No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  “ ‘Jim,’ Roosevelt said, his right hand clasping the arm of his chair as he leaned back, his left bent at the elbow to hold his cigarette and his face and eyes deadly earnest, ‘if nominated and elected, I could not in these times refuse to take the inaugural oath, even if I knew I would be dead within thirty days.’”

  With this statement, Farley had the information he had come for—Roosevelt was definitely planning to run for a third term. There was a pause, and then Farley resumed the conversation. “Now I am going to say something else you won’t like . . . . I am going to allow my name to go before the convention . . . . I feel I owe it to my party.”

  On hearing the unwelcome news, which smashed his hope to be drafted by acclamation, the president simply nodded, making no attempt to change Farley’s mind. When it was clear the discussion was exhausted, Roosevelt thrust out his hand to Farley and said, “Jim, no matter what happens, I don’t want anything to spoil our long friendship.”

  • • •

  The weekend before the Democratic convention was set to open in Chicago, the president invited Missy, Dr. Ross Mclntire, White House speechwriter Sam Rosenman, and two friends of Missy’s, the Bartletts, for an overnight cruise on the Potomac, announcing to anyone who would listen that he had absolutely no plans to attend the convention. Despite Farley’s intention to “fight” him for the nomination, the president refused to ask the delegates to vote for him, believing that, at the very least, he deserved a spontaneous draft as a show of warmth and affection from the party he had led so well for so many years. At the same time, he knew that he would be stronger in the general election the less anxious he seemed for a third term, which both Washington and Jefferson had refused.

  Never leaving anything to chance, the president sent Harry Hopkins to Chicago. In the troublesome days to come, Roosevelt would insist that Hopkins had been given no authority to act on the president’s behalf, that he was simply there to listen and report back to the White House. But once Hopkins got to Chicago and installed himself in a third-floor suite in the Blackstone Hotel with an open wire to Roosevelt in his bathroom, everyone assumed that Hopkins was acting for the president.

  From the outset, Harry Hopkins found himself in an untenable position, as bewildered delegates, looking for some word, any word, from FDR, came knocking on his door at every hour of the day. “There was a great deal of news emphasis laid upon the appearance of anybody at Hopkins’ headquarters,” Frances Perkins recalled. “If anybody turned up there, that was news and in the papers, whereas the regular officers of the convention, even [FDR fund-raiser Frank] Walker and [Bronx boss Ed] Flynn, didn’t have as many newspapermen watching their door as watched Hopkins’ door.” The most glaring contrast was provided by the Farley offices across the street in the Stevens Hotel. DNC Chairman Farley’s suite normally would have been the hub of the convention, but so large was Roosevelt’s shadow even without an announced intention to run that Farley’s rooms remained, in his own words, “as deserted as a church at the setting of the sun.” A few delegates came to pay their respects to the big party chief, but even these few, Farley noted, seemed “timidly ill-at-ease.”

  Since the delegates did not dare to criticize the president directly, “the man who got all the dead cats and overripe tomatoes was Harry Hopkins,” reporter Marquis Childs observed. “There was bitterness among the organization leaders at [Hopkins’] presence there,” Ed Flynn admitted. “While they had nothing against him personally, in fact a great many of them were fond of him, they felt that he, representing the President, distinctly lowered their prestige . . . . They considered [Hopkins] an amateur.”

  To be sure, Hopkins’ lack of experience did produce mistakes. A seasoned political hand would have called on Farley at once, but Hopkins let several days go by before sending word through a whispered message that he would like the chief to come to his suite. “If Harry Hopkins wants to see me,” the proud Farley exploded, “he can see me in the office of the Democratic National Committee where everybody else sees me.” The next morning, Hopkins came to call on Farley, but by then Farley was so hurt and angry that nothing was accomplished.

  “He threw one leg over the arm of a chair at my desk,” Farley recalled. “He looked tired; his eyes were sunk deep in his pallid face; his scanty hair looked as though it had been combed with his fingers. He was restless, constantly fingering a cigarette.” The haggard look was familiar, but the difficulty with words was not. “Well,” Hopkins finally blurted out, “what I want to say is that whatever you may hear, the Boss wants you to run the campaign.”

  “Be that as it may,” Farley replied, making it clear that he was still determined to have his own name placed in nomination, “I can’t discuss it with you.”

  • • •

  The weekend cruise of the Potomac might have seemed a rest from the hubbub in Chicago, but on July 13, with Sam Rosenman aboard, it was obvious that the president was intending to work on a message to be delivered to the convention.

  During both of the previous conventions, in 1932 and 1936, Roosevelt had relied on Rosenman, a graceful writer and a clear thinker, for help with both the party platform and the acceptance speech. The task at hand now, as Roosevelt explained it to Rosenman on the quiet journey down the river, was a statement to the delegates confirming that he was not actively seeking a third term and that he wanted them to feel free and clear to vote for whomever they wanted. Though Hopkins and Jimmy Byrnes feared that the president’s posturing might open the door for someone else to receive the nomination, Roosevelt stubbornly insisted that, unless the convention came to him with an overwhelming show of support, he would refuse the nomination.

  As Rosenman set to work on the statement, the president read the newspapers, fished, perused his stamps. “One would never imagine that significant political history was being made,” Rosenman observed, “by the calm, thoughtful man” sitting in the stern relaxing with his hobbies. In the evening, after dinner, to his great delight, the president caught a rock bass and an eel. Then, while Missy and her friends adjourned to an upper deck, he rolled up his shirtsleeves and got to work on the brief message that Rosenman had drafted.

  Missy tried to turn her mind from the distressing business of the convention. More and more, she saw, her boss was leaning toward a third term. For months, Missy had been living with the happy thought that, when the president’s second term was over, she would accompany him to Hyde Park. In Missy’s eyes, a friend observed, “Top Cottage was the most cherished spot in all the world, the first home that could truly be hers as well as his.” Though she relished the excitement and prestige of her position in the White House, she loved Franklin more. Her whole existence was wrapped up in him, and she knew that, once they were back at Hyde Park, she would have much more time to spend with him alone.

  It was now sixteen years since the languid days Missy and Franklin had spent together on the Larooco (the seventy-one-foot houseboat he had purchased in 1924, during his convalescence from polio) so he could sun, bathe, and fish in the warm waters off the Florida coast. Four months each winter for three years, Missy had served as Franklin’s hostess on the boat, sharing conversations with the guests who regularly came aboard, sitting by his side as he fished off the deck, providing warmth and understanding when the frustrations of his paralysis broke through his cheerful exterior. “There were days on the Larooco,” Missy later admitted to Frances Perkins, “when it was noon before he could pull himself out of depression and greet his guests wearing his light-hearted facade.”

  Eleanor had accompanied Franklin for two weeks during the first winter’s cruise, but the aimless days drove her crazy and she hated every minute of the trip. “I tried fishing but had no skill and no luck,” she recalled. “When we anchored at night and the wind blew, it all seemed eerie and menacing to me.” Far better for everyone concerned, she decided, if Missy stayed aboard while she returned to New York, where she could keep Franklin’s name alive by attending meetings, making speeches, and
talking with political leaders. Franklin’s mother had objected at first to this curious arrangement in which Missy was clearly the “wife” for months at a time, but Eleanor was thankful for the freedom it afforded her to shape her days as she wanted them.

  The desultory pattern of the years from 1924 to 1927 was such that, after the winter’s cruise came to an end, Franklin and Missy moved directly to Warm Springs, Georgia, a resort community where spring water came out of the ground at a soothing eighty-six degrees, winter and summer alike, providing therapy for crippled patients and relaxation for wealthy vacationers. Still searching for the elusive cure that would restore power to his legs, Roosevelt had first journeyed to the little community on the side of a mountain in the autumn of 1924, after hearing that the healing waters had made it possible for a fellow polio victim to walk again.

  “Warm Springs was not much beyond the horse-and-buggy stage in those days,” recalled Egbert Curtis, manager of the Warm Springs property. “The little whitewashed cottages were dilapidated, and the single hotel in town was pretty run-down, but Roosevelt loved the place the moment he saw it, so much so that he decided to invest money in it, with the idea of sprucing it up and turning it into a national resort.”

  Eleanor accompanied Franklin on his first visit to Warm Springs, but her reaction to the small Southern town was as negative as her husband’s was positive. It was later said that Eleanor began asking questions about the plight of the poor blacks in the town as she rode from the train station the first night; and that once she started asking questions, she never stopped. “We didn’t like her one bit,” one Southern lady admitted. Between the harsh segregation, the suffocating poverty, the Spanish moss, which she hated, and the sound of the Southern drawl, which grated on her ears, Eleanor could not wait to get away.

  It was Missy who stayed by Franklin’s side in Warm Springs, as elsewhere, cheering him on as he underwent a daily regimen of exercise in the healing waters, hoping against hope to strengthen his legs to the point where he could walk on his own power again. “I can still remember the day he almost made it,” Egbert Curtis recalled. “We had a substitute head nurse that day, a large woman. He braced himself against one wall in the living room, and the nurse walked backward in front of him. Slowly, ever so slowly, he forced his body across the room—one inch at a time, it seemed. He was so drenched with sweat that I was afraid he would collapse from exhaustion. I’ve always believed that something happened that day, that, while he pretended it was a triumph, the effort to simply inch his way forward was so monumental that this was the moment he knew he would never really walk again. It was not long after this, in fact, that he decided to return to New York and get back into politics, a decision that effectively brought an end to his physical recovery. I remember looking at Missy’s face while he was trying to walk. She was in tears.”

  In the spring of 1927, Roosevelt decided that he had had enough of the pleasant but purposeless existence on the houseboat. The Larooco, damaged by a hurricane the previous winter, was sold for junk. “So ended a good old craft with a personality,” Roosevelt wrote.

  Missy was devastated by the sale of the Larooco. The pattern of her life with the man she loved was being disrupted, and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. That June, she collapsed in her cottage at Warm Springs. It was thought at first to be a mild heart attack, a consequence of the rheumatic fever she had suffered as a child, but though her “heart action quickly improved,” as Roosevelt noted in a letter to his mother, she began experiencing alarming bouts of delirium and depression. It was “a little crack-up,” secretary Grace Tully later admitted; “a nervous breakdown,” in the words of Missy’s high-school friend Barbara Curtis.

  So severe was Missy’s disorientation that the doctor at Warm Springs, Dr. LeRoy Hubbard, ordered her hospitalized and had removed from her hospital room every object that she could use to harm herself. For weeks, while Roosevelt returned to Hyde Park for the summer, Missy remained under the doctor’s care. In early July, her brother Bernard LeHand found her greatly improved. “I had a most enjoyable afternoon with Missy on the lawn,” he wrote Roosevelt. “She of course has not regained the strength—therefore moves and acts very deliberately and calmly but such an improvement. Just herself—that’s all . . . [She] can read . . . . Remembers everything—in detail except for the first eleven day period at the hospital during which time she is hazy on happenings except perfectly conscious of her deliriums. Since the 28 of June has been normal—and it was her own suggestion that visitors be excluded until such time as she was convinced that she had “arrived.” Conscious of her own condition . . . She would like her fountain pen. A pencil does not appeal to her, although a pen is really considered a dangerous ‘weapon.’ I am confident that you will decide to take her to Hyde Park for August.”

  By November 1927, Missy’s strength had returned and she was able to go back to work. The storm had passed. “Except for a few intervals, I never thought of her as unhealthy,” Egbert Curtis confirmed. “She was always so cheerful and so vigorous that she made everyone else feel good. What amazed me always was the amount of wit and laughter that flew around in her presence.”

  But the following autumn, the pattern of Missy’s life was jolted again when Roosevelt yielded to pressure and agreed to run for governor of New York. It was October 1928; Roosevelt was in Warm Springs, and the Democratic State Convention was about to convene. New York Governor Al Smith, the Democratic incumbent, had received his party’s nomination for president, so the governor’s race was up for grabs. Believing that the magic Roosevelt name would generate a large turnout, the Democratic leaders pleaded with Roosevelt to run.

  From the beginning, Missy was opposed to his running for governor, believing it would end forever his chances to recover and cut short the time she was able to spend with him. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare,” she told him again and again. He seemed at first to agree with her, reckoning that he still needed another year of therapy on his legs.

  For days, Roosevelt deliberately stayed out of touch with the party leaders in New York, stealing away for long picnics far out of the reach of the single telephone which stood in the lobby of the old hotel. In desperation, Smith called Eleanor at Hyde Park, imploring her to reach her husband and persuade him to accept the nomination. Eleanor agreed to communicate with Franklin and see if she could get him to talk to Smith. Her message reached him while he was giving a speech in a small town ten minutes from Warm Springs. Franklin returned at once to Warm Springs, where, assisted by Egbert Curtis, he made his way into the phone booth at the old hotel to call Smith. “He was in there a long time,” Curtis recalled. “When he finally came out he looked very agitated and was wringing with sweat. ‘They want me to run for Governor and that is the last thing I want to do,’ he said. I asked if he had accepted. ‘Curt, when you’re in politics you have to play the game,’ he replied.”

  Roosevelt’s decision to run for governor represented a final victory for Eleanor in the long struggle with her mother-in-law provoked by Franklin’s polio. Sara was convinced that Franklin should preserve his remaining strength by giving up all thought of a career and settling down at Hyde Park as a gentleman farmer, while both Eleanor and Louis Howe felt strongly that he should resume his political activities and continue to lead a useful life. “My mother-in-law thought we were tiring my husband and that he should be kept completely quiet,” Eleanor recalled. “She always thought that she understood what was best particularly where her child was concerned.”

  “I hated the arguments,” Eleanor later admitted, “but they had to happen. I had to make a stand.” The struggle over Father’s recovery was the big issue, Anna observed, against which everything else paled into insignificance. “Father sympathized with mother,” Jimmy observed; he was determined to ignore his disability and carry on where he left off. “Ultimately,” Jimmy concluded, “he came to admire his wife more than he did his mother.”

  Within days of Roosevelt’s de
cision, Missy fell ill once again, suffering what was probably a second nervous breakdown. The collapse prevented her from taking part in his successful campaign, but by January she had recovered sufficiently to move into the Governor’s Mansion, where, with Eleanor’s full support, she was allocated a bedroom of her own on the second floor, right next to FDR’s master suite.

  • • •

  Missy went on to become the most celebrated private secretary in the country. “Marguerite LeHand is the President’s Super-Secretary,” Newsweek announced in an adulatory article written five months after Roosevelt became president. Missy’s genius was not simply in doing everything she was asked to do with exceptional skill, but in anticipating the wants and needs of her boss before he knew them himself. She was known to interrupt the most statesmanlike conference on occasion to announce that the time had come for him to take his cough medicine, or to advise him to put on his jacket because of the draft.

  “If she thought he was getting pretty tired or stale” from the strain of daily work, Sam Rosenman recalled, “she would arrange a poker game, or invite some guests in whom he liked. He wouldn’t know anything about it until maybe six that night. Had she asked he would have said, ‘No, I have too much to do.’ Acutely sensitive to his moods and feelings, she would know when to bring out the stamps so he could work with them. She would know when to arrange picnics. She was, all in all, fairly indispensable.”

  “We loved Missy,” White House maid Lillian Parks recalled, “because she was so much fun. She could always find the humor in things. They always had bets going and FDR would get up pools and cheat to win before he was found out and had to pay up. She made every day exciting for FDR.”

  One of the president’s sweetest pleasures was to get behind the wheel of his special automobile, which had been designed for him by Ford so that it could be operated by hand levers instead of foot pedals. From all accounts, however, Roosevelt was a dreadful driver, so bad that many of his friends and relatives, including Eleanor, refused to ride with him. But Missy loved nothing more than to accompany him on a late-afternoon spin, sharing his delight as he revved up the motor and left his handicap behind.