Kati Marton (15 page)

Edith Wilson, who knew something about presidential illness, was shocked when she saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt on his fourth Inauguration Day. “Did you get a good look at the president?” she asked Frances Perkins. “Oh, it frightened me. He looks exactly as my husband looked when he went into his decline.”

Franklin had a final historic journey to make. The first lady was desperate to go along for the secret meeting with Stalin and Churchill. FDR asked Anna, however, not Eleanor, to accompany him to the Yalta Conference. He was a very sick man; his daughter could do things for him that his wife could not. He needed looking after, not prodding. For Eleanor, it was one more injury, one more rejection.

FDR spent his sixty-third birthday at sea and received a surprise package from Lucy and Daisy. It was full of sentimental knickknacks recalling their long history with him. From Eleanor, he received an irritated letter sent several days earlier chiding him for his nominee for secretary of commerce. She also sent a birthday message, but it never got through. FDR’s ship was under radio silence due to the proximity of two German submarines. The missed communication was emblematic of their final months.

Franklin returned from the long journey bone-tired and obviously unwell. On March 1, 1945, he addressed Congress for the very first time from his wheelchair. “I hope you will pardon me for the unusual posture,” he said, “but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not having to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs, and also because I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.” Those who knew the fiercely proud man now understood, possibly for the first time, how sick he was. Much of the country was stunned to hear the president admit he was a cripple. He had trained people not to notice his polio, few ever mentioned it and many were unaware of it altogether. Very few people knew how exhausting it was for him to stand even briefly. In one stroke, he declared the deception over. Just as he had lost the energy to spar with Eleanor, he no longer had the strength to disguise his handicap.

The Roosevelts, always faithful in observing rituals, celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary shortly after his meeting with Lucy. En route home for a weekend at Hyde Park, Franklin and Eleanor made plans for the future. He wanted Eleanor to go with him to the opening session of the United Nations, and then, in early summer, to London, Holland and the front. “The war in Europe,” he told Perkins, “will be over by May.” He wanted to drive through London and bask in the warm glow of victory.

In April, he went to Warm Springs, accompanied by Lucy, Daisy and another cousin, Laura Delano. He had drawn particularly close to his daughter and called her every night he was there. “But there was a funny little thing there,” Anna remembered, “just to show that he never discussed his real personal life with anyone. He never once mentioned Lucy Mercer. His private life was his private life.” Franklin’s final act was to sit for a portrait intended for Lucy. On April 12, he looked up suddenly and said, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.” Lucy, Daisy and Laura carried him to his bed, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Eleanor arrived quickly from Washington. Laura compounded the first lady’s loss by telling her about Lucy’s presence. The old wound was reopened and was made sharper when she learned of her daughter’s role in the reunion. Surely this would explain the “impersonal feeling” Eleanor described at the news of her husband’s death. Self-imposed detachment was her way of coping with the fresh wave of anguish.

“He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical,” she wrote. “That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in some other people. Nevertheless, I think I sometimes acted as a spur, even though the spurring was not always wanted or welcome. I was one of those who served his purposes.

“I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone a little outside of myself who was the President’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I
felt and worked until I left the White House.” Many other presidential wives survive by the same means, but none achieved what Eleanor did.

FROM HER CORRESPONDENCE,
we know much more about Eleanor’s inner life than we do about Franklin’s. Did he open to anyone that “black box” containing his innermost thoughts? Lucy’s family continues to treat her relationship with the president as private. Winthrop Rutherfurd III, grandson of Lucy’s husband, first learned of the affair in 1967 when he read about it. “We never talked about this in the family,” he said in 1999. “It was not our business. It was theirs.”

Among her bedside papers when Eleanor died was a poem entitled “Psyche” by Virginia Moore, which Eleanor had clipped out of a newspaper and marked “1918,” the year she discovered her husband’s love affair. The poem is not only a testament to her lifelong pain but to her indomitable spirit as well.

No present-day couple could live as the Roosevelts did during their twelve years in the White House. Eleanor and Franklin’s traits—his love of martinis and the company of charming women, and her prolonged absences and intense friendships—might well be politically damaging in today’s climate. Unable to forge a conventional marriage, Eleanor and Franklin turned their personal differences into a strong political partnership. The most gifted politician of the last century, FDR relied on his wife, the indomitable idealist, to be his moral compass. A marriage that might well have collapsed under the weight of two such powerfully divergent personalities survived, and enriched the country. The Roosevelts
were inexhaustible. His expansive, reassuring spirit and her blend of humility and energy guided the nation through the twin crises of the Depression and World War II. All succeeding presidents and first ladies have measured themselves against the Roosevelt standard.

“The story is over,” Eleanor declared the day she left the White House. Their story had come to an end, though a new chapter of hers was just beginning. For the next seventeen years, until her death on November 7, 1962, she continued to be a principled voice for the New Deal ideals of justice, civil and human rights. The world became her stage.

T
HE
G
OOD
H
USBAND

THE PASSAGE FROM ELEANOR AND FRANKLIN’S ROCKY RELATIONSHIP TO BESS
and Harry’s solid union was akin to traveling from the Hudson Valley with its mountains and twisting rivers to the flat, open plains of the Midwest. The Roosevelts were authentic American aristocrats, landed, widely traveled and confident of their birthright. The Trumans were authentic Middle Americans, neither rich nor glamorous, products of small towns and neat farms in the heartland described by Mark Twain and painted by Thomas Hart Benton. Much has been written about the inner strength that enabled Truman to manage one crisis after the next
without losing his balance, but historians have paid scant attention to one of his greatest personal resources: his rock-solid marriage.

Because Bess Truman was neither glamorous nor in pursuit of an independent agenda, she has often been underestimated by historians. This is a serious error, one Harry himself never made. While he navigated the nation through some of the roughest waters of the American century, Bess was there as both his constant sounding board and as a reminder of who they were and where they had come from. Loyal, blunt, unpretentious and self-reliant, she was the solid embodiment of the country he loved. She was also difficult, stubborn and unaccommodating.

But he adored her and always looked up to her. Until the end of their days, when he looked at his short, stout, gray-haired wife, he still saw a spirited, athletic girl with long blond hair and blue eyes, the Bess Wallace whom Truman started courting almost in their childhood. Success, with all its traps and trappings, in no way diminished Harry’s devotion. No matter where high office propelled him, no matter the company he kept, he never stopped courting his wife. His adviser Clark Clifford said that the Trumans were the only couple he had seen unchanged by the presidency. The man who surprised the country with his supple performance always remained a very good husband.

HARRY TRUMAN ASSUMED OFFICE
under traumatic circumstances during a critical moment in our nation’s life. He lacked FDR’s charisma. His flat, nasal tones were no match for his predecessor’s rich baritone; nor did Truman possess Roosevelt’s great wit or raconteur’s charm. Truman was a farmer, not a gentleman farmer like Roosevelt. Harry’s mother often boasted that no one could plow a straighter furrow than her son.