“After that,” Morgenthau commented, “things were all right between the two households.”24
Even before Harry Hopkins moved into the White House, under Roosevelt’s tutelage, the chief New Dealer had become much more political in his approach to issues. In the early New Deal years Harry repeatedly told his WPA staff that the political effects were not theirs to worry about; “we’re here to implement a policy.” But under Roosevelt’s influence he changed. The day came when he said that the policy was right but he had to think about the political repercussions. After he moved into the White House he became occupied with the grand strategy of the war, and his angle of vision changed; he became impatient with those “goddam New Dealers” as, in a moment of irritability, he once described them to Robert E. Sherwood. Roosevelt, too, was prey to such moods. “I am sick and tired of having a lot of long-haired people around here who want a billion dollars for schools, a billion dollars for public health,” he exploded to Henry Morgenthau in mid-july, 1939. “Here was Harry who was Mother’s protégé to start with,” said Anna, “and suddenly Harry became Father’s protégé.”25
Expecting an ally, Eleanor now often found in Harry an adversary and critic. And the vestigial puritan in her identified the shift in Harry’s point of view with his taste for the elegant life and smart society—the parties on Long Island, the race tracks, the night clubs. It was a side of him she had not known and it offended her, although she said that Harry’s top associate, Aubrey Williams, always remained the “idealist.”26
Once not long after Hopkins moved into the White House, Eleanor’s friends heard that she was ill with pleurisy, so ill that Tommy said, “It’s the first time I’ve known her to turn her face to the wall.” But when Eleanor came to New York to her little hideaway apartment on East Eleventh Street, she sent a message to Esther Lape that she wanted to talk with her. “I just want to tell you I haven’t been ill at all. Something happened to me. I have gotten used to people who say they care for me but are only interested in getting to Franklin. But there was one person of whom I thought this was not true, that his affection was for me. I found this was not true and I couldn’t take it.”27
There was another reason why Harry’s presence in the White House disturbed her. She feared that his fondness for high living encouraged the “playboy” in the president, a side of him that she disliked. When James once confessed to her that he was mystified by his father’s pleasure in the companionship of a group of yachtsmen known as the “Nourmahal Gang,” she agreed. She had never understood how he “could have gone on those cruises and relaxed with those people.”28
But Franklin did enjoy “those people.” “Father and Mother had a completely different way,” said Anna:
If Father became friendly with a princess or a secretary, he’d reach out and give a pat to her fanny and laugh like hell and was probably telling a funny story at the same time, whereas to Mother that was terrible.
He loved to outrage Granny, to tease her. He could never do that with Mother. She was much too serious. Mother was inhibiting to him. She would never go along. That’s why he turned elsewhere.29
This, too, was a dividing line in the White House—those persons like Missy and James’ wife, Betsy, who played up to this side of the president’s nature and the few who stood with Eleanor when she felt she had to be a hair shirt. It’s not what the president wants, but what the president needs, she once said to a friend, but when Roosevelt turned on his charm there were few who did not succumb.30 For a time, James and Betsy lived at the White House. Franklin was very fond of his daughter-in-law, who was gay and sophisticated in a way Eleanor could never be. Eleanor felt that Betsy was sometimes more concerned about pleasing her father-in-law than her husband. And when Betsy—without Franklin’s saying so, perhaps even with his encouragement—began to encroach upon Eleanor’s prerogatives as mistress of the White House, Eleanor put her foot down firmly.
“Mother was a very jealous person,” said Anna.
She was jealous of Missy, of Betsy, of Louise, even of me. . . . They were all three women who had succeeded to some degree in usurping some of her responsibility as wife and First Lady. Mother came in late once, realized she had done nothing about the seating arrangements and asked for the chart and was told by the ushers Mrs. Hopkins had seated the table. She was furious.
Betsy never did anything for Father except always turn up for cocktails when he was alone. In those few minutes before the guests came in, there was always Betsy, chic and lovely, full of light quips. These were things Mother couldn’t give him. She knew that, but she was a human being and never could quite accept it.31
“Tommy & I got back (by air) tonight,” Eleanor wrote Maude Gray, “& I found Betsy here but leaving at once tonight. She does not kiss me but is very attractive to F.D.R. Aren’t people funny?”32
Eleanor Roosevelt’s most complex relationship was with Missy. There was affection and motherly solicitude—and also resentment. “Dearest ER,” Missy wrote her in one of the early White House years. “Another Christmas, and thanks to your good example I am not exhausted by last minute wrapping. . . . I have had such a happy year—I hope you know how very much I appreciate being with you—not because of the White House—but because I’m with you!” Few letters to Franklin from his wife did not ask him to give her love to Missy, and when Missy’s nieces were married, Eleanor attended the weddings and arranged for the gifts.
But Missy created problems, for the children as well as for Eleanor. While Anna was still in the East and spending a good deal of time in the White House, she admitted that she hated it when Missy was in a car with her father and had the preferred seat next to him. Franklin Jr., when asked by his mother whether he had ever resented Louis Howe, firmly said no, but he had resented Missy. Once he had said to Missy, “Are you always agreeable? Don’t you ever get mad and flare up? Do you always smile?” She looked as if she were going to burst out crying, Franklin Jr. said.33
Anna was not wholly sure that “jealousy” was the right word to describe her mother’s feelings toward Missy. Her presence in the White House made it possible for Eleanor to move around the country as much as she did. In 1938 Doris Fleeson wrote about Missy’s role in the Saturday Evening Post. She described how Missy presided over the White House tea table when Mrs. Roosevelt was not there, how she wrote all the president’s private letters, did the accounts, paid the bills, balanced his checkbooks, saw that the children got their allowances, kept track of his stamp, marine-print, and rare-book collections and ran the Little White House at Warm Springs “when Mrs. Roosevelt can’t be there.” Missy’s service to the president was beyond price. “She was sweet and gentle,” said Sam Rosenman, and continued:
a very good hostess when Mrs. Roosevelt was away . . . and far more intelligent than most people gave her credit for. I remember many occasions when letters passed over her desk that she did not think ought to go out. She would show them to me and Steve Early and if we agreed, she would put them in the desk and go back to him. . . . When she had her stroke in 1941, I said, “A much greater loss to the country than the loss of a battleship.”34
She wished, said Eleanor after reading Doris Fleeson’s piece, that someone would write a similar article about Tommy, who made life possible for her.
But there was a murkier side to the relationship between Franklin and Eleanor in regard to Missy than the generous praise of Doris Fleeson’s article disclosed, a side which Eleanor’s great sense of dignity and pride caused her to keep well hidden, usually successfully.
Once a friend saw Eleanor go over and kiss Missy good night. “I thought to myself—how could she?” It required great strength and self-control for Eleanor to treat Missy with such warmth and friendliness. It was difficult for Missy, too. Fulton Oursler glimpsed that side of it. He ran the Macfadden publications, including Liberty, for which both Franklin and Eleanor had often written. Oursler’s introduction to the Roosevelt household in the Albany days had been through Eleanor,
but he found her too serious and high-minded. It was easier to relax with Missy, and by the mid-thirties the Ourslers were taking Missy to the races and she even considered summering near them on the Cape.
Oursler came down for dinner in May, 1935. It was a hot day. Since the president was off fishing and not expected back until dinner time, Missy invited Oursler up to the president’s study for a drink. Then the president arrived and insisted on mixing the drinks. Mrs. Roosevelt was nowhere about, and in response to Oursler’s inquiry the president remarked that he did not know where she was that night. Oursler was struck by the way he said it, and found it equally extraordinary that his only companion should be Missy. That evening Missy was hostess, “and she presided with a queenly dignity as a substitute for the apparently unmentionable First Lady of the Land,” an evening, added Oursler, when it seemed to him that “everyone at the table wanted the President to have a good time.” He was impressed with Missy’s devotion. “She was young and attractive, and should have been off somewhere cool and gay on a happy weekend. Yet month after month and year after year she gave up date after date . . . here she sat with him knitting,” keeping company with a very lonely man.35
Oursler again sensed the tangled relationship between Eleanor and Franklin and Missy during an overnight visit in January, 1938. It was the night of the reception for the judiciary, one of the season’s more formal entertainments, and, as soon as they could, Missy and the Ourslers slipped away to have a drink upstairs. After a while Missy put in a call for the president. As she anticipated, he, too, had left the reception and was alone in his oval study. Why didn’t they join him? he asked. They did and the president was in the middle of expressing his pleasure with Emil Ludwig’s biography of him, which Oursler had commissioned for Liberty, when Eleanor, according to Oursler, came in “without any knocking.” She declined an offer of beer but readily expressed herself on the Ludwig biography. It interested her because it gave a European point of view on the president, but it was inaccurate.* They moved into a discussion of public figures, and it became evident that Eleanor was partial to her Uncle Theodore. And while Franklin found this irritating, Oursler offered to publish an article by Eleanor on that theme. She would consider it, she said. Then she looked at the beer and asked, “Are my friends included in this?” and when Franklin said no, Eleanor left. The Ourslers, Missy, and the president then settled in for a long, relaxed talk. The president, in a genial mood, spoke freely about men and affairs of state that were then in the headlines, and the Ourslers found the talk exhilarating. After they bid good night to the president, Missy walked with them to their room. She, too, was exultant. “The President was never so frank before,” she told them, and it was to her friends, Oursler noted in his journal, adding, “We feel we are part of a much darker quarrel which we can only guess about.”36
Only rarely did Eleanor betray her feelings as she did in her thrust in front of the Ourslers about her Uncle Theodore. It was meant to gall, and Franklin’s bristling response showed that it had reached home. Three days after that tension-filled episode, Oursler received a note from Eleanor, the “briefest” she had ever sent him: “I am sorry that I cannot write this article, but feel it would be in bad taste for me to do it.”37
Eleanor’s open expression of admiration for Theodore Roosevelt rankled Franklin because he was angry with most of the Oyster Bay kin, and Eleanor, too, regarded the Oyster Bay clan as the aggressors in the feud. “I am afraid Aunt Edith would not appreciate being mentioned in my column,” she wrote a mutual friend who had asked her to praise Aunt Edith’s “grit, hanging on despite a broken hip.” “There is no love lost on that side of the family for this side of it.” It was Alice who turned the knife. She infuriated Franklin at White House parties when she became the rallying center for anti-New Deal raillery and wisecracks. She was under no obligation to come to White House parties if she thought them a bore, Eleanor informed her—at Franklin’s instigation, Alice thought. When James suggested to his father that Cousin Alice be appointed to a vacancy on a certain commission, “his reply, which I shall censor somewhat, was: ‘I don’t want anything to do with that woman!’”38
Eleanor, although she was more often the butt of Alice’s barbs than Franklin, was more detached. She tried to keep politics from disrupting family ties, and when she was in Cincinnati for a lecture she lunched with Alice at the Longworth home. “It was strictly a family affair—we never allow politics to come between us,” Alice later told the press. “I always enjoy my cousin,” Eleanor wrote with an equability that must have annoyed her husband, “for while we may laugh at each other and quarrel with each other’s ideas or beliefs, I rather imagine if real trouble came that we might be good allies. Fundamental Roosevelt characteristics gravitate towards each other in times of stress!” An irate Roosevelt loyalist tore this out and sent it to Eleanor along with a report of an Alice Longworth speech in which she accused Franklin of “buying his way to a third term with the W.P.A.” On the margin of the clipping the gentleman had written, “so she’s your dear, gravitating to you Roosevelts, cousin?”39
Since the death of Louis Howe, Eleanor had seen many people become White House familiars and then disappear. Each had imagined he was indispensable to the president; all were surprised at their dispensability. The president used those who suited his purposes. He made up his own mind and discarded people when they no longer fulfilled a purpose of his, she said. She could never conceive of his doing a reckless thing for a friend, except for Louis Howe. Perhaps all presidents have to be this way. Reserve is indispensable to the presidency. Yet this reserve also reflected the side of her husband that she hated. She had to have contact with people she loved; it was her way of refreshing her spirit. Franklin seemed to have no such bonds to people—not even to his children, Eleanor once said. She could never get accustomed to what she saw as his lack of real attachment to people. After Missy’s stroke, Eleanor went in to Franklin on Christmas Eve to ask whether he had called her. He had not, he told her, and was not planning to do so. Eleanor could not understand that. Even Missy once confessed to Fulton Oursler that the president “was really incapable of a personal friendship with anyone.”40
His father was a lonely man, James thought: “Of what was inside him, of what really drove him, Father talked with no one.” Eleanor believed this was by choice. He never expressed regrets about the life of a public man or said that he wished things could have been different: “He lived his own life exactly as he wanted it.”41
And while she was hurt by Missy’s role and often annoyed by the procession of young women vying for the president’s favor, she blamed him more than the women. And she was sorry for Missy, too, was a victim of this fascinating man’s concentration upon himself and his objectives.
And at moments when his preoccupations hurt her, Eleanor told herself she did not love him, that she was simply rendering him a service of love, that she did not like to be First Lady and if it had been within her power would have lived quite differently. On her wedding anniversary in 1918 she had written Sara a letter full of thanks for the interesting and happy life Franklin had given her. In 1935 Sara mentioned this letter to her biographer, Rita Halle Kleeman, who asked Eleanor if she could see it. Eleanor was unable to find it, she said.42 That was a measure of how differently she felt. Yet somewhere she still loved him; otherwise he would not have been able repeatedly to hurt her as he did. She loved him, for only a woman in love could have written as she did after one of his great electoral triumphs:
[undated]
The White House
Washington
Dearest Honey,
I haven’t had a chance to say much to you but I want you to know that I feel this should be a happy day because you have done much for many people. Everyone has a happier feeling & you are doing a grand job. Just go on thinking of others & not of yourself & I think an undreamed of future may lie ahead for the masses of people not only here but everywhere.
Much love
&nb
sp; E.R.
She not only loved but respected him and believed in his leadership. Franklin would sometimes say to his people in the White House, “My Missus wants me to do this, and I can’t.” Fundamentally she accepted his judgment of what was politically impossible because she knew that he wanted the same things for the country that she did, and that when he said he could not push a particular program it was not for lack of caring but because Congress was opposed and the country unreceptive. Sometimes in despair over public apathy she would say to him that she wondered whether people were worth saving.
“Give people time, my dear,” he would comfort her. “It takes time to understand things. You are much too impatient and would never make a good politician.”
It was not a one-way relationship. She learned from him and under his tutelage became one of the most accomplished politicians of the time.
All during the White House years she would insist that whatever praise she received for her activities as First Lady came to her because she was the wife of the president. That was partly true humility, partly superb tact, partly a canny woman’s recognition that the public considered such deference to one’s husband seemly. But it was also her way of saying that she was doing all these things because of Franklin’s position and not because she wanted to do them. Yet after his death she would go on with most of the public activities—the organizations, the dinners, the benefits, the travels, the inspections—in which she had engaged during the White House years. She would do so because she wanted to, and she would do it better because of what she had learned from him.
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