The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (46 page)

A radiant Eleanor prepared to address the press after visiting the Arthurdale, West Virginia, homestead, her favorite New Deal program.

Eleanor, FDR, Sara Delano Roosevelt, and Betsy and James Roosevelt boarded the USS
Indianapolis
to review the U.S. naval fleet.

Eleanor began her political career by training women to be effective advocates. In 1936, she worked behind the scenes to ensure that women voted in increased numbers.

By FDR’s second term, the nation saw the presidential couple as political partners and respected Eleanor’s stamina as much as her compassion.

Eleanor admired young leaders. She often convened youth leadership summits and listened intently when these young people expressed their ideas, hopes, and concerns.

Eleanor, pictured here with Admiral Halsey (right) and an unidentified sailor, boarded an uninsulated military aircraft to visit wounded, exhausted troops stationed in the Pacific. She never forgot the horror and courage she witnessed.

Eleanor thought that helping draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the most important work she ever undertook.

After FDR died, Eleanor transformed her beloved Val-Kill Cottage into the home, office, and retreat she had always craved.

Eleanor and Marian Anderson united to combat segregation in Washington, DC, and promote human rights around the world.

Eleanor and John Kennedy initially had a tense relationship. Yet they united to appoint women to senior positions in his administration.

PART III

On My Own

Twenty-eight
    

An End and a Beginning

I RODE DOWN
in the old cagelike White House elevator that April morning of 1945 with a feeling of melancholy and something of uncertainty, because I was saying good-by to an unforgettable era and I had given little thought to the fact that from this day forward I would be on my own.

I realized that in the future there would be many important changes in my way of living but I had long since realized that life is made up of a series of adjustments. If you have been married for forty years and if your husband has been president of the United States for a dozen years, you have made personal readjustments many times, some superficial, some fundamental. My husband and I had come through the years with an acceptance of each other’s faults and foibles, a deep understanding, warm affection, and agreement on essential values. We depended on each other. Because Franklin could not walk, I was accustomed to doing things that most wives would expect their husbands to do; the planning of the routine of living centered around his needs and he was so busy that I was obliged to meet the children’s needs as well.

I had to face the future as countless other women have faced it without their husbands. No more children would be living at home. The readjustments to being alone, without someone else as a center of life and with no children about, would be difficult. Having Tommy with me made it easier at first, for Tommy, as she was called in the family, had long been my secretary and she made coming home to wherever it might be worthwhile. But there was still a big vacuum which nothing, not even the passage of years, would fill.

I had few definite plans but there were certain things I did not want to do. I did not want to run an elaborate household again. I did not want to cease trying to be useful in some way. I did not want to feel old—and I seldom have. In the years since 1945 I have known the various phases of loneliness that are bound to occur when people no longer have a busy family life. But, without particularly planning it, I have made the necessary adjustments to a different way of living, and I have enjoyed almost every minute of it and almost everything about it.

It was not always easy. At first there was seemingly a greater adjustment to be made in my outer way of life than in my inner life. Ever since my husband had become president in 1933 I had lived in the White House, which meant a public existence. In earlier days he had held various public positions, but somehow our public and private lives had meshed more easily. Then came the years of his disabling illness. Later, beginning with the governorship of New York, we were back in public life on a changed basis. There was less of a family private life. Franklin was busy and there was at all times a public life that had to be planned and arranged with care.