Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents

by Cormac O'Brien

  In 1921, he was stricken with polio, from which he was to lose the full use of his legs for the rest of his life. It didn’t stop him—after a lengthy recovery, he got right back into politics, stunning everyone with his determination to carry on despite daunting physical challenges. As governor of New York from 1929 to 1933, he initiated programs to help ease the misery brought about by the Depression, setting himself up for the White House. He had charm, style, good looks, and a disarming sense of humor. Most conspicuous of all, however, was his infectious optimism—a quality he would rely on time and again while leading the country out of its economic woes.

  His strategy for tackling the Depression was simple: Try something, anything, and if it didn’t work, try something else. FDR first spoke of the “New Deal” during his acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention in 1932, and it became the catchphrase for his ambitious campaign to reinvigorate the economy. Among the numerous projects he pushed through were the Civilian Conservation Corps, a public works department that employed the poor; the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which offered direct government assistance to the impoverished; and the National Industrial Recovery Act, which helped states fund construction projects. Compared with the terse defeatism of Herbert Hoover, FDR was a beacon of hope and action, and his ceaseless efforts—combined with his twice-yearly “fireside chats,” in which he spoke directly to the nation over the radio—were a boon to a populace weary of government lethargy.

  The New Deal’s results, however, were spotty at best. Moreover, it ran into opposition at every turn—the Supreme Court ruled that some of it was downright unconstitutional, an abuse of executive power. In the end, total relief from the Great Depression would come not through government programs but from the unlikeliest of sources: the Japanese.

  When the United States Pacific fleet got creamed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it vaulted Americans into a fight that FDR had been trying to join for years. Nazi Germany, his chief concern, made things easier by declaring war on America three days after Congress declared war on Japan. The conflict was now truly global. As commander in chief, FDR presided over an industrial power that quickly went from moribund to massive, an industrial juggernaut the likes of which the world had never imagined. Though he forged a close and friendly bond with British prime minister Winston Churchill, his other ally, Joseph Stalin, proved much harder to handle. At the Allied conferences near the conclusion of the war, Roosevelt, though convinced that he could deal with the Soviet premier, was duped into giving the Russians firm control over Eastern Europe, sowing the seeds of the Cold War. Many historians have also given FDR a lot of guff about the plight of the Jews; he was entirely in the know about the Holocaust yet steadfastly insisted on winning a military victory rather than intervening in the genocide. Nevertheless, he saw his country through history’s most disastrous conflagration, and he did it masterfully.

  FDR’s vice president after the election of 1944 was a little-known machine politician named Harry Truman, with whom the president shared virtually no information—including the fact that America was developing an atomic bomb. Ironically, it was Truman to whom the decision to use it would fall. On April 12, 1945, FDR was in his home-away-from-home at Warm Springs, Georgia, sitting for a portrait, when he suddenly announced that he had “a terrific headache.” Just hours later, he was dead from a cerebral hemorrhage. For a people who had gotten used to the image of FDR leading them through their worst nightmares, it was like losing a parent.

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  FAMILY MAN

  In 1905, Franklin Delano Roosevelt married Eleanor Roosevelt. They were fifth cousins once removed. Eleanor’s uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, remarked, “It’s a good thing to keep the name in the family.” Hmmm.

  But Uncle Teddy wasn’t the only famous person in the family tree. FDR could count George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Howard Taft as his distant relatives. He was even related to Winston Churchill, who was a seventh cousin once removed.

  BRACING FOR THE WORST

  Franklin Roosevelt’s vast accomplishments as president are all the more impressive when one considers the physical hurdles he had to overcome. He was the only paraplegic to occupy the White House—and he did it through more than three terms.

  He had plenty of help. Through a gentleman’s agreement that seems impossible today, the media obeyed the administration’s wish to avoid photographing the president in his wheelchair. But the subterfuge went much further and was so effective that, incredibly, many Americans never knew the full extent of Roosevelt’s condition. He wore steel braces that were heavy and often dug into his flesh. They were as much a burden as an aid and could be relied upon to support him for only brief periods. As a result, Secret Service agents were often called upon to handle FDR as if he were a great sack of grain: They lifted him out of his car, carried him across barriers, and always remained on the lookout for eager photographers—whose cameras were quickly knocked to the ground. At House Speaker William Bankhead’s funeral in 1940, the street outside was actually raised to the same level as the church floor so that Roosevelt could seem to walk in under his own power. The president didn’t always need help, though—especially when he was driving one of the cars he had specially fitted with hand controls to let him speed about with impunity.

  TOUGH TARGET

  In February 1933, FDR was finishing a speech in a Miami park when a man stood up on a bench and fired five shots at him. The assassin’s name was Joseph Zangara, and apparently his aim was terrible. The bullets struck five people unfortunate enough to be standing next to Roosevelt, including Chicago mayor Anton Cermack, who later died.

  Taking No Chances

  FDR was extremely superstitious. He never lit three cigarettes off a single match, refused to sit at a table set for thirteen, and never began a trip on a Friday. Strangely enough, the funeral train that took his body back home from Georgia began its journey on Friday the thirteenth.

  HANKY PANKY

  In 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt discovered a collection of love letters between her husband and her own social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Eleanor confronted Franklin, vowing to sue for divorce unless he stopped seeing Lucy. FDR’s mother, Sara Roosevelt, helped make the decision easier for him by threatening to cut off his share of the family finances unless he complied. He complied. The result was a marriage that thereafter remained almost completely devoid of physical contact.

  FDR eventually replaced Mercer with another mistress. Missy LeHand became one of his secretaries while he was governor of New York, and she would stay with him right into the White House. Stories abound of people walking into the president’s office to discover Missy sitting on Roosevelt’s lap. Eleanor seemed far less bothered by LeHand than she’d been by Mercer—perhaps because she was said to have her own mistress by this time. Reporter Lorena Hickock lived in a room in the White House right across from the first lady’s, and it seems certain to many that the two shared more than just a deep friendship.

  When Missy LeHand died in 1944, FDR mourned her passing . . . and then started up with Lucy Mercer again. Because Eleanor’s ban on Mercer was still in effect, the relationship remained a secret (with the help of the Secret Service, of course, who regularly arranged for illicit meetings between their boss and his old flame). Mercer was with FDR when he died in 1945. By the time Eleanor arrived, all evidence of Mercer’s presence had been removed from the home.

  33 HARRY S TRUMAN

  May 8, 1884–December 26, 1972

  ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

  TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1945–1953

  PARTY: Democratic

  AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 60

  VICE PRESIDENT: None (after FDR’s death); Alben W. Barkley (elected term)

  RAN AGAINST: Thomas E. Dewey

  HEIGHT: 5′7″

  NICKNAMES: “The Haberdasher,” “Give ’Em Hell Harry”

  S
OUND BITE: “I fired MacArthur because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

  Harry S Truman began his presidency with a glass of bourbon in his hand. He was having a cocktail with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn in the Capitol Building lounge when word came that President Roosevelt was dead. “Jesus Christ and General Jackson,” exclaimed Truman. His words were a little graver the next morning when he assembled a group of reporters: “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now.”

  If Truman was pessimistic about his own abilities, he was in good company—virtually nobody expected great things from this little-known politician from Missouri. “Now, Harry,” said Speaker Rayburn to the new president, “a lot of people are going to tell you you are the smartest man in the country, but Harry, you and I know you ain’t.” He remains the only twentieth-century president without a college degree. When Truman walked into the room at FDR’s funeral, nobody stood up. After twelve years of Roosevelt’s commanding presence, no one could bear to think of this bespectacled haberdasher as the chief executive.

  In his younger days, Truman had been a mailroom clerk, a bookkeeper, and a farmer. At the age of thirty-three, he volunteered for the army and became a captain of artillery during World War I. Then he came home, opened a men’s clothing store in Kansas City, watched it go bust, and decided to give politics a try. The local Democratic machine was as corrupt as they come, and it overlooked Truman’s honesty to make him a judge of Jackson County, Missouri. He went on to the U.S. Senate, where his investigation of defense contracts saved the government billions of dollars. Though Truman loved being a senator, Franklin Roosevelt had bigger plans for him. FDR eventually convinced the irascible Missourian to become his vice presidential candidate in 1944.

  Truman was woefully unprepared to fill his predecessor’s gigantic shoes when FDR died in April 1945. Nevertheless, the new president was soon rubbing shoulders with Churchill and Stalin at the Potsdam conference and authorizing the use of atomic bombs against Japan. Winning the war, however, was the easy part—picking up the pieces would prove far more difficult.

  “Give ’Em Hell” Harry set new heights in presidential profanity—at least until Richard Nixon came along.

  Due in large part to postwar economic hardships, Truman’s popularity had waned so severely by 1948 that nobody—literally, nobody—thought he could win reelection. After a vigorous “whistle-stop” campaign fought in large part from the back of a railcar that toured the country, Truman pulled off the impossible and beat Thomas Dewey. Nobody was more shocked than the Chicago Daily Tribune, which had gone ahead and printed “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” on the front page of its postelection edition.

  Delight over the surprise victory had barely subsided before another struggle overwhelmed the administration: the Cold War. Before reelection, Truman responded forcefully to Soviet bullying with the “Truman Doctrine,” a plan that emphasized containment—communism would be bottled up where it was and prevented from spreading further. The “Marshall Plan,” named for Secretary of State George Marshall, succeeded in helping war-torn nations with heaps of financial aid. And in 1948, Truman succeeded in airlifting supplies to West Berlin when that city was blockaded by Stalin’s troops.

  But his second term witnessed a slew of nasty surprises. China soon fell to communist rule, and the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. Communist North Korea invaded its southern neighbor, starting a war that would draw in not only America and the U.N. but China as well. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, the general sent to win the Korean War, the immensely popular Douglas MacArthur, started criticizing the president openly. Truman did the only thing he could: He sacked the general, a move for which he was widely and viciously criticized.

  As the Korean War dragged on, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts had everyone at home believing that a communist spy lurked in every pantry. Poor Harry was seen as light on communism, an old New Dealer whose civil rights agenda, noble as it was, didn’t address important security issues. Truman’s decision not to run for a second elected term was an easy one; as 1952 approached, his approval ratings were the worst of any president in American history. Posterity, however, has been much kinder to him. Long after he was shouted out of the White House, Truman has come to represent earthy, straightforward, tough-talking simplicity—a quality that’s hard to come by in a politician these days.

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  “S” IS FOR “STUCK IN THE MIDDLE”

  There is no period after the “S” in Harry S Truman’s name. That’s because it doesn’t actually stand for anything. When he was born, a disagreement arose over whether to make his middle name Shippe, after his paternal grandfather, or Solomon, after his maternal grandfather. The issue was never resolved, and “S” was put on the birth certificate as a compromise.

  SWEARING IN

  Harry Truman had a fondness for harsh language, and he rarely hesitated to use it. When first told that FDR wanted to make him his running mate, Truman said, “Tell him to go to hell.” During a speech in Washington, he took umbrage with all those who made cabinet recommendations, proclaiming that “no S.O.B. is going to dictate to me who I’m going to have!” He didn’t calm down after leaving the White House, either. While stumping on behalf of John Kennedy in 1960, Truman told a Texas crowd that anyone who voted for Nixon should “go to hell.”

  Daddy’s Little Girl

  Truman’s temper was notorious. Once, when an ambassador canceled a dinner engagement with him at the last minute, Truman blew a gasket and demanded that the diplomat be sacked immediately. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson joined forces with First Lady Bess Truman to talk Truman down. It was standard practice at the White House—Mrs. Truman and many of the president’s cabinet went out of their way to intercept Truman’s mail in case he sent out a dangerously wrathful reply that might get him in trouble.

  Sometimes they failed. The most notorious instance involved Washington Post music critic Paul Hume, who gave a scathing review of a singing recital given by the president’s daughter, Margaret. Truman read the review and flipped out. “You sound like a frustrated old man who never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job and all four ulcers working,” penned a fuming Truman in his 150-word letter to Hume. “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!” Despite his rage, Truman maintained the presence of mind to realize that the letter would never get through his advisers if he sent it through the normal channels. So he stamped the letter himself, went for a walk, and posted it personally to ensure that it would be delivered. It soon appeared on the front page of the Washington News, causing a scandal. Sadly, it did little for Margaret’s singing career.

  IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE! IT’S . . . THE PRESIDENT?

  Truman had a presidential DC-4 airplane called the Sacred Cow, whose pilot he once talked into buzzing the White House while Bess and Margaret Truman were on the roof. Unfortunately, none of the Secret Service agents knew the president was on the plane. As the swooping machine roared over the White House, terrifying the first family and staff, the mansion’s security—convinced that some assassin had commandeered the plane—flew into action. By the time the truth was discovered, even Air Force security units had been scrambled. Thankfully, nobody was hurt (but the president was mightily embarrassed).

  CURIOSITY (ALMOST) KILLED THE CAT

  While the White House underwent an extensive renovation in 1950, the Trumans stayed at Blair House, a government-owned building across the street. There, on November 1, the president was the target of an assassination attempt that very nearly succeeded.

  Not that the would-be assassins knew what the hell they were doing. Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola were determined to strike a bl
ow for the Puerto Rican independence movement by assassinating the president of the United States. After having Blair House identified by their taxi driver, they attempted to get in—through the heavily guarded front door.

  Once the shooting started, Truman, who had been taking a nap upstairs, got out of bed and stuck his head out the window to see what was going on. Had the assassins only looked up, they might have gotten a shot at their target. But despite Truman’s cooperation, it wasn’t to be. Torresola was dead and Collazo wounded. They’d taken a White House police officer with them.

  Daughter of the Confederacy

  Some of Harry Truman’s ancestors on his mother’s side had been Confederates who did time in a Union internment camp during the Civil War. His mother, Martha Ellen Young Truman, forever held a grudge against the federal cause. After her son became president, she visited the White House and was invited to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. She said she’d rather sleep on the floor.

  34 DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER

  October 14, 1890–March 28, 1969

  ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Libra

  TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1953–1961

  PARTY: Republican

  AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 62

  VICE PRESIDENT: Richard M. Nixon

  RAN AGAINST: Adlai E. Stevenson

  HEIGHT: 5′10″

  NICKNAME: “Ike”

  SOUND BITE: “I just won’t get into a pissing contest with that skunk” (referring to Senator Joe McCarthy).

  After World War II, when supporters began suggesting that Dwight Eisenhower run for public office, he acted as if they were out of their minds. “I cannot conceive of any circumstance that could drag out of me permission to consider me for any political post from dogcatcher to Grand High Supreme King of the Universe.” But Dwight wasn’t fooling anybody. It was only a matter of time before the most important general in the greatest military conflict in history gave in to the pressure to become commander in chief.