Eleanor and Franklin (110 page)

Another telling sign of Eleanor's fondness for Harry was her solicitude for him and his five-year-old daughter, Diana, after Barbara died in 1937:

This is just to remind you that we are counting on inviting you and Diana to stay with us over Christmas. Sara and Kate [James'
children] feel that Santa Claus will be less apt to overlook them if they stay at the White House than if they stay at home, so they will be here Christmas Eve and Diana will have company.
¹⁶

A memorandum Harry left for Diana underscored the closeness of their relationship:

Just before Christmas in 1938 Mrs. Roosevelt came out to our house in Georgetown to see me. At that time I was feeling none too well. I had seen a great deal of Mrs. Roosevelt during the previous six months and the day she came out she told me she thought I seemed to be disturbed about something and wondered if it was a feeling that something might happen to me and that there was no proper provision for you. She told me that she had been thinking about it a good deal and wanted me to know that she would like for me to provide in my will that she, Mrs. Roosevelt, be made your guardian.
¹⁷

Harry was greatly relieved at this offer and made out his will accordingly, and Eleanor took care of Diana until Harry's marriage to Louise Macy in July, 1942.

In 1939 Harry's health collapsed completely and he had to enter the Mayo clinic again; when he returned to Washington it was eight months before he could leave his Georgetown house. Eleanor and Missy kept him “in touch with Roosevelt's state of mind through frequent telephone calls and visits.”
¹⁸

She had seen Harry, Missy reported to Eleanor when she and the president came to Val-Kill for a Sunday lunch in January, 1940. He still seemed to feel he might run for president that year, Missy said, and someone should tell him that his health put it out of the question; perhaps four years later. Missy lamented that he was seeing too few people, and Eleanor agreed with her. Both women spoke affectionately of him.
¹⁹

Missy was right about his health. On May 10, 1940, Hopkins went to dinner at the White House. “He was feeling miserable,” wrote Sherwood, “and Roosevelt prevailed upon him to stay overnight. He remained, living in what had been Lincoln's study, for three and a half years.”
²⁰

Mrs. Roosevelt would never admit it, Tommy said, but once he was in the White House Harry dropped her and transferred his complete loyalty to the president.
²¹

Harry's companionship and help, even before he moved into the White House, filled much of the void that had been left in Franklin's life by Louis Howe's death, and Eleanor approved and encouraged it. But Louis had been her ally and confidant as well as Franklin's. She had inscribed Louis' copy of
It's Up to the Women:
“Dear Louis, Always my most helpful critic & best adviser.” She hoped that Harry would play a similar role and, as Louis had done, hold the two sides of the White House together and instead of reinforcing the division there would help to heal it.

But Louis, as she noted, had helped to shape Franklin, had been his friend and counselor before he was surrounded by the aura of the presidency, while Harry, a younger man than the president, was shaped by him. On occasion Louis swore at the president and hung up the telephone on him. Harry had to tread warily. What Eleanor failed to acknowledge was that she, too, was a very different person from the insecure, inexperienced woman she had been in 1921 when Louis took her in hand. Louis said things to her that no one else could, and she had a greater respect for his political judgment than for any other man's except Franklin's. She, too, regarded herself as Harry's teacher, not his pupil, in politics. “In Harry Hopkins my husband found some of the companionship and loyalty Louis had given him,” she wrote, “but not the political wisdom and careful analysis of each situation.” She thought that Franklin might have avoided some of the mistakes of the 1938 purge if Louis had been around, and she wrote May Craig that “we wish with you that Harry Hopkins had not said a word about the primaries anywhere, but I haven't the faintest idea who urged him to.” Mrs. Roosevelt still was “off of Harry,” Ickes rejoiced in his diary after Roosevelt's election to a third term, and when she gets back from her lecture trip “she will put Harry in his place.” Ickes lamented that the president was isolating himself “more and more” and that Harry, who played up to the president, was the only liberal seeing him.
²²

Harry, Eleanor wrote later, “frequently agreed with the president regardless of his own opinions, or tried to persuade him in indirect ways.” When the president discussed a course of action with Harry, Sam Rosenman, or any of his own people and came to a conclusion, the discussion was closed. “That was not true with Eleanor. She stuck to it,” said Rosenman. She had seen many people go in to talk with the president, prepared to tell him how much they disagreed with him: “They went in,” Eleanor wrote, “but if I had a chance to see them
as they came out, they usually looked at me blankly and behaved as though they never disagreed at all.”
²³

“There were only two people who stood up to Franklin,” Eleanor once said to Henry Morgenthau, Jr.; “you and Louis.” Morgenthau demurred. “No, you are wrong. There were three people—Louis, myself and Eleanor Roosevelt.” But Henry was as careful as Harry not to give Roosevelt the impression that he was in league with “the Missus.” Henry's wife, Elinor, suffered keenly because she felt that the president kept her at arm's length. Once when she was sitting next to him at Sunday lunch she confronted him with her worry. “I want you to know that I am not a bearer of tales from your entourage to Mrs. Roosevelt's. I don't even report to my husband, nor does Henry tell me what goes on in your entourage.”

“After that,” Morgenthau commented, “things were all right between the two households.”
²⁴

Even before Harry Hopkins moved into the White House, under Roosevelt's tutelage, the chief New Dealer had become much more political in his approach to issues. In the early New Deal years Harry repeatedly told his WPA staff that the political effects were not theirs to worry about; “we're here to implement a policy.” But under Roosevelt's influence he changed. The day came when he said that the policy was right but he had to think about the political repercussions. After he moved into the White House he became occupied with the grand strategy of the war, and his angle of vision changed; he became impatient with those “goddam New Dealers” as, in a moment of irritability, he once described them to Robert E. Sherwood. Roosevelt, too, was prey to such moods. “I am sick and tired of having a lot of long-haired people around here who want a billion dollars for schools, a billion dollars for public health,” he exploded to Henry Morgenthau in mid-july, 1939. “Here was Harry who was Mother's protégé to start with,” said Anna, “and suddenly Harry became Father's protégé.”
²⁵

Expecting an ally, Eleanor now often found in Harry an adversary and critic. And the vestigial puritan in her identified the shift in Harry's point of view with his taste for the elegant life and smart society—the parties on Long Island, the race tracks, the night clubs. It was a side of him she had not known and it offended her, although she said that Harry's top associate, Aubrey Williams, always remained the “idealist.”
²⁶

Once not long after Hopkins moved into the White House, Eleanor's friends heard that she was ill with pleurisy, so ill that Tommy said, “It's
the first time I've known her to turn her face to the wall.” But when Eleanor came to New York to her little hideaway apartment on East Eleventh Street, she sent a message to Esther Lape that she wanted to talk with her. “I just want to tell you I haven't been ill at all. Something happened to me. I have gotten used to people who say they care for me but are only interested in getting to Franklin. But there was one person of whom I thought this was not true, that his affection was for me. I found this was not true and I couldn't take it.”
²⁷

There was another reason why Harry's presence in the White House disturbed her. She feared that his fondness for high living encouraged the “playboy” in the president, a side of him that she disliked. When James once confessed to her that he was mystified by his father's pleasure in the companionship of a group of yachtsmen known as the “
Nourmahal
Gang,” she agreed. She had never understood how he “could have gone on those cruises and relaxed with those people.”
²⁸

But Franklin did enjoy “those people.” “Father and Mother had a completely different way,” said Anna:

If Father became friendly with a princess or a secretary, he'd reach out and give a pat to her fanny and laugh like hell and was probably telling a funny story at the same time, whereas to Mother that was terrible.

He loved to outrage Granny, to tease her. He could never do that with Mother. She was much too serious. Mother was inhibiting to him. She would never go along. That's why he turned elsewhere.
²⁹

This, too, was a dividing line in the White House—those persons like Missy and James' wife, Betsy, who played up to this side of the president's nature and the few who stood with Eleanor when she felt she had to be a hair shirt. It's not what the president wants, but what the president needs, she once said to a friend, but when Roosevelt turned on his charm there were few who did not succumb.
³⁰
For a time, James and Betsy lived at the White House. Franklin was very fond of his daughter-in-law, who was gay and sophisticated in a way Eleanor could never be. Eleanor felt that Betsy was sometimes more concerned about pleasing her father-in-law than her husband. And when Betsy—without Franklin's saying so, perhaps even with his encouragement—began to encroach upon Eleanor's prerogatives as mistress of the White House, Eleanor put her foot down firmly.

“Mother was a very jealous person,” said Anna.

She was jealous of Missy, of Betsy, of Louise, even of me. . . . They were all three women who had succeeded to some degree in usurping some of her responsibility as wife and First Lady. Mother came in late once, realized she had done nothing about the seating arrangements and asked for the chart and was told by the ushers Mrs. Hopkins had seated the table. She was furious.

Betsy never did anything for Father except always turn up for cocktails when he was alone. In those few minutes before the guests came in, there was always Betsy, chic and lovely, full of light quips. These were things Mother couldn't give him. She knew that, but she was a human being and never could quite accept it.
³¹

“Tommy & I got back (by air) tonight,” Eleanor wrote Maude Gray, “& I found Betsy here but leaving at once tonight. She does not kiss me but is very attractive to F.D.R. Aren't people funny?”
³²

Eleanor Roosevelt's most complex relationship was with Missy. There was affection and motherly solicitude—and also resentment. “Dearest ER,” Missy wrote her in one of the early White House years. “Another Christmas, and thanks to your good example I am
not
exhausted by last minute wrapping. . . . I have had such a happy year—I hope you know how very much I appreciate being with you—not because of the White House—but because I'm
with you!
” Few letters to Franklin from his wife did not ask him to give her love to Missy, and when Missy's nieces were married, Eleanor attended the weddings and arranged for the gifts.

But Missy created problems, for the children as well as for Eleanor. While Anna was still in the East and spending a good deal of time in the White House, she admitted that she hated it when Missy was in a car with her father and had the preferred seat next to him. Franklin Jr., when asked by his mother whether he had ever resented Louis Howe, firmly said no, but he had resented Missy. Once he had said to Missy, “Are you always agreeable? Don't you ever get mad and flare up? Do you always smile?” She looked as if she were going to burst out crying, Franklin Jr. said.
³³

Anna was not wholly sure that “jealousy” was the right word to describe her mother's feelings toward Missy. Her presence in the White House made it possible for Eleanor to move around the country as much as she did. In 1938 Doris Fleeson wrote about Missy's role in the
Saturday Evening Post
. She described how Missy presided over the White House tea table when Mrs. Roosevelt was not there, how she
wrote all the president's private letters, did the accounts, paid the bills, balanced his checkbooks, saw that the children got their allowances, kept track of his stamp, marine-print, and rare-book collections and ran the Little White House at Warm Springs “when Mrs. Roosevelt can't be there.” Missy's service to the president was beyond price. “She was sweet and gentle,” said Sam Rosenman, and continued:

a very good hostess when Mrs. Roosevelt was away . . . and far more intelligent than most people gave her credit for. I remember many occasions when letters passed over her desk that she did not think ought to go out. She would show them to me and Steve Early and if we agreed, she would put them in the desk and go back to him. . . . When she had her stroke in 1941, I said, “A much greater loss to the country than the loss of a battleship.”
³⁴

She wished, said Eleanor after reading Doris Fleeson's piece, that someone would write a similar article about Tommy, who made life possible for her.

But there was a murkier side to the relationship between Franklin and Eleanor in regard to Missy than the generous praise of Doris Fleeson's article disclosed, a side which Eleanor's great sense of dignity and pride caused her to keep well hidden, usually successfully.