December 4, 1944
Dearest Franklin:
I realize very well that I do not know the reasons why certain things may be necessary nor whether you intend to do them or do not intend to do them.
It does, however, make me rather nervous for you to say that you do not care what Jimmy Dunne thinks because he will do what you tell him to do and that for three years you have carried the State Department and you expect to go on doing it. I am quite sure that Jimmy Dunne is clever enough to tell you that he will do what you want and to allow his subordinates to accomplish things which will get by and which will pretty well come up in the long time results to what he actually wants to do.
In addition, it seems to me pretty poor administration to have a man in whom you know you can not put any trust, to carry out the things which you tell him to do. The reason I feel we can not trust Dunne is that we know he backed Franco and his regime in Spain. We know that now he is arguing Mr. Winant and the War Department in favor of using German industrialists to rehabilitate Germany because he belongs to the group which Will Clayton represents, plus others, who believe we must have business going in Germany for the sake of business here.
I sent you a memo on Yugoslavia, not because I want it sent to Mr. Stettinius because he has a duplicate, but just because I want you to read it while you have the time. This does not look as though Tito refused to send for things which would relieve his civilian population.
One of the young officers who worked for Gen. Donovan in Yugoslavia and who is now on leave, came to see me and said he had written a report which they promised to send you. He is afraid you have never seen it. In it he tells certain things which are gradually turning most of the people against us and toward Russia. He said that at first, Europeans everywhere thought America would help them but if we really want Russian influence to be paramount, we are going about it in the best possible way.
Neither you nor I can, of course, tell Bill Donovan that this young man told me these things, but you might ask whether there are any conflicting reports on the situation in Spain. The fine Catholic hand is visible in Europe and in our State Department.
With Dunne, Clayton and Acheson under Secretary Stettinius, I can hardly see that the set-up will be very much different from what it might have been under Dewey.
I hope the weather will be warmer and that you are getting some swimming and I am glad you are going to stay a little bit longer.
I suppose I should trust blindly when I can’t know and be neither worried or scared and yet I am both and when Harry Hopkins tells me he is for Clayton, etc. I’m even more worried. I hate to irritate you and I won’t speak of any of this again but I wouldn’t feel honest if I didn’t tell you now.
Much love,
E. R.
Two days later she was back at him again. The United States had protested Churchill’s veto of Count Carlo Sforza, the distinguished Italian anti-fascist, as foreign minister in the new Italian cabinet:
I like the statement on Sforza and our attitude toward the other governments very much indeed, but, are we going to use any real pressure on Winston? I am afraid words will not have much effect.
All of the newspapers which were agin you and all of the people who were agin you in the election are now loudly praising the State Department set-up. It does make me nervous and perhaps it is all right if you can make them all behave like reformed characters so the rest of us who have been doubting Thomases will have to take our hats off to them.
While the president gave his wife the impression that he did not agree with her criticism of the new command group in the State Department, in Warm Springs some of his actions showed that her criticisms had struck home. He refused to approve a press release submitted to him by Secretary of State Stettinius announcing the appointment of six new assistant secretaries because the name of Archibald MacLeish was not included. William D. Hassett, his press secretary, quoted him as saying that “Archie was the only liberal in the bunch, which is top-heavy with Old Dealers.”3 Who rendered him a greater service of love—Eleanor with her criticism, or Laura and Daisy, who were at Warm Springs (as was Lucy Rutherfurd the first few days of his stay) and who were concerned only with making this overburdened man’s life as pleasant as possible and introducing no jarring political note?
Eleanor wanted to see him on his return from Warm Springs, she warned him, “before you begin to look weary!”4 But he was in no hurry to see her. She, haunted by the fear of a war fought in vain, pressed her husband more strongly than ever. He, with the responsibility for victory or defeat, not to mention ten million lives, his energy and patience quickly exhausted, put her off more abruptly than ever before, sometimes without even a softening jollification. Anna, caught in the middle, sympathized with her father:
Although she knew the doctors had said he should have half an hour of relaxation, no business, just sitting around, maybe a drink, she would come in more and more frequently with an enormous bundle of letters which she wanted to discuss with him immediately and have a decision.5
On one occasion when Anna was mixing cocktails and her mother came in with her usual budget of questions and problems, “Father blew his top. He took the bundle of letters and pushed it over to me. ‘Sis, you handle this.’ And here I was striving to be neutral. What she wanted was o.k. but for him it was one more thing at the end of a tough day.”
Yet more than anyone else Eleanor helped him conserve his physical energy and emotional vitality. Missy had died in August while the president was in the Pacific,* and it was Eleanor who had attended the funeral, as she did the Mass for Alfred E. Smith in October and the memorial service for Wendell Willkie a few days later. At the inaugural receptions, while the president saw only a few intimates in the Green Room—chiefly family and Princess Martha and her entourage—she stood for hours, until she was drawn and exhausted doing the ceremonial things, shaking hands with hundreds of her husband’s supporters, visiting the National Democratic Club to shake more hands, then moving on to a gathering of the Democratic faithful at Oscar Ewing’s and ending the evening at the Electors’ Dinner. She was always ready to ease Franklin’s burdens by taking them on herself, but problems had to be faced and decisions made, and she could not remain silent when it seemed to her, as in the case of the State Department appointments, that he was following “the line of least resistance.”6 With an invincible belief that will and spirit could transcend infirmity, she was reluctant to treat him as an invalid or to have him accept invalidism. Indelibly engraved in her memory was the precedent to be avoided, if humanly possible, of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson standing between a nation calling for leadership and her invalid husband.
He had rallied so often before, but this time it seemed to be different:
For the first time I was beginning to realize that he could no longer bear to have a real discussion such as he always had. This was impressed on me one night when we were discussing with Harry Hooker the question of compulsory military service for all young men as a peacetime measure. Harry Hooker had long believed in this and had worked for it. I disliked the idea thoroughly and argued against it heatedly, probably because I felt Harry was so much in favor of it that Franklin seemed to be getting only one side of the picture. In the end, I evidently made Franklin feel I was really arguing against him and I suddenly realized he was upset. I stopped at once, but afterwards Harry Hooker took me to task and said I must not do that to Franklin again. I knew only too well that in discussing the issue I had forgotten that Franklin was no longer the calm and imperturbable person who, in the past, had always goaded me to vehement arguments when questions of policy came up. It was just another indication of the change which we were all so unwilling to acknowledge.7
Two days after the inauguration the president left for the Yalta Conference. Eleanor had asked to go along, but as in the case of the Cairo and Teheran conferences he had turned her down:
Franklin felt that if I went it would only add to the difficulties as everyone would
feel they had to pay attention to me, but since Sarah Churchill was going, Franklin thought Anna would be a help and a comfort and I am sure she will be. I am very proud of her, she has grown into such an extremely capable person and a fine person as well as a lovely one.8
So Eleanor wrote to Lady Willert two weeks after the travelers left, but what she said of her pride and pleasure in Anna’s having accompanied her father only partially disclosed her feelings. She was worried about Franklin’s condition, his irritability, his impatience, his tendency to follow the path of least resistance. “FDR and Anna go tomorrow night and I’m not really happy about this trip but one can’t live in fear, can one?”
Just before his departure Roosevelt sent to Congress his nomination of Wallace to succeed Jesse Jones as secretary of commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The battle that broke out in Congress seemed to Eleanor symptomatic of the “bigger” fight: “Are we to be Liberal or Conservative?” Roosevelt’s letter dismissing Jones did not help Wallace because it made it appear that the only reason he was asking Jones to take another job in his administration was to repay Wallace for a political loyalty in 1944 that entitled him to whatever job he wanted—except secretary of state. “The Jones-Wallace fight is on,” Eleanor reported to her husband in Yalta:
Of course Jones has behaved horribly & your letter when published was hard on Wallace. I know you wrote it hoping to make Jones feel better but I guess he’s the kind of dog you should have ousted the day after election & given him the reasons. He would not have published that letter! . . . People like Oscar Ewing are telling newspaper men that “Henry is a nice fellow, but he shouldn’t have R.F.C.” So to-morrow I’m going to call Mr. Hannegan & ask what he and the Com. are doing to back Wallace.9
It was time to stop being blackmailed by the conservatives, she wrote a soldier correspondent stationed in China: “Either we are going to give in to our diehard Southern Congressmen or we are going to be the liberal party.”10
She tried to get more help from her husband for Wallace: “Your message came through to Barkley but we wish you had added a little word for Wallace. We assume you take it for granted we know you believe Wallace will help you to do the job, but a little reassurance would be helpful!” But Roosevelt was unresponsive. As cabled messages came in about the Wallace situation from Sam Rosenman as well as from Eleanor, Roosevelt handed them on to James Byrnes, who was with him, with “little indication of personal interest.”11
Eleanor sensed that: “I wish I knew what you really thought & really wanted. I’ve explained your letter to Jones & wondered if I was doing some wishful thinking & Mary Norton asked me the other day if you really wanted Wallace.”
This was written on February 13. The few messages he sent her from Yalta were, although affectionate, either silent or equivocal on the subject of Wallace. “Dearest Babs,” he wrote her the day he left the Crimea:
We have wound up the conference—successfully I think and this is just a line to tell you that we are off for the Suez Canal and then home but I doubt if we get back till the 28th. I am a bit exhausted but really all right.
I do hope all goes well. It has been grand hearing from you and I expect another pouch tomorrow.
Ever so much love.
Devotedly
F12
On February 11 the results of the Yalta Conference were announced in a joint statement by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. “We seem to be almost united as a country in approval of the results of the Conference,” Eleanor reported to her husband, happy to be able to send him good tidings for a change:
I think you must be very well satisfied & your diplomatic abilities must have been colossal! Jonathan is happy. John is happy. All the world looks smiling! I think having the first U.N. meeting in San Francisco is a stroke of genius. At last will Marshal Stalin leave his own country, or won’t you three have to be on hand?13
The travelers returned, and Eleanor was grateful that the president seemed ruddy and rested and stoical about the death of Pa Watson, which had occurred at sea:
He says he felt well all the time & he feels evidently that all went well. He liked Stalin better & felt they got on better than before. He says his one complete failure was with Ibn Saud on Palestine but says F. “he is 75 & has been wounded 9 times, it will be easier to deal with the son who comes to power.” I believe there are 49 sons! He does not seem upset over DeGaulle. We do go out to open the San Francisco Conference.14
She liked his report to Congress on Yalta partly because he was conciliatory and resisted the temptation to strike back at his critics. But a few weeks later when the news about the agreement to give Soviet Russia three votes in the UN General Assembly was leaked, she began to have misgivings:
The secret agreement at Yalta sounds to me very improbable but I do know F. remarked Molotoff was interpreting certain things differently from the way they had been understood. Of course I don’t know what happened & can’t ask over the telephone but I just don’t think FDR would be stupid enough to make secret agreements!15
U.S. differences with Russia over what had been agreed to at Yalta, she later learned, related to the more vital matters of Poland and the liberated areas generally and not to Russia’s three UN votes, to which the president had acquiesced. It is doubtful that Eleanor’s presence at Yalta would have changed the course of events there. In later years she said that Franklin got as good an agreement from the Russians as was possible given the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe and the desire of U.S. military leaders to insure Russian’s entry into the war against Japan once Hitler was defeated.†16
The president’s willingness to address Congress sitting down, because of the weight of his steel braces, had meant to her that he was accepting “a certain degree of invalidism.” All through March he had been impatient to get away to Warm Springs, and she was pleased when he decided to do so, taking Laura Delano and Margaret Suckley with him. “I know they would not bother him as I should have by discussing questions of state; he would be allowed to get a real rest and yet would have companionship—and that was what I felt he most needed.”17
Margaret Fayerweather was at the White House when he arrived from Hyde Park on his way to Warm Springs. The president seemed to her “terribly thin and worn and gray,” and it was painful to her to watch the way his hands shook. She asked Eleanor about it. “She says a loss of muscular control is noticeable,” Mrs. Fayerweather noted in her diary. “He no longer wants to drive his own car at Hyde Park—lets her drive, which he never did before, and lets her mix cocktails if Colonel Boettiger is not present.” And yet, added Eleanor, she had to smile when people spoke of how tired Franklin must be:
I am all ready to hand over to others now in all that I do and go home to live in retirement; but Franklin said to me last Sunday, “You know, Eleanor, I’ve seen so much now of the Near East and Ibn Saud and all of them, when we get through here, I believe I’d like to go and live there. I feel quite an expert, I believe I could help to straighten out the Near East.” “Can’t you think of something harder to do?” I asked. “Well, yes,” he answered quite seriously. “It’s going to be awfully hard to straighten out Asia, what with India and China and Thailand and Indo-China. I’d like to get into that.” Does that sound tired to you, Margaret? I’m all ready to sit back. He’s still looking forward to more work.18
Her letter to Maude was gloomier:
FDR with whom I talked to-day seems settled in Warm Springs & the rest will do him good. He should gain weight but he hates his food. I say a prayer daily that he may be able to carry on till we have peace & our feet are set in the right direction. . . . Elliott cables that he hopes the end will come soon in Germany. The boys in the Pacific are not so optimistic. All three are there now & I suppose in this battle. I can’t help worrying about them all, they’ve been in so long, will their luck hold.19
With the president in Warm Springs and less accessible than ever, the calls on Eleanor for help were greater tha
n ever. Mrs. Gladys Tillett, assistant chairman of the Democratic National Committee, wanted her to ask Stettinius to appoint women as advisers to the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco Conference; she did. Charl Williams of the National Education Association was worried about a bill that might permit federal aid to church-related schools; off went a memo to the president: “It seems to me unwise to strengthen the sectarian and private schools.” James Carey, who had attended the founding conference of the World Federation of Trade Unions in London, sent her his report; “Frances dear,” Eleanor wrote the secretary of labor, “what do you think of these recommendations?” She asked Ugo Carusi, the commissioner of immigration, why unused quotas could not be added to current quotas to ease the barriers against refugees, a thought-provoking question, even though the commissioner felt legislation would be needed. The sharecroppers in southeastern Missouri, whom she had helped before, were now threatened with eviction from their FSA homes; Eleanor asked presidential assistant James Barnes to see what he could do on the Hill to stop it. She conferred with Senator J. W. Fulbright and Assistant Secretary of State MacLeish about the proposed International Education and Cultural Organization. She attended Mary Bethune’s meeting of the National Council of Negro Women and left with a new batch of assignments. She went after General Frank J. Hines for his stale and unimaginative management of the Veterans Administration, using an article in Harper’s—“The Veterans’ Runaround” by Charles Bolte, head of the fledgling American Veterans Committee—to instigate a discussion that involved Byrnes, Baruch, and her husband. She transmitted to General George C. Marshall and other military leaders her weekly accumulation of complaints and appeals from GIs, their mothers, and their wives. She saw Algernon Black of the Ethical Culture Society, who wanted to go overseas to work with Negro troops, and gave him a letter to the undersecretary of war. A young Nigerian prince told her of a plan to obtain scholarships for Nigerian boys and girls, and she promised to help him set up his committee. Rabbi Isaac H. Steinberg came to see her about a proposal to settle Jewish refugees in Australia; she sent it on to the president. There was a request from nuclear physicist Leo Szilard to see her. He had composed a memorandum on how to avoid a nuclear-arms race with Russia. “I was not certain that this memorandum would reach the president if I sent it ‘through channels.’ . . . I intended to transmit my memorandum through her—in a sealed envelope—to the President.” He was informed Mrs. Roosevelt would see him on April 12.
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