by Gore Vidal
In February 1841, the Supreme Court met to decide what should be done with the mutineers from the Amistad. J.Q.A. had not appeared before the Court in many years; had not, indeed, appeared in courts at all during his long periods of public service. He was nervous. He was also less and less master of a temper that was growing more terrible with age as he denounced equally intemperate Southerners in the House. Many thought his eruptions were not so much righteous as mad; and he himself prayed, in his diary, for “firmness to rule my own spirit.”
Baldwin opened for the defense. The next day, a somewhat jittery J.Q.A. closed the defense. Over the years, despite a shrill voice, he had become a great orator; thousands came to hear him wherever he spoke—for seldom less than three hours. Now, in the dank subterranean Supreme Court, beneath the Capitol’s Senate chamber, he faced a packed house, always an encouragement to a performer.
Five members of the Court, including Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, were Southerners. It was thought that they were inclined to send the Africans back to Cuba, in their double capacity as merchandise and murderers. Happily, one Southerner was too ill to sit upon the case and another died of a heart attack the evening of the day J.Q.A. finished his four-and-a-half-hour defense. Baldwin had already questioned the jurisdiction of the Court in determining the fate of men who, even had they been slaves, were free in New York State; also, had not our finest and greatest Chief Justice, John Marshall, ruled at the beginning of the Republic, “The Courts of no country execute the penal laws of another”? One wonders if Noriega’s American lawyer quoted Marshall in that travesty of a trial where, after murdering a number of Panamanians in Panama during peacetime, George Bush ordered the kidnapping of the Panamanian leader, Noriega, so that he could be tried in an American court, which had no jurisdiction over him, on charges that should have been brought, if at all, in Panama, an allegedly foreign nation.
J.Q.A. took much the same tack as Baldwin, but he was out for blood, specifically that of former President Van Buren, whose interference in the case he found intolerable. On March 9th, Associate Justice Joseph Story, of Massachusetts, gave the majority opinion. Apropos J.Q.A.’s defense, he wrote his wife that it was an “extraordinary argument . . . extraordinary . . . for its power, for its bitter sarcasm, and its dealing with topics far beyond the record and points of discussion.” Wisely, Story ignored the possible culpability of Van Buren and kept to the issue: Were these free men who had been unlawfully seized and, in self-defense, had freed themselves, a natural right, “the ultimate right of all human beings in extreme cases: to resist oppression, and to apply force against ruinous injustice”? Since it seemed unlikely to the Court that they had intended “to import themselves here as slaves, or for sale as slaves,” the mutineers were declared free to go home to Sierra Leone. And so, nearly three years after Cinqué left Africa, he finally achieved this season’s wonderful TV word, “closure,” which is so akin to death. And now, a hundred and fifty-five years later, he is enjoying posthumous closure, so like resurrection, The Movie.
John Quincy Adams ended his days as a beloved national hero. The son of a Founding Father, he must have seemed to his contemporaries as an ever-bright link to the first days of the Republic. He loved a good fight and fought the noblest one on offer in his time, earning himself what he regarded as the supreme accolade from a Virginia congressman, who found him “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery.”
Adams’s last days were very much like the last days of anyone old. He suffered a stroke. He weakened. But he continued to go to the House. On February 21, 1848, he cast his last vote, a “no” in regard to the war upon Mexico. He motioned to the chair that he would like to speak. As he rose, he staggered. Another member caught him before he hit the floor. He was carried into the Speaker’s private chamber. For two days, he drifted in and out of consciousness. Then, on February 23rd: “This is the last of earth,” he was heard to murmur. “I am composed.” Final words. Articulate to the end.
There is, of course, no place for such a man in American politics today—and only through the exercise of a powerful will did Adams make himself so high a place in his own time. Nevertheless, instead of today’s whites emptily apologizing for their ancestors’ enslavement of the ancestors of black Americans, Congress would be better advised to hire some sculptors with sandblasters and let them loose on Mount Rushmore so that they can turn the likeness of the war lover Theodore Roosevelt into that of a true hero, John Quincy Adams. The only American historian of the last half century who can safely be called great, William Appleman Williams, particularly revered Adams because, among other things, “he challenged America to become truly unique by mastering its fears. It was Jefferson and his followers who did not face up to the tension that freedom involved. They denied it was possible to be free and disciplined. Adams insisted that was the only meaningful definition of freedom. . . . ‘The great object of civil government,’ Adams declared in his first annual message to the Congress, ‘is the improvement of the conditions of those who are parties to the social compact.’ ”
The New Yorker
10 November 1997
* FDR: LOVE ON THE HUDSON
For nearly twenty years I lived at Barrytown on the east bank of the Hudson, upriver from the villages of Hyde Park, Rhinebeck, and Rhinecliff. Technically, I was a River person, since I lived in a River house built in 1820 for a Livingston daughter; actually, I was an outsider from nowhere—my home city of Washington, D.C., being as close to nowhere as any place could be, at least in the minds of the River people. The Mrs. Astor, born Caroline Schermerhorn, boasted of having never been west of the Hudson—or was it her drawing room at Ferncliff which looked west upon the wide Hudson and the Catskill Mountains beyond? The River road meandered from some spot near Poughkeepsie up to the old whaling port of Hudson. Much of it had been part of the original Albany Post Road, not much of a post road, they used to say, because it was easier to take mail and passengers by boat from New York City to Albany. Even in my day, the Hudson River was still a splendidly convenient boulevard.
The area entered our American history when the Dutch patroons, centered upon New Amsterdam, began to build neat stone houses north of their island city. Of the Dutch families, the grandest was called Beekman. Then, in war, the Dutch gave way to the English, some of whom were actually gentry though most were not. But the river proved to be a common leveler—or raiser up. The newcomers were headed by one Robert Livingston, who had received from James II the “Livingston Manor” grant that included most of today’s Dutchess and Columbia counties. Other wealthy families began to build great houses on the east bank of the river, making sure that their Greek Revival porticoes or mock Gothic towers would make a fine impression on those traveling up or down river. The Dutch coexisted phlegmatically with the new masters of what was no longer New Amsterdam but New York; they also intermarried with the new Anglo ascendancy.
By the middle of the last century, all in a row from Staatsburg north to the Livingston manor, Clermont, there were the houses of Roosevelts, Vanderbilts, Astors, Delanos, Millses (theirs was Mrs. Wharton’s House of Mirth), Chanlers, Aldriches, Montgomerys. The Dutch Roosevelts of Hyde Park were fifth cousins to President Theodore Roosevelt (of Long Island). They had also intermarried not only with the Beekmans but with the Delanos. In fact, for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his Beekman heritage was a matter of great pride, rather like an Englishman with a connection to the Plantagenets, the one true legitimate, if fallen, dynasty. So it was with Franklin’s cousin Margaret (known as Daisy) Suckley; although a member of a good River family she, too, exulted in her Beekman blood and now in Geoffrey C. Ward’s engrossing study, Closest Companion, of the two cousins and their . . . love affair? the joy that they take in their common Beekman heritage is absolute proof that although President Roosevelt wanted to inaugurate “the age of the common man,” it was quietly understood from the very beginning that a Beekman connection made one a good deal more common than any other man
and, thus, democracy had been kept at bay.
I remember Daisy well. She was a small, pleasant-looking woman in her sixties, with a charming, rather secretive smile. She had a soft voice; spoke very little. Unmarried, she lived in her family house, Wilderstein, having sold off an adjacent River house, Wildercliff, to the critic and Columbia professor F. W. Dupee. I would see her at the Dupees’ and at Mrs. Tracy Dows’s but only once at Eleanor Roosevelt’s Hyde Park cottage (the ladies did not really get on); I knew that she was the President’s cousin (Eleanor’s too) and that she had been with Franklin the day he died in Georgia. One thought of her as a poor relation, a useful near-servant, no more. By and large, there was not much mingling of the River cousinage. As the Astor family chieftain, Vincent, put it, “No Visititis on the Hudson.” Even though—or because—they were all related, most seemed to be on amiably bad terms with the rest. Only Daisy, wraithlike, moved from River house to River house, a benign presence. Now Ward has read her letters to Franklin as well as Franklin’s letters to her, and Daisy has become suddenly very interesting as Ward, politely but firmly, leads us onto history’s stage.
Did Daisy and Franklin have an affair? This is the vulgar question that Ward is obliged to entertain if not answer. But what he is able to demonstrate, through their letters and diaries, is the closest friendship of our complex mysterious President, who kept people in different compartments, often for life, never committing too much of his privacy to anyone, except his Beekman cousin and neighbor, quiet Daisy.
It is no secret that Ward has already written by far the best study* of Franklin Roosevelt that we are ever apt to get. Along with his scholarship and wit, the last rather rare in American biography, Ward shared with Roosevelt the same misfortune, polio—he, too, spent time at Warm Springs, Georgia, a spa that Roosevelt had founded for himself and others so struck. Polio was the central fact of Roosevelt’s mature years. He could not walk and, towards the end, could no longer even fake a steel-braced upright step or two where useless leg muscles were compensated for by strong arms and whitened knuckles, as he clutched at the arm of a son or aide.
The first fact of Franklin’s entire life was his adoring mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, known to the River as Mrs. James. She adored him, he adored her. He always lived in her house on the River where she was chatelaine, not his wife and cousin, Eleanor. By 1917, the Franklin Roosevelt marriage effectively ended when Eleanor discovered that he was having an affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Eleanor’s ultimatum was swift; give up Lucy or Eleanor will not only divorce Franklin but allow Lucy the added joy of bringing up his five children. Since Franklin already had the presidency on his mind, he gave up Lucy while Eleanor, with relief, gave up their sexual life together. Gradually, husband and wife became like two law partners. He did strategy and major courtroom argument; she went on circuit. I never detected the slightest affection—as opposed to admiration—for Franklin in the talks that I had with Mrs. Roosevelt during the last years of her life. She had been profoundly shaken to find that Lucy was present that day at Warm Springs when he had his terminal stroke. Worse, she discovered that he had been seeing her for years, often with the connivance of Daisy. Eleanor at the graveside was more Medea than grieving widow.
A number of “new” aspects of Franklin’s character emerge from those previously unpublished letters and diaries, many not even known of until now. One is his almost desperate need for affection from a woman (or amiable company from a man like Harry Hopkins) and how little he got of either. Until his mother’s death, he relied on her for comfort. When she was gone he was either alone and depressed in the White House or surrounded by people for whom, despite his failing strength, he had to be unrelievedly “on” or, as he put it, “Exhibit A.”
Most Rooseveltians are either Franklinites or Eleanorites. Since I never knew him, I saw him largely through my family’s eyes—that is to say, as a sinister, rather treacherous, figure who maneuvered us into war—while I got to know Eleanor as a neighbor and, later, as a political ally when I ran for Congress in the District. Now I begin to see how Eleanor must have looked to Daisy and, perhaps, to Franklin, too. The portrait is forbidding. She is forever on the move, on the firm’s behalf, of course, but there are hints that she would rather be anywhere than at his side. Daisy is almost always careful to praise Eleanor’s good works. But there are times when Daisy grows exasperated with a wife who is never there to look after an invalid husband who, by 1944, is visibly dying before their eyes. On February 8, 1944, Daisy notes in her diary: “I said he should either take a rest or a short drive, every afternoon. He said he hated to drive alone. I said he should ask Mrs. R. He laughed: ‘I would have to make an appointment a week ahead!’ ”
Eleanor also saw to it that Franklin would never have a decent meal in the White House:
The P. [President] & all the men came back about 7.45; all enthusiastic about their supper. The P. told them at supper that in W. H. he never had such good beef stew, carrots, macaroni, home baked bread, butter, & coffee! Poor Mrs. [Henrietta] Nesbitt, the W. H. housekeeper!
Ward comments:
Mrs. Nesbitt was a Hyde Park caterer whom Eleanor Roosevelt had hired to manage the White House kitchens. FDR disliked her and detested her pallid cooking, but was unable to get rid of her. She was evidently as imperious as she was inept; when the President sent her a memorandum detailing his dislike of broccoli, she ordered the chefs to serve it to him, anyway. “It’s good for him,” she said. “He should like it.”
Daisy concedes, “His wife is a wonderful person, but she lacks the ability to give him the things his mother gave him. She is away so much, and when she is here she has so many people around—the splendid people who are trying to do good and improve the world, ‘uplifters’ the P. calls them—that he cannot relax and really rest.” But then, confronted with the disastrous news of his first thorough medical checkup in the spring of 1944—enlarged heart, congestive heart failure, hypertension—Eleanor said that she was not “interested in physiology.” Like Mary Baker Eddy, she felt such things were weaknesses of the mind.
The Beekman cousins began their close relationship when he invited her to his first inauguration as president. Daisy was enthralled and wrote her cousin; thus, the long correspondence began; later, they would travel together. Daisy was what used to be called, without opprobrium, a spinster. Of the two boys and four girls at Wilderstein only one girl was to marry. Their mother, still alive in the Thirties, loathed sex and, as Ward puts it, “invariably wept at weddings at the thought of the awful things awaiting the bride.” Daisy showed no interest in marriage and, presumably, none in sex. By 1933 the Suckley fortunes were at a low ebb; the eldest brother had invested badly but then matters stabilized and she had her small income and could still live at home. In due course, she was put in charge of the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park. She was intelligent but not clever; drawn to quack doctors, numerologists, astrologists; she also knew that the ghost of Abraham Lincoln was constantly aprowl in the White House.
Daisy’s first “date” with Franklin was in September 1934. He took her for a drive to Eleanor’s getaway cottage, Val-Kill. There is rather a lot in her diaries of little me and the President himself at the wheel.
By November Franklin is writing, “You added several years to my life & much to my happiness.” By early 1935, when the New Deal is in crisis with Huey Long, the Supreme Court, Dr. Townsend, Franklin writes her, “I need either to swear at somebody or to have a long suffering ear like yours to tell it to quietly!”
For the remaining ten years of Franklin’s life, Daisy provided that ear. The letters to her have not all survived but hers to him are complete as well as her diary. She came to know many secrets. She was on hand when Churchill came to Hyde Park. Daisy was not quite temperance but Churchill’s constant whisky drinking awed her. When they visited Franklin’s blue-haired cousin, Laura Delano, something of a card, the Prime Minister asked for his usual whisky while the willful Laura, a devotee of co
mplex sugary drinks, gave him a daiquiri to drink. Not noticing what was in the glass, Churchill took a sip and then, to Laura’s horror, spat it out at her feet. Even in my day, a decade later, Laura would look very stern at the mention of Churchill’s name. Interestingly, for those clan-minded River families, so like the American South, Daisy was closer to Eleanor in blood than to Franklin—fourth cousin to her, sixth to him.
If anything “happened,” it would have begun during August 1933 when they took shelter from a storm on what they called Our Hill. The spinster and the sickly polio victim seem unlikely as lovers, though, a year earlier at Warm Springs, Elliot Roosevelt assured my father that the President was very active sexually, particularly with his secretary Missy LeHand. But that Franklin and Daisy were in love is in no doubt and that, of course, is the point. They were already discussing a cottage atop Our Hill for after the presidency, or even before, if possible. It should be noted that Missy LeHand’s family thought that the house on Our Hill was to be for Missy and Franklin and I suspect that he might even have mentioned it as a getaway to his last love, Crown Princess Martha of Norway, who came to stay during the war, causing Missy to retire (and promptly die) and Daisy to note with benign malice, “The Crown Princess hasn’t much to say, but as the P. talks all the time anyway it didn’t make much difference. It is strange, however, that a person in her position, & with so much natural charm, has no manner! Even in her own home . . . she leaves the guests to take care of themselves. . . .”