No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  So it was not unusual that, on May 10, 1940, Eleanor found herself away from home, driving along a country road in central Connecticut. Months earlier, she had accepted the invitation of the headmaster, George St. John, to address the student body. Now, in the tense atmosphere generated by the Nazi invasion of Western Europe, her speech assumed an added measure of importance. As she entered the Chapel and faced the young men sitting in neat rows before her, she was filled with emotion.

  “There is something very touching in the contact with these youngsters,” she admitted, “so full of fire and promise and curiosity about life. One cannot help dreading what life may do to them . . . . All these young things knowing so little of life and so little of what the future may hold.”

  Eleanor’s forebodings were not without foundation. Near the Chapel stood the Memorial House, a dormitory built in memory of the eighty-five Choate boys who had lost their lives in the Great War. Now, as she looked at the eager faces in the crowd and worried about a European war spreading once again to the United States, she wondered how many of them would be called to give their lives for their country.

  For several days, Eleanor’s mind had been preoccupied by old wars. “I wonder,” she wrote in her column earlier that week, “that the time does not come when young men facing each other with intent to kill do not suddenly think of their homes and their loved ones and realizing that those on the other side must have the same thoughts, throw away their weapons of murder.”

  Talking with her young friend Joe Lash that week at lunch, Eleanor admitted she was having a difficult time sorting out her feelings about the war. On the one hand, she was fully alert to the magnitude of Hitler’s threat. On the other hand, she agreed with the views of the American Youth Congress, a group of young liberals and radicals whom Eleanor had defended over the years, that the money spent on arms would be much better spent on education and medical care. Her deepest fear, Lash recorded in his diary, was that nothing would come out of this war different from the last war, that history would repeat itself. And because of this sinking feeling, she could not put her heart into the war.

  Building on these feelings in her speech to the boys of Choate, Eleanor stressed the importance of renewing democracy at home in order to make the fight for democracy abroad worthwhile. This argument would become her theme in the years ahead, as she strove to give positive meaning to the terrible war. “How to preserve the freedoms of democracy in the world. How really to make democracy work at home and prove it is worth preserving . . . . These are the questions the youth of today must face and we who are older must face them too.”

  • • •

  Eleanor’s philosophical questions about democracy were not the questions on the president’s mind when he met with his Cabinet at two that afternoon. His concerns as he looked at the familiar faces around the table were much more immediate: how to get a new and expanded military budget through the Congress, how to provide aid to the Allies as quickly as possible, how to stock up on strategic materials; in other words, how to start the complex process of mobilizing for war.

  The president opened the proceedings, as usual, by turning to Cordell Hull, his aging secretary of state, for the latest news from abroad. A symbol of dependability, respected by liberals and conservatives alike, the tall gaunt Tennessean, with thick white hair and bright dark eyes, had headed the department since 1933. Hull spoke slowly and softly as he shared the latest bulletins from his embassies in Europe, his slumped shoulders and downcast eyes concealing the stubborn determination that had characterized his long and successful career in the Congress as a representative and senator from Tennessee. In Holland, it was reported with a tone of optimism that later proved unfounded, the Dutch were beginning to recapture the airports taken by the Germans the night before. In Belgium, too, it was said, the Allied armies were holding fast against the German thrusts. But the mood in the room darkened quickly as the next round of bulletins confirmed devastating tales of defeat at the hands of the Germans.

  After hearing Hull, the president traditionally called on Henry Morgenthau, his longtime friend and secretary of the Treasury. Just before the Cabinet meeting had convened, Morgenthau had received word that the Belgian gold reserves had been safely evacuated to France, and that much of the Dutch gold was also safe. But this was the extent of the good news Morgenthau had to report. All morning long, Morgenthau had been huddled in meetings with his aides, looking at the dismal figures on America’s preparedness, wondering how America could ever catch up to Germany, since it would take eighteen months to deliver the modern weapons of war even if the country went into full-scale mobilization that very day.

  Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the only woman in the Cabinet, tended to talk a great deal at these meetings, “as though she had swallowed a press release.” But on this occasion she remained silent as the conversation was carried by Harry Hopkins, the secretary of commerce, who was present at his first Cabinet meeting in months.

  For the past year and a half, Hopkins had been in and out of hospitals while doctors tried to fix his body’s lethal inability to absorb proteins and fats. His health had begun to deteriorate in the summer of 1939, when, at the height of his power as director of the Works Progress Administration, he was told that he had stomach cancer. A ghastly operation followed which removed the cancer along with three-quarters of his stomach, leaving him with a severe form of malnutrition. Told in the fall of 1939 that Hopkins had only four weeks to live, Roosevelt took control of the case himself and flew in a team of experts, whose experiments with plasma transfusions arrested the fatal decline. Then, to give Hopkins breathing space from the turbulence of the WPA, Roosevelt appointed him secretary of commerce. Even that job had proved too much, however: Hopkins had been able to work only one or two days in the past ten months.

  Yet, on this critical day, the fifty-year-old Hopkins was sitting in the Cabinet meeting in the midst of the unfolding crisis. “He was to all intents and purposes,” Hopkins’ biographer Robert Sherwood wrote, “a finished man who might drag out his life for a few years of relative inactivity or who might collapse and die at any time.” His face was sallow and heavy-lined; journalist George Creel once likened his weary, melancholy look to that of “an ill-fed horse at the end of a hard day,” while Churchill’s former daughter-in-law, Pamela Churchill Harriman, compared him to “a very sad dog.” Given his appearance—smoking one cigarette after another, his brown hair thinning, his shoulders sagging, his frayed suit baggy at the knees—“you wouldn’t think,” a contemporary reporter wrote, “he could possibly be important to a President.”

  But when he spoke, as he did at length this day on the subject of the raw materials needed for war, his sickly face vanished and a very different face appeared, intelligent, good-humored, animated. His eyes, which seconds before had seemed beady and suspicious, now gleamed with light. Sensing the urgency of the situation, Hopkins spoke so rapidly that he did not finish half of his words, as though, after being long held back, he wanted to make up for lost time. It was as if the crisis had given him a renewed reason for living; it seemed, in reporter Marquis Childs’ judgment at the time, “to galvanize him into life.” From then on, Childs observed, “while he would still be an ailing man, he was to ignore his health.” The curative impact of Hopkins’ increasingly crucial role in the war effort was to postpone the sentence of death the doctors had given him for five more years.

  Even Hopkins’ old nemesis, Harold Ickes, felt compelled to pay attention when Hopkins reported that the United States had “only a five or six months supply of both rubber and tin, both of which are absolutely essential for purposes of defense.” The shortage of rubber was particularly worrisome, since rubber was indispensable to modern warfare if armies were to march, ships sail, and planes fly. Hitler’s armies were rolling along on rubber-tired trucks and rubber-tracked tanks; they were flying in rubber-lined high-altitude suits in planes equipped with rubber de-icers, rubber tires, and rubber life-preserver rafts.
From stethoscopes and blood-plasma tubing to gas masks and adhesive tape, the demand for rubber was endless. And with Holland under attack and 90 percent of America’s supply of rubber coming from the Dutch East Indies, something had to be done.

  Becoming more and more spirited as he went on, Hopkins outlined a plan of action, starting with the creation of a new corporation, to be financed by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, whose purpose would be to go into the market and buy at least a year’s supply of rubber and tin. This step would be only the first, followed by the building of synthetic-rubber plants and an effort to bring into production new sources of natural rubber in South America. Hopkins’ plan of action met with hearty approval.

  While Hopkins was speaking, word came from London that Neville Chamberlain had resigned his post as prime minister. This dramatic event had its source in the tumultuous debate in the Parliament over the shameful retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Norway three weeks earlier. Responding to clamorous cries for his resignation, Chamberlain had stumbled badly by personalizing the issue and calling for a division to show the strength of his support. “I welcome it, indeed,” he had said. “At least we shall see who is with and who is against us and I will call on my friends to support me in the lobby tonight.”

  But the division had not turned out as Chamberlain expected: Tory officers in uniform, feeling the brunt of Britain’s lack of preparedness, surged into the Opposition lobby to vote against the government. In all, over thirty Conservatives deserted Chamberlain, and a further sixty abstained, reducing the government’s margin from two hundred to eighty-one. Stunned and disoriented, Chamberlain recognized he could no longer continue to lead unless he could draw Labour into a coalition government. For a moment earlier that day, the German invasion of the Low Countries threatened to freeze Chamberlain in place, but the Labour Party refused his appeals for a national government. “Prime Minister,” Lord Privy Seal Clement Attlee bluntly replied, “our party won’t have you and I think I am right in saying that the country won’t have you either.” The seventy-one-year-old prime minister had little choice but to step down.

  Then, when the king’s first choice, Lord Halifax, refused to consider the post on the grounds that his position as a peer would make it difficult to discharge his duties, the door was opened for Winston Churchill, the complex Edwardian man with his fat cigars, his gold-knobbed cane, and his vital understanding of what risks should be taken and what kind of adversary the Allies were up against. For nearly four decades, Churchill had been a major figure in public life. The son of a lord, he had been elected to Parliament in 1900 and had served in an astonishing array of Cabinet posts, including undersecretary for the colonies, privy councillor, home secretary, first lord of the admiralty, minister of munitions, and chancellor of the Exchequer. He had survived financial embarrassment, prolonged fits of depression, and political defeat to become the most eloquent spokesman against Nazi Germany. From the time Hitler first came to power, he had repeatedly warned against British efforts to appease him, but no one had listened. Now, finally, his voice would be heard. “Looking backward,” a British writer observed, “it almost seems as though the transition from peace to war began on that day when Churchill became Prime Minister.”

  Responding warmly to the news of Churchill’s appointment, Roosevelt told his Cabinet he believed “Churchill was the best man that England had.” From a distance, the two leaders had come to admire each other: for years, Churchill had applauded Roosevelt’s “valiant effort” to end the depression, while Roosevelt had listened with increasing respect to Churchill’s lonely warnings against the menace of Adolf Hitler. In September 1939, soon after the outbreak of the war, when Churchill was brought into the government as head of the admiralty, Roosevelt had initiated the first in what would become an extraordinary series of wartime letters between the two men. Writing in a friendly, but respectful tone, Roosevelt had told Churchill: “I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with everything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch.” Though relatively few messages had been exchanged in the first nine months of the war, the seeds had been planted of an exuberant friendship, which would flourish in the years to come.

  • • •

  Once the Cabinet adjourned, Roosevelt had a short meeting with the minister of Belgium, who was left with only $35 since an order to freeze all credit held by Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg had gone into effect, earlier that morning. After arrangements were made to help him out, there began a working session on the speech Roosevelt was to deliver that night to a scientific meeting.

  Then Roosevelt, not departing from his regular routine, went into his study for the cocktail hour, the most relaxed time of his day. The second-floor study, crowded with maritime pictures, models of ships, and stacks of paper, was the president’s favorite room in the White House. It was here that he read, played poker, sorted his beloved stamps, and conducted most of the important business of his presidency. The tall mahogany bookcases were stuffed with books, and the leather sofas and chairs had acquired a rich glow. Any room Roosevelt spent time in, Frances Perkins observed, “invariably got that lived-in and overcrowded look which indicated the complexity and variety of his interests and intentions.” Missy and Harry Hopkins were there, along with Pa Watson and Eleanor’s houseguest, the beautiful actress Helen Gahagan Douglas. The cocktail hour, begun during Roosevelt’s years in Albany, had become an institution in Roosevelt’s official family, a time for reviewing events in an informal atmosphere, a time for swapping the day’s best laughs. The president always mixed the drinks himself, experimenting with strange concoctions of gin and rum, vermouth and fruit juice.

  During the cocktail hour, no more was said of politics or war; instead the conversation turned to subjects of lighter weight—to gossip, funny stories, and reminiscences. With Missy generally presiding as hostess, distributing the drinks to the guests, Roosevelt seemed to find complete relaxation in telling his favorite stories over and over again. Some of these stories Missy must have heard more than twenty or thirty times, but, like the “good wife,” she never let her face betray boredom, only delight at the knowledge that her boss was having such a good time. And with his instinct for the dramatic and his fine ability’ to mimic, Roosevelt managed to tell each story a little differently each time, adding new details or insights.

  On this evening, there was a delicious story to tell. In the Congress there was a Republican representative from Auburn, New York, John Taber, who tended to get into shouting fits whenever the subject of the hated New Deal came up. In a recent debate on the Wage and Hour amendments, he had bellowed so loudly that he nearly swallowed the microphone. On the floor at the time was Representative Leonard Schultz of Chicago, who had been deaf in his left ear since birth. As Mr. Taber’s shriek was amplified through the loudspeakers, something happened to Mr. Schultz. Shaking convulsively, he staggered to the cloakroom, where he collapsed onto a couch, thinking he’d been hit in an air raid. He suddenly realized that he could hear with his left ear—for the first time in his life—and better than with his right. When doctors confirmed that Mr. Schultz’s hearing was excellent, Mr. Taber claimed it was proof from God that the New Deal should be shouted down!

  Harry Hopkins was no stranger to these intimate gatherings. Before his illness, he had been one of Roosevelt’s favorite companions. Like Roosevelt, he was a great storyteller, sprinkling his tales with period slang and occasional profanity. Also like Roosevelt, he saw the humor in almost any situation, enjoying gags, wisecracks, and witticisms. “I didn’t realize how smart Harry was,” White House secretary Toi Bachelder later remarked, “because he was such a tease and would make a joke of everything.”

  Missy was undoubtedly as delighted as her boss to see Harry back at the White House, though her playful spirit most likely masked the genuine pleasure she took in the company of this unusual man. Once upon a time, after Hopkins
’ second wife, Barbara, died of cancer, there had been talk of a romance between Missy and Harry. In a diary entry for March 1939, Harold Ickes reported a conversation with presidential adviser Tommy Corcoran in which Corcoran had said “he would not be surprised if Harry should marry Missy.” In that same entry, Ickes recorded a dinner conversation between his wife, Jane Ickes, and Harry Hopkins in which they “got to talking about women—a favorite subject with Harry. He told Jane that Missy had a great appeal for him.”

  Among Hopkins’ personal papers, there are many affectionate notes to Missy. During a spring weekend in 1939 when Missy was at the St. Regis in New York, Hopkins sent her a telegram. “Vic and I arriving Penn Station 8. Going direct to St. Regis. Make any plans you want but include us.” On another occasion, when Hopkins was in the hospital for a series of tests, he wrote her a long, newsy letter but admitted that “the real purpose of this letter is to tell you not to forget me . . . . Within a day or two I expect to be out riding in the country for an hour or so each day and only wish you were with me.”

  The president, Harry, and Missy had journeyed together to Warm Springs in the spring of 1938. “There is no one here but Missy—the President and me—so life is simple—ever so informal and altogether pleasant,” Hopkins recorded. “Lunch has usually been FDR with Missy and me—these are the pleasantest because he is under no restraint and personal and public business is discussed with the utmost frankness . . . . After dinner the President retreats to his stamps—magazines and the evening paper. Missy and I will play Chinese checkers—occasionally the three of us played but more often we read—a little conversation—important or not—depending on the mood.”