No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  Yet the paralysis that crippled his body expanded his mind and his sensibilities. After what Eleanor called his “trial by fire,” he seemed less arrogant, less smug, less superficial, more focused, more complex, more interesting. He returned from his ordeal with greater powers of concentration and greater self-knowledge. “There had been a plowing up of his nature,” Labor Secretary Frances Perkins observed. “The man emerged completely warmhearted, with new humility of spirit and a firmer understanding of profound philosophical concepts.”

  He had always taken great pleasure in people. But now they became what one historian has called “his vital links with life.” Far more intensely than before, he reached out to know them, to understand them, to pick up their emotions, to put himself into their shoes. No longer belonging to his old world in the same way, he came to empathize with the poor and underprivileged, with people to whom fate had dealt a difficult hand. Once, after a lecture in Akron, Ohio, Eleanor was asked how her husband’s illness had affected him. “Anyone who has gone through great suffering,” she said, “is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.”

  Through his presidency, the mere act of standing up with his heavy metal leg-braces locked into place was an ordeal. The journalist Eliot Janeway remembers being behind Roosevelt once when he was in his chair in the Oval Office. “He was smiling as he talked. His face and hand muscles were totally relaxed. But then, when he had to stand up, his jaws went absolutely rigid. The effort of getting what was left of his body up was so great his face changed dramatically. It was as if he braced his body for a bullet.”

  Little wonder, then, that, in falling asleep at night, Roosevelt took comfort in the thought of physical freedom.

  • • •

  The morning sun of Washington’s belated spring was streaming through the president’s windows on May 10, 1940. Despite the tumult of the night before, which had kept him up until nearly 3 a.m., he awoke at his usual hour of eight o’clock. Pivoting to the edge of the bed, he pressed the button for his valet, who helped him into the bathroom. Then, as he had done every morning for the past seven years, he threw his old blue cape over his pajamas and started his day with breakfast in bed—orange juice, eggs, coffee, and buttered toast—and the morning papers: The New York Times and the Herald Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post and the Washington Herald.

  Headlines recounted the grim events he had heard at 11 p.m. the evening before. From Paris, Ambassador William Bullitt confirmed that the Germans had launched violent attacks on a half-dozen French military bases. Bombs had also fallen on the main railway connections between Paris and the border in an attempt to stop troop movements.

  Before finishing the morning papers, the president held a meeting with Steve Early and “Pa” Watson, to review his crowded schedule. He instructed them to convene an emergency meeting at ten-thirty with the chiefs of the army and the navy, the secretaries of state and Treasury, and the attorney general. In addition, Roosevelt was scheduled to meet the press in the morning and the Cabinet in the afternoon, as he had done every Friday morning and afternoon for seven years. Later that night, he was supposed to deliver a keynote address at the Pan American Scientific Congress. After asking Early to delay the press conference an hour and to have the State Department draft a new speech, Roosevelt called his valet to help him dress.

  • • •

  While Franklin Roosevelt was being dressed in his bedroom, Eleanor was in New York, having spent the past few days in the apartment she kept in Greenwich Village, in a small house owned by her friends Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read. The Village apartment on East 11th Street, five blocks north of Washington Square, provided Eleanor with a welcome escape from the demands of the White House, a secret refuge whenever her crowded calendar brought her to New York. For decades, the Village, with its winding streets, modest brick houses, bookshops, tearooms, little theaters, and cheap rents, had been home to political, artistic, and literary rebels, giving it a colorful Old World character.

  The object of Eleanor’s visit to the city—her second in ten days—was a meeting that day at the Choate School in Connecticut, where she was scheduled to speak with teachers and students. Along the way, she had sandwiched in a banquet for the National League of Women Voters, a meeting for the fund for Polish relief, a visit to her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, a radio broadcast, lunch with her friend the young student activist Joe Lash, and dinner with Democratic leader Edward Flynn and his wife.

  The week before, at the Astor Hotel, Eleanor had been honored by The Nation magazine for her work in behalf of civil rights and poverty. More than a thousand people had filled the tables and the balcony of the cavernous ballroom to watch her receive a bronze plaque for “distinguished service in the cause of American social progress.” Among the many speakers that night, Stuart Chase lauded the first lady’s concentrated focus on the problems at home. “I suppose she worries about Europe like the rest of us,” he began, “but she does not allow this worry to divert her attention from the homefront. She goes around America, looking at America, thinking about America . . . helping day and night with the problems of America.” For, he concluded, “the New Deal is supposed to be fighting a war, too, a war against depression.”

  “What is an institution?” author John Gunther had asked when his turn to speak came. “An institution,” he asserted, is “something that had fixity, permanence, and importance . . . something that people like to depend on, something benevolent as a rule, something we like.” And by that definition, he concluded, the woman being honored that night was as great an institution as her husband, who was already being talked about for an unprecedented third term. Echoing Gunther’s sentiments, NAACP head Walter White turned to Mrs. Roosevelt and said: “My dear, I don’t care if the President runs for the third or fourth term as long as he lets you run the bases, keep the score and win the game.”

  For her part, Eleanor was slightly embarrassed by all the fuss. “It never seems quite real to me to sit at a table and have people whom I have always looked upon with respect . . . explain why they are granting me an honor,” she wrote in her column describing the evening. “Somehow I always feel they ought to be talking about someone else.” Yet, as she stood to speak that night at the Astor ballroom, rising nearly six feet, her wavy brown hair slightly touched by gray, her wide mouth marred by large buck teeth, her brilliant blue eyes offset by an unfortunate chin, she dominated the room as no one before her had done. “I will do my best to do what is right,” she began, forcing her high voice to a lower range, “not with a sense of my own adequacy but with the feeling that the country must go on, that we must keep democracy and must make it mean a reality to more people . . . . We should constantly be reminded of what we owe in return for what we have.”

  It was this tireless commitment to democracy’s unfinished agenda that led Americans in a Gallup poll taken that spring to rate Mrs. Roosevelt even higher than her husband, with 67 percent of those interviewed well disposed toward her activities. “Mrs. Roosevelt’s incessant goings and comings,” the survey suggested, “have been accepted as a rather welcome part of the national life. Women especially feel this way. But even men betray relatively small masculine impatience with the work and opinions of a very articulate lady . . . . The rich, who generally disapprove of Mrs. Roosevelt’s husband, seem just as friendly toward her as the poor . . . . Even among those extremely anti-Roosevelt citizens who would regard a third term as a national disaster there is a generous minority . . . who want Mrs. Roosevelt to remain in the public eye.”

  The path to this position of independent power and respect had not been easy. Eleanor’s distinguished career had been forged from a painful discovery when she was thirty-four. After a period of suspicion, she realized that her husband, who was then assistant secretary of the navy, had fallen in love with another woman, Lucy Page Mercer.

  Tall, beautiful, and well bred, with a low throaty voice and an incomparably winni
ng smile, Lucy Mercer was working as Eleanor’s social secretary when the love affair began. For months, perhaps even years, Franklin kept his romance a secret from Eleanor. Her shattering discovery took place in September 1918. Franklin had just returned from a visit to the European front. Unpacking his suitcase, she discovered a packet of love letters from Lucy. At this moment, Eleanor later admitted, “the bottom dropped out of my own particular world & I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”

  Eleanor told her husband that she would grant him a divorce. But this was not what he wanted, or at least not what he was able to put himself through, particularly when his mother, Sara, was said to have threatened him with disinheritance if he left his marriage. If her son insisted on leaving his wife and five children for another woman, visiting scandal upon the Roosevelt name, she could not stop him. But he should know that she would not give him another dollar and he could no longer expect to inherit the family estate at Hyde Park. Franklin’s trusted political adviser, Louis Howe, weighed in as well, warning Franklin that divorce would bring his political career to an abrupt end. There was also the problem of Lucy’s Catholicism, which would prevent her from marrying a divorced man.

  Franklin promised never to see Lucy again and agreed, so the Roosevelt children suggest, to Eleanor’s demand for separate bedrooms, bringing their marital relations to an end. Eleanor would later admit to her daughter, Anna, that sex was “an ordeal to be borne.” Something in her childhood had locked her up, she said, making her fear the loss of control that comes with abandoning oneself to one’s passions, giving her “an exaggerated idea of the necessity of keeping all one’s desires under complete subjugation.” Now, supposedly, she was free of her “ordeal.”

  The marriage resumed. But for Eleanor, a path had opened, a possibility of standing apart from Franklin. No longer did she need to define herself solely in terms of his wants and his needs. Before the crisis, though marriage had never fulfilled her prodigious energies, she had no way of breaking through the habits and expectations of a proper young woman’s role. To explore her independent needs, to journey outside her home for happiness, was perceived as dangerous and wrong.

  With the discovery of the affair, however, she was free to define a new and different partnership with her husband, free to seek new avenues of fulfillment. It was a gradual process, a gradual casting away, a gradual gaining of confidence—and it was by no means complete—but the fifty-six-year-old woman who was being feted in New York was a different person from the shy, betrayed wife of 1918.

  • • •

  Above the president’s bedroom, in a snug third-floor suite, his personal secretary, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, was already dressed, though she, too, had stayed up late the night before.

  A tall, handsome woman of forty-one with large blue eyes and prematurely gray, once luxuriant black hair fastened by hairpins to the nape of her neck, Missy was in love with her boss and regarded herself as his other wife. Nor was she alone in her imaginings. “There’s no doubt,” White House aide Raymond Moley said, “that Missy was as close to being a wife as he ever had—or could have.” White House maid Lillian Parks agreed. “When Missy gave an order, we responded as if it had come from the First Lady. We knew that FDR would always back up Missy.”

  Missy had come a long way from the working-class neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she had grown up. Her father was an alcoholic who lived apart from the family. Her mother, with five children to raise, took in a revolving group of Harvard students as tenants. Yet, even when she was young, Missy’s childhood friend Barbara Curtis recalled, “she had a certain class to her. I remember one time watching her go around the corner—our houses weren’t too far apart—and my mother looked out the window and called my attention to her. She said, ‘she certainly looks smart.’ She had a dark suit on to go to high school. She stood out for having a better appearance and being smarter than most.”

  After secretarial school, Missy had gone to New York, where she became involved in Roosevelt’s vice-presidential campaign in 1920. Impressed by Missy’s efficiency, Eleanor asked her to come to Hyde Park after the election to help Franklin clean up his correspondence. From the start, Missy proved herself indispensable. When asked later to explain her astonishing secretarial skill, she said simply, “The first thing for a private secretary to do is to study her employer. After I went to work for Mr. Roosevelt, for months I read carefully all the letters he dictated . . . . I learned what letters he wanted to see and which ones it was not necessary to show him . . . . I came to know exactly how Mr. Roosevelt would answer some of his letters, how he would couch his thoughts. When he discovered that I had learned these things it took a load off his shoulders, for instead of having to dictate the answers to many letters he could just say yes or no and I knew what to say and how to say it.”

  A year later, when Franklin contracted polio, Missy’s duties expanded. Both Franklin and Eleanor understood that it was critical for Franklin to keep active in politics even as he struggled unsuccessfully day after day, month after month, to walk again. To that end, Eleanor adhered to a rigorous daily schedule as the stand-in for her husband, journeying from one political meeting to the next to ensure that the Roosevelt name was not forgotten. With Eleanor busily occupied away from home, Missy did all the chores a housewife might do, writing Franklin’s personal checks, paying the monthly bills, giving the children their allowances, supervising the menus, sending the rugs and draperies for cleaning.

  When Roosevelt was elected governor in 1928, Missy moved with the Roosevelt family to Albany, occupying a large bedroom suite on the second floor of the Governor’s Mansion. “Albany was the hardest work I ever did,” she said, recalling the huge load she carried for the activist governor without the help of the three assistants she would later enjoy in the White House. By the time Roosevelt was president, she had become totally absorbed in his life—learning his favorite games, sharing his hobbies, reading the same books, even adopting his characteristic accent and patterns of speech. Whereas Eleanor was so opposed to gambling that she refused to play poker with Franklin’s friends if even the smallest amount of money changed hands, Missy became an avid player, challenging Roosevelt at every turn, always ready to raise the ante. Whereas Eleanor never evinced any interest in her husband’s treasured stamp collection, Missy was an enthusiastic partner, spending hours by his side as he organized and reorganized his stamps into one or another of his thick leather books. “In terms of companionship,” Eliot Janeway observed, “Missy was the real wife. She understood his nature perfectly, as they would say in a nineteenth-century novel.”

  • • •

  At 10:30 a.m., May 10, 1940, pushed along in his wheelchair by Mr. Crim, the usher on duty, and accompanied by his usual detail of Secret Service men, the president headed for the Oval Office. A bell announced his arrival to the small crowd already assembled in the Cabinet Room—Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, Navy Chief Admiral Harold Stark, Attorney General Robert Jackson, Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Undersecretary Sumner Welles. But first, as he did every day, the president poked his head into Missy’s office, giving her a wave and a smile which, Missy told a friend, was all she needed to replenish the energies lost from too little sleep.

  Of all the men assembled in the big white-walled Cabinet Room that morning, General George Catlett Marshall possessed the clearest awareness of how woefully unprepared America was to fight a major war against Nazi Germany. The fifty-nine-year-old Marshall, chief of operations of the First Army in World War I, had been elevated to the position of army chief of staff the previous year. The story is told of a meeting in the president’s office not long before the appointment during which the president outlined a pet proposal. Everyone nodded in approval except Marshall. “Don’t you think so, George?” the president asked. Marshall replied: “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with that at all.” The president looke
d stunned, the conference was stopped, and Marshall’s friends predicted that his tour of duty would soon come to an end. A few months later, reaching thirty-four names down the list of senior generals, the president asked the straight-speaking Marshall to be chief of staff of the U.S. Army.

  The army Marshall headed, however, was scarcely worthy of the name, having languished in skeletal form since World War I, starved for funds and manpower by an administration focused on coping with the Great Depression and an isolationist Congress. Determined never again to be trapped by the corruptions of the Old World, the isolationists insisted that the United States was protected from harm by its oceans and could best lead by sustaining democracy at home. Responding to the overwhelming strength of isolationist sentiment in the country at large, the Congress had passed a series of Neutrality Acts in the mid-1930s banning the shipment of arms and munitions to all belligerents, prohibiting the extension of credits and loans, and forbidding the arming of merchant ships.

  Roosevelt had tried on occasion to shift the prevailing opinion. In 1937, he had delivered a major speech in Chicago calling for a “quarantine” of aggressor nations. The speech was hailed by interventionists committed to collective security, but when the press evinced shock at what they termed a radical shift in foreign policy and isolationist congressmen threatened impeachment, Roosevelt had pulled back. “It’s a terrible thing,” he told his aide Sam Rosenman, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there.” He had resolved at that point to move one step at a time, to nurse the country along to a more sophisticated view of the world, to keep from getting too far ahead of the electorate, as Woodrow Wilson had done. The task was not easy. Even the outbreak of war in September had not led to a significant expansion of the army, since the president’s first priority was to revise the Neutrality Laws so that he could sell weapons to the Allies. Fearing that larger appropriations for the ground forces would rouse the isolationists and kill his chances to reform neutrality policy, the president had turned a deaf ear to the army’s appeals for expansion.