Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  Mrs. Roosevelt has been here and gone—a very tired Mrs. Roosevelt, agonized by the men she had seen in the hospitals, fiercely determined because of them to be relentless in working for a peace that this time will last, a very loving and motherly Mrs. Roosevelt, and despite the heat, the weariness and the tragedy, a gracious and magnificent lady.

  For me it was a grand day. . . . Early in the morning I learned she was here and having breakfast with General Twining about a hundred yards away. I dashed madly out to shave and just as I finished I received a telephone call from Colonel Higgins to report to General Howard at 12:30. It was hard waiting through the morning, but I had seven letters from you, and so I wrote you and the hours passed swiftly. I did get a glimpse of Mrs. Roosevelt being photographed with the General as I was going for the mail, but I thought it best not to bollix up the Army’s program and drove rapidly away.

  At 2:30 I drove down to headquarters and as I sat in Colonel Higgins’ tent and heard her hearty laugh—you know how it rings out and dominates the whole table—the robust Roosevelt laugh—I fidgeted impatiently. Finally the lunch with the senior officers was over, and a note was slipped to Mrs. R. that I was here, and army protocol crashed as we embraced one another. The press was there but did not get any photographs. Mrs. R. then talked to the reporters, and then we went into the General’s bedroom and talked for fifteen minutes before she had to go off to more hospitals.

  General Howard gave me a note where to meet them at 3:30. Mrs. R. said she wanted to come back to our headquarters to visit the weather station and take a peek at our tents. I said the boys would greatly love that, except the tent part, if it was all right with General Twining, and he readily acceded. . . . So I dashed ahead to the Weather Station to tell them Mrs. R. was coming and then dashed to the Mobile Hospital where I was to meet her at 3:30. I had had no lunch, foolishly thinking I would be invited to lunch with the Lady, so I did in two tootsie rolls.

  At 4:30 it turned out that Mrs. R. was to meet several Senators and Admiral Halsey who were arriving there. So the General told me to get into the station wagon, one of the snazziest I have ever seen, and we drove over to the rendezvous place. The poor General must have been baffled by the conversation between us which was of color schemes for the 11th Street house, furniture and a person named “Trude.”

  When we arrived at the rendezvous, I stayed in the car while Mrs. R. and the General went out to greet the gentlemen, and then to my horror Admiral Halsey who is a legendary figure in these parts flanked by the Commanding-General of these parts, came over with Mrs. Roosevelt to the station wagon. Now a Sergeant doesn’t smugly remain seated when a four-star Admiral comes over, so I decided to hell with the press and the Senators and jumped out and stood at attention. And then Admiral Halsey put out his hand and Mrs. Roosevelt introduced us: “So this is the young man,” he said, and inspected me critically as the photographers snapped their cameras. I hope the damn pictures were suppressed. I don’t want to finish the Admiral. I can see the Chicago-Tribune with a caption—THIS IS WHY OUR CAMPAIGN IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC IS NOT MOVING FORWARD.

  Then we dropped Mrs. Roosevelt and General Howard at another hospital and I was there alone with the Admiral. So I gulped and said nothing, knowing the man has great cares, anyway a Sergeant doesn’t speak until spoken to. He asked me about my work as an “aerologist” (Navy term for weather man) and then said some amusing things about the Senators, who seem to have left him severely alone. Admiral Halsey is a jovial man but with a reputation for remarkable bluntness and directness so I guess the Senators decided it was best not to tangle with the old seadog.

  Then I went back to get Mrs. Roosevelt in the Weather Station’s car. We got rid of the MPs who were greatly relieved and I drove Mrs. R. down to our area. I introduced her to Van who had voted for Willkie in ’40 but was now urging his friends to vote for FDR in ’44, and she told a wonderfully amusing story which you undoubtedly have heard about the sad marine whose unit was to leave these parts, and who felt he couldn’t leave until he had shot a Jap. So his officer advised him to stand up on the ridge and shout “To hell with Hirohito,” and a Jap would certainly appear and then he could bag him. Next day the officer came on the Marine he still was depressed. “What happened?” asked the officer. “I did as you said, Sir, and a Jap did climb out of his foxhole, but he yelled ‘To hell with Roosevelt’ and how could I shoot a fellow Republican.”

  Then despite all my grimaces Mrs. R. came down to our tent, and she will report her impressions. By this time everyone in the area was clustering around. Lucky that no one thought to ask her for an autograph for I never would have been able to get her back to the General by 5:15. “How do these weather men rate?” asked Marines, GIs, swabbies.

  So I drove her back disregarding the speed limit of 25 miles as I could afford to with Mrs. R. in the car. We drove by a river, and 50 Marines drove frenziedly into the shallow water when one of them spotted Mrs. R. Three sailors before they knew who was in the car signalled for a lift. They clambered in raucously, saw Mrs. R., gulped and were the silentest swabbies I have met in the service as Mrs. R. told them about things back home.

  I came back again in the evening and we sat on a screened porch and talked until 11:30 but I have never seen her so weary. And today she had to be up at 4:15 and fly and then another round of hospitals. So though I hated to let her go, because for a little while I was back in the world of those I love, at 11:30 I left. You and Tommy must make her rest, really rest, when she returns, impatient though she may be to tell the American people about the boys here. Honestly, Trude, I have never seen her as tired as she was last night. She must have been going a terrific pace, because while she was going through hospitals here this afternoon, the officers who have been with her gratefully took time out to sleep.16

  Having covered seventeen islands, New Zealand, and Australia, and, by George Durno’s estimate, having seen about 400,000 men in camps and hospitals, she began her homeward journey. It was, she confessed to Doris Fleeson, “most exhausting emotionally as well as physically.” But she left the South Pacific with “a sense of pride in the young people of this generation which I can never express and a sense of obligation which I feel I can never discharge.”17

  When Admiral Halsey said good-by to her he told her it was impossible for him to express his appreciation for what she had done for his men. “I was ashamed of my original surliness,” he wrote later. “She alone had accomplished more good than any other person, or any group of civilians, who had passed through my area. In the nine months left to me as COMSOPAC, nothing caused me to modify this opinion.” But his misgivings were warranted, since the Japanese bombed Guadalcanal the night before her arrival and the night after her departure.18

  The long flight home gave her a chance to think through the recommendations she wished to make to officials in Washington, beginning, of course, with her husband. First she prepared a report for the Red Cross, which, with its covering letter, came to nine pages single-spaced. Most of her other notations related to postwar planning and were items that she intended to take up with the president. She was fearful that once the war was over the returning veterans would be forgotten in a general slackening of national spirit and relaxation of controls. Legislation providing for jobs and education for veterans should be passed now and made known to the men in the services. There were other memos: “I do not like General . . . ” “Men not chief concern anywhere. Officers have too much men too little [Guadalcanal].” “French natives poorly cared for.”

  Had his wife told him about her trip, reporters asked Roosevelt shortly after Eleanor’s return. Yes, he replied, she has been talking almost ever since she got back.

  In press conference and radio broadcast she spoke of her admiration for the generation that she had seen in the South Pacific. She had been told that this generation was soft. “Golly, if that generation is soft I don’t know what it is going to be when it gets tough.” Often the mother in her spoke out: “If you had seen
the gatherings at the post offices each time we unloaded a bag of mail and it was distributed, you would know what your letters mean.”

  She ended the radio broadcast in which she reported on her trip with a plea for racial and religious tolerance:

  I wonder if I can transmit to you the feeling which I have so strongly. In a nation such as ours every man who fights for us is in some way, our man. His parents may be of any race or religion, but if that man dies, he dies side by side with all of his buddies, and if your heart is with any man, in some way it must be with all.19

  55.THE 1944 CAMPAIGN

  NOT LONG AFTER ELEANOR RETURNED FROM THE PACIFIC, Franklin told her that the meetings he had long sought with Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek were at last to take place.

  She wanted to accompany him because the tide of battle was turning, and the moment had arrived for political decisions that would shape the destinies of men and nations for decades to come. She wanted to be there when those decisions were made, perhaps to be able to interpose her “but Franklin” when in moments of weariness or irritation he seemed to be yielding to expediency or when the pulls of a class with which she had broken more decisively than he began to assert themselves.

  If she asked to go and did not wait for his invitation, she was emboldened to do so by the picture she nowadays always carried with her of the broken boys she had visited in the hospital wards: “If we don’t make this a more decent world to live in I don’t see how we can look these boys in the eyes. They are going to fight their handicaps all their lives & what for if the world is the same cruel, stupid place.”1

  At Harvard, Churchill had broached the idea of a common Anglo-American citizenship. That worried Eleanor, and when she mentioned her concern to Henry Wallace, the two agreed that Churchill was pushing for a U.S.-British alliance—“and we believed in a United Nations one. We thought Franklin did but it might not yet be the moment to shout about it when Eden, Hull & Stalin were meeting and the principals may meet in November or December. So I asked FDR & gathered he would like us all to keep quiet.”2

  She did what he asked, yet within the privacy of the family she continued to prod and press for a United Nations approach. She did not like the role of goad, especially when she realized that Franklin was beginning to show signs of wearing out, but she was driven by the sense that a moment of opportunity had arrived when history was open, a moment that must not be lost. Not even illness turned her aside.

  In October the president came down with intestinal flu. The founding conference of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was scheduled to meet a few weeks later in Atlantic City, and former Governor Lehman and Frank Sayre, who were in charge of the preparatory work, still did not know what the United States was prepared to offer. Should Eleanor bother the president, who was just beginning to recover? She decided that Lehman and Sayre had to have a chance to talk to him and put it up to her husband:

  Tonight the Lehmans’ & Sayres’ come to dine & get a chance to tell F. some of their troubles. The Relief Com. meeting is the 9th & they feel that no one is fighting for them or telling the country about their needs. They should lay in stores of food, clothing, seeds, farm machinery & they fight here with local demands. Now 44 nations will have to agree to take their quotas. It looks like our first test on working together & we are not even sure what our own Congress & our own agencies will do.3

  What the United States might be prepared to do to save the liberated peoples from starvation related to its ability to enlarge its food output without a price inflation. And that, in turn, depended on subsidy payments, which were the administration’s chief weapon for keeping down the cost of living. But Congress, in rebellion against wartime controls, was hostile to subsidies. Eleanor had been urging her husband to press Congress on the issue, and a week before he opened the UNRRA Conference he sent a message to Congress proposing a comprehensive food program. It delighted her. She found in it, she told friends, much that she had long advocated but which she had thought he had never accepted.4

  That was Franklin’s way. He fought her. He baited her. He used her to develop a case with which he might be in eventual, though not practical, sympathy. He tried to escape from her. And then he turned around and accepted her point of view. While the politician in him, the gay cavalier, the Hudson River squire, and the now weary and harassed president was often impatient with her, sometimes even angry, the idealist in him recognized her indispensability and valued the presence within the household of a loving and principled opposition.

  So she thought she might be of help in the conferences at the summit and asked to go. But he put his foot down and said no; no women would be there. Some journeys he wanted her to make and some he vetoed.5 There were times he wanted her with him and others when he did not. He set the pattern. He was in command. He ordered matters to suit himself. In continuing to serve him she walked a lonely path.

  He did not want his wife to accompany him to Cairo and Teheran, but he liked to have members of his family with him and arranged to have Elliott, Franklin Jr., and John Boettiger, all of whom were in the European theater of war, meet him. Eleanor questioned having Franklin Jr. leave his destroyer, the Mayrant, which had been badly damaged in the Palermo bombing. It was scheduled to return to the States for repairs, and Franklin Jr., who had behaved with great gallantry in that action, felt he should be with his men on the difficult return journey. “I tried to make Pa ask but not order,” Eleanor wrote James, “but he said he needed him & that was that.” All the way from Oran to Tunis Roosevelt tried to persuade his son that the Mayrant could do without him. He needed him, the president said. “You know, I am the Commander-in-Chief and I can order you to join me.” At this his son grinned and said he hoped his father would not do that. Finally the president gave up:

  F. jr. met the travelers in Tunis & blandly F. wrote me it seemed wiser for F. jr. to return with his own ship! I’m glad F. jr. had the sense of responsibility & F. respected it. Of course, I should never get excited for things always turn out this way!6

  The two Franklins arrived back in the United States at about the same time. It was a happy Christmas. Anna, Franklin Jr., John, and their families, including seven grandchildren, gathered in Hyde Park. When the grandchildren became too obstreperous in the library while their grandfather was with the photographers, Eleanor distracted them with carol singing. “It was busy but I think everyone enjoyed it,” she wrote, and before the holidays were over she had been told pretty much everything that had taken place at Cairo and Teheran. She knew from a letter from Mme. Chiang that the president had gotten on well with the generalissimo and that largely due to the president’s statesmanship the conference had been “a great success.” The president felt he had been equally successful at Teheran in mediating between Stalin and Churchill. With the artistry of a practiced storyteller, he described his first encounter with Stalin. He had scarcely been installed in his quarters, he said, when the door opened and there stood the marshal. He had paused on the threshold for a moment, taking Roosevelt’s measure while Roosevelt took his. Then Roosevelt grinned and Stalin reciprocated, and they shook hands firmly. The president felt that by the end of the conference he and Stalin were coming to understand and trust each other. Roosevelt and Churchill told Stalin the date and plans for the cross-channel invasion of Europe, and Stalin informed Roosevelt of Russia’s intention to enter the war against Japan once Hitler was defeated. The breakup of the Reich had been discussed and tentatively agreed to, but the decisions that most interested Eleanor were those dealing with the plans for a postwar peacekeeping organization:

  He found in a box yesterday a plan which he wrote when he was flat on his back years ago & Mr. Bok offered an award for a “peace plan” & I was on the jury so he never sent it in. . . . It shows F. says that you may forget what you once produced but it remains in your subconscious mind. Today it is virtually, with changes, the same as has been agreed on by some important people as the basic machinery to be set up.7


  As happy and relaxed as Roosevelt was at Hyde Park during Christmas week, he returned to Washington an ailing man. Diagnosed as flu the malady proved persistent and nagging, and after two weeks in Washington, the president was ready for another rest. “FDR left for a week in H.P.,” Eleanor wrote her Aunt Maude, “& I know he will return made over.” The stay at Hyde Park helped him, but the old zest seemed to be lacking: “FDR says he feels much better but I don’t think he longs to get back & fight.” That was something new. In the past the rout of an infection had been accompanied by a return of political combativeness. The previous winter he had left Hyde Park after a siege of flu “full of health” and, as he wrote Winston Churchill, feeling like “a fighting cock.” Now he could not shake his weariness. From a physical point of view the time had come for him to lay down his burdens, but Eleanor, who had strongly opposed a third term, did not feel that way about the fourth. As she was to tell her old Albany friend Margaret Doane Fayerweather just before Roosevelt departed on his last trip to Warm Springs: “I think he faced the fact, five years ago, that if he had to go on in office to accomplish his work, it must shorten his life, and he made that choice. If he can accomplish what he set out to do, and then dies, it will have been worth it. I agree with him.”8

  She agreed with him—a striking statement, for it showed that as critical as Eleanor often was of his compromises, she trusted his judgment and leadership. And leadership carried a responsibility which must be discharged even at the price of life. In her eyes, as well as his own, he, too, was a soldier in the service, and with almost five million young Americans overseas, how could he not finish the job? “Halsey has been here & Eisenhower,” she wrote Maude in January, 1944, “& today F. is reported to have said the war will last another 18 months which means I fear that we stay here & you stay in Ireland.”