No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  In trying to keep the president from doing something he would soon come to regret, Watson was playing the role normally assigned to Missy. Over the years, she had held up dozens of letters the president had written in anger and pleaded with him the next morning not to follow through. Most of the time, the president’s fury had subsided and the letter was thrown away, but if his bad humor remained, she simply put the letter in the drawer of her desk and tried again in another day or two.

  This time, however, Missy was absolutely delighted by the sudden turn of events. The poisonous atmosphere at the convention only reinforced her case. It was difficult enough for the president to lead with the country divided on foreign policy; it was impossible without the steadfast support of his own party. She had already seen the toll exacted on Roosevelt by the stress of the eight years; she feared a third term would deplete his energy and destroy his health.

  “Fine, I’m glad,” she said; the president was doing “the only thing he could do.”

  In the hallway, Watson continued to argue his case for tearing the paper up, but Rosenman refused. “Pa, I hope he never has to read this speech, but if I know that man inside,” if Wallace loses, Roosevelt is going to read it, “and nobody on earth is going to be able to stop him.” With this, Rosenman picked up the draft and went to his room to polish it.

  When Rosenman returned fifteen minutes later, the president was still playing solitaire. “Pa Watson was almost in tears and looked at me angrily for bringing the sheets back,” Sam recalled. “I suppose he had hoped I would run off with them and hide.” By now, everyone in the room knew what was happening, and everyone, except Missy, told the president he was making a fatal mistake. But Rosenman knew it was hopeless to try to change his mind, for “if I ever saw him with his mind made up it was that night.”

  We will never know for sure if Roosevelt truly intended to withdraw or if his statement was simply a ploy. But one thing is certain: once the statement was delivered, events were likely to take on a life of their own, making it difficult for the president to turn things around.

  • • •

  It was 10:30 p.m. before the state delegates finished their nominating speeches. The plan was to have Mrs. Roosevelt speak first and then proceed with the balloting. But at the last minute, Frances Perkins and Lorena Hickok, the two women most instrumental in getting the first lady to come to Chicago, were overcome with panic. “Oh, she can’t go now,” Eleanor heard the two of them shouting just as FDR fund-raiser Frank Walker reached her chair to escort her to the rostrum. “It’s a terrible thing to make her do.” By now, the delegates were totally out of control, surging madly up and down the aisles, yelling and screaming. Surely this was not the moment to make history by inviting the wife of a presidential nominee, for the first time ever, to address a major political party conclave.

  But Eleanor quietly rose from her chair, and when she reached the rostrum, a majestic silence fell over the tumultuous convention, perhaps the most heartfelt expression of respect and admiration the entire week. She knew before she started that the only hope lay in persuading the delegates to put their personal interests aside at a time when the country was facing one of the most severe challenges in its entire history.

  Her words were simple and brief, but the stillness of the listeners testified to their eloquence. She began with an expression of thanks for Jim Farley. “Nobody could appreciate more what he has done for the party, what he has given in work and loyalty.” She then moved directly into her message, which pleaded with the delegates to recognize that this was not “an ordinary nomination in an ordinary time,” that the president could not campaign as he usually did, because he had to be on the job every minute of every hour. “This is no ordinary time,” she repeated, “no time for weighing anything except what we can best do for the country as a whole.”

  “No man who is a candidate or who is President can carry this situation alone. This responsibility is only carried by a united people who love their country and who will live for it . . . to the fullest of their ability.” Without mentioning Wallace, she was reminding the delegates that, if the president felt that the strain of a third term might be too much for any man, and if he believed a particular person was the person best equipped to give him help, then they, in asking him to run again, must respect his judgment.

  By the time she finished, the prevailing emotion of the crowd had been transformed. Genuine applause erupted from every corner of the room. Trivial hurts and jealousies subsided as the delegates recalled why they had chosen Roosevelt in the first place. All along, they had simply wanted some sign of appreciation for what they were doing, and now the first lady was giving it to them.

  Eleanor’s remarkable speech gave the delegates a chance to get their second wind, Alben Barkley said, and it put them in a much better frame of mind. Sam Rosenman agreed. Speaking for the admiring group in the president’s study, he said the speech seemed to lift everything “above the petty political trading that was going on and place it on a different level, far removed.”

  As soon as Eleanor sat down, the balloting began. In the study, the president laid aside his cards and tallied the votes himself. The atmosphere was tense at first, as Bankhead took an early lead, but, with each state that was called, support for the president’s choice grew, and by the end of the first ballot, Wallace had garnered a majority of the votes to become the vice-presidential nominee.

  The mood in the president’s study lightened perceptibly as Roosevelt phoned the convention and announced that he would deliver his acceptance speech within fifteen minutes. But first he asked to be taken into his bedroom to wash his face and change his shirt. The ordeal had taken its toll on the fifty-eight-year-old man, who, Rosenman noted, looked “weary and bedraggled, his shirt wilted from the intense heat.” It took him only a few minutes to freshen up, however, and when he came out he was smiling and “looking his usual, jaunty, imperturbable self.”

  Excepting Missy, the entire group happily accompanied the president to the radio-broadcasting room in the basement. There, at 1:20 a.m. East Coast time, he finally told the convention and the entire nation that he would break the precedent of 175 years and run for a third term. Throughout his entire speech, which would take twenty minutes, Missy was in tears.

  Seated before a battery of microphones, in a melancholy voice that sometimes grew emotional, the president gave his reasons both for accepting the nomination and for having kept silent for so long. When he was elected in 1936, he told the delegates, it was his firm intention to turn over the reins of government at the end of his second term. That intention remained firm when the war broke out in 1939. But “it soon became evident” that a public statement at that time announcing that he would not run again “would be unwise from the point of view of sheer public interest.” So he waited, and then the German conquest of Europe occurred, and “the normal conditions under which I would have made public a declaration of my personal desires was gone.”

  “Lying awake, as I have on many nights, I have asked myself whether I have the right, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to call on men and women to serve their country or to train themselves to serve and, at the same time, decline to serve my country in my own personal capacity if I am called upon to do so by the people of my country . . . . Like most men of my age, I had made plans for myself, plans for a private life of my own choice and for my own satisfactions to begin in January 1941. These plans, like so many other plans, had been made in a world which now seems as distant as another planet.”

  Remarking later on the “painful humbuggery” of this passage, Hedley Donovan, a young Washington Post reporter, wrote: “Being highly eligible myself for the other draft, I couldn’t grieve too much for FDR’s lost private plans.” But the speech was just right for the crowd that night, and when it came to the end, the cheering delegates rose as one.

  Eleanor was seated on the platform throughout the speech, watching blue searchlights shed their glare on a huge drawi
ng of the president’s face hung on the west wall, listening along with everyone else. When her husband’s last words came across the loudspeaker, she rose and cheered as the band played “Hail to the Chief.” Then, as the weary delegates wandered home to bed, she was driven to the airport to return to Hyde Park.

  As the plane began to taxi down the runway, a man came running frantically across the field. The president was on the phone in the hangar, wanting to thank his wife for the excellent job she had done. He was not effusive, Eleanor later recalled. That was not his way, though on several occasions he said to others: “‘Her speech was just right.’ I think he thought that people should know by their own feelings when they had done well.”

  Harry Hopkins was on a second line, also filled with gratitude. When he volunteered that he knew he had made many mistakes, Eleanor frankly agreed. She had seen the hurt on Farley’s face. “You young things don’t know politics,” she said. Then the plane took off.

  The next morning, Roosevelt slept soundly until eleven o’clock, but Eleanor, feeling as if “it had all been a dream with a somewhat nightmarish tinge,” was up for an early breakfast, though she had slept only a few hours on the flight. “What a schedule she has kept,” Joe Lash marveled in his diary. “She was up til 3 a.m. Thursday, had breakfast at 9 a.m., took a plane to Chicago after her broadcast, spent a hot constantly on the go eight hours in Chicago, back to the plane and here for breakfast at 9:30. Now she’s taking a bath and will be ready for a full day again which includes a swim, a column, letters, picnic with 30 Hudson Shore Labor School people and dinner with Mrs. James.”

  In the days that followed, Eleanor was, Tommy told Hick, “swamped with wires and letters of approval” for her speech. “Mrs. Roosevelt stills the Tumult of 50,000,” one headline read. But perhaps the letter that meant the most came from Seattle, from her daughter, Anna. “Your speech practically finished me,” Anna wrote. “By that I mean you did a wonderful job.” She went on to say that the president’s speech was very moving, too, although he sounded weary at first, but the point of her letter was to tell her mother how proud she was to be the daughter of such an extraordinary woman. Three days later, Anna wrote again. That morning, Anna related, she had received a letter from Eddie Roddan, a friend who had been at the convention. The letter asserted that “Mrs. Roosevelt saved the situation.” “We could sense that you had done much more than make a speech, darling, but Eddie’s letter makes us very curious to hear the story.”

  Only one sour note spoiled Eleanor’s triumph. Apparently Harry Hopkins was so angry and hurt at what Mrs. Roosevelt had said to him that, Tommy reported, “he is sulking and will not come to Hyde Park.” At a luncheon with Jim Farley a week after the convention, Eleanor explained the situation. “Jim, I’m going to tell you something I have discussed with no one but Franklin. Hopkins has complained to Franklin that he didn’t like the way I talked to him in Chicago. You will remember I went directly to the Stevens with you and then to the convention, so that I didn’t see him. From the Stadium I went directly to the airport. He called me at the airport to say how sorry he was that he did not get to see me. I told him that I was sorry that I didn’t get to see him because there were some things I wanted to talk to him about . . . . I told him quite frankly I did not think he had political judgment and that he had helped create an unfavorable situation.”

  But the final word was Tommy’s. “Gosh,” she remarked, noting Harry’s estrangement, “it seems hard to believe that adults can be so self-centered in a time like this.”

  For her part, Eleanor deliberately underplayed what she had accomplished. In a remarkably disingenuous column, she reported that the atmosphere in Chicago “was much like the atmosphere one always finds on these occasions. To me, there is something very contagious about the friendly atmosphere brought about by meeting old friends. I was delighted when Mrs. Henry Wallace arrived to sit beside me.”

  But the delegates at the convention and the people in the White House knew and appreciated the perilous task Eleanor had accomplished. “She is truly a magnificent person,” Tommy wrote Hick, “and while you and I have always known that and admitted it, it takes a dramatic thing once in a while to recharge us . . . . Being too close to the picture very often dulls one’s appreciation.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “I AM A JUGGLER”

  “I am a juggler,” Roosevelt once said. “I never let my right hand know what my left hand does.” Throughout his presidency, he repeatedly displayed an uncanny ability to toss a number of balls up in the air and keep them afloat. Whereas critics decried his clever tricks as evidence of manipulation and deception, admirers considered such sleight of hand the mark of a master politician. Never would his juggling act be put to a more severe test than in the summer of 1940, when he had to deal with Britain’s urgent request for destroyers, passage of a selective-service bill, the drafting of a controversial tax law, and, influencing all of them, a presidential election.

  Almost no one, it seemed, had anything positive to say about life in the nation’s capital that summer. Under the strain of a record heat wave which clung to the area for six weeks, flowers wilted, tempers flared, and a general mood of irritation settled over the city. The Capitol building was air-conditioned, but most federal offices and most residential homes in Washington were not. Under normal circumstances, particularly in an election year, when time for campaigning was needed, the politicians would have fled and the wheels of government would have ground to a halt. But this summer, with most of Europe at Hitler’s feet, the usual flight from the capital was barred. “I shudder for the future of a country,” one congressman commented, “whose destiny must be decided in the dog days.”

  Air conditioning had recently been installed in six of the White House rooms, including the president’s study and bedroom, the first lady’s suite, Hopkins’ quarters, and Missy LeHand’s bedroom on the third floor. But the president’s chronic sinus problems were such that he could not work or sleep in an air-conditioned room. Even electric fans seemed to bother him, Sam Rosenman observed, so he would simply take off his coat and tie, roll up his sleeves, and perspire freely.

  As he suffocated in the heat, Roosevelt was struggling to find a legal way to make the transfer of the fifty destroyers Churchill had requested in May. There was nothing America could do that would be of greater help to England, Churchill repeatedly emphasized during the summer. More than half the British fleet of destroyers had been sunk or damaged at Dunkirk; eleven more had been damaged in July. Without destroyers to protect its merchant ships from submarines, an island nation which imported every gallon of its oil and half its food could not survive.

  Destroyers were also needed, Churchill told Roosevelt, to repel the expected German invasion. On July 16, Hitler had directed his generals to begin a massive air offensive against England with the goal of driving the Royal Air Force out of the skies in preparation for an invasion in mid-September. Night after night, German planes pounded the southern coasts of England, damaging airfields, dockyards, communication lines, and radar stations. (In a single night, the Luftwaffe hit six radar stations, but, not realizing how critical radar was to Britain’s defense, the Germans did not pursue the attack.) Meanwhile, hundreds of German barges were moving down the coasts of Europe, convoys were passing through the Straits of Dover, and tens of thousands of German troops were gathering along the northern coasts of France. The Battle of Britain was under way.

  The next three or four months would be vital, Churchill cabled Roosevelt on the last day of July. Britain had a large construction program in progress which would produce new destroyers by late fall or early winter. But until that time, only American destroyers could fill the gap. “Mr. President,” Churchill concluded, “with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now.”

  Roosevelt agreed. He told his Cabinet on August 2 that “the survival of the British Isles under German attack might very possibly depend on their gettin
g these destroyers.” But he faced what seemed an insurmountable obstacle. On June 30, when the Congress adopted the Munitions Program of 1940, which expanded the monies available to national defense beyond the fiscal-year appropriation, Senator David Walsh had attached an amendment stipulating that nothing could be delivered to a foreign government without the certification by Congress that it was surplus material unnecessary to American defense. The stipulation posed a special problem for the transfer of the destroyers Churchill wanted: five months earlier, in an attempt to ward off consigning these same destroyers to a junk heap, Navy Chief Admiral Stark had testified to Congress that they were truly essential to American defense.

  During the discussion at the Cabinet meeting, Navy Secretary Frank Knox brought up the possibility of exchanging the destroyers for access to British bases in the Americas, in Newfoundland, Trinidad, Bermuda, and other places. The Cabinet responded enthusiastically to the idea of an exchange, but everyone still assumed, Roosevelt noted after the meeting, that this could not be accomplished without congressional authorization, and that “in all probability the legislation would fail.” A majority could be fashioned if members of the Republican minority were brought along, but that seemed unlikely given the bitter divisions that had paralyzed the Congress all summer long over the question of compulsory selective service.

  • • •

  A bill to create the first peacetime draft in American history had been introduced in both the House and Senate in June. Though no one familiar with the American military situation doubted the necessity of conscription, Roosevelt had been reluctant at first to take a strong stand, believing that aid to Britain had to be given first priority. “It would have been too encouraging to the Axis,” he explained to one of his advisers, “too disheartening to Britain, too harmful to our own prestige to make selective service a matter of personal contest with Congress and be defeated.”