No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  Of course, no one in Britain realized this at the time. On the contrary, the furious attacks on London that began on September 7 and became known as the Blitz seemed to signal just the opposite: that the Nazi invasion was about to begin. Throughout the country, church bells rang and military units were told to be ready to move at an hour’s notice. From this night on, New Yorker correspondent Molly Panter-Downes has written, there were “no longer such things as good nights. There [were] only bad nights, worse nights and better nights,” as Londoners learned to adapt to an entirely new way of life—lining up in the evenings for public shelters, carrying blankets and babies to the vast dormitories in the underground tubes, shifting their sleeping quarters to their basements.

  “The amazing part of it,” Panter-Downes marveled, “is the cheerfulness and fortitude with which ordinary individuals are doing their jobs under nerve-wracking conditions.” Small shopkeepers whose windows had been totally blown apart would hang up “Business as Usual” stickers in the open spaces and exchange jokes and stories with their customers. And everywhere one looked, in the heaps of rubble that had once been homes, offices, and churches, were paper Union Jacks stuck defiantly to the sides of crumbling walls. Londoners suddenly came to realize, reported Ben Robertson, correspondent for the liberal daily, PM, that “human character can stand up to anything” if it has to. For the British people, this was indeed, as Churchill had predicted, “their finest hour.”

  • • •

  Sunday morning, September 8, as “a vast smoky pall” hung over London and exhausted firemen struggled to bring the fires under control, President Roosevelt proclaimed a nationwide day of prayer. Accompanied by Mrs. Roosevelt, Princess Martha, and the Countess Ragni Ostgaard, Martha’s lady-in-waiting, Roosevelt drove to his family church, the St. James Episcopal Church, an ivy-covered stone building set in a peaceful grove of trees. There, seated between Eleanor and Martha, he heard the minister proclaim: “We are on the brink of the greatest catastrophe of all times. Can the hand of the oppressor be stayed? The President of the United States believes that it can, with God’s help. That is why he has called upon us to join today in prayer.”

  Luncheon that afternoon was a royal affair, as the President brought Martha together with the former empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Zita, and her two young sons, the Archduke Otto of Hapsburg and Archduke Felix. The former empress, who had been safely exiled in Belgium until the German bombs destroyed her asylum, had arrived in the United States in mid-July.

  Seated at the head of the table, holding herself erect, the president’s mother reveled in the presence of her royal guests. There was something in Sara’s demeanor that suggested her own form of majesty. “Sara was known in some circles as ‘The Duchess,’” one family friend explained, “not because she gave orders, but because she had an unconscious air of being considered above all other people. I don’t think that she felt anyone was her social equal, except maybe the queen of England, and she wasn’t sure about that.”

  When Sara talked, she spoke with great slowness and distinctness, pronouncing every syllable of every word. Keeping a vigilant watch on the table at large, she was particularly taken with the composure of Martha’s children, whose excellent manners reminded her of Franklin’s when he was a boy. The children were all fair-haired and good-looking with regular features. Turning her gaze from Martha’s children to her own child, his head so like hers, Sara smiled broadly. This was her house, her family, her world, and she was perfectly at ease.

  • • •

  When Martha left at the end of the weekend the president issued an open invitation to the princess to live at the White House until she found a proper residence for herself and her children. Martha took him up on his generous offer, settling herself into the Rose Suite, on the second floor of the family quarters. There she remained for weeks, joining the president for tea in the late afternoons, sharing his cocktail hour at night, accompanying him on his weekend cruises on the Potomac. “She was a special character,” Secret Service Agent Milton Lipson recalled, “a real beauty.”

  “I don’t think I will ever be able to express my gratitude for your kindness toward me and my children,” Martha wrote the president. “The way you talk to my three little children and make them happy by collecting and finding stamps also makes me very happy.”

  “There was no question,” Jimmy Roosevelt recalled, “that Martha was an important figure in Father’s life during the war.” Indeed, Jimmy observed, “although historians have never really looked into it, there is a real possibility that a true romantic relationship developed between the president and the princess. Father obviously enjoyed her company. He would kiss her hello when she arrived and goodbye when she left and good night if she stayed over.” Martha’s ubiquitousness became a source of teasing among the president’s aides, who took to describing her as “the president’s girlfriend.”

  Teasing within the White House was one thing, but when reporter Walter Trohan wrote a series of suggestive articles about Princess Martha in the Chicago Tribune, Steve Early was furious. “Early tried every way he could to get me to stop writing about Martha,” Trohan later recalled, “but I was having too much fun so I just kept doing it. For example, I’d count the number of times Martha had been to Hyde Park in the space of four and five weeks. Then I’d describe her descending the steps of the train in high heels and black silk hose. If you read between the lines, the drift was clear. ‘Goddamn it,’ Early would say, ‘after Eleanor, isn’t the president entitled to some feminine interest?’ I’d say, ‘Isn’t Missy enough?’ and that would end the conversation, but I’d never ever write anything negative about Missy. I liked her too much.”

  Eventually, with the help of the president, who drove with her to scout out possible choices, Martha found a magnificent estate to rent, Pook’s Hill, a rambling twenty-four-room stone house on 105 acres of wooded land in Bethesda, Maryland. “Martha and her lady-in-waiting were very much elated when we met at tea time,” Eleanor reported on September 26, “because they found a comfortable house.” Still, Martha continued to visit the White House regularly, often staying overnight, and on a number of occasions the president drove out to Pook’s Hill to visit her.

  For the most part, Eleanor regarded Martha’s flirtatiousness with wry detachment, explaining to a friend that “there always was a Martha for relaxation and for the nonending pleasure of having an admiring audience for every breath.” After three decades of watching her husband bask in the glow of admiring females, Eleanor was rather accustomed to the situation Martha created. Knowing that she was unable to play so casually at love, Eleanor looked with both disdain and longing at Martha’s coquettishness. “I can’t imagine Mrs. Roosevelt even thinking of flirting,” Betsey Whitney, Jimmy Roosevelt’s first wife, said. Yet, near the end of her life, speaking in a wistful tone, Eleanor told a friend that flirting was the one thing she wished she had learned how to do when she was young.

  • • •

  If Eleanor managed to take her husband’s fondness for Martha in stride, Missy was distraught. Keeping an anxious watch on the president whenever the princess was around, Missy could not help noticing how his spirits soared the moment Martha entered the room. In the past, Missy was the one who had always sat in the place of honor next to the president in his car, a lap robe tucked around them. Now, when the President took his long rides in the afternoon for relaxation, it was Martha who sat by his side.

  Once, when Missy was in her late twenties, she was asked by a friend if she ever regretted not being married. “Absolutely not,” Missy laughingly replied. “How could anyone ever come up to FDR?” To be sure, there had been a few romances in her life, a dalliance with Eleanor’s bodyguard, the handsome state trooper Earl Miller, in the early 1930s, and a more serious romance with William Bullitt a few years later.

  It is not clear how these romances started or ended. Earl Miller claims that he deliberately played up to Missy because he could see that Eleanor, whom
he loved, was being hurt by Missy’s closeness with Franklin. For two years, Miller says, he squired Missy around, taking her out to dinner or the movies in their free time. “Missy had me put on night duty so that I could come to her room [at Warm Springs],” Miller recalls. But the carefree Miller had not counted on Missy’s becoming emotionally involved. When she discovered he was simultaneously “playing around with one of the girls in the Executive Office,” she took to her bed and cried for three days.

  Missy’s involvement with Bullitt was more significant. Born into a wealthy old-line Philadelphia family, Bullitt had distinguished himself at Yale as editor of the Yale Daily News before embarking on a successful career as a newspaper correspondent and foreign diplomat. In 1933, Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to Russia; three years later, he was made ambassador to France. Outgoing and opinionated, Bullitt had married and divorced two women—Ernesta Drinker, a Philadelphia socialite, and Louise Bryant Reed, widow of the writer John Reed.

  The people closest to Missy believed that Bullitt was very much in love with her. The gossip in Missy’s home town was that something big was going on. Suddenly the young secretary was sporting beautiful jewelry, all courtesy of Bullitt. “He used to telephone her all the time from Russia, and when he’d come to Washington he’d take her out,” Missy’s friend Barbara Curtis recalled. “Indeed, at one point he wanted to marry her, but her attraction to Roosevelt was simply too overpowering.” This was, Jimmy Roosevelt confirmed, “the one real romance” in Missy’s life. “Father encouraged it, feeling, I think she had devoted a lot of her life to him and was entitled to a life of her own.”

  Others saw Bullitt’s interest in Missy in darker tones. “I think Bullitt used Missy as a way of getting access to FDR,” Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, observed. “He was a great operator, and he led Missy to believe he would marry her when he never intended to.” In his diary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., records a meeting with the president to discuss various candidates for director of the budget. “I was very much amused at Miss LeHand seriously suggesting Bill Bullitt and the President said, quite curtly, ‘No, no, he is all wrapped up in international diplomacy and knows nothing about this’ to which Miss LeHand answered, ‘But he would like to . . . .’ ”

  When Bullitt was in Russia, Dorothy Rosenman recalled, Missy traveled to Moscow to see him, only to find on arriving there that he was involved with a ballet dancer. “I don’t know why the engagement ended,” Jimmy Roosevelt wrote. “I believe Bill treated her badly . . . .” And from then on, “Missy devoted the rest of her life to father.”

  The second week of September, Missy celebrated her forty-second birthday at a White House dinner with a half-dozen friends and colleagues, including the president, Harry Hopkins, Grace Tully, and Roberta Barrows. “I remember that she was uncharacteristically quiet that night,” Roberta Barrows recalled. “She seemed sad and lonely, as if she were brooding about something.” Perhaps, taking stock of her life as she began her forty-third year, Missy was forced to admit to herself that her chances for marriage and children were all but gone.

  Over the years, Missy had enjoyed warm relations with the five Roosevelt children. “Nearer my age than Father’s,” Jimmy Roosevelt remarked, “Missy was a wonderful go-between. I often relied on her judgment as to the best times to approach Father on some delicate matter.” In Missy’s files at the Roosevelt Library, there are scores of affectionate letters to and from Roosevelt’s daughter, Anna, suggesting an almost sisterly relationship. But, as close as Missy was to the Roosevelt children, it was not the same as having a husband and family of her own. In later years, Anna admitted that she hated driving in a car with her father and Missy because Missy automatically took the preferred seat next to him, so that she had to find a seat wherever she could. FDR, Jr., also admitted that he had resented Missy terribly when he was younger. At one point the anger tumbled out. “Are you always so agreeable?” he asked her. “Don’t you ever get mad and flare up?” She looked at that moment, FDR, Jr., recalled, “as if she were going to cry.”

  • • •

  There remained one unfinished piece of business before the Congress adjourned in 1940—tax legislation. Though the Congress had imposed new taxes in June in order to raise part of the revenue needed for the defense effort, a more comprehensive tax program was required. Despite the promise of the cost-plus-fixed-fee contracts, private enterprise remained reluctant to convert its plants to defense production until a new tax structure had been put into place.

  In mid-July, Roosevelt told business what it wanted to hear. He called for legislation that would permit companies building new plants and equipment to amortize their capital expenses within five years or less. This meant that companies could deduct 20 percent of their capital costs before arriving at the net income on which taxes were paid. At the same time, he proposed repeal of the Vinson-Trammell Act, which held aircraft and shipbuilding manufacturers to a flat 8-and-l2 percent profit rate. In its place, he recommended a steeply graduated “excess profits tax” that would apply to all companies, not just airplane manufacturers and shipbuilders.

  Liberals were dismayed, believing that Roosevelt was surrendering to what amounted to a strike by capital instead of labor, a deliberate refusal by business to sign any defense contracts until it got the precise tax legislation it wanted. There was truth to these claims. At the August 2 Cabinet meeting where the destroyer deal was discussed at length, Stimson warned Roosevelt that “delay in enacting legislation covering the amortization question was holding up many contracts.” Yet, unlike the scattered labor strikes that summer at the Kearney Shipyard, Vultee Aircraft, and the Boeing Company, where the demand for a raise of 10 cents was greeted on Capitol Hill with the cry of “treason,” Nation columnist I. F. Stone noted, “no such harsh accusation has been made against the aviation companies, though plane contracts to the value of 85 million have been held up by their recalcitrance.”

  As the probusiness legislation emerged from the House Ways and Means Committee, liberal opposition heightened. It was “a lousy bill,” Morgenthau told Roosevelt. Drafted by a lawyer from the Chamber of Commerce, it sponsored “the very kinds of discrimination that the President, and the Treasury have for so many years opposed.” First, Morgenthau warned, the wording of the excess-profits tax would place “a grave handicap on growing business, would give established corporations a near monopoly in their industries.” Second, the final version of the amortization scheme was so generous that, in effect, government would be fully responsible for building the plants and equipping them at its own expense, while permitting corporations to make huge profits at practically no risk.

  “This is abandoning advanced New Deal ground with a vengeance,” Harold Ickes recorded in his diary. “It seems to me intolerable to allow private people to use public capital in order to make a guaranteed profit for themselves . . . . If private citizens won’t supply munitions of war at a reasonable profit and take pot luck with the rest of the citizens in the matter of taxation, then the government ought to build its own plants and conscript the necessary managers to run them.”

  Eleanor agreed wholeheartedly with Morgenthau and Ickes. For months, Joe Lash had been telling her that the administration’s defense program evoked no enthusiasm because “there was no clearcut vision of the kind of world that was wanted.” What was so discouraging to Lash about the fight of the manufacturers to lift the profit margin of 8 percent was that it meant “we still had the old order of things.” If only, Lash urged Eleanor, the president were willing to carry a fight against monopoly, promising that something different would emerge out of the war, then young people would go enthusiastically into battle. Youth wants “battle cries,” Lash said, “with which it can go to death exultantly—something worth dying for.”

  Taking up Lash’s hope that a new economic system would emerge out of the war that would place the forces of production at the disposal of all, Eleanor suggested in her column that, while the government was drafting men, it sh
ould also “draft such capital as may be lying idle for investment in ways which may be deemed necessary for defense.” The best minds in the country, she said, should be occupied with “determining how it can be made equally certain that capital, wherever possible, is drafted for the use of the country in just the way that lives are drafted.” In a follow-up column written two weeks later, Eleanor endorsed the controversial Russell-Overton amendment to the September Selective Service Act, which allowed the president to take over uncooperative factories. Responding to Willkie’s charge that this provision would “sovietize” American industry, Eleanor wrote: “I, for one, am glad to see some consideration is being given to a draft of industry as well as men.”

  Eleanor’s economic musings provoked a sharp rebuttal from business writer Ralph Robey in Newsweek. Claiming that she had been led astray in her thinking, Robey warned that, should her ideas be followed, “that is, should the government start taking over our accumulated supplies of wealth,” then “our system of private enterprise will necessarily come to an absolute dead end. There will be no supply of private savings with which to go ahead—no private wealth out of which to make the investment necessary to create jobs—Everything, from top to bottom, will have to be government.”

  Robey need not have worried, for on the revenue issue the president was listening to Stimson, the War Department, and the conservatives in Congress rather than to Morgenthau, Ickes, or his wife. Stimson, never having been a New Dealer, shared none of Morgenthau’s suspicions of big business, nor his urgent desire to protect the principles of tax reform. As Stimson and the War Department saw the situation, the need for production was so great that nothing must be placed in the way of getting started. The War Department was not in the business of social reform; its goal was not to change the nation’s industrial pattern but to procure munitions as quickly as possible. “There are a great many people in Congress who think that they can tax business out of all proportion and still have businessmen work diligently and quickly,” Stimson wrote. “This is not human nature.”