Pearl Harbor (20 page)

Eleanor's route to power, however, had been paved with pain that stretched back to a difficult, and loveless, childhood. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884. Her alcoholic father, Elliott, adored her but was largely absent from her life, while her self-centered and vain mother, Anna, was emotionally distant and verbally abusive. Eleanor viewed herself as an ugly duckling, although as a child she was quite attractive. Shy, socially awkward, and unable to win the affection of her mother, young Eleanor was filled with insecurity. She seemed old even as a child, which was why Anna nicknamed her daughter “Granny.”
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It was not until after the premature deaths of her parents, and her escape from home, that Eleanor started to emerge from her shell. Anna died of diphtheria in 1892 when Eleanor was only eight. Six months later, Eleanor's three-year-old brother, Elliott Jr., also succumbed to diphtheria. Less than two years later, her father died. “Their daughter was just ten years old, an orphan and already hurt by life,” said her son James. Over the next few years, Eleanor's stern grandmother raised her. When Eleanor turned fifteen, her grandmother sent her to a boarding school in England. It was there that she found herself and her voice. It was also the first time she felt appreciated for her passion and her intellect.
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Growing up as members of a large extended family, Eleanor and Franklin had met as children, but their relationship blossomed after they attended a horse show at Madison Square Garden in 1903. He was a twenty-year-old Harvard undergraduate at the time; she was eighteen years old and had just moved back to New York after three years of boarding school. A few weeks later, they joined other family members to watch her cousin Theodore welcome guests to the East Room of the White House. They continued dating while Franklin completed his degree at Harvard. “He was young and gay and good-looking,” she recalled, “and I was shy and awkward and thrilled when he asked me to dance.” The future president proposed to Eleanor shortly after he graduated in 1904. They married on St. Patrick's Day, 1905, at a friend's house in Manhattan. The current president, Theodore Roosevelt, gave away the bride.

On first appearance, they were an odd couple. Franklin was tall, athletic, and handsome. Eleanor was too tall, too lanky, and plain. He was charming, warm, and outgoing. She was insecure and painfully shy. As a relative remembered, she “took everything—most of all herself—so tremendously seriously.” Eleanor had lived a monastic life, rarely encountering other men. FDR, by comparison, enjoyed the company of attractive women, and they responded to his good looks and charm. “Nothing is more pleasing to the eye than a good-looking lady, nothing more refreshing to the spirit than the company of one, nothing more flattering to the ego than the affection of one,” FDR used to quip.
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Eleanor, however, charmed him with her sincerity and intelligence. “A more sophisticated woman would have scared the daylights out of him,” recalled his son Elliott. The future first lady remembered Franklin telling her that he believed she could help him to be successful. Her response was, “Why me? I am plain. I have little to bring you.” The fact that she was the favorite niece of cousin Theodore, who happened to be the president of the United States, no doubt added to her appeal, as did the fact that she sat on a sizable trust fund that was even larger than Franklin's.
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For the first few years of their marriage, Eleanor focused on raising a family. She gave birth to her first child fourteen months after the wedding
and to five more over the next nine years. (One died in infancy.) Eleanor struggled with her new role as wife and mother. Having been raised with servants, she did not, for example, know how to cook or clean. Her husband offered little emotional support. These were difficult years for Eleanor and for their marriage.
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In 1918, after returning from Europe to visit the war front, FDR became violently ill. He had to be carried off the ship and transported home in an ambulance. Eleanor was unpacking his suitcases when she came across a bundle of love letters from the dark-haired and attractive twenty-two-year-old Lucy Mercer. Eleanor had hired Mercer to work as her part-time social secretary, but Lucy soon caught Franklin's eye. Eleanor had been suspicious that her husband was having an affair, but the letters confirmed it. “The bottom dropped out of my own particular world and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world honestly for the first time,” she reflected later.
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Eleanor believed that Franklin had betrayed her trust. She told him that she would grant him a divorce. But FDR understood that a divorce would have ended his political ambitions. From that point forward, Eleanor and Franklin's relationship was more a merger than a marriage, based in mutual self-interest, not bonds of intimacy. James Roosevelt described it as an “armed truce.” “I have the memory of an elephant,” she once said. “I can forgive, but I cannot forget.” As part of the arrangement, FDR promised never to see Lucy Mercer again—a promise he would later break. He accepted Eleanor's demand that they sleep in separate bedrooms, an arrangement they maintained even in the White House. Eleanor occupied a separate suite of rooms in the southwest corner of the mansion.
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Eleanor emerged from the Mercer affair a new woman: more secure, more independent, more self-confident. She and Franklin led separate personal lives, but they would form a remarkable public partnership. “After the affair she was less subservient to father,” reflected James. “She demanded respect from then on.” “I knew more about the human heart,” she confessed later. “I became a more tolerant person . . . but I think more determined to try for certain ultimate objectives.” It marked
the beginning of her evolution from a private to a public person. She emerged from FDR's shadow, willing to strike out on her own, to pursue the issues that mattered most to her.
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I
t was not until late on the afternoon of December 7 that Eleanor had a chance to talk with FDR. She described him as looking “very strained and tired.” But she observed another quality: his “deadly calm.” As she reflected later, “His reaction to any great event was always to be calm. If it was something that was bad, he just became almost like an iceberg, and there was never the slightest emotion that was allowed to show.”
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The “deadly calm” that Eleanor noticed had many sources. No doubt, FDR felt some degree of relief that the uncertainty of America's involvement in the war had come to a dramatic, and tragic, end. “I thought that in spite of his anxiety Franklin was in a way more serene than he had appeared in a long time,” she observed. “I think it was steadying to know finally that the die was cast. One could no longer do anything but face the fact that this country was in a war.”
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The roots of the “deadly calm” traced back to FDR's childhood. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, New York. His patrician family provided him with all the comforts of wealth. Growing up on a serene Hudson River estate, the young FDR forged fond memories that would endure for a lifetime. “All that is in me goes back to the Hudson,” Roosevelt liked to say. His childhood memories of a time when he was athletic, and when the world seemed to revolve around him, would provide a psychological retreat in times of crisis. He would return there in his mind many times to find solace and strength. Later in life, he would fall asleep imagining himself as a child sledding down the hill behind his Hyde Park home.
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He lived in a world of privilege where anything seemed possible. He summered in Europe, often with royalty. Raised with private tutors and governesses, he attended the finest schools—Groton, Harvard. In 1887, when Franklin was five, he was introduced to President Grover Cleveland.
The beleaguered Cleveland placed his hand on FDR's head as he left. “My little man,” he said, “I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States.” At nineteen, his distant cousin Theodore became president.
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Franklin's domineering mother, Sara, nicknamed “the Duchess” because of her imperious style, created an ideal environment for young Franklin. Shortly after FDR became president, the
Ladies' Home Journal
observed that “much of the President's strength in facing incredible obstacles [was] planted in a childhood presided over by a mother whose broad viewpoint encompasses the art of living.”
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He was her only child, and she smothered him with affection and insulated him from the struggles of ordinary life. She controlled every aspect of his childhood. Although servants surrounded Franklin, Sara insisted on bathing and dressing him herself. He was eight years old when he took a bath by himself for the first time. Throughout Franklin's life, Sara provided her only child with financial security and deep affection. She kept a detailed diary of his activities until he was in his twenties. His daughter Anna said of Sara, “Granny was a martinet, but she gave father the assurance he needed to prevail over adversity. Seldom has a young child been more constantly attended and incessantly approved by his mother.”
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Sara nurtured and protected young Franklin, enabling him to grow up in an idealized world. There were certain rules to being a Roosevelt, however. He was not permitted to show emotion or weakness of any kind. Sara taught her son to hide his feelings behind a veil of pleasantness. The Roosevelts placed a high priority on being upbeat and sunny, even if it meant ignoring inconvenient facts.

In 1890, when Franklin was eight, his father, who was twenty-six years older than Sara and already middle-aged, suffered a heart attack. It was a major blow to Franklin. James had been his active companion, teaching him to ride horses, sail, and swim. Every afternoon, his father took him for an inspection of their estate, teaching him about the management of the land, pointing out the different types of trees and plants.
If FDR was shaken by his father's illness, he never revealed it. Instead, he conspired with his mother to ignore his father's declining health.
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During the summer, the family traveled to Europe so that James could enjoy the baths of Bad Nauheim in Germany that were supposed to have curative powers. The family made the trips in the hopes of prolonging James's life, but they treated them like vacations. The family's letters reveal no hint of illness or expressions of concern about James and his health.
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While James would remain in poor health for the next decade, Franklin and Sara conspired to insulate him from bad news that might disturb him and stress his already damaged heart. When a steel rod sliced Franklin's forehead, for example, he hid so that his father would not see the wound. When a friend accidentally knocked out his front tooth with a stick, FDR deliberately kept his mouth closed so his father could not view the damage.
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In December 1900, during FDR's freshman year at Harvard, James suffered a series of heart attacks. FDR rushed home to New York to be by his side. On December 8, exactly forty-one years before he stood before Congress and delivered his war message, FDR watched as James took his last breath. “All is over,” Sara wrote in her diary. James left Franklin a significant trust that would remain the main source of his income throughout his life.

After the death of her husband, Franklin became the sole focus of Sara's smothering attention. She took an apartment in Boston to be near him while he was at Harvard. She also opposed his marriage to Eleanor and tried to convince him to call it off. FDR refused, instead allowing Eleanor to compete with his mother for his affection. Sara's wedding present to the couple was a new townhouse in New York City. The only catch was that she would live in the adjacent house, with doors connecting the two residences.

 

 

T
he last time that Eleanor had seen that “deadly calm” expression on her husband's face was in August 1921. The family was at their vacation
home at Campobello, a rockbound island in the Canadian waters off the coast of Maine. FDR felt achy but went sailing anyway and trekked two miles with the children to swim at a freshwater lake. After returning to the house, he sat on the porch and read the mail. He was too exhausted to change out of his wet bathing suit. “I'd never felt quite that way before,” he said later. The next morning, he stood up for a few minutes and then collapsed on his bed. He would never stand again. He was thirty-nine years old.
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Louis Howe, FDR's close friend and political adviser, who was staying with the Roosevelts, summoned the local doctor to examine FDR. He diagnosed him as suffering from nothing more than a cold. When FDR's condition worsened, Howe contacted the famous Philadelphia surgeon William Keen, who was vacationing on a nearby island. Keen told them that a blood clot had settled in FDR's spine, causing “temporary” paralysis of the legs. He recommended vigorous massage. Over the next few days, Howe and Eleanor massaged FDR's lifeless muscles, hoping to stimulate a response. Because of the misdiagnosis, their efforts not only inflicted needless pain, but may have caused more damage to the fragile nerves and made recovery less likely.

For nearly two weeks, FDR lay in bed in terrible pain, his legs so sensitive he could not bear the weight of the sheets that covered them. By this point, massage was out of the question. His hands and arms became paralyzed. His fever soared, and he lost control of his bodily functions. Eleanor and Howe kept a round-the-clock vigil by his bed. She bathed him and turned him over to prevent bedsores. She administered catheters and enemas. She even had to brush his teeth.