No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  “Perhaps,” Perkins admitted, “it wasn’t in his nature to do it, so that he was working at cross-purposes with himself, when he was trying to do it.” For, at bottom, “he obviously did like being President. It was a full time occupation for all of his energies and talents and anybody is happy and content when fully functioning. Even when the problems are very great, full functioning is such a rare experience that it’s quite pleasing.”

  But the two-term limitation had become a cherished tradition, and Roosevelt knew, as 1940 opened, that he would be asking for trouble if he tried to buck it. In political circles in the winter and early spring, the dominant opinion was that Roosevelt should not run for a third term. “This is a government of law, and not of one man, however popular,” Democratic Senator Patrick McCarran said. “No President should seek a third term,” West Virginia Senator Rush Holt maintained, “that is, if he believes in the continuation of democracy in this country. Has it come to the place in the glorious history of our great country that we have exhausted all leadership until today our existence depends upon one man in 130 million?”

  Coupled with the uncertainties of a bid for re-election, Roosevelt nourished a genuine desire to return to Hyde Park. In a conversation with Senator George Norris, he expressed his weariness. “George, I am chained to this chair from morning till night. People come in here day after day, most of them trying to get something from me, most of them things I can’t give them, and wouldn’t if I could. You sit in your chair in your office too, but if something goes wrong or you get irritated or tired, you can get up and walk around, or you can go into another room. But I can’t, I am tied down to this chair day after day, week after week, and month after month. And I can’t stand it any longer. I can’t go on with it.”

  Roosevelt had signed a contract with Collier’s in January to write a series of articles at an annual salary equal to the $75,000 he received as president. “The role of elder statesman appealed to him,” Eleanor said. Throughout much of the winter, his mind had been happily occupied with two building projects at Hyde Park. For years, Roosevelt had wanted a small place of his own where he could write and think in peace away from the bustle of the Big House. At the far end of his property, on a hilltop overlooking the Hudson Valley, he had found the perfect spot to build a small stone cottage, a simple place with a cozy living room, a small kitchen, three bedrooms, and a magnificent porch overlooking the Catskills to the north and rolling wooded fields to the south. “It’s perfect, just perfect,” he would often say, as he and Missy gradually furnished the place to his own liking, hung the pictures he wanted to see, and chose the books he wanted to read. Some day in the future, Roosevelt imagined, he might even want to live full-time at Top Cottage. So hurt was his mother by his plans for a home away from home, however, that he solemnly promised never to spend a full night there so long as she was alive.

  At the same time, he was deeply involved with plans for a presidential library on the grounds of his estate, to house the White House papers and all the other documents of his public life since he first went to the New York State Senate in 1910. Having collected things—stamps, coins, stuffed birds, prints, and books—since he was a child, he took great pleasure in the process of sorting his papers, spending hours at a time with his Hyde Park neighbor Margaret Suckley, whom he had brought on the staff to supervise the transfer. “Every time he came to Hyde Park in the winter and spring of 1940,” Miss Suckley recalled, “he brought large gobs of stuff—papers, documents, statues, presents—to be taken to the attic and sorted out for the library.” All through the spring, housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt confirmed, “we were clearing out storerooms, packing and shipping to Hyde Park; in fact, the Roosevelts were closing up.”

  But after the fall of France, the third-term dialogue shifted. “If times were normal,” Senator Elmer Thomas told reporters, “I would not favor a third term for President Roosevelt, [but] I consider 1940 an abnormal year.” Arguing along similar lines, Representative Charles Kramer noted that “a speeding car simply cannot change drivers without losing control. No one in the United States is better informed on world affairs than President Roosevelt or so capably qualified to guide us through this critical period. Whether it be the first, second, third or fourth term is not as important as competent leadership.”

  “I think my husband was torn,” Eleanor told an interviewer years later. “He would often talk about the reasons against a third term,” but “there was a great sense of responsibility for what was happening. And the great feeling that possibly he was the only one who was equipped and trained and cognizant not only of the people who were involved in the future, and in what was going to happen, but of every phase of the situation.”

  Candidly, she concluded: “Now, whether that was purely a sense of responsibility, whether there was some feeling of not wanting to leave the center of history . . . no one, I think, could really assess . . . . When you are in the center of world affairs, there is something so fascinating about it that you can hardly see how you are going to live any other way. In his mind, I think, there was a great seesaw: on one end, the weariness which had already begun, and the desire to be at home and his own master; on the other end, the overwhelming interest which was the culmination of a lifetime of preparation and work, and the desire to see and to have a hand in the affairs of the world in that critical period.”

  While the president was grappling with the perplexing question of whether he should run again or not, Eleanor carefully avoided asking him what he was going to do. She felt she had no right to put pressure on him by saying what she wished he would do. “It was a position of such terrific responsibility,” Eleanor explained, “involving the fates of millions where the final decisions always had to be made alone, that the decision of whether or not to run again had to be made by the President himself, uninfluenced.”

  Eleanor’s habitual reluctance to give advice, which extended to her children as well as her husband, had its roots in her sense that “one never knows, one can never be certain that one’s advice is correct.” At one point, before the German blitzkrieg, she had suggested that “the President might have served his purpose in history and that . . . new leadership was required for the next step ahead.” Unless, she cautioned, “the international crisis made him indispensable.”

  All through her married life, Eleanor had suffered under the domination of her mother-in-law’s strong opinions about everything, her haughty inclination to declare what she considered “the straight path,” the best and proper thing to do in any situation. Once, after a long evening with Sara and her two sisters, Eleanor remarked to Franklin, “They all in their serene assurances and absolute judgments on people and affairs going on in the world make me want to squirm and turn bolshevik.” Determined not to follow in Sara’s footsteps, she generally held back her counsel.

  “Will the President seek a third term?” reporters asked her repeatedly. “I don’t know,” she could honestly respond. “I haven’t asked him.” When reporters tried to get the answer in a different way, by inquiring where she thought she would be after 1940, she replied, “When you have been married as long as I have to a man who has been in public office a long time, you will learn never to think ahead and you will make up your mind to accept what comes along.”

  But of course she did think ahead, and when she did, she admitted to her old friend Isabella Greenway, she “would not look forward to four years more in the White House with joy.” Too much of her day, she felt, was still taken up with the superficial aspects of the first lady’s job. Despite her best efforts to focus her energies on a few important issues, “there was no end to the appointments, teas, social obligations.” Indeed, in 1939, her secretary recorded that Eleanor received 9,211 tea guests, 4,729 dinner guests, and 323 house guests. It was particularly hard in the busy winter months, when her day was so filled with routine obligations that she couldn’t even start working on her mail until after midnight. Staying up regularly until 3 or 4 a.m., she stil
l had to arise at 7 or 8 to begin another long day. If only she could do some work of her own, she remarked, “take on a job and see it through to a conclusion.”

  There was, however, no room in a world at war for such personal desires. “At the present moment,” Eleanor concluded her letter to Greenway, “what anyone likes or dislikes does not seem very important.”

  • • •

  By refusing to say whether or not he would seek a third term, Roosevelt had effectively paralyzed the political process. By July, leading Democrats were beginning to panic. Believing the time for a decision had come, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman James Farley drove up to Hyde Park on July 9.

  Whatever the president decided, Farley was determined not to retreat from the decision he had already taken: to have his own name placed in nomination for the presidency. Though he understood that his candidacy was a long shot at best, he believed someone in the party had to take a principled stand against the third term. The problem with the third term, as Farley saw it, even beyond the risk of shattered tradition, was the fact that having the same man run for president again and again created an inflexible political situation in which ordinary people, particularly younger men and women scattered all around the country, lost interest in politics. When a president is satisfied with the work of the people he’s got, he tends not to change them; the turnover is slight and there is little chance for aspiring outsiders to get experience. The young people who ought to be hustling for votes feel everything has already been arranged, and, over time, passion diminishes. Farley was hoping to get Roosevelt to commit himself against running again once and for all.

  The journey to Hyde Park took Farley through Rockland County, where he was born and grew to manhood, evoking memories of his parents, his Catholic boyhood, and his years of work in the family’s bricklaying business before he entered politics and achieved, as he put it, “greater success than I had dreamed of.” Rising steadily through the ranks of the Democratic Party, Farley was in 1928 and 1930 elected secretary and then chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, where he played a major role in organizing the successful gubernatorial campaigns for FDR. Recognizing Farley’s charm and great organizing talent, Roosevelt had chosen him to direct his presidential campaign in 1932 and then had appointed him postmaster general. In 1936, Farley once again directed Roosevelt’s tremendously successful campaign, and increased his reputation as a political genius by correctly predicting that the president would carry all but two states. In the past year, however, primarily because of Farley’s known opposition to the idea of a third term, relations had cooled to the point where, that very morning, the newspapers had carried a story that Farley would soon resign his Cabinet post to go into private business.

  The temperature was ninety-five degrees when Farley reached the president’s home. There, still playing the role of the gracious hostess, the president’s mother was waiting for him on the broad front porch. Dressed in black lace, she grasped Farley’s hand in a warm welcome and then lost no time in asking him if there was any truth to the story that he was thinking of leaving the Roosevelt administration to head the New York Yankees.

  “You know,” she said, using her hands to emphasize what she was saying in the same way her son did, “I would hate to think of Franklin running for the Presidency if you were not around. I want you to be sure to help my boy.”

  “Mrs. Roosevelt, you just have to let these things take their course,” Farley answered.

  But letting things take their course was not in Sara’s character. If her son wanted a third term, then everything should be done to make it happen. As Sara and Farley were talking, Harry Hopkins and Missy LeHand came downstairs, and the small party moved into the entrance hall, bordered on one side by a large glass case containing a collection of birds Franklin had shot and stuffed as a boy, on the other by the young man’s collection of early-nineteenth-century naval prints.

  Since the president was not home from church, Sara led her guests into the spacious living room, which she and her son had designed as a showcase for the family’s fifteen thousand leather-bound books, the president’s rare coins, and his treasured stamp collection. At the center of the elegant room, flanking the stone fireplace, stood two highback chairs—the one to the left was Sara’s; the one to the right, Franklin’s; Eleanor was forced to find a chair wherever she could. After all these years, Sara was still the mistress of the house.

  Half an hour before lunch, a Chinese gong was tapped, and it was rung once again five minutes before the food reached the table. At the second ring, the banter stopped as Sara led her guests into the dining room, with its heavily carved dark sideboards, and chairs whose leather seats were too well worn for comfort.

  At that moment, Eleanor came downstairs. Greeting Farley in the hallway on the way in, she told him she was “both pleased and shocked by the news” in the morning papers that he was leaving politics and going into business. “Of course, I am pleased to have anything happen to you which would be personally beneficial, but I am shocked at the thought you may not direct things in the coming campaign,” she said.

  Eleanor liked Farley. The jovial party chief was as forthright and simple as Franklin was labyrinthine and complex. Furthermore, she believed her husband was largely to blame for the rift that had grown between the two. Eleanor was still talking with Farley when the president returned from church. Guiding everyone into the dining room, Franklin sat at one end of the table and Sara at the other. In the dining room as in the living room, Eleanor had no seat of her own but simply found a place as best she could—on this occasion, next to Harry Hopkins. “There was a lot of good-natured conversation during the meal,” Farley recalled. “Somehow a discussion of Andrew Jackson was raised, during which the President recalled how the hero of New Orleans was attacked on the question of the legality of his wife’s divorce. The President’s mother pricked up her ears at the mention of divorce, and after listening for a moment or two, turned to me and said: ‘My heavens! I didn’t know they had such bad things as divorce so long ago.’”

  Having had her own way for so many years, Sara tended to say exactly what she thought, speaking in a straightforward, undiplomatic manner. Once, in the middle of a lunch at Hyde Park, a young visitor turned to Eleanor and said, “Mrs. Roosevelt, what is the President going to do about the budget?” Eleanor stopped to think for a moment and at the end of the table Sara suddenly spoke up. “Budget, Budget? What does the child mean? . . . Franklin knows nothing about the budget. I always make the budget.” On another occasion, when the flamboyant governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, was monopolizing the luncheon conversation, Sara glanced at him from head to foot, taking in his striped suit and his polka-dotted tie. Then, in a loud stage whisper, she said to the guest beside her: “That’s the reason why I didn’t want Franklin to go into politics. He has to deal with such dreadful people.”

  After lunch, the president asked Farley to join him in his study, a narrow room off the back hall that had been his school room as a boy. The room was small but it contained all the president needed: a comfortable old chair, a big desk, a few mementos of his earlier career, including the placard he had carried for Woodrow Wilson at the Democratic convention in 1916 and the books he wanted near by. “Everything right within reach,” he liked to say. From this cluttered room, so unsatisfactory for press conferences that reporters tumbled onto the porch outside, forced to relay the questions and answers back and forth, the president directed the affairs of the nation during the nearly two hundred visits he made to Hyde Park during his presidency. Over the years, Sara had begged him to let her fashion a study befitting his high political office. But he liked the tiny room exactly as it was, the perfect size for his crippled body to maneuver in and manipulate the movements of others.

  The midday sun was so hot that before settling down to talk both the president and Farley took off their coats and ties. For the first ten minutes, pictures were taken of the two men smiling and laughin
g. As soon as the photographers left, however, there was a heavy silence, until the president approached the unpleasant task of admitting to Farley—indirectly, of course—that if the convention nominated him for a third term he would indeed run.

  “Jim,” the president began, starting off, typically, at the opposite end of what he meant to say, “I don’t want to run and I’m going to tell the convention so. You see I want to come up here,” he added with a smile, directing his eyes through the open window of his study toward the woods and the Hudson River far below. The house at Hyde Park was at its most beautiful on summer afternoons. It was there under the blossoming trees that he had read as a child, there in the woods that he had first learned to ride a pony, and everything today was just as he remembered it from his boyhood.

  Now, Farley was as sentimental as any politician, but, having promised himself that he would not succumb to the president’s charm, he cut Roosevelt short. If the president made his wish not to run specific, Farley asserted, the convention would not nominate him. All that was needed was Roosevelt’s word. Farley went on to enumerate the reasons he believed a third term would be devastating to the Democratic Party. The president, Farley said, was making it impossible for anyone else to be nominated by refusing to declare his intentions one way or the other.

  Mopping his face with a handkerchief, Roosevelt finally asked what Farley would do if he were in the president’s place. “In your position,” Farley bluntly responded, “I would do exactly what General Sherman did many years ago—issue a statement saying I would refuse to run if nominated and would not serve if elected.”