No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  But if over the years their familiarity had brought Harry and Missy to the point of intimacy, Missy had probably cut it short, as she had cut short every other relationship in her life that might subordinate her great love for FDR. No invitation was accepted by Missy if it meant leaving the president alone. “Even the most ardent swain,” Newsweek reported, “is chilled at the thought that, to invite her to a movie he must call up the White House, which is her home.” At the end of her working day, Missy preferred to retire to her little suite on the third floor, where, more often than not, she would pick up her phone to hear the president on the line, asking her to come to his study and sit by his side as he sorted his stamps or went through his mail.

  If this behavior seemed mistaken in the eyes of her friends, who could not imagine how someone so young and attractive, who “should have been off somewhere cool and gay on a happy weekend,” would give up “date after date, month after month, year after year,” Missy had no other wish than to be with Roosevelt, her eager eyes watching every movement of his face, marveling at his overwhelming personality, his facility for dealing with people of every sort, his exceptional memory, his unvarying good humor. “Gosh, it will be good to get my eyes on you again,” Missy wrote Roosevelt once when he was on a trip. “This place is horrible when you are away.”

  While Franklin was mixing cocktails, Eleanor was on a train back to Washington from New York. For many of her fellow riders, the time on the train was a time to ease up, to gaze through the windows at the passing countryside, to close their eyes and unwind. But for Eleanor, who considered train rides her best working hours, there was little time to relax. The pile of mail, still unanswered, was huge, and there was a column to be written for the following day. Franklin’s cousin Margaret “Daisy” Suckley recalls traveling with Eleanor once on the New York-to-Washington train. “She was working away the whole time with Malvina, and I was sitting there like a dumbbell looking out the window, and suddenly Mrs. Roosevelt said to. Malvina, ‘Now I’m going to sleep for fifteen minutes,’ and she put her head back on the seat. I looked at my watch, and just as it hit fifteen minutes, she woke up and said, ‘Now Tommy, let’s go on.’ It was amazing. I was stunned.”

  Even if Eleanor had reached the White House that evening in time for the cocktail hour, she would probably not have joined. Try as she might over the years, Eleanor had never felt comfortable at these relaxed gatherings. Part of her discomfort was toward alcohol itself, the legacy of an alcoholic father who continually failed to live up to the expectations and trust of his adoring daughter. One Christmas, Eleanor’s daughter, Anna, and her good friend Lorena Hickok had chipped in to buy some cocktail glasses for Eleanor’s Greenwich Village apartment in the hopes she would begin inviting friends in for drinks. “In a funny way,” Anna wrote “Hick,” as Miss Hickok was called, “I think she has always wanted to feel included in such parties, but so many old inhibitions have kept her from it.”

  But, despite Anna’s best hopes, Eleanor’s discomfort at the cocktail hour persisted, suggesting that beyond her fear of alcohol lay a deeper fear of letting herself go, of slackening off the work that had become so central to her sense of self. “Work had become for Eleanor almost as addictive as alcohol,” her niece Eleanor Wotkyns once observed. “Even when she thought she was relaxing she was really working. Small talk horrified her. Even at New Year’s, when everyone else relaxed with drinks, she would work until ten minutes of twelve, come in for a round of toasts, and then disappear to her room to work until two or three a.m. Always at the back of her mind were the letters she had to write, the things she had to do.”

  “She could be a crashing bore,” Anna’s son Curtis Dall Roosevelt admitted. “She was very judgmental even when she tried not to be. The human irregularities, the off-color jokes he loved, she couldn’t take. He would tell his stories, many of them made to fit a point, and she would say, ‘No, no, Franklin, that’s not how it happened.’”

  “If only Mother could have learned to ease up,” her son Elliott observed, “things would have been so different with Father, for he needed relaxation more than anything in the world. But since she simply could not bring herself to unwind, he turned instead to Missy, building with her an exuberant, laughing relationship, full of jokes, silliness, and gossip.”

  • • •

  “Stay for dinner. I’m lonely,” Roosevelt urged Harry Hopkins when the cocktail hour came to an end. There were few others at this stage of his life that the president enjoyed as much as Hopkins. With the death in 1936 of Louis Howe, the shriveled ex-newspaperman who had fastened his star to Roosevelt in the early Albany days, helped him conquer his polio, and guided him through the political storms to the White House, the president had turned to Hopkins for companionship. “There was a temperamental sympathy between Roosevelt and Hopkins,” Frances Perkins observed. Though widely different in birth and breeding, they both possessed unconquerable confidence, great courage, and good humor; they both enjoyed the society of the rich, the gay, and the well-born, while sharing an abiding concern for the average man. Hopkins had an almost “feminine sensitivity” to Roosevelt’s moods, Sherwood observed. Like Missy, he seemed to know when the president wanted to consider affairs of state and when he wanted to escape from business; he had an uncanny instinct for knowing when to introduce a serious subject and when to tell a joke, when to talk and when to listen. He was, in short, a great dinner companion.

  As soon as dinner was finished, Roosevelt had to return to work. In less than an hour, he was due to deliver a speech, and he knew that every word he said would be scrutinized for the light it might shed on the crisis at hand. Taking leave of Hopkins, Roosevelt noticed that his friend looked even more sallow and miserable now than he had looked earlier in the day. “Stay the night,” the President insisted. So Hopkins borrowed a pair of pajamas and settled into a bedroom suite on the second floor. There he remained, not simply for one night but for the next three and a half years, as Roosevelt, exhibiting his genius for using people in new and unexpected ways, converted him from the number-one relief worker to the number-one adviser on the war. Later, Missy liked to tease: “It was Harry Hopkins who gave George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart the idea for that play of theirs, ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner.’”

  As the president was preparing to leave for Constitution Hall, he remembered something he had meant to ask Helen Gahagan Douglas during the cocktail hour. There was no time to discuss it now, but, stopping by her room, he told her he had an important question for her and asked if she would meet him in his study when he returned. “Certainly,” she replied, and he left to address several thousand scientists and scholars at the Pan American Scientific Congress.

  “We come here tonight with heavy hearts,” he began, looking out at the packed auditorium. “This very day, the tenth of May, three more independent nations have been cruelly invaded by force of arms . . . . I am glad that we are shocked and angered by the tragic news.” Declaring that it was no accident that this scientific meeting was taking place in the New World, since elsewhere war and politics had compelled teachers and scholars to leave their callings and become the agents of destruction, Roosevelt warned against an undue sense of security based on the false teachings of geography: in terms of the moving of men and guns and planes and bombs, he argued, every acre of American territory was closer to Europe than was ever the case before. “In modern times it is a shorter distance from Europe to San Francisco, California than it was for the ships and legions of Julius Caesar to move from Rome to Spain or Rome to Britain.”

  “I am a pacifist,” he concluded, winding up with a pledge that was greeted by a great burst of cheers and applause, “but I believe that by overwhelming majorities . . . you and I, in the long run if it be necessary, will act together to protect and defend by every means at our command our science, our culture, our American freedom and our civilization.”

  Buoyed by his thunderous reception, Roosevelt was in excellent humor when he returned to his
study to find Helen Gahagan Douglas waiting for him. Just as he was settling in, however, word came that Winston Churchill was on the telephone. Earlier that evening, Churchill had driven to Buckingham Palace, where King George VI had asked him to form a government. Even as Churchill agreed to accept the seals of office, British troops were pouring into Belgium, wildly cheered by smiling Belgians, who welcomed them with flowers. The change was made official at 9 p.m., when Chamberlain, his voice breaking with emotion, resigned. It had been a long and fateful day for Britain, but now, though it was nearly 3 a.m. in London, Churchill apparently wanted to touch base with his old letter-writing companion before going to sleep.

  Though there is no record of the content of this first conversation between the new prime minister of England and the president of the United States, Churchill did reveal that when he went to bed that night, after the extraordinary events of an extraordinary day, he was conscious of “a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.”

  “Therefore,” Churchill concluded, “although impatient for morning, I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.” He had achieved the very position he had imagined for himself for so many years.

  While Roosevelt was talking with Churchill, Helen Douglas tried to prepare herself for the important question the president wanted to ask her. Perhaps, she thought, it was related to her work with the farm-security program, or the National Youth Administration. Both Helen and her husband, fellow actor Melvyn Douglas, were ardent New Dealers, members of the National Advisory Commission for the Works Progress Administration and the California Advisory Commission for the NYA. Earlier that year, they had hosted Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit to Los Angeles, accompanying her to the migrant-labor camps in the San Joaquin Valley.

  “The day was unforgettable,” Helen later recalled. “Soon after we started, Mrs. Roosevelt spotted a cluster of makeshift shacks constructed of old boards, tarpaper and tin cans pounded flat, one of the ditch bank communities that were commonplace in California then.” She asked to stop the car and walked across the field toward some migrants. “One of the bent figures straightened to see who was approaching and recognized her at once. ‘Oh, Mrs. Roosevelt, you’ve come to see us,’ he said. He seemed to accept as a natural event of American life that the wife of the President of the United States would be standing in a mucky field chatting with him.”

  Perhaps the president’s question related to something his wife had told him about her journey. To be sure, Helen knew that Roosevelt loved movies and movie people, but not even that knowledge prepared her for the whimsical nature of the question the president posed to her that night.

  “OK, Helen,” Roosevelt began, his eyes flashing with good humor. “Now, I want you to tell me exactly what happened under the table at Ciro’s between Paulette Goddard and Anatole Litvak.” The juicy gossip Roosevelt wanted to hear involved the Russian-born director Anatole Litvak and Paulette Goddard, the vivacious brunette actress who was married first to the filmmaker Hal Roach and then to Charlie Chaplin. As Helen Douglas told the story, Goddard and Litvak were having dinner at the elegant nightclub, where the men had to wear tuxedos and the women long dresses, when the urge to make love became so strong that they eased themselves onto the floor under the table. As the moans were heard across the restaurant floor, waiters rushed to the scene with extra tablecloths to cover the sides of the table. Or so the story was told. “I love it, I love it,” Roosevelt responded.

  Returning to the White House from Union Station just as Helen was finishing her tale, Eleanor heard her husband’s laughter and assumed that, as usual, he was with Missy, relaxing at the end of the day. At such times, she later admitted to her son Elliott, she felt terribly left out, wishing that she could let herself go and simply join in the frivolity. But as it was, she knew that if she opened the door she would be driven to talk business, to share the information and insights she had gleaned from her recent trip. Then, if her husband was tired and unresponsive, she would feel hurt and rejected. It had happened this way before. Better to go to her own bedroom and wait until morning to see her husband. “All her life,” her niece Eleanor Wotkyns observed, “Eleanor yearned to be more spontaneous, to relax more readily, but in the end how can one force oneself to be spontaneous?”

  At ten after eleven that evening, according to the White House usher diary, both Eleanor and Franklin went to bed—Franklin settling into his small bedroom off his study, Eleanor into her own suite of rooms, next to her husband’s, in the southwest corner of the mansion. But the separation by night belied the partnership by day—a partnership that would help change the face of the country in the years ahead.

  CHAPTER 2

  “A FEW NICE BOYS WITH BB GUNS”

  At 1 p.m. on May 16, 1940, President Roosevelt was scheduled to address a joint session of Congress. It was the president’s first appearance in the House Chamber since the war in Western Europe had begun. Despite the blinding rain falling steadily since early morning, a huge audience had gathered to hear him.

  Here, on the floor of the House of Representatives, all the contending forces of American life had gathered over the years to argue their causes—abolitionists versus slaveowners, liberals versus conservatives, unions versus management, farmers versus city-dwellers. On a number of occasions, particularly in the nineteenth century, the debates had descended into physical violence as members brandished pistols, smashed one another’s heads with tongs, canes, and brass spittoons, and pummeled each other with fists. The very size of the House Chamber, with large numbers of legislators, clerks, and page boys running from place to place, conspired to produce confusion and chaos.

  As one o’clock neared, there was a stir among the audience, an air of expectation. Every face, not knowing for sure where the country was going, wore a look of nervousness. In the Congress in 1940, there were 526 men and five women, nearly three hundred lawyers, two dozen schoolteachers, sixty merchants, twenty bankers and insurance agents, nine newspaper publishers, five dentists, a half-dozen preachers, the owner of the largest cattle ranch in the world, an amateur magician, and a half-dozen or more aspirants to the presidency. There was one Negro.

  At 12:59 p.m. the assistant doorkeeper announced the members of the Cabinet. The spectators responded with warm applause. But when the audience caught sight of the president himself, his right hand holding a cane, his left hand grasping the forearm of a Secret Service man, they jumped to their feet, applauding and cheering him as he had never been cheered in the Capitol before, a bipartisan ovation that could only be interpreted as a demonstration of national unity in a time of crisis.

  It had been a week no one in the Western world would forget. After only five days of fighting, Holland, with tens of thousands of her citizens said to be dead, had surrendered; the Belgian army was almost totally destroyed, and France, reputed to possess the best army in all of Europe, was being overrun. The Germans seemed to have discovered a radically new style of air-ground warfare that was somehow free from ordinary constraints of time and distance. The speed and destructiveness of Germany’s powerful tanks—able to cross rivers and canals as if they were paved boulevards, resisting all fire at normal ranges—were almost incomprehensible. Against these metal mastodons, French Premier Paul Reynaud lamented, the French defenses were like “walls of sand that a child puts up against waves on the seashore.” Equally hard to fathom was the effectiveness of Germany’s air force, roaring in ahead of advancing columns, bombing communication lines, strafing and terrorizing ground troops to the point of an almost total Allied collapse.

  For many in the audience, Roosevelt’s dramatic journey to the Hill awakened memories of Woodrow Wilson’s appearance before Congress in the spring of 1917, when America entered the Great War. Now, once again, Europe was engaged in an expanding war that threatened to engu
lf the entire world, and emotions were running high. As the applause continued to swell, the president slowly maneuvered his body up the long ramp from the well of the House to the rostrum.

  Standing at the podium, his leg braces firmly locked into place, the president looked at his audience, and an uncharacteristic wave of nervousness came upon him. Absent were both his conspicuous smile and the swaggering way he usually held his head; in their place, a slight slump of the shoulders and a grim expression that matched the gray day. Reporters seated behind the podium detected anxiety in his trembling hands and in the faltering way he tried and failed, not once but twice, to put on his glasses. From the center of the visitors’ gallery, where she was seated between Missy and Tommy, Eleanor looked down anxiously, a flush on her cheeks.

  The president had cause to feel apprehensive. He knew that both Britain and France were looking to the United States for help. Alone among the democratic nations, the United States possessed the potential resources—the abundance of raw materials, the oil fields, the bauxite mines, the assembly lines, the production equipment, the idle manpower, the entrepreneurial skills, the engineering know-how—necessary to wage technological war on a scale equal to that of Nazi Germany. “I trust you realize, Mr. President,” Churchill had written earlier that week, “that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long.”

  But, as much as Roosevelt wanted to help, he recognized all too well—in a way neither Churchill nor French Premier Paul Reynaud could possibly have imagined—how unprepared America was, both mentally and physically, for war. In Europe, the vision of the New World coming to the rescue of the Old was so alluring that dreams were confused with realities, the boundary between potential and actual production erased, a mobilization that had not even begun considered a fait accompli. To harness a nation’s economic potential for war was a complex process at any time, but, given the realities of American life in 1940, it seemed an almost impossible task.