1944

by Jay Winik

  Still, she lacked self-confidence and considered herself an ugly duckling. But as the months passed, she shrewdly learned to compensate for her self-doubts. When she entered boarding school at the age of fifteen, in England at Allenwood—in many ways as prestigious as Groton—where classes were conducted entirely in French, she became the most popular girl in the school. She was earnest and eager and hardworking. She was also a quick study. The school’s headmistress was an ardent feminist—this was rare for the times—and Eleanor learned to question the orthodoxy of the day and to freely express her thoughts, a scandalous liberty in the rigid, patriarchal age of Victorianism. Slender and sophisticated, already at a young age she was an ardent Progressive, taking an interest in political events. She would later comment that under the tutelage of the headmistress, who had a profound influence on her, she developed a “liberal mind and a strong personality.” And unlike Franklin, whose success at sports was modest at best, she made the first team in field hockey.

  In the cool autumn days of 1903, Roosevelt and Eleanor dated, always, of course, with a chaperone. He asked her to come to Cambridge for the big game—Harvard versus Yale. The next day, under a clear sky, the two ambled along the Nashua River. Roosevelt proposed; she accepted. When he told his mother at Thanksgiving, Sara was aghast, believing that he was simply too young. She entreated the young couple to keep the engagement secret for a year. However, she did not object to Eleanor, nor did she try to forbid the marriage. They accepted the arrangement. In the meantime Eleanor wrote letters to Franklin brimming with affection—she called him “boy darling,” or “Franklin dearest.” In turn her nickname was “Little Nell.”

  In September 1904, Franklin and his mother moved to 200 Madison Avenue, a massive brick town house near J. P. Morgan’s stately mansion, and Franklin entered Columbia Law School. This was prelude. On October 11, a buoyant Roosevelt gave Eleanor an engagement ring from Tiffany’s. She was just twenty, and their arrangement was now official. When their engagement was announced and they were receiving a flurry of congratulations, Theodore Roosevelt insisted the wedding take place in the White House “under his roof.” They demurred. Instead the lavish wedding took place at Eleanor’s great-aunt’s twin town houses; there were top hats and elegant carriages, and Theodore himself was there to give the bride away. The couple had two honeymoons: the first was a modest week away; the second was a three-month grand tour that took them to London, Scotland, Paris, Milan, Verona, Venice, Saint Moritz, and the Black Forest. Roosevelt bought Eleanor a dozen dresses and a long sable coat, and, for himself, a silver fox coat and an old library: three thousand leather-bound books.

  At Columbia Law School, as at Harvard, he was an undistinguished student, receiving B’s, C’s, and a D. Vaguely bored and wealthy, confident and even a bit cocky, he seldom let studies stand in the way of a good time. One Columbia professor remarked that Roosevelt had little aptitude for the law—actually, he had initially failed courses in contracts and civil procedure—and that he “made no effort” to overcome the problem with hard work. Nevertheless, he easily passed the New York bar examination in his third year, upon which he promptly dropped out of school; he never earned his degree. Meanwhile, at Christmastime in 1905, Sara told the newlyweds that she had hired a firm to construct a town house for them (“a Christmastime present from mama”), which would adjoin a second home: hers; the dining rooms and drawing rooms of the two homes opened into each other. Very much her own woman, Eleanor was deeply unhappy with the fact that Sara was making so many major decisions for her family. But Roosevelt was unsympathetic, acting as if there were no problem. As Eleanor herself explained, “I think he always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough it would settle itself.” Three years later, Sara gave Roosevelt and Eleanor a second house, an elegant seaside cottage on the gorgeous shores of Campobello Island. The sprawling home had thirty-four rooms, manicured lawns, shimmering crystal and silver, and seven fireplaces, as well as four full baths—although no electricity.

  All told, theirs was a lavish lifestyle. In addition to their three houses, they always had at least five servants, a number of automobiles and carriages, a large yacht, and many smaller boats; Roosevelt continued to love the water. As befitted their station, they belonged to exclusive clubs, dressed stylishly, and donated their money to various charitable causes. As for their five children? They were to be raised by governesses, nurses, and other caregivers. Eleanor, as serious as ever, was the stricter of the two parents. Her grandmother had always been quick to say “no” rather than “yes,” and she was the same. By contrast, Franklin was warm, good-humored, and engaging. As his daughter Anna once said, “Father was fun.”

  He was more than fun. Early on, he confessed that he had little taste for the law. Nor was he content with summering at Campobello or sailing at Newport or spending his time at seasonal coming-out parties. With uncommon candor, he explained that he planned to run for office, and audaciously believed he would one day be president. First, he would become a state assemblyman—a low-paying part-time job in Albany—then assistant secretary of the navy, and finally governor of New York. Theodore had made it to the White House following exactly that path; why couldn’t Franklin?

  IT HAPPENED ALMOST AS he predicted.

  Except at the start. The assemblyman who Roosevelt assumed would step aside to provide him with a seat declined his entreaties. Still, Roosevelt was determined. He first threatened to run as an independent, but was then persuaded to run for the state senate as a Democrat, in the Twenty-sixth District, which had elected only one Democrat to the office in fifty-four years. A committee of three nominated Roosevelt, and the local newspaper, the Republican Poughkeepsie Eagle, sniped that he had been “discovered” by the Democrats more for his deep pockets than for any other redeeming qualities. Roosevelt, in a style he would use again and again, motored around the district in an open touring car, which was painted bright red and owned by a piano tuner. Along with two other local candidates, he crisscrossed the district in this newfangled automobile, purring along at twenty-two miles per hour. He was attentive: as he bumped down the dusty, rutted roads, he made sure that the campaign car was pulled over and the engine shut off whenever a horse-drawn carriage or hay wagon appeared, lest it startle the animals or peeve a voter.

  At the outset, he was not a great speaker. His words were too abstract, and he relied too much on flattery of himself and others. But he would speak anywhere—on a front porch, by the side of a road, on the top of a hay bale. Eleanor would describe his style as “slow,” noting that “every now and then there would be a long pause, and I would be worried for fear he would never go on.” With her discerning eye, she thought he looked “tall, high-strung,” and even “nervous.” However, he excelled at working a crowd—his energetic hands seemed permanently outstretched, ready to grip the next open palm. Still, the campaign was often poorly run. Once, while traveling in the eastern edge of the district, he arrived at a small town late in the afternoon, jumped from the car, headed straight to the hotel, and invited everyone in the bar to have a drink—on him. Only after the bartender began pouring did Roosevelt think to ask where he was: Sharon, Connecticut, not only the wrong district but the wrong state. Undaunted, Roosevelt grinned and paid up; and then proceeded to reuse the story and the joke for years. And he had no qualms about trading on his famous name, borrowing his cousin Theodore’s pronunciation of “dee-lighted,” and sometimes announcing to a crowd, “I’m not Teddy,” his way of suggesting that he was the other Roosevelt. On Election Day, despite a last-minute rush by the Republicans, Franklin Roosevelt carried the district by more than 1,100 votes.

  The Roosevelts rented a house in Albany, for a princely $4,800 a year. Eleanor, prone to recurring depressions, was at first reluctant about the house, about the job, and about politics in general, but she gritted her teeth and assumed that it was a wife’s duty to be involved in her husband’s interests—although when she had tried her hand at golf, Roosevelt had watche
d her swing and promptly dissuaded her.

  He immersed himself in political life but did not always win over his fellow politicians. He particularly had trouble reaching the Irish-Catholic Democrats. Roosevelt’s father had disdained Irishmen, even as workers in his household, and a leading New York politico, James Farley, claimed that Eleanor had once said to him, “Franklin finds it hard to relax with people who aren’t his social equals.” Eleanor strongly denied it, although in her own early letters she made less than temperate observations about Jews; once, of a party honoring the financier Bernard Baruch (who would later become a close ally), she wrote, “I’d rather be hung than seen there.” And Roosevelt himself was at times clearly uneasy working with different classes outside his own tight circle. As he later acknowledged to his secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, “I was an awfully mean cuss when I first went into politics.” Moreover, if he was a Progressive, he was a cautious one. It took him until 1912 to openly support women’s suffrage, and he would not back a labor reform bill mandating a fifty-four-hour maximum workweek for women and children, even after the devastating fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, in which more than a hundred female garment workers died.

  Then came 1912. Two years after Roosevelt had won his state senate seat, he was running for reelection and Woodrow Wilson was running for president, against Theodore, who was a third-party candidate. Following politics rather than kinship, and, as ever, self-interest most of all, Roosevelt backed Wilson. He had been at the Democratic convention, working the room, ostensibly on behalf of Wilson, but equally on behalf of himself. One of the men he impressed was Josephus Daniels, a member of the Democratic National Committee and also the editor of the Raleigh, North Carolina, News and Observer. But that would be significant later. First, Roosevelt had to win reelection to the state senate, and suddenly that goal was in jeopardy. In September, Roosevelt fell seriously ill with typhoid fever in New York City. He was too sick to campaign, or even to get out of bed. Eventually he recovered, but his political career now seemed imperiled.

  It was Eleanor who rescued him by contacting Louis Howe, a dogged Albany newspaperman and political impresario who was enthralled with Roosevelt. She asked whether Howe would consider taking over the campaign. Howe eagerly said yes. In truth, he didn’t look like much, and seemed an odd partner for the patrician Roosevelt. He was squat, asthmatic, and stooped, with a pitted face and a cigarette wobbling between his lips; he was often unbathed as well. Yet he was a political genius who quickly became Roosevelt’s virtual surrogate, taking out full-page newspaper ads and producing a direct-mail campaign of multigraphed letters bearing Roosevelt’s signature. In effect he took over the last six weeks of the campaign. And in a dramatic departure, Howe remade Roosevelt into a full Progressive, supporting labor rights, supporting women’s suffrage, and complaining about Republican political bosses. With Howe at the helm, Roosevelt won reelection by an even wider margin than he had achieved in 1910. When Roosevelt reached the White House, Howe became his secretary—the equivalent of today’s chief of staff—and he did not leave Roosevelt’s side until he died in April 1936.

  The state senate was only a stepping-stone. Roosevelt had early on let it be known, to Wilson in particular, that he wanted a job in Washington. He turned down two offers—as an assistant secretary in the Treasury, and as a collector for the Port of New York—holding out for his desire: assistant secretary of the navy. His obstinacy paid off; Wilson gave him the navy job. He would be serving under Josephus Daniels, whom he had befriended during his state senate campaign. Roosevelt now held the same post that had launched his cousin Theodore on the way to the White House.

  In the Navy Department, Roosevelt learned about the bureaucracy and the ways of Washington. He brought Louis Howe with him, and this enabled him to also keep tabs on New York. Roosevelt enjoyed the trappings and the ceremony, but as the number two man, he was on the periphery of power, and he knew it. Making the ships run on time was not the role to which Roosevelt aspired. He tried to make a bid himself for the U.S. Senate but failed. His candidacy was rebuffed by his own party and by the president himself—humiliatingly for Roosevelt, Wilson openly backed a rival candidate. Roosevelt was routed in the primary, and never forgave the man who had opposed him, James Gerard, who was the U.S. ambassador to Germany and a former justice of the New York state supreme court. Fortunately World War I intervened, and Roosevelt quickly devised plans for expanding the U.S. Navy (which were ignored) and also improved his ability to testify before Congress (which got him noticed). The efforts worked. By 1916, his stance as a “preparedness Democrat” made him an asset in Wilson’s reelection campaign. Roosevelt was sent to stump in New England and the mid-Atlantic states, and it was here that he first began using his fire hose analogy, the idea of lending one’s own hose to a neighbor whose house is on fire. Over time, he would tweak, amend, and refine this analogy, which became one of the most famous concepts of his political career. He would later use it during World War II to sell a wary American nation on his Lend-Lease policy for Great Britain.

  For Roosevelt, when the United States finally entered World War I in April 1917 after the torpedoing of three steamships, the navy was the place to be. At that time it had 60,000 men and 197 ships in active service; at the end of the war it had almost 500,000 men and more than 2,000 ships, a staggering number. Roosevelt threw himself enthusiastically into the expansion and was so successful that he was forced to share some of his newly acquired supplies with the army, and “see young Roosevelt about it” quickly became a catchphrase in Washington. But Roosevelt, as ambitious as he was restless, was unsatisfied. He dreamed of seeing military action, again following in the footsteps of his cousin, but was thwarted at every turn by his superiors, who would not allow him to go overseas, let alone enlist in any branch of the armed forces. Instead, he put his persuasive skills to use, lobbying for the creation of a 240-mile underwater chain of explosives to foil German submarines. Roosevelt’s position in the navy and his work to protect naval shipyards also endeared him to the leaders of Tammany Hall, which dominated New York Democratic politics.

  In the capital, the Roosevelts were much in demand. Invitations arrived daily, and Eleanor quickly discovered that the social whirlwind required her to have a social secretary. In 1914, she hired Lucy Mercer to come in three mornings a week. Not long after that, having borne six children, Eleanor informed Franklin that there would be no more babies. To ensure this, Roosevelt was also informed that he was no longer welcome in his wife’s bed.

  Roosevelt was a tall, attractive man of thirty-four. When he had first run for the state senate, women had flocked to hear his speeches, even though they could not vote. Now he also had status, a touch of maturity, and roving interests. Lucy, Eleanor’s part-time social secretary, was everything her employer was not, feminine and self-assured with a gentle voice and a “hint of fire in her eyes.” She was also tall, slender, and blue-eyed, with long, light-brown hair. And although her family had long since exhausted its funds, she was nevertheless part of the same hallowed social set as the Roosevelts. Even as she worked in the Roosevelts’ house, Lucy attended the same large dinners and parties as Franklin and Eleanor. Amid the guests, Roosevelt flirted and Lucy flirted back. From there, things quietly escalated. Roosevelt and Lucy went on cruises on the Potomac and long, private drives in Virginia—alone. Once, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore’s oldest daughter, who had been Eleanor’s maid of honor at her wedding, caught sight of them riding side by side in Roosevelt’s roadster. Alice wrote to Franklin, mentioning that he had never noticed her: “Your hands were on the wheel, but your eyes were on that perfectly lovely lady.”

  Eleanor sensed trouble. Not long after a Potomac cruise hosted by Franklin and Eleanor, a suspicious Eleanor terminated Lucy’s employment. She likely did it on the pretext of going away for the summer; she had no proof of any relationship, only her suspicions. Almost immediately, Lucy enlisted in the navy. Not unsurprisingly, her first assignment was
secretarial duty at the Navy Department; she had left Roosevelt’s house for his office. Possibly aware of the link between Roosevelt and Lucy, Secretary of the Navy Daniels removed her from her post and then from the navy only a few months later. Yet while distance may have banked their passion, it did not extinguish it. For nearly thirty years, Franklin and Lucy would continue to meet and write to each other. In his last conscious moments in April 1945, it would be Lucy, not Eleanor, who was with him. At the end, it was her voice that he heard and her face that he saw.

  THE YEAR 1918 WAS when Franklin Roosevelt was at last determined to go to war. All four of his Republican Roosevelt cousins had signed up for combat. Just as the young Austrian painter Adolf Hitler was itching for action on the front, Roosevelt wanted at least to set foot in Europe, even if he were not in full uniform. Then a congressional delegation announced plans to inspect naval installations during the summer. Secretary Daniels dispatched Roosevelt to ferret out any potential problems. While crossing the Atlantic on a destroyer, he heard bells sound for a U-boat attack, and he raced to the deck. The attack never materialized; the waters remained calm, and the destroyer was unmolested. Yet that outcome was not good enough for Roosevelt. His biographer Jean Edward Smith has observed: “As Roosevelt retold the story through the years, the German submarine came closer and closer until he had almost seen it himself.”

  He arrived in England a week after his cousin Quentin Roosevelt was killed in a dogfight over France. After his ship docked, Rolls-Royces whisked Roosevelt to London, where he met the king and the prime minister and came away with a strong dislike of the British Minister of munitions, Winston Churchill, “one of the few men in public life who was rude to me,” he would later tell Joseph Kennedy. From there he went on to Paris, where he was deeply impressed with the presidential wines, “perfect of their kind and perfectly served.” And at each location, letters awaited him, from Eleanor and also from Lucy Mercer. Then he headed for the front. He saw the scarred battlefields of Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and Verdun. At Verdun alone there had been some 900,000 casualties; partially and fully exploded shells had obliterated the forts and trenches, and the battlefield was an unrecognizable expanse of brown, churned-up earth. Roosevelt stared at it in silence.