First Ladies (10 page)

In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the great opera star Marian Anderson from singing in Constitution Hall, Mrs. Roosevelt resigned from the DAR and denounced the ban as a disgrace. Her protest, in which thousands joined, led to a triumphant concert on the mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Although the DAR remained unrepentant, the episode was a major step forward in American race relations.

Perhaps the most important cause in Eleanor Roosevelt’s activist panoply, after equal rights for women, was American youth. She maintained they were the hardest hit by the Depression—unable to marry or start careers, the last to be hired, the first to be fired. It was not an idea for which FDR had much enthusiasm. In his memoirs, the magazine editor and author Fulton Oursler told of attending a White House dinner during Roosevelt’s first term at which Eleanor urged her husband to set up youth programs. He curtly told her the young were no different from the millions of other Americans looking for jobs. As the dismayed guests watched, the president and his wife were soon redfaced and snarling at each other. She persisted until he wearily agreed to consider the matter.

Eventually, Eleanor persuaded FDR to launch the National Youth Administration, whose goal was to propose and execute measures to help young Americans. In pursuit of this, Mrs. Roosevelt developed close links with two private organizations, the American Youth Congress and the American Student Union. Unfortunately, both of these groups were heavily infiltrated by Communists, who devoted a great deal of their time and energy in the thirties to wooing idealistic young people. Until 1939 the AYC backed most New Deal legislation, asking only for larger and more forceful programs, such as a five-hundred-million-dollar government loan fund to enable young people to establish homes and families. Internationally, both organizations agreed wholeheartedly with the President’s growing hostility to the fascist dictatorships of Germany, Italy, and Japan. But when Russia’s dictator, Joseph Stalin, signed his infamous nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939, the two organizations did a 360-degree turn and launched an all-out attack on a flabbergasted FDR, calling him a militarist and a warmonger for trying to rearm the country.

Seldom if ever has a President been more politically embarrassed—and it got worse. The following year the AYC met to pass still more anti-Roosevelt resolutions, including a condemnation of the President for his criticism of the Russian invasion of Finland. Nevertheless, when AYCers made a February 1940 “pilgrimage” to Washington to publicize their views, Mrs. Roosevelt urged FDR to address them. She persuaded friends up to the level of cabinet wives to provide beds, and squeezed some of the AYC leaders into the third floor of the White House. The U.S. Army was requisitioned to provide additional beds and meals.

In a cold drizzle, several thousand AYC members gathered on the lawn of the White House. While the First Lady sat in mortified silence, FDR gave them the tongue-lashing of their lives. He told them their ideas were “twaddle.” The future of freedom in the world was at stake, and they were trying to sabotage American attempts to defend it. Never before or since has a President so totally repudiated his wife’s politics in public. Several months later Eleanor severed her connections with the AYC and the American Student Union.

The failure of her youth outreach wounded Eleanor Roosevelt deeply. Even before this disappointment, there were signs that she was wearying of her role as the conscience of the New Deal. She told several friends she did not want FDR to run for a third term, unless a world crisis made it necessary. She felt he had nothing more to give the country. These comments need to be viewed against the background of the drift and irresolution that engulfed the Roosevelt administration in its second term. FDR’s attempt to increase the number of justices so he could pack the Supreme Court with New Deal supporters triggered a tremendous revolt in Congress, ending in a humiliating defeat for the President. In 1937 a recession almost as bad as the first Depression left the New Deal’s social engineers looking feckless and dismayed.

As the emphasis of the Roosevelt presidency shifted to foreign affairs, Eleanor felt herself more and more excluded from the inner circle around FDR. She was sometimes driven to desperate expedients to keep in touch with what was happening inside his administration. One of the saddest stories I came across while researching this book was told by Betsy Cushing, Jimmy Roosevelt’s wife, who happened to be in the Oval Office when Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, called. FDR greeted him, then paused and said: “Mamma, will you please get off the line—Mamma I can hear you breathing, will you
please
get off the line?”

Another reason why Eleanor opposed a third term may have been her awareness of FDR’s deteriorating physical condition. As early as 1938 he had suffered a fainting spell at Hyde Park but quickly recovered and joined his guests for dinner. However, Eleanor eventually concurred with his decision to shatter the two-term precedent in 1940 because she shared his fear that the southern conservatives under Vice President Jack Garner or British-hating Irish Catholics under London Ambassador Joe Kennedy would seize the presidency and capitalize on the widespread American loathing for another European war to make a deal with Hitler. The President himself was aware that his fragile health made another four years in office a risky gamble. At a 1940 meeting with Jim Farley, the Democratic Party
chairman, he said he would run, even if it meant he would only live a month into a third term.

After Pearl Harbor propelled America into World War II, FDR’s physical decline accelerated. Electrocardiogram readings revealed a worrisome lack of oxygen to the heart, caused by hypertension and worsening arteriosclerosis. When cardiac specialist Dr. Howard Bruenn examined him in March of 1944, he was appalled by the President’s condition. His heart was alarmingly enlarged, a prime symptom of congestive heart failure. His lips and fingernails had a bluish tinge. Bruenn told the White House physician, Dr. Ross McIntire, Roosevelt could die at any moment.

Although a regimen often hours sleep each night and a reduction of his workday to four hours produced some slight improvement, the President’s condition was visible to anyone who saw him up close. When my father conferred with him after he had been nominated for the vice presidency in the summer of 1944, he came home and told my mother FDR was a dying man.

No President more desperately needed the zone of peace within the White House that other First Ladies have felt it was their primary duty to create. But Eleanor Roosevelt was unable to provide it for her husband. Instead, she continued to play FDR’s political conscience. Again and again she pressured him to do something about segregated rest room facilities in southern post offices or the conservative policies of a federal housing administrator when the President was grappling with the complexities of global coalition warfare and a recalcitrant, ever more hostile Congress.

By this time the Roosevelts’ daughter, Anna, was old enough to pass judgment on her mother—and it was harsh. She felt Eleanor constantly miscalculated people’s moods and insisted on bringing up issues and problems when they wanted to relax. Anna described her parents as living virtually separate lives during the war years, when she spent a lot of time in the White House as her father’s companion.

Even loyalists like Frances Perkins noticed the alienation and the frequency of Eleanor’s absences from the White House. “I really think
you ought to be here in the White House more often,” Ms. Perkins told her. “I think it would be better for the President.”

“Oh no, Frances, he doesn’t need me anymore,” Eleanor said. “He has Harry Hopkins…. Harry tells him everything he needs to know.” The former head of the WPA, Hopkins had emerged as FDR’s foremost wartime adviser.

Those words confess the tragic diminishment of the Roosevelts’ marriage as they neared the end of their lives together. For me this sad fact makes the First Lady’s struggle to uphold her ideals immensely—heartbreakingly—touching. After Pearl Harbor, when a hysterical Congress stampeded the President into rounding up Japanese Americans and confining them in camps far from the West Coast, the First Lady went out of her way to pose for a picture with four young Nisei. Afterward she visited these unhappy people in their desolate camps to express her regret for the government’s action.

In spite of what she described as “an almost violent argument with FDR and Elliott,” Eleanor decided to become assistant director of the Office of Civilian Defense. She wanted to help bring more women and local volunteers into this vital home-front program. FDR predicted she would make herself a political target, and he was soon proved right. The Hearst papers raked the First Lady’s liberal appointments as “pinkos and commies,” and other papers savaged her choice of an old friend, dancer Mayris Chaney, as an assistant in the physical fitness program, calling her unqualified for the post. After several months of this sort of abuse, Eleanor resigned.

Another major effort that added to Mrs. Roosevelt’s sense of wartime displacement and failure was her losing struggle to persuade Congress to admit generous numbers of refugees—-Jewish fugitives from the Nazis as well as war-orphaned children of other creeds and nationalities—into the United States. But Congress was adamantly hostile to the idea, and FDR, always the politician, hesitated to antagonize them. One Republican congressman, perhaps heady from the success in driving the First Lady from her OCD job, sneered he was not going to let the President’s wife tell him what to do. Eleanor’s proposals died in committee.

More successful were her visits to GIs on all the fighting fronts. She wore out military aides as she plodded through miles of wards full of wounded. Invariably she returned to the White House with notebooks bulging with names and addresses and telephone numbers of wounded men and spent hours calling or writing their parents or wives.

On Guadalcanal, she reportedly told one of the few jokes I have seen attributed to her—a story that got a huge laugh and reveals she was well aware of the violent antipathy many people felt for her and FDR. She said she had heard one of the Marine cooks had persuaded his commanding officer to let him go to the front with a rifle because he yearned to shoot at least one enemy before the war ended. The next day the man came back very discouraged. He said he had met an enemy and could not kill him. “He yelled, ‘To hell with Roosevelt,’” the cook said. “I couldn’t shoot a fellow Republican.”

Wonderful as she was in the wartime White House as a spokesperson for a caring government, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to see her husband largely as a personage, a man to prod and lecture. FDR grew more and more disenchanted with his First Lady’s style. Once a White House visitor remarked that Eleanor would be very tired when she returned from a trip to the South Pacific. “No,” FDR snapped. “But she will tire everybody else.”

Not only was Eleanor unable to recognize her husband’s need for a zone of peace within the White House but she inflicted on him the worst imaginable housekeeper, a New Yorker named Henrietta Nesbitt. Later, for a few awful months, the Trumans inherited this creature. From the start Mrs. Nesbitt made her regime synonymous with atrocious cuisine. Once she served mutton and boiled carrots at a cabinet dinner, washed down by a New York State champagne which FDR pronounced the worst he had ever tasted.

During the wartime years, with state dinners and almost all other official functions canceled in the name of national austerity, Mrs. Nesbitt’s menus became even more abominable. She almost gloried in their badness—as if indigestion were her contribution to the war effort. If the President criticized a dish, he got it again and again. At one point FDR said he was eating chicken six times a week, and when
he complained Mrs. Nesbitt gave him sweetbreads six times a week. She repeatedly served him broccoli, even though he said he detested it. For months she served him oatmeal for breakfast, until he was reduced to sending her advertisements for cornflakes and Wheaties.

Some books on the Roosevelt White House have tried to make Mrs. Nesbitt seem amusing. Having dealt with this dragon in skirts, I disagree. This sort of aggravation was the last thing a very sick President needed.

Even in the final year, with the war roaring to a climax on a dozen fronts and FDR’s health so precarious—at least six times he toppled to the floor of his study and had to be lifted back into his wheelchair by one of his Secret Service men—the First Lady persisted in playing his social conscience. She would invade his cocktail hour with sheaves of memos pushing her various causes, insisting on immediate decisions. Once, Anna Roosevelt recalled, “Father blew his top. He took every single speck of that whole pile of papers, threw them across the desk at me and said, ‘Sis,’ you handle these tomorrow morning.’” A humbled Eleanor apologized—but several weeks later, when she asked to accompany FDR to the last summit meeting of the war at Yalta, he coldly refused—and took Anna instead.

Inevitably, FDR sought love from other women—notably his beautiful secretary, Marguerite (Missy) LeHand, until she collapsed from the strain of trying to combine overwork and adoration. In the last two years of his life the still beautiful, still devoted Lucy Mercer, now the widowed Mrs. Winthrop Rutherfurd, returned—with the tacit collaboration of Anna Roosevelt.

A few of Lucy’s visits were in the White House. Most were at Warm Springs, the Georgia rehabilitation center which FDR had found when he was struggling to recover from polio. Mrs. Rutherfurd had an estate in nearby Aiken, South Carolina. During a particularly felicitous stay in late 1944, Lucy told Anna of a marvelous hour she had just spent with FDR, sitting in his car on a nearby mountaintop, listening to him talk about the problems of the world, interspersing global concerns with lively anecdotes about his years as a visitor to that part of Georgia. Anna realized, “Mother was not capable of giving him this—just listening.”

Anna’s brother Elliott agreed: “What he [FDR] missed more and more was a woman’s warm inspiriting companionship, which Mother by her very nature could not provide…. She was no kind of company when he wanted to relax without listening to her voice of conscience.”