No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  “She said quietly one time that he had no idea of the demands he put upon people who were close to him,” Barbara’s husband, Egbert Curtis, recalled. “Would you do this? Would you do that? And it went beyond some of their powers to keep up.”

  On June 4, 1941, the dam burst. At six-thirty that evening, the president was relaxing with the members of his White House staff, including Missy, Harry Hopkins, Grace Tully, and Pa Watson, at a party hosted by Harry Somerville, the manager of the Willard Hotel. Mr. Somerville’s party, an annual tradition, was normally held at the Willard, but on this evening the event was held at the White House so the president could attend. A piano was rolled in, and Marvin McIntyre played all the songs FDR loved.

  Near the end of the dinner, Grace Tully recalled, Missy arose from her chair, saying she felt ill and very tired. Tully urged her to excuse herself and retire to her room, but she insisted on staying until the president left. He did so at 9:30 p.m. and, moments later, Missy let out a piercing scream, wavered, and fell to the floor unconscious. Dr. Ross McIntire and Commander George Fox, the president’s physical therapist, took her to her room on the third floor and sedated her.

  The doctors seemed to think at first it was some sort of heart trouble or a kind of nervous collapse, much like the ones she had experienced before, brought about in this case by a combination of sleeplessness and overwork. “It was very secret,” White House secretary Toi Bachelder remembered. “The fact that she was ill was kept very quiet. Nobody said anything.”

  The next morning, when White House maid Lillian Parks arrived at the third-floor sewing room across from Missy’s bedroom, a distraught nurse was in the hallway just outside Missy’s door. “She’s gotten up and I can’t get her back in bed,” the nurse said, asking for help. Parks walked into the room. “Come on, Miss LeHand,” she said sternly. “Come get into bed.” Responding to the tone of Parks’ voice, Missy climbed meekly back into bed, where she remained, stroking Parks’ arm, until Dr. McIntire and a second doctor arrived. McIntire told Parks that Missy was utterly exhausted, that she had been working too hard and needed complete rest. Her speech was slightly slurred, but this was attributed to the opiates and the sleeplessness.

  Eleanor was in Hyde Park the night Missy collapsed, but as soon as she heard about the situation, she called Maggie Parks, Lillian Parks’ mother, who had retired from the White House two years earlier. “Missy loved you,” she told Maggie; “would you come back and sit with her at night? She is so lonely.”

  So Maggie sat through the nights with Missy, listening to her ramblings, her wild callings for FDR, her worries that her work was piling up and that her boss would suffer as a result. “It’s sad to love a man so much,” Maggie commented to her daughter, believing that “the strain of loving and knowing nothing could come of it” had helped bring about Missy’s illness.

  Eleanor did not know what to make of Missy’s collapse. “Missy is very ill again,” she confided to Anna on June 12. “She’s been taking opiates and had a heart attack and then her mind went as it does, so now we have three nurses and the prospect of some weeks of illness before we get her straightened out.” The following week, Eleanor suggested to Anna that Missy’s problem was complicated by “change of life.”

  In 1941, the superstitions of past ages still retained a firm hold on popular attitudes toward menopause. “Too many women,” Maxine Davis wrote in Good Housekeeping, “attribute all sorts of ailments—headaches, backaches, worries, depression, bad temper—to the menopause . . . . Other women nourish the gnawing fear that they’ll lose their minds. They can remember Aunt Ida and Mother’s horror stories of cousin Edith, who finally had to be committed to an institution.”

  In Missy’s case, the loss of the childbearing function that accompanied menopause may have been the hardest to bear, providing dread confirmation of her failure to marry and build a family of her own. Though she was only forty-three, a monumental door was closing behind her, never to be opened again.

  As Missy’s feelings of desolation and uncertainty intensified, she began to write a series of agitated, scarcely decipherable letters to people who had been close to her over the years. Passages in these tormented letters were manic descriptions of her love life, fantasies of a world she had never entered. “The letters told of this one being in love with her, and that one wanting to marry her,” Anna confided years later to the writer Bernard Asbell. “Everyone realized that she could no longer be trusted with important information. These friends and the family drew together to get the letters out of sight, to hush up Missy’s lapse.”

  For the president, Missy’s breakdown was a catastrophe. Day after day he visited her third-floor apartment. As time went by, she seemed to get worse, not better. How many hours Roosevelt had spent with Missy in this comfortable suite, escaping from official guests. There stood the familiar chair and the wooden bookcase he had carved for her years before as a special present; there the familiar desk and the four-poster bed. Nonetheless, everything had changed. On the bed, her head propped high on the pillows, Missy looked like a frightened stranger. Anguished eyes peered at him, instead of the gaze of love he had found for twenty years.

  Unable to grieve, unable to accept the fact that Missy was not getting better as she always had before, Roosevelt developed an illness of his own; his throat became infected and he began to run a temperature. Worried about her husband’s fever, Eleanor begged him to see an outside doctor. But in a letter to Anna, she admitted that Missy’s collapse was the most likely cause of Franklin’s illness. “Missy has been worse for the last few days,” Eleanor confided, “and that may be at the bottom of much of Pa’s trouble.”

  In retrospect, it is clear that Missy’s condition was caused by neither insomnia nor the change of life; her collapse on the evening of June 4 was most likely a small stroke, an undiagnosed warning signal for the major stroke she suffered two weeks later. The naval ambulance arrived at the White House at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 21. The president had spent the afternoon with Princess Martha and had worked through dinner clearing up his correspondence with Grace Tully. He was still at work when Missy was carried out on a stretcher to the ambulance and taken to Doctors Hospital at 35th and I streets.

  Since Missy had suffered from rheumatic heart disease as a child—the dread disease which “licks the joints and bites the heart”—it is most likely that her stroke was caused by a cerebral embolism, a clot that was formed in her heart and carried by her blood to her brain. When it reached the narrow blood vessels of the brain, it got stuck, cutting off the blood flow to the brain cells on her left side. The result was the loss of movement in her right arm and leg, and the loss of her ability to speak coherently.

  Word of Missy’s illness gradually slipped out. “I was distressed to hear from Mother that you have been miserable,” Anna wrote Missy. “Please, do be a good girl and get well quickly. Even thinking of the pressure of responsibility and work on you all makes one shudder and the importance of watching one’s health becomes greater than ever. Being sick is never any fun—and it’s not natural to think of you that way.”

  “My dear Missy,” Sara Roosevelt wrote from Campobello, “I do not like to think of you still in bed, but I believe you and I are cases for bed. I for old age and you for rest to an overworked rather delicate organ. For the autumn perhaps you will come to Hyde Park and rest with me.”

  For her part, Missy must have been horrified by the breakdown of her body, overwhelmed by a sense of solitude. The doctors held out hope that over time she would be able to relearn the movements necessary for standing and walking, but she was particularly sensitive to the effect of her illness on her speech. She refused most visits, except those of the Roosevelts, who came to see her at Doctors Hospital nearly every week all summer long.

  For the president, the visits were unbearable. All his life, he had steeled himself to ignore illness and unpleasantness of any kind, to maintain an attitude of perpetual cheer. So now he would wheel himself into he
r room, his face set in a wide smile, a series of amusing anecdotes on his lips. But the president’s cheery monologues were not what Missy needed to hear. Tired and bewildered, filled with dread and foreboding, she frequently broke into tears. Suddenly Roosevelt had no more stories to tell. He would look at her, smile another smile, and say goodbye.

  For Eleanor, who was more accustomed to vulnerability and loss, the visits were easier to handle. She went to see Missy as often as she could, sending her flowers, fruit, presents, and letters. “The strange thing,” Elliott Roosevelt observed, “was that Mother was more protective and upset about Missy’s illness than Father. He seemed to accept it and go through the loss without its affecting him nearly as much as I would have thought it would have affected him.”

  To outside observers, Roosevelt’s equanimity in the face of Missy’s illness seemed disturbingly coldhearted. “Roosevelt had absolutely no moral reaction to Missy’s tragedy,” Eliot Janeway remarked. “It seemed only that he resented her for getting sick and leaving him in the lurch. This was proof that he had ceased to be a person; he was simply the president. If something was good for him as president, it was good; if it had no function for him as president, it didn’t exist.”

  In a moment of anger at the president after a bitter political fight that summer, Harold Ickes made a similar observation. “As I sat at the Cabinet table yesterday looking at the President,” he recorded in his diary, “I felt a clear conviction that I had lost my affection for him . . . despite his very pleasant and friendly personality, he is as cold as ice inside. He has certain conventional family affections for his children and probably for Missy Le-Hand and Harry Hopkins, but nothing else. Missy, who has been desperately ill for several weeks, might pass out of his life and he would miss her. The same might be true as to Harry, but I doubt whether he would miss either of them greatly or for a long period. When Louis Howe died, so far as appearances, the President was not noticeably affected, although no one has ever had a more devoted friend than Louis Howe.”

  That Roosevelt made no outward display of his feelings did not mean, however, that he was indifferent to Missy’s distress. Indeed, his actions tell a different story. While Missy was in the hospital, he ordered round-the-clock care, absorbed every expense, and wrote each of her doctors personal notes. “No words will ever be able to express to you,” he wrote Dr. John Harper, “my very deep feeling of appreciation and gratitude for the outstanding and unselfish services you have rendered in looking after my secretary, Miss LeHand.”

  In the months that followed the stroke, Missy’s condition improved, but ever so slightly. With the help of daily physical therapy, movement began to return to her right leg, and after many weeks of practice she was ready, with the help of a heavy brace and crutches, to start walking again. “The case has been a difficult one, indeed,” Dr. Winfred Overholser wrote the president, “but I am encouraged by the progress made in the last few weeks.” But such are the mysteries of rehabilitation that the right hand and arm stubbornly resisted any improvement at all, as did the function of speech. Though she was able to understand both spoken and written language, she was unable to speak herself except in simple phrases.

  Recognizing that Missy’s therapy would take months, if not years (and even when it was completed, there was scant hope that she could return to her demanding job in the White House), Roosevelt worried about what would happen to her if he should die. The only money Missy ever had was her annual salary, which at its peak of $5,000 was half that of the male secretaries. With no savings in the bank and no family money to back her up, there was no guarantee that her medical expenses would be covered.

  With this in mind, Roosevelt took a decisive act. He arranged a luncheon with his old friend and legal adviser, Basil O’Connor. At the lunch, he told O’Connor that he wished to alter his will in order to leave half of his estate to Missy. O’Connor fiercely opposed the change, for it involved removing the Roosevelt children as beneficiaries. But Roosevelt insisted. He argued that “the children could care for themselves, but this faithful aide could not.”

  The new provision was incorporated into Roosevelt’s will five months after Missy’s stroke. After first directing that half of his estate (which was eventually probated at more than $3 million) be left to his wife, he directed that the remaining half be left “for the account of my friend Marguerite LeHand” in order to cover all expenses for “medical attention, care and treatment during her lifetime.” Upon Missy’s death, the trustees were instructed to distribute the remaining income in equal shares to his five children.

  “I owed her that much,” Roosevelt later explained to his son Jimmy. “She served me so well for so long and asked so little in return.”

  • • •

  That June of 1941, a storm was gathering in the black community. Though some progress had been made in opening doors to blacks in the armed forces, discrimination in the mushrooming defense industry continued unabated. All over the country, the new war plants were refusing to hire blacks. “Negroes will be considered only as janitors,” the general manager of North American Aviation publicly asserted. “It is the company policy not to employ them as mechanics and aircraft workers.” In Kansas City, Standard Steel told the Urban League: “We have not had a Negro working in 25 years and do not plan to start now.” And from Vultee Air in California a blanket statement was issued: “It is not the policy of this company to employ other than of the Caucasian race.”

  The black press abounded with stories of flagrant discrimination. In early 1941, a hundred NYA trainees were sent to Quoddy Village to work in an aircraft factory near Buffalo. One of the hundred was black, and he was the only one not hired, even though he had the best grades of the group. “Negroes who are experienced machinists are being refused employment,” the Pittsburgh Courier observed, “while white men and boys who have had no training in this work are being hired and trained later.”

  “What happens,” Walter White asked in a long letter to the New York Post, “when a Negro who has had excellent training at one of NYC’s technical or trade schools applies for one of the thousands of new jobs opening up? He finds the jobs segregated even in New York City. ‘Wanted—white Mechanics, tool and die makers, sheet metal workers.’ Far less frequently he finds, ‘Wanted—colored. Porters, cleaners, janitors.’” Or perhaps, White went on, “the colored applicant is told that he can get a job only if he is a member of the AFL aeronautical workers union, chartered by the International Association of Machinists, whose constitution bans all but white persons from membership.”

  The fundamental unfairness of the situation led A. Philip Randolph to a radical change in thinking. For years, he and other civil-rights leaders had relied on decorous middle-class pressure applied through letters, telegrams, and conferences with government-department heads. But now, as Randolph witnessed Negroes being “shunted from pillar to post, given the run-around and oft-times insulted when they applied for war jobs to help make our country an arsenal of democracy,” he concluded that all these established methods were simply “chloroform for the masses. When the chloroform wears off, the passions of the beast of race prejudice flare up again.”

  The time had come, Randolph argued, setting the strategic stage for the civil-rights movement of later decades, to mobilize the power and pressure that resided, not in the few, not in the intelligentsia, but in the masses, the organized masses. “Only power,” he observed, “can effect the enforcement and adoption of a given policy, however meritorious it may be.”

  Randolph’s shift in strategy had taken concrete form in early 1941. Traveling with his friend and colleague Milton Webster on a long train ride through the deep south to visit the Sleeping Car Brotherhood Divisions, Randolph had suddenly declared that “we ought to get 10,000 Negroes and march down Pennsylvania Avenue and protest against the discriminatory practices in this rapidly expanding economy.” There was silence; then Webster asked: “And where are you going to get 10,000 Negroes?” “We can get them
,” Randolph promised softly.

  As the two civil-rights leaders continued their journey through the South, they proposed the idea of a Negro march on Washington at every stop where they could find an audience. “I think the first place we talked was Savannah,” Webster recalled. “It scared everybody to death. The head colored man in Savannah opened up the meeting and introduced me and ran off the platform to the last seat in the last row.” But as the word began to spread through the Brotherhood, thousands of voices joined in the refrain. For the first time, Randolph later recalled, “the voiceless and helpless ‘little men’ became articulate. In meeting after meeting, the ‘forgotten black man’ could rise and tell an eager and earnest crowd about jobs he had sought but never got, about the business agent of the union giving him the brush-off, how he had gone to the gates of the defense plants only to be kept out while white workers walked in, how he cooled his heels in an office and finally was told with a cold stare ‘no more workers wanted.’”

  Encouraged by the enthusiastic response, Randolph formed a national March on Washington Committee with branches in eighteen cities. Within days, the Sleeping Car Brotherhood was out on the streets, approaching people in churches and schools, shops, and bars, publicizing the march, and raising money to finance the movement. Black newspapers printed Randolph’s call to march in banner headlines. “Be not dismayed in these terrible times,” Randolph exhorted the black community. “You possess power, great power. The Negro stake in national defense is big. It consists of jobs, thousands of jobs. It consists of new industrial opportunities and hope. This is worth fighting for . . . . To this end we propose that 10,000 Negroes march on Washington . . . . We call upon President Roosevelt . . . to follow in the footsteps of his noble and illustrious predecessor [Lincoln] and take the second decisive step to free America—an executive order to abolish discrimination in the work place. One thing is certain and that is if Negroes are going to get anything out of this National defense, we must fight for it and fight for it with gloves off.”