Eleanor (2 page)

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FEW DAYS AFTER FRANKLIN’S DEATH, A NEWSPAPERWOMAN
intercepted Eleanor Roosevelt at the doorway of her Washington Square apartment in New York City, the one which she had selected with an eye to Franklin’s using it after the White House years, and asked her for a statement. “The story is over,” Mrs. Roosevelt said quietly and hurried on.

If precedent was any guide, the story would be over. Previously, presidential wives, after the death of their husbands, quickly sank into obscurity and were seldom seen or recalled except on ceremonial occasions. But this presidential wife was different. It was a measure only of Mrs. Roosevelt’s lingering insecurity and modesty that after thirteen strenuous years in the White House she could still believe that she was so widely admired—and hated—not in her own right but because she had been FDR’s wife, and could still wonder whether with his death her public career might not be finished.

Yet, the same qualities that had turned this protected daughter of old New York into an uncompromising champion of the poor and oppressed, that had transmuted her beloved but alcoholic father’s letters into a primer of youthful virtues and strengths, that had enabled her to remake her marriage after the discovery of her husband’s unfaithfulness into a journey of self-discovery and a partnership of immense usefulness to America foretold that Eleanor Roosevelt, now standing alone and speaking for herself, would leave her mark on the times.

She had overcome so much, turned so many difficulties into points of growth. She had emancipated herself from the insular
and caste-minded society into which she had been born and, in a relentless battle of wills, had freed herself from the domination of a strong-minded mother-in-law who had embodied the values of that society. She had established a unique relationship of independence and partnership with her husband. A homely adolescent with a deep sense of inadequacy because of her physical plainness, she had grown into a woman of poise, dignity, and gracious beauty. She who had been anti-Semitic and prejudiced against “darkies” had become the epitome of a concern that excluded no one from the circle of its compassion and love. Although she had opposed the woman’s suffrage movement, she was now a tough-minded and astute political figure in her own right. She for whom speaking had been an ordeal had become one of the most self-possessed and moving speakers in public life.

She had even learned to cope with the sense of alienation, of being an outsider, that she had acquired in childhood with the death of her parents. Work and loving people no matter what they did were her formulas for transcending loneliness and disappointment.

Could the story be over? She was only sixty-one, full of vitality, at home in the corridors of power, and adept at using power to help others. She had a vast political constituency and felt an obligation to promote her husband’s objectives, especially the achievement of peace through the United Nations. Before long the realization would come to her that the story was far from over.

E L E A N O R :
T H E  Y E A R S  A L O N E

1.
CHAMPION OF HER HUSBAND’S IDEALS

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HE HAD NOT QUITE REALIZED HOW MUCH SHE HAD RELIED
upon her husband intellectually, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote Walter Nash, New Zealand’s minister of finance, adding, “I shall hope to continue to do what I can to be useful, although without my husband’s advice and guidance I feel very inadequate.”
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It was the old ambivalence. She belittled her powers at the very time she was astonishing the world by her stoutness of heart. Franklin Roosevelt’s death occasioned an overwhelming sense of personal loss. “I am frightened,” wrote Helen Wilmerding, Eleanor’s Roser classmate. “Who will take care of us now?” Strong men felt the same. “What a void has been left for the nation and the world,” commented Justice Wiley Rutledge, and over in the House office building, a young Texas congressman, Lyndon B. Johnson, with tears in his eyes, exclaimed to a newspaperman, “God—God how he could take it for us all.”
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She sensed the country’s feeling of rudderlessness and loss but instead of yielding to it sought to convert the nation’s grief into an instrument for her husband’s objectives. “Perhaps in His wisdom,” she said in her column “My Day,” which she resumed writing the Monday after her husband’s burial,

the Almighty is trying to show us that a leader may chart the way, may point out the road to lasting peace, but that many leaders and many peoples must do the building. It cannot be the work of one man, nor can the responsibility be laid upon his shoulders, and so, when the time comes for people to assume the burden more fully, he is given rest.
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Franklin’s death seemed to have united the country, she wrote her Aunt Maude:

We knew of course Franklin had aged & no longer felt very strong but everyone, including himself, felt that with care he could carry through these four years. He wanted to see a good peace made but perhaps a better one will come through his death. The upsurge of love & realization of how much they had depended on him & left to him has I think made many people feel that they want to see his objectives succeed where before they were critical on many points & might have been apathetic or really obstructionist. One feels in the San Francisco conference that a strong hand is missing. I am sad that he could not see the end of his long work which he has carried so magnificently but I am thankful that he had no pain & no long lingering illness in which he would have watched others not doing as he would have done.
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Throughout the years in Albany and Washington Eleanor had had to fight Franklin. His very strength and magnetism had required a special effort of will to keep her own ideals and personality from being smothered. Now she presented him in a different perspective. Beneath all the compromise, she wrote, there had been a steadiness of purpose which was to give the average human being “a fairer chance for ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’” His political-spiritual legacy to the nation lay not in particular statutes or appointments, but in an attitude, so she advised John Gilbert Winant, U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, a year later, when he was scheduled to deliver an FDR memorial address in Congress at a time when New Dealers had begun to turn against Truman because he was not Roosevelt. Winant’s good friend Belle (Mrs. Kermit) Roosevelt came to Eleanor for suggestions for his address because “he is now feeling a desperate loneliness which comes inevitably to all those who loved Franklin.” “It seems rather late to have this memorial,” she replied immediately,

and so I think the only thing to do is to point up the fact that as time passes, the perspective of what a man has lived by is probably more important than the actual things he did, because new situations necessitate new answers and one can not apply the same theories or exact methods. The background of a man’s thinking and acting is at all times a living thing.

If you can in some way touch on this, it might help a lot of the progressives who are feeling rather lost and friendless at the present time.
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In life she had been, Henry L. Stimson wrote her, her husband’s “worthy helpmate”; in death, she now emerged as the principal champion and interpreter of his ideals, and by the time she wrote her account of the White House years and had dealt with most of the nation’s and world’s leaders as a colleague and co-worker, she could testify about her husband, “I have never known a man who gave one a greater sense of security.”
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The first week after the funeral was taken up with the melancholy business of moving out of the White House. Although the amount to pack was “appalling” and President and Mrs. Truman told her to take all the time she needed, she managed it in a few days. “This is the last evening,” she wrote a week after the president’s death, “and I have a great sense of relief.” She held her last press conference, had dinner in the family dining room with Belle Roosevelt, Tommy (Malvina Thompson, her personal secretary), and Tommy’s friend, Henry Osthagen, and, before climbing into bed, took a last look at the Washington Monument with its little red light on top which had always seemed to twinkle at her “in friendly fashion.” The next morning she breakfasted on the sun porch, went through some busy hours of saying good-bys and thank-yous, and then was driven to the train.

The return to Hyde Park was even sadder. For a few days, with trucks disgorging barrels and packing cases and a beginning made in the business of sorting and dividing possessions, with James and Elliott in and out, the loneliness was not so acute. But Hyde Park
without Franklin as its center and children about was a different place. She was not only on her own but alone. Tommy helped, but there was a vacuum which time and other people would never fill.

She might write her old friend Esther Lape, as she did, that love for Franklin had died long ago, but that by believing in his objectives she had rendered him a service of love in helping him achieve his purposes; but her melancholy and loneliness belied such protestations. She had been hurt anew by the discovery that Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd had been at Warm Springs at the time of Franklin’s death, Lucy’s presence having been kept a secret from her. She had gone to Anna’s room after her return to the White House from Warm Springs, her face and manner as stern as they could get when she was angry, and had asked Anna why she had not been told. Anna assured her she had not known Mrs. Rutherfurd was at Warm Springs. Had Mrs. Rutherfurd also been at the White House? Anna explained that one morning when she was with her father, taking notes on things that he wanted done, he had asked her if she would object to inviting an old friend, Mrs. Rutherfurd, to dinner. Did Anna know who Mrs. Rutherfurd was? her father had asked. Deadpan, Anna said she did. Had she objected to having her invited? No, she had not. She had thought of her father, immured in the White House, the only women around to amuse him being his cousins Laura Delano and Daisy Suckley, oppressed by world cares, and had quickly decided that it was not her responsibility to object. Never had she discussed with her father or anyone else the relationship that she knew there had been between the two many years earlier. It was all aboveboard; there were always people around, she assured her mother. That was how it had happened. “Mother was so upset about everything, though so cool on the exterior, and now so upset about me. I was upset enough to wonder whether it would make my relationship with Mother difficult. It did, for two or three days. That was all. We never spoke about it again.” Yet sometimes Anna wondered whether her mother had ever quite forgiven her.
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Eleanor was vulnerable, and her sadness at Hyde Park bespoke that vulnerability. But Hyde Park was home for her as no other place would be. The president had often spoken of his rootedness
there. She, too, became aware, in the course of a battle with the president’s executors, insisting that they not sell off the president’s woods and fields, of how deeply she was attached to Hyde Park’s rural loveliness and memories. Daily she slipped into the hedge-surrounded rose garden to place a spray of flowers on FDR’s grave. Spring, too, had a healing power. When she awoke on her sleeping porch, the birds were twittering, the air fresh, the tree a haze of tender greenness. Her spirits lifted. “Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality,” she wrote. She even enjoyed listening to the farmer’s hour on the radio. She was, at heart, a country woman.
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Fala, Franklin’s dog, was a great comfort to her. He had originally been taken by Margaret Suckley to live with her because Grace Tully (the president’s secretary) had reported that that was what the president had intended, but James Roosevelt asked her to send the dog back to Hyde Park: “In talking to my sister and brother, we all feel very disappointed that Fala is not staying with Mother,” he wrote. Fala was really “part of the family,” and it would make his mother “very happy to have Fala back at Val-Kill.” Miss Suckley agreed immediately.
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Fala and Mrs. Roosevelt became inseparable. He accompanied her on all her walks through the woods, and when he wandered off the path to pursue a scent, a high-pitched “Fala” summoned him back. When he covered himself with mud she bathed him, getting as wet as Fala in the process, and when she fed him, she made him do all his tricks—stand up on his hind legs, roll over, beg—as he had done for his master.

On V-E Day the messages and telegrams poured into Hyde Park telling her how much the senders wished that the late president might have been alive to see the end of the European war. When she heard Truman and Churchill proclaiming Germany’s unconditional surrender, she could almost hear Franklin’s voice making the announcement “for I had heard him repeat it so often.” She spoke over WNBC, expressing what she felt would have been the late president’s gratitude to the soldiers, war workers, and civilians who had made victory in Europe possible and urging them to go on and “win through to a permanent peace. That was the main objective that my husband fought for. That is the goal which we must never
lose sight of.” It still was difficult to believe “my husband is not off on a trip,” she wrote President Truman.
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