Uncle Elliott, as I said, had chosen to join my grandmother in reestablishing an estate at Hyde Park. She had been left some modest acreage surrounding her Val-Kill home in her husband’s will, but she chose to buy back from the estate many more acres so that Elliott would have a real occupation managing its many activities—from farming to bees to tree planting. He lived at FDR’s Top Cottage. For him, such a life proved difficult as he then had a wife on the Broadway stage. When he remarried, it turned out his new wife didn’t like living at Hyde Park and so Elliott moved to Colorado to manage her ranch. Later he moved to Florida with another new wife, becoming mayor of Palm Beach for a short period.
Uncle Johnnie prospered in his chosen “retailing,” working for several big department stores, and finally ended up a partner in the securities firm Bache & Company, where he oversaw the accounts of several important trade unions. Early on he had announced publicly that he was a Republican, and had given a seconding speech in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s nomination for president at the Republican National Convention.
Though I don’t think they fought very strongly against it, if at all, the primary identification of each of these four men, my uncles, derived from their earlier years, in the 1930s and 1940s, as the sons of my grandparents.
And what most impressed me about them was their self-assurance. I was in awe. In contrast I couldn’t open my mouth without tremendous self-consciousness. With other people, I was always concerned about what they would think of me, what impression I would make. My uncles seemed unconcerned, as if they took for granted their acceptance and the special recognition accorded them. That had been their experience when their father was president, and it seemed, as far as their own attitudes went, to continue without a pause after his death.
What happened to my mother and stepfather after the sun went down for good is a different story. So is my sister’s—and mine, too.
But let me return for a moment to my grandmother’s “best seller” status and look at it more closely. Several months after Eleanor had been widowed, she received a telephone call from President Truman asking her to become one of the top five American delegates to the United Nations. Demurring, she told him she wasn’t qualified. Truman insisted, and she finally agreed, and before long was off to London for one of the first UN General Assembly meetings. Assigned to represent the United States on the Third Committee, the Economic and Social body, the competence she demonstrated was quickly recognized. When her committee agreed to establish a subcommittee to draft a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor was elected its chairperson. For the next three years it was her major preoccupation. As I have described earlier, she shepherded it through all the hurdles, right to the end of the 1948 General Assembly meeting in Paris when it was approved by a nearly unanimous vote.
Although I have described her UN experience already in this book, it is impossible to overemphasize the very special relationship Eleanor had with the delegates from other countries. They saw her, of course, as a member of her own U.S. delegation, but also thought of her as objective and genuinely concerned about the human side of the economic and social issues on their agendas, as well as about the future of the smaller member states at the UN. She could even be described as a universal aunt figure—for there were delegates who consulted her on personal matters.
My grandmother continued to serve on the American delegation until John Foster Dulles became secretary of state under President Eisenhower in 1952. Afterward she continued a variety of “good works,” principal among them being her untiring support for the American Association for the United Nations.
As she aged she slowed down a bit—but only just a bit—and her schedule until the last year of her life remained very full.
After her husband’s death my grandmother had had to put up with the desire of many people to be nostalgic. They plagued her with wanting to know what FDR would have thought or done. She was often asked about the new president. Grandmère had reservations about Mr. Truman, but comparisons were not her way of expressing her criticism. Even my sister and I were often questioned about what our grandfather would have done. Our pat answer was usually, “How should I know?”
My mother and stepfather’s reaction to this new situation was courageous, sad, and tragic. Anna and John Boettiger’s saga illustrates fully the illusions and delusions of living in the reflected aura of FDR and the first lady, perhaps the most recognized political icons of the twentieth century. Their adjustment brought out the best in my mother, but the worst in my stepfather, who had always been of a depressed nature. It is a story that needs a full narrative telling, and hence it will be described separately in chapter 17.
My sister and I had been well known by many Americans when resident in the White House in our early years. Our identity as “Sistie and Buzzie” was firmly fixed in the public mind during the first half of the 1930s. When we moved to Seattle the spotlight on us markedly diminished. After returning to the White House with our mother, in 1944 and 1945, our shine was only a glimmer. At age fourteen, I was no longer the cute towheaded little darling that I had been at ages three to seven. My Secret Service companionship, meaning with the agents assigned to protect me, was now casual, limited to their accompanying me when I traveled to and from my boarding school.
Both my sister and I had only a modest reaction to no longer being thought of as the president’s eldest grandchildren. We had liked our time at the White House—all twelve years of it. It had been exciting, much different than what any of our contemporaries had ever experienced. Yet despite coming to feel “at home” in the White House, we always knew, because we were often reminded, that “we were only visiting.”
When my school term ended the June after my grandfather died, I was keenly aware of not heading east to Washington but instead traveling west to Seattle. Without the guiding hand of my assigned bodyguard the Secret Service had assigned—a companionship I’d always had as long as I could remember—I was on my own. I missed the company and was only too aware of how much I depended on those companions to tend to my (our) travel details.
I have attached the rest of my own story to that of my mother and stepfather’s.
The president’s four sons were given very special recognition—by the public and by the press. It was something my uncles took for granted. It happened wherever they went. They walked into the Copacabana or Toots Shor’s and were given the best table. The sturdy men outside the unmarked door of the “21” Club immediately recognized them, and, with nodded acknowledgment, the door swung open.
Here are comments typical of ones I heard as a boy and as a teenager, often from total strangers: I saw your Uncle Jimmy boarding a plane at LaGuardia last week. I heard Elliott on his radio program in Texas. Franklin’s wedding to Ethel du Pont was the social event of the year. The newspapers reported that your Uncle John and Aunt Ann were at a dance in Nantucket last week. Just as my mother did, I kept track of her brothers through the press and from the multitude of tales that filtered down to me through my grandmother and mother—one echoing the other.
Often my mother’s and grandmother’s tones, when passing on such accounts, were meant to be instructive. They were often disapproving when reporting my uncles’ scrapes with the press or local authorities, their womanizing, heavy drinking or reckless driving. Or generally calling attention to themselves, showing off. At the same time, both my mother and my grandmother always feel prey to their charms.
Additionally, Eleanor Roosevelt did not approve of her sons’ preference for the upper-class types she considered self-centered and indulgent. In my grandmother’s view, “society” was a moneyed group of people seemingly unaware of the basic changes rapidly altering America’s social landscape. They seemed, she thought, to use their social position to distance themselves from the “hoi polloi,” rather than offer any sort of useful stewardship.
By contrast, both my mother and my stepfather—who himself did not come from the social background my uncles
belonged to and enjoyed—were very much engaged in the issues my grandmother felt were important. They better understood her beliefs in what mattered, where one’s energy should be expended, and thus were approved of fully.
I have recorded how our family was given preferential treatment when visiting the White House, sparking more than a little jealousy and resentment from my uncles and their wives, who found themselves relegated to smaller rooms than even my sister and I had.
Of course it was a completely different scene after FDR died. My grandmother had a new career, a very consuming one as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations. My uncles made the adjustment by changing almost not at all and by continuing to expect the special recognition they were used to.
My mother adjusted to her father’s death quite well. To some extent she was still recognized as the daughter of the late president. But I’m afraid that no longer being identified as the president’s son-in-law proved too much for John Boettiger to bear.
17
My Mother, the President’s Daughter
Our mother told my sister and me very little about her early childhood except what illustrated her own mother’s inability to give of herself. Being the eldest child and the only girl—four younger brothers were soon to follow—one might assume that a special relationship would have developed between mother and daughter. However, this was not the case until my mother decided to separate from my own father, many years later. My mother, the eldest, was just a year old when her first brother was born—James—followed thereafter by Elliott, Franklin Jr., and John. My impression is that she was frequently the follower, tagging along—in fact, fairly in awe of her younger brothers. Although not as assertive as they were, she often imitated them, resulting in poor manners that brought them their Grandmother Sara’s disapproval.
Our mother did tell Sis and me how she hated the school she was sent to in New York City, Miss Chapin’s, a very proper one for upper-class young ladies. “Snobbish” was our mother’s condemnation. But she admitted, too, that she had always been in rebellion and never studied.
My grandmother, for her own part, always regretted never having had the opportunity to go to college. So when my mother, Anna, reached that age, Eleanor urged her daughter to do so. Franklin agreed to the idea and suggested the New York State Agricultural College, hoping his daughter would take an interest in helping to manage the family estate. (On the eight hundred or so acres of the Roosevelt estate there was not only our own family farm but also several tenant farmers. FDR also wished to start up a tree farm). My mother behaved predictably and balked; then a compromise was reached with her agreeing to try college for one semester.
Eleanor Roosevelt drove her daughter down to Schenectady, later recording it as an unpleasant journey. Seemingly, they had exchanged not a word for the entire trip.
Anna’s brother Elliot visited her during that semester and reported back that his sister was having a great time—involved with boyfriends and the school dances. Then, upon returning home from her one semester, my mother soon set her sights on getting married. This was quite unlike the untruthful story she told my sister and me about marrying the first eligible man who proposed to her. Anna had many boyfriends, and indeed several suitors, with a busy social life. Her correspondence at the time illustrates this very well. Bent on becoming active in New York’s social world, my mother married my father when she was only twenty and, although my father could not afford it, they lived in grand style.
My sister was born in 1927, less than a year after my parents were married. I was born three years later. But soon after my birth, my parents separated.
My first memories of either my father or my mother begin, really, with my mother, sister, and I moving into the White House to live with my grandparents. So with my father, what I recollect is always linked to our visitations with him, my grandmother and my mother having agreed that these should not take place at the White House. Therein begins a saga.
For unclear reasons, my mother—with the support of my grandmother (but not of my great-grandmother, Granny—began to paint a picture of my dad as a “Bad Guy,” an undesirable person, describing him as a snob and as prejudicial. This undoubtedly helped justify her choice to separate from him.
When Dad requested a visitation, he would have to take us to New York—as he was blocked from access to Sis and me within the White House. When she would announce Dad’s request to us children, my mother’s voice and face took on a pained expression, which my sister soon echoed. I didn’t! I liked my father and enjoyed my time with him. In response to my positive attitude, my mother would roll her eyes up to the ceiling for my sister’s benefit, who then put on an ugly expression. When my sister and I were together (as we usually were for security reasons), her most telling, derisive point to throw at me was, “You’re just like Dad!”
It hurt, and I knew I couldn’t reply. Sis was only taking on the official attitude toward our father. I couldn’t even retort that I liked my father, for that would mean contravening the three important ladies in my life, my grandmother, my mother, and my sister. Doing so would have risked my losing all approval from them.
Why my father was vilified—literally made into a “legitimate object of hostility”—I simply do not know. It makes no sense, and the “case” against him is quite inaccurate and even includes outright lies. Most of this, I should add, only came to light when I was doing research for my earlier book at the Roosevelt Library.
So what is a small boy to make of it? It never occurred to me that my mother might be stringing together so many fibs, with my grandmother implicitly backing her. What I didn’t know at the time was that our Granny Sara refused to join in the ongoing campaign against Dad. She would invite him to Hyde Park during our New York City visits, and he remained an executor of her estate until her death. Also, when I reviewed my father’s correspondence, I found letters to FDR, whose replies were friendly, much like any father-in-law replying cordially to his son-in-law.
During these early years in the White House my mother was often away—she had joined her father’s campaign train in the 1932 presidential election and had met a reporter with whom she had fallen in love. My grandmother demonstrated a strong liking for John Boettiger, even though he was a principal reporter for the Chicago Tribune, a strongly anti-FDR newspaper. She openly supported his affair with my mother until they were married in 1934–35, at which point I formally acquired a stepfather. My sister, always seeking our mother’s approval, immediately showed her affection to this new man in our life.
My own reaction, however, was more reserved. I wondered where this change left my father. My mother never explained. From correspondence between my mother and my grandmother I have since learned that it was expected that my stepfather would become “the man in Buzzie’s life.” Dad would be further sidelined in their minds. My feelings seemed not to weigh on their thoughts, although it was plainly regretted that I seemed to enjoy my father’s company. During our visits with Dad, my sister also seemed to enjoy herself although that was never revealed to our mother.
Then, when Sis and I were respectively eleven and eight (or ten and seven), our nurse who accompanied us on our visit to Plumb Lake with our father, felt moved to write to our mother about my sister’s hostile attitude toward Dad. My sister felt she had the license to be rude to Dad, coming very close to being contemptuous. But Sis was simply responding to our mother’s continual demonization of him. It was only too clear to me that expressing pleasure in my father’s company was too risky. Fearing disapproval, I was caught in a very unhappy situation for a young boy.
My mother’s marriage to John Boettiger—now to be called “Uncle J,” a label foisted upon me by my mother and sister—encouraged my grandmother to consider us as “The Boettiger Family.” This identification was further cemented when they had a child, my half brother Johnny. It was announced to me that Sis now wished to call Uncle J “Popsie.”
I have previously, in my book, written of this inci
dent because I was then further pushed into dropping my father’s name altogether. Now I was to be known as Curtis Boettiger at school. I surrendered. What else? I would have had to take a stand and I could not bring myself to do that. I was only nine or ten! And I was living in Seattle, three thousand miles away from Dad in New York. I could not manage rebellion. What is more, due to the distance, my father’s visits with us were limited. He had to take us with our governess to a fancy hotel resort, an expense he could rarely afford.
When his new wife, Katherine, had a baby, he wrote to my mother to tell her, asking that the news “be conveyed to Sis and Buzz that Katherine had given birth to a little girl,” a new half sister for us. Our mother duly informed us but never shared our father’s letter with us, nor her very polite response. The net result was that I became more and more Buzz Boettiger, and indeed thought less frequently of my father. To have done otherwise would have meant entering a “no go” area. But still, despite my mother’s encouragement, I could not join my sister in her affection for our stepfather. There was indeed no man in my life except my grandfather, and I adored him. And yet for me to say so, implying that I wanted to be like my grandfather, was apparently as close to blasphemy as I could possibly come! In my book I quote my mother’s intense reaction, “You can never be like Papa!”
This pattern of watching carefully what I said continued throughout my period of growing up—until I married, in fact—and even then, questions about Dad were never raised with my mother or my sister.
Upstairs at the Roosevelts' Page 20