Upstairs at the Roosevelts'
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9. Eleanor and Her Mother-in-Law
1. Eleanor went to live with her Grandmother Hall after both her parents had died.
2. Jan Pottker, Sara and Eleanor: The Story of Sara Delano Roosevelt and Her Daughter-in-Law, Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 121.
3. See Jan Pottker’s Sara and Eleanor, 125–26.
4. Pottker, Sara and Eleanor, 142.
5. Joseph P. Lash in his authorized biography, Eleanor and Franklin.
6. Ward, First-Class Temperament, chapter 7.
7. Pottker, Sara and Eleanor, 191.
8. Eleanor recognized this personal limitation even with her friends. She writes to Lorena Hickok: “Yes, dear, you are right. I give everyone the feeling that you have that I have ‘taken them on’ & don’t need anything from them & then when they naturally resent it & don’t like to accept it from me, I wonder why! It is funny I know & I can’t help it something locked me up & I can’t unlock!” My italics. Quoted in Joseph Lash’s Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends, 1943–1963 (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 201, published twenty years after my grandmother died.
9. Most of these references to Sara’s engagements with social organizations are drawn from Jan Pottker’s Sara and Eleanor.
10. Joseph Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 293.
11. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 329.
12. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 329–30.
13. Lash, Love, Eleanor, 56–57.
14. Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).
15. Quote from Bernard Asbell, Mother and Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt (New York: Fromm International, 1988).
10. Others in the White House
1. Taken from a quote in Jean Edward Smith’s book FDR (New York: Random House, 2007).
11. The Chaste Eleanor Roosevelt
1. Lash, Love, Eleanor, 205.
2. Eleanor Roosevelt, If You Ask Me (New York: Appleton-Century, 1946), 93.
3. I write about this in my book Too Close to the Sun.
13. To Europe with My Grandmother
1. Dulles was one of the senior U.S. delegates in Paris as it was expected that Thomas E. Dewey would be elected president in 1948 and Dulles would be his secretary of state. (That Truman beat Dewey was a real shock.)
2. Joseph Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 157. Unfortunately the author doesn’t relate how seriously religious my grandmother actually was.
3. All the quotes in this section are taken from Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).
4. He was of the minority sect, Ahmadiyya Muslim. Later he was appointed a justice of the World Court. Shortly after I joined the UN Secretariat he popped into my office one day to give me a copy of the Koran—which he had translated into English!
14. Roosevelt as Commander in Chief
1. Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 642.
2. Larrabee, Commander in Chief, 638.
15. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill
1. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Plume, 2001), 785.
2. Churchill had held cabinet posts during World War I and after, as well as in the early 1920s. Roosevelt had been assistant secretary of the navy for eight years during President Wilson’s administration, 1912–20.
3. David Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, OM, 1938–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).
4. Likewise, the title of Geoffrey Ward’s second volume on FDR was taken from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s comment about FDR when he was campaigning for the presidency in 1932: “a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.”
5. The U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall took this stance throughout the war. He was the only close aid of FDR’s who was not called by his first name.
6. Note the Tolstoy Conference in Moscow in October 1944.
7. Dilks, ed., Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan.
8. Lady Soames, Churchill’s last surviving child, made plain to me her father’s hurt feelings over lunch one day at the Reform Club. Later, after my talk at the Churchill Museum in London, she wrote me a nice note telling me that she was grateful to see that a Roosevelt family member fully acknowledged the awkward situation between her father and my grandfather during the Yalta Conference.
About Curtis Roosevelt
Curtis Roosevelt (1930–2016) is the grandson of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. He worked for eighteen years in the Secretariat of the United Nations. He is the author of Too Close to the Sun: Growing Up in the Shadow of My Grandparents, Franklin and Eleanor and consulted on numerous television productions, including the History Channel’s FDR: A Presidency Revealed and the documentary miniseries The Churchills.
Curtis Roosevelt
April 19, 1930–September 26, 2016
We are thankful he lived long enough to complete this book but at the same time very sad he will not be able to see its publication.
1. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the young couple.
2. My grandmother and grandfather are older here. In the background is the covered walkway of the White House.
3. My mother, Anna, is typing a letter home from her room in Livadia Palace during the Yalta Conference, February 5, 1945.
4. Anna is here with Kathy Harriman, who is translating a Soviet anti-Franco propaganda billboard in Yalta, February 10, 1945.
5. FDR and Anna greeting Emperor Haile Selassie and the Crown Prince of Ethiopia.
6. My great-grandmother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, with her only child, her son, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
7. A family picture posed on the front portico of our house at Hyde Park, in 1932. I am on my mother’s lap with my father standing behind her. I would be two years old.
8. All of us grandchildren, at our grandfather’s inauguration in January of 1945. This picture is taken in his study on the second floor of the white House. I am in my military school uniform.