Eleanor and Franklin

by Joseph P. Lash

  My conclusion is that there have been no more missteps and delays than ought to be anticipated on a matter of this novelty and complexity and that the organization is sound and in capable hands.37

  Conant’s report to the president was not wholly correct, according to Wigner: “By that time I felt it was too late for a change, but we certainly did not tell Conant we did not share Lowen’s views.” While reconciled to the arrangements with duPont, the MetLab men were more than ever concerned with long-range development and control of the atom. Eleanor saw Lowen again, three weeks after D day. “We now have the discovery, I’m told, which he feared Germany would have first but I gather no one wants to use it for its destructive power is so great that no one knows where it might stop.” “Our fears were political,” recalled Wigner. “They were fears about letting this destructive force loose upon the world.”38

  To the nuclear scientists, and to the country generally, Eleanor and Franklin were partners. In the 1944 presidential campaign those who viewed her as a “dangerous” woman counted this against Roosevelt, but to the New Deal wing of the Roosevelt coalition her presence at his side was a reassurance as to Roosevelt’s purposes. The prospect of a fourth term gave Eleanor fewer problems than had the third: “I don’t know what F. will decide but if he thinks he is needed I’m sure he’ll make the fight & if he loses, I shant be as sorry as I would be if he didn’t accept the responsibility when he felt he should.”39

  She listened to the Republican convention, which nominated a Dewey-Bricker ticket at the end of June:

  All promises & no performance. We’ll promise too in our convention & how little any of us really know what we can do after the war. All one should say is: “Build a character that can meet new conditions without fear, develop the power to think things thro’ & face facts & recognize the interdependence among men!” I wonder why we can’t all be humble & less bombastic?40

  May Craig, who stopped at Hyde Park en route home from the Republican convention, told Eleanor that the Republican campaign was to be keynoted to youth as against “a tired old man.” “Fortunately, he looks pretty vigorous,” was Eleanor’s comment to May, as it was to a discouraged young friend who wrote her that the Democratic party had turned timid and respectable. The president had to compromise at the moment because winning the war was the most important thing, Eleanor replied. “When the war is over even an elderly gentleman like the President may do some surprising things.”41

  The president’s health fluctuated wildly and deceptively. His wife could write about Franklin’s postwar plans, yet Ed Flynn, who saw him after his return from Hobcaw, was so shocked by his appearance and by a querulousness and apathy that were wholly foreign to his old friend that he begged Eleanor to use her influence to keep him from running again. There is no evidence that she did; on the contrary, and especially after the Republicans had nominated Thomas E. Dewey, she found herself contemplating the possibility of her husband’s defeat with apprehension for the country, even though from her “own point of view four more years in the White House is almost more than I can bear. I am very conscious of age & the short time I have in which to live as I like & I know that is such selfish thinking that one has no right even to let it be in one’s mind.”42

  She had a profound trust in her husband’s leadership, but it did not keep her from disagreeing with him. She did her utmost to keep him from dropping Wallace as his running mate even though she had to agree with him that Wallace was not a good politician. “I wrote a column on Wallace but Franklin says I must hold it till after the convention. I wish I were free!” She accompanied Franklin to the West Coast while the Democratic convention was in progress. “Wallace is fighting,” she reported, sadly adding that his radio speech “was nice but not inspiring.” She sought to console Wallace when he lost. “I had hoped that by some miracle you could win out, but it looks to me as though the bosses had functioned pretty smoothly. I am told that Senator Truman is a good man, and I hope so for the sake of the country.” A week later she wrote more positively about Truman to Esther Lape: “I am much more satisfied with Senator Truman than I would have been with some of the others who were seriously considered.”43

  Publicly her role in the 1944 campaign was little different from what it had been in earlier ones: “I have been very busy making ‘non-political’ speeches about registering and voting!” But her behind-the-scenes participation was considerably reduced. Farley and Flynn had always consulted her, indeed, had sought to pull her into the campaign as deeply as she allowed, but Hannegan gave her a wide berth, avoiding her invitations before the Democratic convention to come in and talk to her. Not only was she a strong Wallace partisan, but she was a transmitter of messages that neither he nor the president wanted to receive, such as Walter White’s warning that the Negro vote should not be taken for granted. White had telephoned Eleanor just before the convention to warn that the majority of Negroes would vote Republican unless a very strong civil-rights plank was adopted at the convention. She tried, unsuccessfully, to get the president to see White, but the Democratic leaders feared that a strong plank would mean a split with the southern democrats. So Hannegan kept away from Eleanor, and after the convention when he very much wanted to see her, there was always a reason why she could not fit him in. She was no political novice.44

  Another reason that she was less involved in the 1944 campaign was Roosevelt’s own aloofness from it. He was withdrawn and indifferent. “I don’t think Pa would really mind defeat,” Eleanor wrote James. “If elected he’ll do his job well. I feel sure and I think he can be kept well to do it but he does get tired so I think if defeated he’ll be content. . . . I am only concerned because Dewey seems to me more and more to show no understanding of the job at home or abroad.” Pa Watson remarked that the president “just doesn’t seem to give a damn.” As usual, when every other approach failed, the White House staff and the politicians turned to Eleanor to persuade her husband to come down “into the dusty political arena” and begin to swing.45

  Eleanor felt that the president owed it to the country to campaign—it was “only through the actual sight and feel of the crowds that the man in public life really gets to know what the people who back him believe in.” Moreover, he looked well to her after his return from Honolulu and the Aleutians, although he did look older: “Whatever he had last spring took a toll, but I guess he feels his experience and equipment will help him to do a better job than Mr. Dewey.” She thought so, too, even though within the family she fought the conservative pressure on him, which, if yielded to, she feared might mean losing the peace. She and the president drove down to Fishkill to have tea with the Morgenthaus. The future of Germany came up, and Morgenthau chided the president for appointing Robert Murphy as political adviser to Eisenhower in Germany: “Why pick Robert Murphy for the job? In the minds of the people it connoted Darlan§ and everything that goes with it.” Eleanor intervened to say that given the attitude of the pope it was a mistake to send a Catholic to Germany. The president came to the pope’s defense, reported Morgenthau, “particularly in regard to this last speech the Pope made on private property. The President said the Pope had always been for private property and was against Communism.” Morgenthau did not find the president’s line of reasoning reassuring or convincing, but he was gratified to note Eleanor’s attitude on the future of Germany: “She had been slightly pacifist before the war and I thought she might think we should go a little easy on the Germans, but she doesn’t.”46 Eleanor accompanied the president to Quebec for his talks with Churchill on the future of Germany. “I hope for the sake of these negotiations & the future that F. is elected & continues vigorous in action till the major trends are established.”¶47

  With Roosevelt silent, the polls in early September showed an alarming drop in his strength and a rise in Dewey’s. The clamor that he campaign actively increased, and Eleanor quietly abetted the efforts of his associates to get him to do so. She seated a personable friend, Trude Pratt, who wa
s working at Democratic headquarters, next to him at dinner at Hyde Park:

  I had a long talk with the Boss, sticking out my neck—trying to convince him to speak more often—and before crowds. . . . He said he did not want to speak—his voice was bad. I told him he had to—and his ills were imaginary—and if he did not really want to win he should not have run (after that I almost died)—but he said, I was right—and would I go on. Yes, I said, it’s a tragedy that both Hannegan and Porter were green and that you have to do it all alone. Yes, he said, that was bad—what else? They could think only of the Democratic Party, I said, and had no courage. Yes, he said, he was interested in a new liberal party—and that’s why he wanted to see Wendell (whose death may be very bad for us). What else? By that time I was no longer afraid of him, so we talked about the kind of thing that should be done. . . . 48

  The proddings were effective, or perhaps he enjoyed the proddings because they pushed him in the direction he had always planned to go. A week before he went to Hyde Park he surprised his news conference by announcing that he would make a political speech to the Teamsters Union on September 23. That speech proved to be a political classic:

  These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, on my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. . . . He has not been the same dog since.49

  He was still champ. He began to campaign as energetically as he had in 1940, and as he campaigned, wrote Robert Sherwood, he “improved visibly in strength and resilience,” even regaining the use of his legs sufficiently to stand and speak from the rear of his campaign train. Sherwood did not know how Roosevelt had accomplished this, but he believed that “it was largely due to the determination of Mrs. Roosevelt who supported him in refusal to accept physical defeat as she had done when he was first stricken in 1921.”#50

  The Monday before the election, Roosevelt made what he called “another sentimental journey” in an open car through the Hudson Valley. Eleanor did not go along. “They always stop at the same places,” she explained, “and I think the one in Beacon is the very spot where the President made his very first campaign speech when he entered politics as a young man, running in a ‘hopeless’ district for the State Senate.” She caught up with Franklin at his last stop in Poughkeepsie, where he was introduced by Dean Mildred Thompson of Vassar, and then she dashed down to headquarters in New York City to thank the campaign workers on the president’s behalf.

  This election night at Hyde Park was the same as the others had been, yet somehow different: the neighbors came in and the president’s intimates were there, as were Eleanor’s; but all four sons were overseas, and Anna and her son Johnny were the only members of the immediate family who were present. There were other faces missing as well. When at 9:00 P.M. the dining room was cleared and “the real business,” as Eleanor put it, of tabulating the votes began, she thought of Louis Howe, “who really enjoyed sitting in his shirt sleeves and calculating the percentages,” of Missy, who always sat with the little group of men around the president, and of Sara, who could never understand Eleanor’s detachment on such occasions.

  At 11:40 the traditional torchlight parade from the village arrived, and this time Roosevelt permitted himself to be wheeled out to address them from the wheel chair, instead of putting on his heavy braces and standing up. It was too early to make any statement, he told his neighbors, “but it looks like I’ll be coming up here from Washington again for another four years.” The president was wheeled back into the house, and Eleanor beckoned the scores of shivering reporters and photographers to come in and warm themselves in front of the library’s fires, which she ordered stoked up, and to share in the cheese, crackers, and coffee that were being served. The president returned to the dining room. The returns grew progressively better, and at 3:15 in the morning Dewey conceded.

  “There was a great deal of excitement all through the evening among many people about us,” Eleanor wrote afterward, “but I can’t say that I felt half as much excited as I will feel the day that I hear the war is over.”51

  Although the president’s popular margin was reduced in comparison to the 1940 returns, his victory was substantial and included a sizable increase in Democratic strength in Congress. To Eleanor, victory immediately posed the question: “What for?” When they returned to Washington she put that question to the president and Harry Hopkins in a talk she had with them about the next four years and which Hopkins recorded:

  Mrs. Roosevelt urged the President very strongly to keep in the forefront of his mind the domestic situation because she felt there was a real danger of his losing American public opinion in his foreign policy if he failed to follow through on the domestic implications of his campaign promises. She particularly hoped the President would not go to Great Britain and France and receive great demonstrations abroad for the present, believing that that would not set too well with the American people.

  She impressed on both of us that we must not be satisfied with merely making campaign pledges; the President being under moral obligation to see his domestic reforms through, particularly the organizing of our domestic life in such a way as to give everybody a job. She emphasized that this was an overwhelming task and she hoped neither the President nor I thought it was settled in any way by making speeches.52

  Of this Hopkins note Sherwood wrote that Eleanor was known as the president’s “eyes and ears” but that there were many others who reported to him. The unique function that she performed for her husband was “as the keeper of and constant spokesman for her husband’s conscience.”

  Her allegedly radical influence upon the president had been an issue in the campaign, a “phony” one, she said. She had never had any real power or influence, she maintained. In any case, “these aren’t the things people make decisions about. But, the election showed that the people on the whole believe even a woman has a right to do what she believes is the right thing.” With the world “rocking on its foundations,” she did not intend to play the part of “a Dresden doll.”53

  * This presumably is what Dr. McIntire told Eleanor, and it may be that she did not appreciate the nature of his illness. A young heart specialist, Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, who was brought in to examine the president at this time—the end of March—diagnosed “hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, cardiac failure (left ventricular) and acute bronchitis”—conditions, he added, that “had been completely unsuspected up to this time.”

  “I’m sure Mother did not know he had congestive heart failure,” Anna asserted, “and if they said he had hypertension it would have meant very little to her.” Neither was Anna told about the congestive heart failure. In 1956 Eleanor was interviewed by Clayton Knowles of the New York Times on the subject of the president’s health. She said that the president’s doctors had told him less than three months before his campaign for a fourth term that he “could quite easily go on with the activities of the Presidency,” and that despite recurrent rumors to the contrary, he had never had a heart attack.

  † My account of this episode is based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s correspondence with Josephine Truslow Adams and interviews with Earl Browder and Esther Lape, a friend of Miss Adams’.

  ‡ The announcement that had alarmed the scientists was an Associated Press dispatch from London, December 3, 1943, which read: “Again threatening retaliation for the air war upon Germany, the Berlin radio said today that the German High Command ‘intends by one fell drastic stroke to end the unbridled mass murder,’ and added that ‘mankind is not far from the point where it can at will blow up half the globe.’”

  § The U.S. decision to recognize the authority in French North Africa of the Vichyite Admiral Jean Darlan when Allied troops landed there had provoked an uproar that only abated when Darlan was assassinated a few weeks after the invasion began.

  ¶ “As to your feelings about ‘uncon
ditional surrender,’” Eleanor wrote Helena Hirst in London (Sept. 28, 1943),

  I think that was my husband’s phrase because he uses it very often. I think the feeling is that Germany needs to be made to feel that civilized people do not associate with people who accept brutality such as they have meted out to the Jews and other conquered peoples. One can not pin all the blame on Hitler. The people accepted him and though it was done through education, they will have to take the consequences I fear, until new generations have grown up. I am afraid I have very little sympathy for any people or any nationality whether German, Italian or Japanese, who accept tamely, actions of their governments and then think they are not to blame for them.

  # There was “a complete disregard of the rest regimen” in October, Dr. Bruenn wrote. “He really enjoyed going to the ‘hustings,’ and despite this his blood pressure levels, if anything, were lower than before.”

  56.DEATH OF THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

  ELEANOR WAS “IN FOR IT” FOR ANOTHER FOUR YEARS, ESTHER Lape wrote her on Election Day, adding that Eleanor had an obligation to think of how she could use her power most effectively. “She’s not the only one to tell me I have a responsibility but I feel inadequate,” Eleanor wrote on Esther’s letter.1 Her sense of inadequacy did not keep her from expressing her views to Franklin more forcefully than ever.

  At the time of the Democratic convention when Eleanor had protested the party’s “pussyfooting” on all controversial issues, the president had put her off with the plea “wait till November.” She was fearful then that in November there would be other “compelling reasons . . . for tactics which may be wise but which I feel are just appeasement.”2 That was what now happened. The reorganization of the State Department that followed Hull’s resignation alarmed and outraged her. She expressed herself forcefully in a letter to her husband, who had left for Warm Springs. The letter is worth quoting in some detail for it shows how tough, relentless, and perhaps unfair, she could be: