No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  It would take the attack on Pearl Harbor and American entry into the war to create a receptive audience for Reuther’s vision of mass-producing airplanes in automobile plants. But in the meantime, precious time was lost.

  • • •

  The Christmas holidays found the White House in a state of cheerful confusion, with dozens of houseguests coming and going—some staying only for the night, some for a few days, others for longer stretches. There was Sara Roosevelt, the president’s mother, who brought her maid and took up residence in the Rose Suite, the principal guest quarters on the second floor, which the queen of England had occupied during the royal visit in 1939. There was Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, who arrived with her two little daughters and a retinue of servants. There were Elliott Roosevelt and FDR, Jr., with his wife, infant son, and nursemaid. There was an odd assortment of single men occupying various bedrooms on the third floor, including Eleanor’s younger brother, Hall; Franklin’s old friend Harry Hooker; and Eleanor’s new friend Joe Lash.

  Despite the full household, Eleanor managed to slip away for several days to New York, where she lunched with author Ernest Hemingway, whose book For Whom the Bell Tolls was currently on the best-seller list; saw Ethel Barrymore in The Corn Is Green; enjoyed an excellent production of the opera Tristan and Isolde; and finished her Christmas shopping at Arnold Constable, where she bought eighteen dozen pairs of nylon-silk hose and fourteen sets of matching ties and handkerchiefs. In her customary fashion, Eleanor had begun shopping for this Christmas the day after the previous Christmas; she couldn’t bear the anxiety of waiting until the last minute, she once told a friend, but preferred to stretch the process over the entire year, taking comfort in the gifts that were accumulating month by month in her special Christmas closet.

  The president, White House housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt reported, was in a happy mood when Eleanor returned. “He was just bursting with news.” For weeks, he had been trying to make arrangements to bring Prince Olav to Washington from London as a surprise Christmas present for Princess Martha and the children, and finally everything had been worked out. How was he getting here? Eleanor asked, knowing how difficult it was to secure any form of transportation from Europe. “By clipper,” Roosevelt announced. “I arranged it.”

  Eleanor spent the morning after she returned going over menus with Mrs. Nesbitt. The week before Christmas was a trying time for the household staff. Besides the houseful of guests, there was a special round of parties—a formal reception for the members of the judiciary, a state dinner in honor of Crown Princess Juliana, and a large reception for White House employees and their families. Mrs. Nesbitt did not deal well with added stress. A plain, unimaginative woman of German stock with a stern face and a dark bun pulled tightly at the nape of her neck, Mrs. Nesbitt supervised a staff of twenty-six, including cooks, butlers, ladies’ maids, and chambermaids. She was not a professional housekeeper—Eleanor had originally hired her in the mid-twenties to bake pies and strudels for large parties at Hyde Park—but she was thrifty, and Eleanor was determined to keep a tight rein on expenses at the White House.

  For years, the president had pleaded with Eleanor to find a new house-keeper to replace Mrs. Nesbitt. All his life, he had loved good food—he was especially fond of quail and pheasant cooked so rare as to be bloody. He loved oyster crabs, out-of-the-way country cheeses, and peach cobbler. But Mrs. Nesbitt maintained that a proper diet consisted of “plain foods, plainly prepared.” She served the same simple meals over and over again, to the point where White House guests could predict by the day of the week what they would have for dinner—tongue with caper sauce on Mondays, boiled beef on Tuesdays, roast beef and mashed potatoes on Wednesdays. The word was out that the White House cuisine was impossibly drab, dull, and overcooked.

  For the president, who rarely had a chance to eat out in restaurants because of his paralysis, Mrs. Nesbitt was a unique cross to bear. But, true to form, he could not bring himself to fire her. So Mrs. Nesbitt—or “Fluffy,” as she was called behind her back—remained at her post, month after month, year after year. Elliott Roosevelt recalled various dinners at the White House when Missy, “always handsome in a dinner gown,” would catch the president’s eye as some overcooked dish appeared. They would smile knowingly at one another, proceed to eat as much as they could bear, and then rummage up egg sandwiches in the little kitchen off the president’s study.

  As long as Mrs. Nesbitt remained in charge of the kitchen, her concept of what should be eaten prevailed. She insisted, for instance, on serving Roosevelt broccoli even though he let everyone know that he didn’t like it. “Fix it anyhow,” she told the cooks; “he should like it.” Once, when royal guests were dining with the president, the call came to the kitchen for hot coffee. Mrs. Nesbitt sent iced tea instead. “It was better for them,” she said.

  The housekeeper’s personal tastes governed breakfasts as well. “My God!” the president exclaimed one morning to Grace Tully. “Doesn’t Mrs. Nesbitt know that there are breakfast foods besides oatmeal? It’s been served to me morning in and morning out for months and months now and I’m sick and tired of it!” Later that day, he called Tully in for dictation. Leaning back in his chair, he held in his hand an advertisement for various cereals he had torn from the morning paper. “Corn Flakes! 13 ounce package, 19 cents! Post Toasties! 13 ounce package, 19 cents! Cream of Wheat! two for 27 cents! . . . Now take this gentle reminder to Mrs. Nesbitt.”

  When Mrs. Nesbitt failed to respond to his gentle reminders, Roosevelt turned to Eleanor. “Do you remember,” he asked her in a memo, “that about a month ago I got sick of chicken because I got it (between lunch and dinner) at least six times a week? The chicken situation has definitely improved, but ‘they’ have substituted sweetbreads, and for the past month I have been getting sweetbreads about six times a week. I am getting to the point where my stomach positively rebels and this does not help my relations with foreign powers. I bit two of them today.” Eleanor must have relayed the message, but the sweetbreads kept coming until the president sent Mrs. Nesbitt an ultimatum, telling her he did not want to see sweetbreads again for at least two months!

  Unfortunately for the president, Eleanor had absolutely no taste for fine food. Her own cooking was limited to scrambling eggs, and she never thought about what she was eating. To her mind, good conversation created a good meal; the food was secondary. Though she tried to respond to the president’s specific requests, the White House food remained, “to put it mildly,” frequent visitor John Gunther observed, “undistinguished.”

  If the food was undistinguished, the company was not. The president loved the bustle of Christmas, the festive atmosphere, the holly that decked the mansion, and the gay conversations. Whether greeting guests on a receiving line or sharing a dinner, he was a genial host, charming and attentive. If the conversation flagged, he could always get it going by asking a question, telling a story, or exchanging a piece of gossip. Clever company and bright conversation stimulated him; talk was his favorite form of relaxation.

  This Christmas, the president took added pleasure in the arrival of a new puppy named Fala, a gift from his cousin Margaret Suckley. He had longed for a puppy for years, he told his cousin as he lifted the little Scottish terrier into his arms, but Eleanor did not consider the White House a proper place to bring up a dog. Roosevelt had had pets before, but Fala became his friend in a way no other pet had been. Fala accompanied the president everywhere, eating his meals in Roosevelt’s study, sleeping in a chair at the foot of his bed. Within a few weeks of his arrival, the puppy was sent to the hospital with a serious intestinal disturbance. He had discovered the White House kitchen, and everyone was feeding him. When he came home, Roosevelt issued a stern order to the entire White House staff: “Not even one crumb will be fed to Fala except by the President.” From then on, Fala was in perfect health.

  “In years to come,” author William Klingaman has written, “many Americans would remember Dece
mber 25, 1940, as one of the happiest Christmases of their lives.” Though there were terrible problems abroad, the economy at home was showing signs of prosperity for the first time in more than a decade. Factories were working double shifts; the railroads were adding personnel and equipment, steel production was on the rise. Unemployment had fallen by nearly two million since the previous year. People had money now and were spending it. Automobile manufacturers were looking to their biggest year since 1929. Restaurant operators were enjoying a marked increase in business; people were ordering prime steak for the first time in years. Gift buying in department stores that December, The New York Times reported, approached “an orgy of spending as if customers were determined to show there was at least one country that enjoyed peace and goodwill.”

  For her part, Eleanor seemed more driven than usual, racing from one event to the next, helping Santa Claus hand out toys to seven hundred needy children from the stage of a local theater, attending the annual Christmas party for the Salvation Army, greeting a community chorus of Negro carolers and looking in on a neighborhood celebration at Green’s Court, a squalid alley dwelling within sight of the Capitol building. “Here life is not so pleasant,” she conceded, “but for another year we may hope for fewer alleys and better places to live in.”

  • • •

  On January 6, 1941, the president was scheduled to present his lend-lease program to Congress in his annual State of the Union Address. While the speech was being drafted, Eleanor was reading And Beacons Burn Again, a new book by a British author. It would not be the landed gentry that would save England, the book argued, but the miners and the workers and the people from the slums. “Here is something to make us swell with pride,” Eleanor wrote in her column on New Year’s Day, “for it proves that our American conception of equality . . . is putting faith in the place it should be, in the strength and capacity of the average human being. Justice for all, security in certain living standards, a recognition of the dignity and the right of an individual human being without regard to his race, creed or color—these are the things for which vast numbers of our citizens will willingly sacrifice themselves.”

  “Eleanor was forever discussing how the world would look after the war,” her friend Trude Pratt Lash later observed, “and finally her ideas took hold in the president’s call for four freedoms in his State of the Union.” The speech had gone through three or four drafts, Sam Rosenman recalled, when the president suddenly announced “he had an idea for a peroration.” He paused, gazed at the ceiling, and then told his secretary to take down his words. As his speechwriters listened, he slowly dictated what would turn out to be the most memorable part of the speech—a call for a world based on “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Eleanor never claimed credit for anything her husband did or said, and there is no way of tracing the direct connection between Eleanor’s ruminations about democracy and Franklin’s concept of four freedoms, but the link seems obvious.

  Eleanor was seated in the president’s box next to Missy, Lorena Hickok, and Princess Martha, who was elegantly dressed, reporters noted, in a black coat and silver fox, when Roosevelt entered the House chamber at 2:03 p.m. The speech began on a somber note: “As your President, performing my constitutional duty to ‘give to the Congress information of the state of the union,’ I find it unhappily necessary to report that the future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.” Because American security depended on defeat of the Axis, he explained, he was asking Congress for authority and funds to continue sending aid to England and other democracies fighting the Axis powers even if these nations could no longer pay with ready cash. “Let us say to the democracies: We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom.”

  As the country committed itself to national defense, he went on, it must never forget the goals for which it was fighting: equality of opportunity, jobs for those who could work, security for the needy, the ending of special privilege for the few, the preservation of civil liberties for all. Leaning forward in her seat, Eleanor smiled broadly as she heard these words, and the smile remained on her face as the president presented his vision of a new world founded on four freedoms. Since the beginning of the war, she had challenged her husband to recognize that the concept of a genuine national defense also encompassed better housing, work training, equal opportunity, and expanded health programs. Now, as the president gave eloquent voice to the ideas about democracy that were uppermost in her mind, she was elated.

  Curiously, Eleanor’s gratification led to a rare lapse of judgment. In the column she wrote the afternoon of the speech, she angrily observed that the Republicans had failed to applaud the president’s address. “It looked to me as though those men were saying to the country as a whole, ‘we are Republicans first. We represent you here in Congress not as citizens of the U.S. in a period of crisis, but as members of a political party which seeks primarily to promote its own partisan interests.’ This is to me shocking and terrifying. There was running through my mind as I watched them, in what would have been an act of childish spite, if it had not been such a serious moment in history, the lines of a song which was popular when I was young: ‘I don’t want to play in your yard. I don’t love you any more.’”

  Reaction to Eleanor’s comments was swift and savage. Republican Representative Edith Nourse told the House that Mrs. Roosevelt’s suggestion that all members applaud “presents a new concept in American constitutional theory. Under our form of government, members of Congress are not elected to applaud the official utterances of the White House, but to frame legislation. The suggestion of a duty to applaud appears to me a dangerous and unwholesome manifestation of war hysteria.” Representative Hoffman of Michigan took the argument even further, charging that “the Roosevelts apparently have in some way gotten the idea they are entitled to receive homage and applause as our King and Queen.”

  • • •

  As Roosevelt approached his third inaugural, critics lamented his deviousness, his lack of candor, his capricious experimentation, his tendency to ingratitude. His character flaws were widely discussed—his stubbornness, his vanity, his occasional vindictiveness, his habit of yessing callers just to be amiable. Former aide Raymond Moley believed he had succumbed over the years to the “intensifying and exhilarating effect of power,” to the unlovely habit of “telling, not asking,” to an “irritable certitude” that led him to ascribe “self-interest or cowardice or subtle corruption or stupidity” to people who questioned his decisions.

  But the critics’ complaints were submerged by the wave of favorable publicity that accompanied Franklin Roosevelt’s historic third term. His hair was thinner and grayer, reporters noted, his face heavier and more deeply lined; yet there was the same captivating smile in his eyes and on his lips, the same bright forehead, the same mannerism of tossing his head before replying to a question. His physical condition, his doctor said, was “the best in many years.” As always, he ate heartily and enjoyed a nightly cocktail. His weight was a perfect 187½ pounds, and thrice weekly he continued to swim in the White House pool. Crises, wars, campaigns notwithstanding, he generally managed to sleep eight hours a night, from midnight to eight. “One of the grand things about him is that he can relax,” Dr. Ross McIntire said. “In the main he has the ability to put his troubles aside when he shouldn’t carry them with him.”

  The day before the inauguration, The New York Times Magazine painted a glowing portrait of a president who still retained an astonishing buoyancy despite the strenuous times. The challenge of war, it was suggested, had added a new dimension to his vitality. “Serious but not grim, concerned but not worried,” reporter Charles Hurd wrote, “in confidence and vigor of assurance he is the same man who told the American people, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’” The article went on to describe the long hours the president worked, th
e voluminous correspondence he handled, the variety of newspapers he read, and the numbers of conferences he held.

  “The Presidency and its problems have nevertheless left their mark on Mr. Roosevelt,” the Times concluded. “Though he gives the impression of cheerfulness, it is cheerfulness without all the spontaneity associated with the first flush of the New Deal,” and though he appears optimistic, “after nearly eight years correspondents have learned that the President does not always reveal his true feelings.”

  With this concluding assessment Eleanor heartily agreed. Still puzzled, after nearly thirty-five years of marriage, by her husband’s inability to share himself openly with anyone, Eleanor remarked to Joe Lash that those final paragraphs of the Times piece perfectly captured the frame of mind of the president in the days before his fifty-ninth birthday. He had kept his own counsel for so long, she observed, that it had become “part of his nature not to talk to anyone of intimate matters.”

  Over the years, many tried to penetrate the president’s reticence, but few succeeded. “The President talked so much,” Frances Perkins recalled, “and yet, all through this talkativeness, there ran a kind of reserve. I saw him often: he dropped the curtain over himself. He never told you, or anyone else, just what was going on inside his mind—inside his emotions—inside his real intentions in life . . . . I think he never intended to reveal himself.”

  A week before the inauguration, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter begged Stimson to see more of the president and seek out opportunities for more talks alone with him. Stimson told Frankfurter he had been keeping away because he did not like to bother him. “Frankfurter said that was wrong,” Stimson recorded in his diary, “that he was a very lonely man and that he was rather proud and didn’t like to ask people to come to him but that he was sure that he would welcome my approaches, if I would make them.”