old Frank!”

  15. “We Are Striking Back”

  16. “The Greatest Man I Have Ever Known”

  17. “It Is Blood on Your Hands”

  18. “It Was a Sight I Will Never Forget”

  19. “I Want to Sleep and Sleep”

  20. “Suspended in Space”

  21. “The Old Master Still Had It”

  22. “So Darned Busy”

  23. “It Is Good to Be Home”

  24. “Everybody Is Crying”

  25. “A New Country Is Being Born”

  Afterword

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  No Ordinary Time has won the following awards:

  Pulitzer Prize for History

  Harold Washington Literary Award

  New England Bookseller Association Award

  The Ambassador Book Award

  The Washington Monthly Political Book Award

  TO MY SONS,

  RICHARD, MICHAEL, AND JOSEPH

  PREFACE

  On May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France, bringing the “phony war” to an end, and initiating a series of events which led, almost inevitably, to America’s involvement in history’s greatest armed conflict. The titanic battles of that war, the movement of armies across half the surface of the globe, have been abundantly described. Less understood is how the American home front affected the course of the war, and how the war, in turn, altered the face of American life. This book is the story of that home front, told through the lives of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the circle of friends and associates who lived with them in the family quarters of the White House during World War II.

  The Roosevelt White House during the war resembled a small, intimate hotel. The residential floors of the mansion were occupied by a series of houseguests, some of whom stayed for years. The permanent guests occasionally had private visitors of their own for cocktails or for meals, but for the most part their lives revolved around the president and first lady, who occupied adjoining suites in the southwest quarter of the second floor. On the third floor, in a cheerful room with slanted ceilings, lived Missy LeHand, the president’s personal secretary and longtime friend. The president’s alter ego, Harry Hopkins, occupied the Lincoln Suite, two doors away from the president’s suite. Anna Boettiger, the president’s daughter, moved into Hopkins’ suite when Hopkins moved out. Lorena Hickok, Eleanor’s great friend, occupied a corner room across from Eleanor’s bedroom. This group of houseguests was continually augmented by a stream of visitors—Winston Churchill, who often stayed for two or three weeks at a time; the president’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt; Eleanor’s young friend Joe Lash; and Crown Princess Martha of Norway.

  These unusual living arrangements reflected the president’s need to have people around him constantly, friends and associates with whom he could work, relax, and conduct much of the nation’s business. Through these continual houseguests, Roosevelt defied the limitations of his paralysis. If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him. The extended White House family also permitted Franklin and Eleanor to heal, or at least conceal, the incompletions of their marriage, which had been irrevocably altered by Eleanor’s discovery of Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918. There were areas of estrangement, untended needs that only others could fill.

  Encompassed by this small society, Franklin Roosevelt led his nation through the war. Although his role as commander-in-chief has been studied at length, less attention has been paid to the way he led his people at home. Yet his leadership of the home front was the essential condition of military victory. Through four years of war, despite strikes and riots, overcrowding and confusion, profiteering, black markets, prejudice, and racism, he kept the American people united in a single cause. There were indeed many times, as those who worked with him observed, when it seemed that he could truly see it all—the relationship of the home front to the war front; of the factories to the soldiers; of speeches to morale; of the government to the people; of war aims to the shape of the peace to come. To understand Roosevelt and his leadership is to understand the nation whose strengths and weaknesses he mirrored and magnified.

  At a time when her husband was preoccupied with winning the war, Eleanor Roosevelt insisted that the struggle would not be worth winning if the old order of things prevailed. Unless democracy were renewed at home, she repeatedly said, there was little merit in fighting for democracy abroad. To be sure, she did not act single-handedly—civil-rights leaders, labor leaders, and liberal spokesmen provided critical leverage in the search for social justice—but, without her consistent voice at the upper levels of decision, the tendency to put first things first, to focus on winning the war before exerting effort on anything else, might well have prevailed. She shattered the ceremonial mold in which the role of the first lady had traditionally been fashioned, and reshaped it around her own skills and commitments to social reform. She was the first president’s wife to hold—and lose—a government job, the first to testify before a congressional committee, the first to hold press conferences, to speak before a national party convention, to write a syndicated column, to be a radio commentator, to earn money as a lecturer. She was able to use the office of first lady on behalf of causes she believed in rather than letting it use her, and in so doing she became, in the words of columnist Raymond Clapper, “the most influential woman of her time.”

  The two stories—that of the Roosevelts and that of America—are woven, in this book, as in reality, into a single narrative, beginning in May 1940 and ending in December 1945. This has required the tools of both history and biography: the effort to illuminate the qualities of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt has demanded occasional departures from chronology. Yet the spine of this work is narrative. Most studies of the home front have been arranged topically—production, civil rights, rationing, women, Japanese Americans, etc. But a president does not deal with issues topically. He deals with events and problems as they arise. By following the sequence of events ourselves, it is easier to see the connections between the home front and the war, between the level of production at a particular time and the decisions about where and when to fight, between the private qualities of leadership and the public acts.

  And there is also a quality to this period which can only be conveyed through narrative—the sense of a cause successfully pursued through great difficulties, a theme common to America itself and to the family which guided it. “This is no ordinary time,” Eleanor Roo
sevelt told the Democratic Convention of 1940, “and no time for weighing anything except what we can best do for the country as a whole.” Guided by this conviction, the nation and its first family would move together through painful adversities toward undreamed-of achievements.

  SECOND FLOOR FAMILY QUARTERS*

  *Missy LeHand’s suite was located on the third floor.

  CHAPTER 1

  “THE DECISIVE HOUR HAS COME”

  On nights filled with tension and concern, Franklin Roosevelt performed a ritual that helped him to fall asleep. He would close his eyes and imagine himself at Hyde Park as a boy, standing with his sled in the snow atop the steep hill that stretched from the south porch of his home to the wooded bluffs of the Hudson River far below. As he accelerated down the hill, he maneuvered each familiar curve with perfect skill until he reached the bottom, whereupon, pulling his sled behind him, he started slowly back up until he reached the top, where he would once more begin his descent. Again and again he replayed this remembered scene in his mind, obliterating his awareness of the shrunken legs inert beneath the sheets, undoing the knowledge that he would never climb a hill or even walk on his own power again. Thus liberating himself from his paralysis through an act of imaginative will, the president of the United States would fall asleep.

  The evening of May 9, 1940, was one of these nights. At 11 p.m., as Roosevelt sat in his comfortable study on the second floor of the White House, the long-apprehended phone call had come. Resting against the high back of his favorite red leather chair, a precise reproduction of one Thomas Jefferson had designed for work, the president listened as his ambassador to Belgium, John Cudahy, told him that Hitler’s armies were simultaneously attacking Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. The period of relative calm—the “phony war” that had settled over Europe since the German attack on Poland in September of 1939—was over.

  For days, rumors of a planned Nazi invasion had spread through the capitals of Western Europe. Now, listening to Ambassador Cudahy’s frantic report that German planes were in the air over the Low Countries and France, Roosevelt knew that the all-out war he feared had finally begun. In a single night, the tacit agreement that, for eight months, had kept the belligerents from attacking each other’s territory had been shattered.

  As he summoned his military aide and appointments secretary, General Edwin “Pa” Watson, on this spring evening of the last year of his second term, Franklin Roosevelt looked younger than his fifty-eight years. Though his hair was threaded with gray, the skin on his handsome face was clear, and the blue eyes, beneath his pince-nez glasses, were those of a man at the peak of his vitality. His chest was so broad, his neck so thick, that when seated he appeared larger than he was. Only when he was moved from his chair would the eye be drawn to the withered legs, paralyzed by polio almost two decades earlier.

  At 12:40 a.m., the president’s press secretary, Stephen Early, arrived to monitor incoming messages. Bombs had begun to fall on Brussels, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying thousands of homes. In dozens of old European neighborhoods, fires illuminated the night sky. Stunned Belgians stood in their nightclothes in the streets of Brussels, watching bursts of anti-aircraft fire as military cars and motorcycles dashed through the streets. A thirteen-year-old schoolboy, Guy de Lieder-kirche, was Brussels’ first child to die. His body would later be carried to his school for a memorial service with his classmates. On every radio station throughout Belgium, broadcasts summoned all soldiers to join their units at once.

  In Amsterdam the roads leading out of the city were crowded with people and automobiles as residents fled in fear of the bombing. Bombs were also falling at Dunkirk, Calais, and Metz in France, and at Chilham, near Canterbury, in England. The initial reports were confusing—border clashes had begun, parachute troops were being dropped to seize Dutch and Belgian airports, the government of Luxembourg had already fled to France, and there was some reason to believe the Germans were also landing troops by sea.

  After speaking again to Ambassador Cudahy and scanning the incoming news reports, Roosevelt called his secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and ordered him to freeze all assets held by Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg before the market opened in the morning, to keep any resources of the invaded countries from falling into German hands.

  The official German explanation for the sweeping invasion of the neutral lowlands was given by Germany’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Germany, he claimed, had received “proof” that the Allies were engineering an imminent attack through the Low Countries into the German Ruhr district. In a belligerent tone, von Ribbentrop said the time had come for settling the final account with the French and British leaders. Just before midnight, Adolf Hitler, having boarded a special train to the front, had issued the fateful order to his troops: “The decisive hour has come for the fight today decides the fate of the German nation for the next 1000 years.”

  There was little that could be done that night—phone calls to Paris and Brussels could rarely be completed, and the Hague wire was barely working—but, as one State Department official said, “in times of crisis the key men should be at hand and the public should know it.” Finally, at 2:40 a.m., Roosevelt decided to go to bed. After shifting his body to his armless wheel chair, he rolled through a door near his desk into his bedroom.

  As usual when the president’s day came to an end, he called for his valet, Irvin McDuffie, to lift him into his bed. McDuffie, a Southern Negro, born the same year as his boss, had been a barber by trade when Roosevelt met him in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1927. Roosevelt quickly developed a liking for the talkative man and offered him the job of valet. Now he and his wife lived in a room on the third floor of the White House. In recent months, McDuffie’s hard drinking had become a problem: on several occasions Eleanor had found him so drunk that “he couldn’t help Franklin to bed.” Fearing that her husband might be abandoned at a bad time, Eleanor urged him to fire McDuffie, but the president was unable to bring himself to let his old friend go, even though he shared Eleanor’s fear.

  McDuffie was at his post in the early hours of May 10 when the president called for help. He lifted the president from his wheelchair onto the narrow bed, reminiscent of the kind used in a boy’s boarding school, straightened his legs to their full length, and then undressed him and put on his pajamas. Beside the bed was a white-painted table; on its top, a jumble of pencils, notepaper, a glass of water, a package of cigarettes, a couple of phones, a bottle of nose drops. On the floor beside the table stood a small basket—the Eleanor basket—in which the first lady regularly left memoranda, communications, and reports for the president to read—a sort of private post office between husband and wife. In the corner sat an old-fashioned rocking chair, and next to it a heavy wardrobe filled with the president’s clothes. On the marble mantelpiece above the fireplace was an assortment of family photos and a collection of miniature pigs. “Like every room in any Roosevelt house,” historian Arthur Schlesinger has written, “the presidential bedroom was hopelessly Victorian—old-fashioned and indiscriminate in its furnishings, cluttered in its decor, ugly and comfortable.”

  Outside Roosevelt’s door, which he refused to lock at night as previous presidents had done, Secret Service men patrolled the corridor, alerting the guardroom to the slightest hint of movement. The refusal to lock his door was related to the president’s dread of fire, which surpassed his fear of assassination or of anything else. The fear seems to have been rooted in his childhood, when, as a small boy, he had seen his young aunt, Laura, race down the stairs, screaming, her body and clothes aflame from an accident with an alcohol lamp. Her life was ended at nineteen. The fear grew when he became a paraplegic, to the point where, for hours at a time, he would practice dropping from his bed or chair to the floor and then crawling to the door so that he could escape from a fire on his own. “We assured him he would never be alone,” his eldest son, Jimmy, recalled, “but he c
ould not be sure, and furthermore found the idea depressing that he could not be left alone, as if he were an infant.”

  Roosevelt’s nightly rituals tell us something about his deepest feelings—the desire for freedom, the quest for movement, and the significance, despite all his attempts to downplay it, of the paralysis in his life. In 1940, Roosevelt had been president of the United States for seven years, but he had been paralyzed from the waist down for nearly three times that long. Before he was stricken at thirty-nine, Roosevelt was a man who flourished on activity. He had served in the New York legislature for two years, been assistant secretary of the navy for seven years, and his party’s candidate for vice-president in 1920. He loved to swim and to sail, to play tennis and golf; to run in the woods and ride horseback in the fields. To his daughter, Anna, he was always “very active physically,” “a wonderful playmate who took long walks with you, sailed with you, could out-jump you and do a lot of things,” while Jimmy saw him quite simply as “the handsomest, strongest, most glamorous, vigorous physical father in the world.”

  All that vigor and athleticism ended in August 1921 at Campobello, his family’s summer home in New Brunswick, Canada, when he returned home from swimming in the pond with his children and felt too tired even to remove his wet bathing suit. The morning after his swim, his temperature was 102 degrees and he had trouble moving his left leg. By afternoon, the power to move his right leg was also gone, and soon he was paralyzed from the waist down. The paralysis had set in so swiftly that no one understood at first that it was polio. But once the diagnosis was made, the battle was joined. For years he fought to walk on his own power, practicing for hours at a time, drenched with sweat, as he tried unsuccessfully to move one leg in front of the other without the aid of a pair of crutches or a helping hand. That consuming and futile effort had to be abandoned once he became governor of New York in 1929 and then president in 1933. He was permanently crippled.