No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

For both Roosevelt and Churchill, the emotional peak of the conference came on Sunday morning, as Roosevelt boarded the Prince of Wales for a religious service, complete with the singing of a dozen common hymns. Supported by his son Elliott, Roosevelt crossed the narrow gangway from the Augusta to the Wales and then walked the entire length of the ship to his designated place beside Churchill on the quarterdeck. “One got the impression of great courage and strength of character,” Prince of Wales Captain W. M. Yool recalled. “It was obvious to everybody that he was making a tremendous effort and that he was determined to walk along the deck if it killed him.” Holding hymnbooks in their hands, the two leaders joined in song, with hundreds of British and American sailors crowded together side by side, sharing the same books. “The same language, the same hymns and more or less the same ideals,” Churchill mused that evening. “I have an idea that something really big may be happening—something really big.”

  “If nothing else had happened while we were here,” Roosevelt later said, the joint service that sunlit morning “would have cemented us.” For one brief moment, human togetherness gained ascendancy. Over the vast ship, so bright and gay with its glittering colors, there was a unity of faith of two people. “Every word seemed to stir the heart,” Churchill attested, “and none who took part in it will forget the spectacle presented . . . It was a great hour to live.”

  • • •

  The mood of good cheer at Argentia was dispelled temporarily on the last day of the conference with the arrival of disagreeable news from Washington. Extension of the draft, which most observers assumed would be easily accomplished, had passed the House of Representatives by the razor-edged vote of 203 to 202. The Selective Service Act of 1940 had obligated draftees for a period of only twelve months; the extension called for an additional eighteen. Had a single vote gone the other way, the new army would have melted away, nullifying everything that had been accomplished in the last year.

  Opponents castigated the extension as a breach of contract with the draftees, who had been told they would only have to serve one year. General Marshall acknowledged the limiting language of the original bill, but to demobilize now, he argued, would be “to court disaster.” In the past two years, the U. S. Army had grown eight times its initial size. It was just now “reaching the point where it could provide the country with an adequate defense.” Wholesale release of men would destroy “the battle worthiness of nearly every American division.”

  At the height of the debate in Congress, while a million draftees in camps across the nation were wondering whether they would be allowed to return to civilian life in a matter of weeks or be forced to remain in the service for another eighteen months, Life magazine sent a reporter to Fort McClellan, Alabama, to sample soldier sentiment. After talking to some four hundred privates from five different regiments, the Life reporter concluded that morale in the camp was very low.

  The most important reason for the low morale was the general sense of uncertainty. “As far as the men can see, the Army has no goal. It does not know whether it is going to fight, or when or where.” Lack of equipment was also producing a rising tide of discontent. Whereas draftees had been content to train with stovepipe rifles and cardboard tanks in the early months, they were losing patience with the lack of real weapons. “We came here to learn how to fight a blitzkrieg. Instead, we get close-order drill and kitchen police.”

  Everywhere one looked, the reporter observed, on walls of latrines, on trucks, on field-artillery pieces, the word “OHIO” could be seen. It stood for “Over the Hill in October,” a code name for the massive desertion that was planned for October, once the year’s service was up. Most of the citizen soldiers would do nothing so drastic, but their palpable resentment was communicated in letters to their parents, and the parents relayed their sons’ sentiments to their congressmen. Stimson acknowledged that morale was slipping. “The absence of any concrete war objective,” he explained to the president in mid-August, “coupled with delays in getting their weapons and lack of energy and imagination here and there among their instructors, are being reflected in the spirit of the men and I am seeing letters on the subject.”

  The rumbles from the army camps undoubtedly contributed to the close margin in the Congress. “Mindful of next year’s election,” Marshall’s biographer Forrest Pogue observed, “members from strongly isolationist areas of the country were weighing their desire to back the Army against their chances of returning to Washington. In most cases, Washington won.”

  The vote on August 12 came after a long day of fiery debate. The overhead galleries were packed. As soon as the voting began, it became clear that Democrats as well as Republicans were deserting the administration. After the first tally, the House rules allowed those who wanted to change their votes to approach the well below the rostrum and gain recognition from the Speaker, Sam Rayburn of Texas. This continued for some time until Rayburn saw the total become 203 for and 202 against, at which point he quickly proclaimed victory. “On this vote,” he shouted, “203 members have voted ‘Aye,’ 202 members have voted ‘No,’ and the bill is passed!” A great protest was lodged by Republicans who claimed that the voting was not finished, that there were still changes and additions to be made. But Rayburn said it was too late: the totals had already been announced.

  The news of the paper-thin margin, Hopkins recalled, had “a decidedly chilling effect” upon everyone at Argentia, particularly the British. Accustomed to the parliamentary way of thinking, the British regarded the division within the Democratic Party on an issue of such critical importance as a signal of “No Confidence” that would, in their country, result in the fall of a Cabinet. “The Americans are a curious people,” a British man in the street commented, “I can’t make them out. One day they’re announcing they’ll guarantee freedom and fair play for everybody in the world. The next day they’re deciding by only one vote that they’ll go on having an Army.”

  But Roosevelt was not discouraged. Though it was not a pretty victory, it was a victory nonetheless, and it meant that he could keep the soldiers on duty for another eighteen months. A near catastrophe had been averted. The army was saved.

  CHAPTER 11

  “A COMPLETELY CHANGED WORLD”

  As American relations with Japan moved to a thunderous climax during the fall of 1941, the Roosevelt family suffered a pair of personal losses. In the space of three weeks in September, both the president’s mother, Sara, and Eleanor’s brother, Hall, died.

  At Campobello that summer, Eleanor could see that her mother-in-law was failing. She had suffered a stroke in June and, aside from a few appearances at lunch, had remained in her bedroom all summer long. “I should not be surprised if this were the start of a more restricted life for her,” Eleanor had written Anna. Watching Sara’s steady decline, Eleanor begged her to engage a trained nurse. Sara stubbornly refused until Franklin wired her, asking if, for his “peace of mind,” she would allow a nurse to be hired. “Of course, you are right to have a nurse,” Sara quickly replied. “I am sorry you got alarmed. I wish you were here looking out of my window. I am taking off two days in my room, don’t be anxious and do keep well, my one and only.”

  The presence of the nurse buoyed Sara’s spirits, and her condition seemed to improve. When the time came for her to close up the cottage, she insisted on walking down the front steps herself. She had to stop halfway down to lean on the banister and catch her breath, but she made it to the back seat of her automobile without assistance.

  Eleanor flew to New York in early September to meet Sara upon her return from Campobello and help her get settled at Hyde Park. As the two women sat together at breakfast, Eleanor noticed Sara’s pale face and labored breathing. Struck by a sudden premonition that death was imminent, she called Franklin at the White House and told him to come to Hyde Park. As a young child, Eleanor had suffered miserably from not being told that her father was ill until after he died; for years, she had been unable to accept that he was reall
y dead. Now she wanted to spare Franklin such pain.

  Impressed by the tone of Eleanor’s voice, Roosevelt decided to leave for Hyde Park on the overnight train. Sara was lying quietly in her bedroom with her brother Fred and her sister Kassie at her side when she received word that her son was on his way. “A telegram has just come from the President,” the butler announced. “He will be here tomorrow morning at 9:30.” Sara brightened perceptibly. “I will be downstairs on the porch to meet him,” she said. But when morning came, Sara was too weak to venture downstairs. She did insist, however, on dressing up for her son—she put on an elegant bed jacket edged with lace, and had her hair wound into a braid with a bright-blue ribbon.

  Sara’s bedroom was in the two-story wing that had been added in 1916, when the house was enlarged to thirty-five rooms. From her window she could see her beloved trees and glimpse arrivals to her house. How delighted she had been over the years to greet the many distinguished men and women who had journeyed to Hyde Park to see her son! To be sure, she was irritated at times, when her unfailing eye discerned cigarette butts in her rose garden or small holes in her Oriental rugs, but she had long since decided that “a mother should be friends with her children’s friends,” even if some of them were overweight, grubby, chain-smoking newspapermen.

  It gave her great comfort to know how much the old house still meant to her son and his children. More than any recent birthday gift, she had enjoyed the scroll presented to her from her grandchildren when she turned eighty. “Although we are now scattered in different places, Hyde Park has been and always will be, our real home, and Hyde Park means you and all the fun you give us there.”

  During the summer, as her body had begun to fail her, Sara had made herself happy by simply thinking about her son and remembering all the good times they had shared together. “I lie on my bed or sit in a comfortable armchair all day,” she told Franklin, but “you are constantly in my thoughts and always in my heart.” Sitting in her sunny window, writing little notes to family and friends, she admitted: “I think of you night and day.” Indeed, so successful was Sara in conjuring up her son’s image that even when they were apart she could picture him with different people in different situations. No sooner, for instance, had she heard the first rumors about the president and the prime minister meeting somewhere on the Atlantic than she could see them in her mind’s eye walking up her lawn.

  At 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, September 6, just as he had promised, the president pulled into the gravel driveway. Sara was lying on her chaise longue, propped up with pillows, when her son appeared in the doorway. He rolled swiftly toward her, kissed her cheek, and touched her hand with the same warmth he had shown her all his life. “Now that he is back, everything is changed,” Sara had written nearly forty years earlier, when Franklin had returned from a trip to Europe. “Such happiness to be together again.”

  Franklin spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon giving his mother the details of his summit meeting with Winston Churchill, telling her what was going on in Washington, talking of old times. At the family dinner that night, everyone agreed that Sara seemed better; it was hoped that the crisis had passed. But at 9:30 p.m., she lapsed into a deep state of unconsciousness from which the doctors were unable to rouse her. A blood clot had lodged in her lung, and her circulatory system collapsed. Franklin returned to her room and sat with her through most of the night, while Eleanor called family and friends to tell them that the end was near.

  As dawn came, the dying woman lay motionless. Her face, with its broad brow and high cheekbones, its beautiful mouth and aristocratic lines, was not disfigured by the proximity of death. Finally, just before noon, two weeks before her eighty-seventh birthday, with her son by her side, Sara Delano Roosevelt died.

  Less than five minutes later, with no storm, wind, or lightning to prompt it, the largest oak tree on the estate simply toppled to the ground. “The President went out and looked at it,” his bodyguard Mike Reilly recalled, “struck, as we all were, by the obvious symbolism.” Geologists later explained that, because of the thin layer of earth over the rocky base that surrounded the Hyde Park area, such occurrences were not out of the ordinary. For anyone who had known the president’s mother, however, that was never the true explanation.

  • • •

  In the days that followed Sara’s death, The New York Times reported, the president “shut himself off from the world more completely than at any time since he assumed his present post.” Canceling all appointments, he withdrew into the seclusion of his Hyde Park home. For a time at least, the events of the war were pushed into the background.

  “I am so weary, I cannot write,” Eleanor scribbled to Hick the day after Sara’s death. “I was up most of last night and I’ve been seeing relatives all day.”

  Eleanor was “of course attending to everything,” Franklin’s half-niece, Helen Robinson, noted in her diary. It was Eleanor who called the undertakers and had the body carried from the second-floor bedroom to the spacious book-lined library, where it would lie in a mahogany coffin beneath the portraits of various Roosevelt ancestors. It was she who met with the Reverend Frank Wilson, the rector at the country church where Sara had worshiped for more than half a century, to plan the burial. “The endless details,” Eleanor wearily confessed to her aunt Maude Gray, “clothes to go through, checks, books, papers.”

  “The funeral was nice and simple,” Eleanor wrote. While Reverend Wilson performed the Episcopal rites, Sara’s family and friends, servants and tenants sat in the library amid the fine paintings, prints, and antique furniture she had collected over the years. The coffin was then transported in procession three miles north to the churchyard behind St. James. There some three dozen men and women assembled under the towering pines to watch as Sara’s casket was lowered into the ground beside her husband, James. The president stood with one hand on the open sedan that had carried him to the church. “He never looked toward the grave,” Washington Post reporter Amy Porter noted, “nor did he return an anxious glance cast his way by his wife.” Finally, with a tolling of church bells and the familiar words “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the solemn ceremony came to an end.

  “I think Franklin will forget all the irritations & remember only pleasant things,” Eleanor wrote Maude Gray, “which is just as well.” To be sure, as in any parent-child relationship, the irritations were legion. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough of your . . . cocktails for one evening?” Sara would frequently ask. “You promised me you would see [Hyde Park neighbor] Edith Eustis,” she reminded Franklin in one of her last letters, “so please telephone her at once.” Unable to accept that her son was a grown man even when he was president of the United States, Sara would pester him constantly to wear his rubbers and listen in on his phone calls. “Mama, will you please get off the line,” a relative once heard the president telling her. “I can hear you breathing. Come on, now.” On another occasion, when Sara was eighty-two and Franklin was fifty-six, Sara simply announced to newsmen at Hyde Park that she wasn’t going to let her son go to church the next day because he was so far behind on his mail.

  Yet, once Sara was gone, as Eleanor predicted, a surge of positive remembrances came to the fore, crowding any disagreeable memories from Franklin’s mind. Long to be cherished was the memory of the time when he was quarantined in the Groton School infirmary with scarlet fever. Since no visitors were allowed to enter the quarantined room, Sara had climbed a tall rickety ladder several times a day so she could peer over the window ledge and talk with her son. “At first sight of me,” Sara later wrote, “his pale, little face would break into a happy, albeit pathetic smile.” Equally treasured was the memory of winter nights at Hyde Park, as he lay sprawled on the floor of the library before the fire, organizing and pasting his stamps while his mother read aloud to him.

  The president managed to get through the days without breaking down until, late one afternoon, sorting through his mother’s things w
ith his secretary Grace Tully, he discovered a box he had never seen. Inside, with each item carefully labeled in her familiar writing, were his first pair of shoes, his christening dress, his baby toys, a lock of his baby hair, and an assortment of the little gifts he had made for her when he was young. Looking down with a tear-stained face, he quietly told Grace that he would like to be left alone. The tears were so unlike the president’s habitual composure, and the dismay depicted on his face was so out of keeping with his usual cheerfulness, that she hurried from the room. “No one on his staff had ever seen Franklin Roosevelt weep,” Geoffrey Ward observed. Nothing in his entire life had prepared him to deal with such crushing sorrow.

  Eleanor’s own emotions were more complex. On the one hand, as she looked at the peaceful expression on Sara’s face, with “all the lines smoothed out, and the stark beauty of contour,” she could not help respecting “the rich, full, confident life” Sara had led. “She loved her own home and her own place . . . . She had seen her only son inaugurated as President three times and still felt that her husband was the most wonderful man she had ever known. Her strongest trait was loyalty to the family. If anyone else in the world were to attack a member of her family she would rise to their defense like a tigress . . . . She had long contemplated this final resting place beside her husband.”

  Yet there were too many hurts over too many years to allow Eleanor to feel a deep sense of personal loss. “I kept being appalled at myself because I couldn’t feel any real grief,” Eleanor wrote to Anna, “and that seemed terrible after 36 years of fairly close association.” In the early days of her marriage, Eleanor had spent more hours with her mother-in-law than with anyone else, lunching with her, riding with her to visit family friends, taking tea in the late afternoons, absorbing her ideas on everything from decorating to children. But this period was branded on Eleanor’s memory as a time of humiliating dependence. “I had so much insecurity in my young life,” she later explained. “At first the sense of security that my mother-in-law gave me made me very grateful.” But before long, Eleanor felt oppressed by Sara’s dominating personality.