No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  The president’s illness kept him away from his desk for nearly two weeks. Canceling all appointments, he spent most of his time in his bedroom, accompanied only by Harry and Missy. To be sure, for at least half of that period he was truly sick, but even after his temperature was normal and his intestinal disturbance had cleared itself up, he remained in bed, inaccessible to all but Harry and Missy. At one point during this period of isolation, Robert Sherwood was invited in to talk. Surprised at how healthy Roosevelt seemed, never once coughing or sneezing, Sherwood asked Missy what was going on. Missy smiled and said, “What he’s suffering from most of all is a case of sheer exasperation.”

  Missy knew her man. Frustrated by the contradictory impulses of public attitudes toward the struggle, dismayed at the prospect of carrying a divided country into war, the president was “waiting to be pushed into the situation.” Throughout his long political career, Roosevelt had worked hard to fathom the unfathomable force of public opinion. From long experience, he had learned that in a democracy one man alone cannot guide tens of millions of people without following (and shaping, as far as one could) that intangible force called the spirit of the country. He had seen at first hand President Woodrow Wilson’s failure to reinforce his foreign policy with public and congressional backing. He had, in effect, made what historian Eric Larrabee has called “a compact with the electorate which he had every reason for wishing to keep.” Yet so confused and so volatile was public opinion in the spring of 1941 that Roosevelt was like a man staring into a fog.

  By the middle of May, the percentage of people supporting convoys had risen from 41 percent to 55 percent, even though three-quarters of the population believed convoying would eventually put the country into war. At the same time, 79 percent of the people expressed the strong desire to stay out of the fighting; and 70 percent felt the president had either gone too far or was already doing enough to help Britain. Roosevelt recognized that with education he could command a national majority on convoys and even on direct involvement in the war, but he feared that his consensus would quickly vanish if a substantial portion of the people felt that he, rather than a recognized threat to national security, had compelled involvement.

  So Roosevelt’s bed became the escape he needed to avoid action and deflate pressure. “Missy was exactly right,” journalist Eliot Janeway affirmed. “Simply put, the President was in bed because he was in a funk, feeling there was nothing he could do except let the tides fall.”

  • • •

  Eleanor returned from the West Coast on the evening of May 7 in good spirits. Her trip had been a fruitful one, and there was much to tell the president. She had lectured in a dozen places, often following Charles Lindbergh. The questions she received, she believed, reflected his arguments and gave her an insight into the isolationists’ frame of mind. She had spent a morning touring one of the new housing projects built under the U.S. Housing Authority; she had talked with a lively group of young men and women involved in a defense-training program sponsored by the NYA; she had spent an afternoon with a group of Negroes at a WPA center for Negro art. And, perhaps of greatest potential interest to the president, she had been taken on a tour of the Boeing Aircraft plant in Seattle, where she witnessed the completion of the first four motor bombers. “Since defense is now the key thing,” Lash observed in his diary, “she is determined to learn as much as she can in her detailed human being interest sort of way, just as she had with WPA etc.”

  But before seeing her husband, Eleanor journeyed to Hyde Park for the weekend. That Sunday was Mother’s Day, and Sara needed Eleanor’s help in preparing her traditional Mother’s Day broadcast to the nation. Speaking from her living room at exactly noon, the president’s eight-six-year-old mother characterized 1941 as a year marked with great suffering, “probably the most crucial year in history.” Watching Sara’s stalwart performance, Eleanor could not help admiring the old lady. “There is no one I know who sets a greater value on the duties and pleasures of motherhood,” Eleanor wrote in her column. That same week, Sara traveled to Toronto to raise money for one of her charities. “Isn’t she amazing?” Eleanor commented to Anna.

  Franklin and Eleanor talked together on the phone several times that weekend, and Eleanor was relieved to discover that he was in good humor, responsive and cheerful, “on the way to being quite well.” Anxious to know whether his young trees had survived the early-spring drought, he asked her to make an inspection and report back as soon as she could. Hyde Park in the spring was one of the most delightful places in the world. Eleanor reveled in the sight of the river tumbling past and the sounds of the birds in the woods. When she reported that everything not newly planted seemed unharmed, he was delighted.

  Yet no sooner had Eleanor arrived at the White House than the old tensions resumed. Impatient to disclose what she had discovered in her cross-country trip—delays in defense housing, inequities in recreational facilities provided for whites and Negroes, the refusal of certain industries to hire Italians and Germans—she found her husband “very tired and very edgy.” What is more, she felt unable to break in on Harry and Missy’s territory.

  “The situation with Harry, Missy and Pa is funny,” Eleanor admitted in a long letter to Anna. “It is a very closed corporation just now. So far I’ve told him nothing as I didn’t think he was well enough to accept any disagreeable facts.” But as long as she was away so often, it was inevitable that her husband would turn to others for companionship. It was, after all, Missy and Harry, not Eleanor, who had sat with Roosevelt in his bedroom night after night when he was sick, talking with him, playing cards with him, soothing his frustration.

  In the third week of May, the president’s energy returned; lethargy gave way to action. “Franklin is much better,” Eleanor told Esther Lape, “really looks very well and is now working very hard to catch up with what he missed while he was ill.” In the Oval Office, where silence had reigned for more than a fortnight, there was now a welcoming air, with lights burning until well after midnight and a steady stream of visitors.

  After weeks of avoiding the press, the president announced that he would deliver a major speech to the nation on May 27. It seemed that everyone was asked to contribute to the draft—Hopkins, Stimson, Welles, Knox, Hull, Berle, Sherwood, and Rosenman. In the meantime, the White House received some twelve thousand letters from all over the country advising the president what to say. It fell to Sherwood and Rosenman, as usual, to collect all the suggestions and then sit with the president to hear what he wanted to say. Generally, Roosevelt would dictate his thoughts at the end of the day, until it was time to go to bed. Then the speechwriters would retire to the large table in the Cabinet Room, where, with scissors and paste, they would begin the task of assembling a coherent speech. The following night, after reading the draft, the president would dictate some more, and then his aides would return to the Cabinet Room to start a second draft.

  These drafting sessions often lasted most of the night. During the preparations for the May 27 speech, Eleanor told Sherwood and Rosenman that she had seen their lights in the Cabinet Room at 3 a.m., and gently scolded them for working so hard and staying up so late. “If I may say so, Mrs. Roosevelt,” Sherwood countered, “you were up rather late yourself.” Unperturbed, Eleanor replied, “I was working on my mail,” failing to understand why everyone laughed.

  The major thrust of the speech concerned the president’s decision to declare an unlimited national emergency, a step which, under the law, the chief executive could take only when he believed war to be imminent. With this proclamation came a variety of domestic and international powers which a peacetime president did not possess—including the power to increase the size of the regular army or navy, to place compulsory defense orders in factories or plants, and to assign priority rating to producers and suppliers, directing them to fill defense orders ahead of private orders. In the last hours before the speech, the president began to waver. “There’s only a small number of rounds of ammu
nition left to use,” he explained, “unless Congress is willing to give me more. This declaration is one of those few rounds, and a very important one. Is this the right time to use it or should we wait until things get worse—as they surely will?” Ultimately, he decided this was the right time.

  Just before the president began to speak at 10:30 p.m., the electric meters in power stations across the country began jumping skyward as people everywhere, in cities and remote towns, in mountains and valleys, in mansions and tenements, turned on their radios. “For almost an hour,” The New York Times reported, “a whole nation here stilled itself to listen to his words.”

  Speaking in the oppressive heat of the East Room into a bank of microphones before a gathering of representatives of the Pan American Union, the president began by recalling that he had promised the people he would not send their boys to war except in case of attack, then went on to define what was meant by the word “attack.” “Some people seem to think that we are not attacked until bombs actually drop in the streets of New York or San Francisco or New Orleans or Chicago. But they are simply shutting their eyes to the lesson that we must learn from the fate of every nation that the Nazis have conquered. The attack on Czechoslovakia began with the conquest of Austria. The attack on Norway began with the occupation of Denmark . . . and the attack on the U.S. can begin with the domination of any base which menaces our security—North or South . . . . We know enough by now to realize that it would be suicide to wait until they are in our front yard. When your enemy comes at you in a tank or a bombing plane, if you hold your fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you will never know what hit you. Our Bunker Hill of tomorrow may be several thousand miles from Boston.”

  With this broadened definition of “attack,” the president justified his decision to add more ships and planes to the American patrols. And beyond that, he promised that “all additional measures necessary to deliver the goods will be taken. Any and all further methods or combination of methods . . . are being devised.”

  Finally, “I have tonight issued a proclamation that an unlimited national emergency exists and requires the strengthening of our defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority.” In justifying his proclamation, he said that a succession of events had made it clear that “what started as a European war” had developed into “a war for world domination.” Indifference to this fundamental fact would “place the nation at peril.”

  Eleanor was seated in the front row as the president spoke, surrounded on all sides by flags and representatives of all the nations of South and North America. “The atmosphere in the room was one of suppressed and intense excitement,” she wrote. “Diplomats are trained to observe the amenities, no matter what they feel, but everybody’s face showed some emotion as the evening progressed. I felt strangely detached, as though I were outside, a part of the general public. I represented no nation, carried no responsibility.”

  But then she looked at her husband’s face and, “like an oncoming wave, the thought rolled over me. What a weight of responsibility this one man at the desk, facing the rest of the people, has to carry. Not just for this hemisphere alone but for the world as a whole! Great Britain can be gallant beyond belief, China can suffer and defend herself in equally heroic fashion, but in the end the decisive factor in this whole business, may perhaps be . . . the President of the United States. In my capacity of objective citizen, sitting in the gathering, I felt that I wanted to accept my responsibility and do my particular job whatever it might be to the extent of my ability. I think that will be the answer of every individual citizen of the U.S.A.”

  Harry Hopkins was in his bedroom, listening to the speech in his old bathrobe. According to Robert Sherwood, Hopkins always preferred to listen to the president’s speeches on the radio, so he could imagine himself in the living room of an ordinary family. After the diplomats left, Eleanor came into Harry’s room to invite him to join the president in the Monroe Room, where a small group of friends, including songwriter Irving Berlin, were gathered to enjoy a midnight snack. The president seemed completely at ease, laughing and smiling as he listened to Berlin play the piano and sing some of his favorite songs.

  This transition from a grim speech to an intimate party with popular music, Rosenman observed, “would have been difficult for most men. For the President, however, those who knew him thought it nothing unusual. It was not callousness or indifference. It was the kind of relaxation that helped him to meet the terrible problems and burdens of the next day, and to live through twelve years of nerve-racking decisions.”

  The response to the speech was overwhelmingly favorable. More than a thousand telegrams were delivered to the White House that night. “They’re 95 percent favorable,” the president remarked. “And I figured I’d be lucky to get an even break on this speech.”

  On the whole, Henry Stimson was pleased with the speech. Though the final draft was not as strong as he had hoped—at the last minute, the president elected not to disclose his plans for transferring part of the fleet to the Atlantic—the proclamation of emergency promised to create a receptive atmosphere down the line, when more drastic steps were needed.

  “We listened to father’s speech on the train and were greatly thrilled,” Anna wrote her mother. “The speech came over beautifully and he sounded well and strong, thank goodness.” Listener polls published the next day revealed that the president’s speech had set an all-time record in the history of radio. It was estimated that more than sixty-five million people in twenty million homes had heard the talk—70 percent of the total home audience in the U.S. The second-highest rating was also held by the president—his fireside chat on December 29 had been heard by 59 percent of the radio audience. Only one other broadcast had come even close to these figures: the second Louis-Schmeling fight at Yankee Stadium in 1938 had achieved a rating of 57.2 percent. To understand the magnitude of the interest in Roosevelt’s words, one need only realize that America’s top-ranking radio comedy shows—Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Goldbergs, Ma Perkins, Amos ’n’ Andy—were currently garnering what were considered fabulous ratings of 30 to 35 percent.

  The speech was heard round the world as well. Goebbels lambasted it in his diary as “demagogic and aggressive.” Roosevelt’s talk, the propaganda minister believed, was nothing but “beer-hall bragging” that should not be taken seriously. “What can the USA do faced with our arms capacity? They can do us no harm. He will never be able to produce as much as we, who have the entire economic capacity of Europe at our disposal.” Nonetheless, Goebbels admitted, Roosevelt’s “reckless accusations” against Germany were irritating. “The USA stands poised between peace and war. Roosevelt wants war, the people want peace . . . . We must wait and see what he does next.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “A GREAT HOUR TO LIVE”

  The president’s return to health at the end of May signaled an end to the hours Missy had enjoyed with him isolated from the world at large. Indeed, no sooner was Roosevelt’s vigor restored than he motored to Pook’s Hill to spend an afternoon with Princess Martha. Missy was under no illusion that the president fully reciprocated her devotion. She knew, however, that she had been a central presence in his life for twenty years, someone to whom he could always turn for undivided comfort and support. It was most unsettling to watch herself being supplanted by another woman.

  As the felt injustice of her position accumulated, “she may have begun,” Roosevelt’s grandson Curtis Roosevelt surmised, “to face him with emotional demands: Why don’t you respond to me, acknowledge me more, give me what I give you? She may have been getting too protective, making demands he couldn’t meet. He could never cope with people who started making emotional demands. He didn’t like weepy women. He was turned off by people who couldn’t fit into his game.”

  Part of the problem, Elliott Roosevelt observed, was that “Missy was not as relaxing for the President as she used to be.” She had become so influential in
the Washington community, representing so many people to the president, that she could no longer simply “sit and simper” the way Martha did. For Jim Rowe, Felix Frankfurter, Harold Ickes, and untold others, Missy had become the conduit to the president, advising them “when to approach FDR and when to put off a vexing matter until another day.” In Missy’s files there are numerous requests for her to intervene on behalf of one person or another.

  “Some of the people who worked closely in the administration with my husband . . . ,” Eleanor Roosevelt later noted, “were brought in through Missy’s efforts . . . [presidential adviser] Tom Corcoran, [Ambassador] William Bullitt . . . .

  “I think none of them ever meant a great deal to Franklin. I also think they exploited Missy’s friendship, believing her more interested in them personally than in what they could contribute to Franklin’s work. In that they were mistaken; . . . though occasionally someone fooled her for a time, I always waited for enlightenment to come, with confidence born of long experience.”

  To make matters worse, Missy was afflicted that spring with insomnia, and the opiates she was taking to combat it were having a bad effect. More and more, her benign temper was punctuated by outbursts of irascibility. The pressure of her job began to get to her. “The president would work night after night,” Missy’s friend Barbara Curtis remarked, “and she was always right there working with him. He could take it, but I think her strength just didn’t hold out to take all that.”