Kati Marton (14 page)

Eleanor had long ago given up on intimacy with her husband. What she sought was a more meaningful contribution to the war effort. “I’m rather tired,” she wrote her daughter, “because I have nothing to do these days, so I asked Pa tonight if I could do anything but it appears I can’t so I guess I go to HP [Hyde Park] the 13th and enjoy my leisure!” Enjoying leisure, of course, was something Eleanor was not equipped to do. As was typical, FDR met her needs while serving his own purposes. In 1942 he dispatched his wife on a morale-raising trip to war-battered England.

All of Eleanor’s remarkable personal qualities surfaced during this trip. A guest of the British royal family, she stayed in bomb-scarred Buckingham Palace and experienced the nightly pounding of Hitler’s carpet bombs. Those who followed her journey were struck by the degree to which she managed to be the same Eleanor dining with the king and queen as in the G.I. chow line. Her astonishing energy left reporters out of breath as they tried to keep up. “Hustle did you say?” a British reporter later wrote. “She walked fifty miles through factories, clubs, and hospitals.” She saw her real role as stand-in for the absent mothers of the “boys” at the front. “The boys are very upset over the mail situation,” she wrote her husband. “Some have been here for two months and not a line from home. Also their pay in many cases is very late and they buy bonds and don’t get them.” Never passing up the chance to strike a blow for a good cause, she urged her husband, “Someone ought to get on top of this situation and while they are about it they might look into the question of how promptly the families are getting allotments.” American reporter Chalmers Roberts wrote, “Mrs. Roosevelt has done more to bring a real understanding of the spirit of the United States to the people of Britain than any other single American who has ever visited these islands.”

The president was waiting for her on the tarmac when she landed in Washington. “I really think Franklin was glad to see me back,” she wrote in her diary, “and I gave a detailed account of such things as I could tell quickly and answered his questions. Later, I think he even read this diary and to my surprise he had also read my columns.”

A classic Eleanor-Franklin clash, pitting her idealism against his pragmatism, erupted during this period. For the first time, information began to trickle out of Nazi-occupied areas that something unimaginable was happening to the Jews. Eleanor embraced their cause, while Franklin maintained that large-scale rescue of refugees would be a diversion from winning the war. A mark of Eleanor’s personal growth was that the woman who once referred to Justice Felix Frankfurter as “an interesting little man but very jew” now wrote in her column, “The Jews are like all the other people of the world. There are able people among them, there are courageous people among them, there are people of extraordinary intellectual ability … integrity and people of great beauty and great charm …. I do not know what we can do to save the Jews in Europe and to find them homes, but I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.”

As early as 1940, Eleanor collided with the State Department’s policy of obstructing Jewish immigration from Europe. The man in charge of refugees for the department was an old FDR friend and former ambassador to Italy, Breckenridge Long. Long was a well-known anti-Semite. Eleanor pleaded with her husband to meet with the chairman of his own Advisory Committee regarding Long’s obstructionism. “I am thinking about these poor people who may die at any time and who are asking only to come here on transit visas and I do hope you can get this cleared up quickly.” But Long persuaded FDR that the refugees would pose a wartime security problem. “Something does seem wrong,” Eleanor wrote her husband, when nothing changed and America’s doors remained firmly bolted against thousands of desperate refugees.
“What
does seem wrong?” her irritated husband challenged.

“Franklin, you know [Long] is a fascist!” Eleanor erupted over lunch one day. “I’ve told you, Eleanor, you must not say that,” he warned. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t say it,” his wife countered, “but he is!” On October 25, 1941, Eleanor wrote in her column, “I have been reading …of the removal of the Jewish people from Germany to Poland and Russia …. It is a leavetaking which savors somewhat of death.” When she eventually learned the full consequences of the missed opportunity to save lives, it was her most bitter disappointment.

AFTER FORTY YEARS
of shared love, loss, recovery and accommodation, during their final year Franklin and Eleanor were physically and emotionally more apart than they were together. Franklin was a very sick man, but his wife was unable or unwilling to acknowledge that fact. It is striking that a woman as compassionate as Eleanor would respond so indifferently to her husband’s declining health in the final year of his life. Eleanor, blessed with an iron constitution, felt good health was a matter of mind over matter. Together, she and Franklin had overcome so many of the effects of his paralysis. Now, in 1944, she refused to face what was apparent to others: that FDR’s health was rapidly failing.

His cousin Daisy Suckley observed something else that Eleanor refused to acknowledge: the president was also lonely. “We went in to dinner [in the White House] behind the P[resident] in his little wheel chair—One almost forgets that it is not normal to have to be wheeled in a chair. He doesn’t let you think of it, and you just see his cheerful fine face, so full of character …. He gets lonely when left alone …. He said he hated to drive alone …. It is so different when one can walk about, get things for oneself,
do
something ….” The unmarried Daisy, who, like Franklin, was raised along the Hudson, a product of the same sheltered, affluent world, loved him uncritically and considered looking after him the greatest privilege of her life. “With you I don’t have to perform,” Franklin once confided to his cousin. Daisy was content to bask in his presence, awake or asleep. She watched over him during his final months. She was alert to his every change of mood or expression. “As soon as the door was closed,” Daisy noted in her journal, “he relaxed completely, yawned and yawned. He said it was the greatest possible rest to be able to just be as he felt and not to have to talk and be the host …. It has apparently become the habit not to relax but to force himself to keep up the outward appearance of energy and force.”

Though unwilling to face up to her husband’s real condition, Eleanor was not without feelings of guilt. “Maybe I’d do the most useful job if I just became a ‘good wife’ and waited on FDR,” she wrote her friend Esther Lape in November 1944. “Anna has been doing all of it
that Margaret [Daisy] does not do, but she can’t go on doing it.” At this late stage, however, Eleanor could not transform herself or her relationship with her husband. For her, it was a matter of “waiting on” Franklin, not spending companionable time with him. Even with his declining health, Eleanor still saw her role as primarily his conscience, not his wife.

Anna noticed a change in her father when he returned from the December 1943 Teheran Conference. His fatigue was now chronic, and the usual remedies—trips home to his beloved Hyde Park, long drives in the company of charming women, his ritual martinis—no longer restored his spirits. His legendary ebullience gave way to an ashen complexion and hollow cheeks; his shirt collar suddenly seemed outsized, and his appetite for food and much else was gone.

There was an unappealing puritanical streak in Eleanor’s dismissal of Anna’s concern. I’m not interested in “physiology,” she sniffed. She maintained her rigorous travel schedule uninterrupted. When Daisy suggested that a daily drive with his wife might be therapeutic, Franklin laughed and said, “I would have to make an appointment a week ahead!” Anna brought in Dr. Howard Bruenn, who confirmed that FDR was suffering from heart failure and prescribed digitalis and bed rest. Franklin showed little interest in his own condition and treated it as he did other unpleasant truths, with studied indifference. But the great performer could no longer act the part of the vigorous man. “I cannot live out a normal lifespan,” the sixty-three-year-old Roosevelt told his daughter. “I can’t even walk across the room to get my circulation going.” It was the first time he had acknowledged the magnitude of his struggle to his daughter.

Franklin had not kept his long-ago pledge to Eleanor. He had seen Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd a number of times, even before she was widowed in 1941. He had made sure she attended all four of his inaugurations, unobserved. She had first visited the White House in August 1941, signing in as Mrs. Paul Johnson. FDR’s secretaries knew to put her calls through immediately. The couple spoke French during those private conversations. “How would you feel,” Franklin asked Anna in the spring of 1944, “about our inviting an old friend of mine to a few dinners at the White House?” His daughter understood he was referring to Lucy. Her
mother had shared with her the story of the affair. “It was a terrible decision,” Anna recalled. “I realized that Mother wasn’t going to be there … and I was sure she didn’t know about it but my quick decision was that the private lives of these people were not my business. Who was I to say you can or cannot?…I never said anything to Mother.” It was a cruel burden for a father to inflict on his daughter.

Lucy visited in the summer of 1944 and continued to be a presence in FDR’s life for the final year. Anna shepherded Lucy through the back door of the White House and kept her name off the official logs. Only the president’s butler, Alonzo Fields, waited on them during dinner. The visit buoyed the tired man’s spirits. Then the president turned suitor to the fifty-one-year-old widow, calling on her in his car, driving with her through Washington’s quiet streets just as they had three decades earlier. He continued to see Lucy at her estate in northern New Jersey, and at his Warm Springs sanctuary.

Daisy, FDR’s frequent companion in Warm Springs, was also privy to their secret. She described the newly widowed Lucy Rutherfurd as

Lucy shared FDR’s cottage in Warm Springs and wrote Daisy, “You can imagine how very wonderful it was for me to feel myself under the same roof and within the sound of the voice we all love after so many, many years.” Returning home to Aiken, South Carolina, after seeing Franklin, Lucy wrote Daisy, “It is only a week ago that we left you but to me it seems months—or years. I have been hoping for word from F[ranklin]. You who live within the radius of the arc lights do not know how hard it can be when one is beyond their rays.”

Lucy cared for the ailing president in a way Eleanor never could. His need of her reveals much about what he missed in his marriage. With Lucy, Franklin could be lighthearted, indulge his love of conversation for the sheer pleasure of it. One moment in 1944 serves to crystallize all that was missing between Eleanor and Franklin, while at the same time illuminates Lucy’s role in his life. On December 2, FDR drove Lucy to his favorite hill in Georgia. Looking out on the lush sweep of Pine Mountain Valley, he spoke for an hour about his hopes for the postwar world, mingled with tales of the countryside around them. Lucy merely smiled and listened, happy to be in his company. Eleanor, for whom the day was never long enough, was constitutionally incapable of sitting and listening to her husband for that long.

Eleanor seemed to fear more for his administration than she did for his health. Appalled to learn that his newly appointed secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, had appointed a group of right-wing businessmen as assistant secretaries, she promptly called her husband in Warm Springs. “Franklin, this is a terrible thing you are about to do,” she erupted. FDR no longer had the energy to do battle with his wife. Quick to sense when her husband was about to hang up on her, Eleanor retreated. “All right, Franklin, I’ve got to go downtown. I’ll call you tomorrow.” But she could not contain herself that long, and instead fired off a letter. “I realize very well that I do not know the reasons why certain things may be necessary,” she wrote her husband. “I suppose I should trust blindly when I can’t know and be neither worried nor scared and yet I am both …. I hate to irritate you and I won’t speak of any of this again, but I wouldn’t feel honest if I didn’t tell you now.” Eleanor had not changed; what she failed to notice was that FDR was no longer the same man.

Franklin must have shared his annoyance with Lucy, for she wrote Daisy, “These State Department … episodes must be exhausting …and how can one help worrying, especially when one does not know what goes on from day to day?”