Even as a child she enjoyed playing practical jokes. Old friends who attended the Rippowam School in Mount Kisco with her recalled the time that she and one or two others, including her sister, Eileen, placed a wedge of Limburger cheese behind a radiator on a wintry Friday afternoon before leaving for home. School officials had to cancel classes on Monday as they worked desperately to air out the building.
Later, Peggy spent one year at the Shipley School, a rather stuffy girls finishing school outside of Philadelphia. She was known as Batty McGrath and delighted in skirting the regulations, especially the ones meant to keep the girls in their rooms in the evening. She had learned through careful observation the location of every creaky board in the building, a skill that allowed her to move about silently to visit her friends.
I witnessed a number of Peggy’s practical jokes myself. One time she planted a device on the engine of Benjy Franklin’s beloved new car. When Benjy pressed the starter button, there was a loud bang and a huge cloud of smoke. Benjy jumped from the car with a look of horror on his face and searched frantically under the hood until he noticed the rest of us laughing hysterically.
Peggy inherited her father’s strong sense of integrity and scrupulously adhered to a high moral standard. She inherited her mother’s excellent taste in many things, particularly the ability to select and wear attractive and flattering clothes, a talent made easier by her having an exceedingly good figure.
While Peggy preferred life in the country to the social whirl of the city, she loved parties. In fact, we first met at a debutante party on Long Island in the early 1930s and often saw each other at dances and other parties during my college years. Both of us enjoyed waltzing, and this interest led to many enjoyable evenings together. The St. Regis Roof and the Rainbow Room were our favorite spots, and one evening we won a polka contest at the Rainbow Room.
From the time I first met Peggy, I knew there was something different and compelling about her. I was not yet in love with her, but I found myself seeking her out more than other girls at parties. She had style, she was fun to talk with, and she was a great dancer. So when I returned to New York in the fall of 1939, my feelings changed significantly. I wanted to be with her as much as possible and found myself calling her on the phone several times a day. She often visited me at Kykuit. We listened to the player organ together or picnicked at some beautiful spot on the family property, where we would go on horseback. We took long walks together through the woods, talking for hours on end. A strong friendship turned into something much more passionate.
By early spring I was thinking seriously about asking Peggy to marry me, but it was not until June that I actually got the courage. Peggy gave me the answer—twenty-four long hours later.
When I told my mother—I had never mentioned the possibility to her before—she said dryly but with amusement, “Well, David, I’m not entirely surprised because I read the telephone bills, and there have been a great many calls to Mount Kisco.”
In order to buy an engagement ring I drew out all my savings, about $4,000, which comprised my available resources at the time. Asking Peggy to marry me was the best decision I ever made. We spent fifty-five wonderful years together. There were rocky moments along the way, but our love deepened with each passing year.
THE LITTLE FLOWER
With my dissertation completed and my doctoral degree in hand, it was time to consider a career. I had no clear idea of what I wanted to do, but I knew that I had no interest in joining the Family Office where John, Nelson, and Laurance were already working.
While I was in Chicago, Bill Benton and Beardsley Ruml told me about Anna Rosenberg, a labor and public relations advisor who had good contacts with important political leaders, including President Roosevelt, Governor Herbert Lehman of New York, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Benton contacted Anna and told her of my interest in government service. After we met, Anna suggested that I take occasional days off from my dissertation to learn about different aspects of New York City’s government. She arranged visits to several City agencies, including a municipal lodging house and soup kitchen. On another occasion I spent the day sitting with a children’s court judge while he disposed of juvenile delinquency cases.
These experiences piqued my interest in public service, and when Anna suggested I might enjoy working with Mayor La Guardia, I quickly agreed. Anna made the necessary arrangements, and on May 1, 1940, I reported to City Hall to begin working as a secretary to the mayor for “a dollar a year.”
I was assigned a large office separated from the Mayor’s more resplendent chambers by a smaller room occupied by his two stenographers. My responsibilities took me in and out of La Guardia’s office a dozen times a day, and I sat in on many conferences and staff meetings, which often were both contentious and loud. I also drafted replies to the dozens of letters that came in every day. I dictated responses to a stenographer and sent them in to the Mayor for his signature. La Guardia seemed satisfied with my efforts, and more often than not he signed my suggested letters without making any changes.
La Guardia, known as the Little Flower, had an explosive temper, though he could turn it on and off at will. He often turned it on. While sitting in my office answering correspondence or talking to a merchant in Brooklyn who was complaining about the lamppost in front of his store being too tall, I would suddenly hear him throw something down on the desk and yell to a trembling subordinate something like “You stupid SOB. How am I supposed to run a city with this kind of incompetence?” The rant would continue for several minutes, and a short while later I would see whoever had been the brunt of his rage slinking from the office.
The commissioners who ran the departments of the City’s government were not spared this treatment, either. One of them, William Fellowes Morgan, Jr., the commissioner of markets, came from an old New York family and had accepted La Guardia’s job offer out of a sense of civic duty. However, whenever La Guardia received a complaint about Fellowes’s department, he would summon him into his office and berate him with the same foul language that he used with everyone. Poor Fellowes would just sit there cowering, practically shivering in a mixture of shame, anger, and fright.
La Guardia was cruel to his secretaries as well. These women worked incredibly long hours and were completely devoted to him. But late in the afternoon, if the Mayor discovered a typo in a letter or some such thing, he would bawl them out unmercifully until they were reduced to tears.
His negatives aside, La Guardia was an extremely impressive man and an extraordinary politician. He was certainly the best mayor New York City has seen in my lifetime—at least until Rudy Giuliani came along. One has to recognize that if La Guardia was impatient and hot-tempered, he had a lot to be impatient about: He was cleaning up a city whose government had become synonymous with corruption. A few years earlier the infamous James J. (Jimmy) Walker had allowed graft to reach new heights of flamboyance and artistry. Most City employees assumed they would be promoted only by paying off the proper person. Robbery, extortion, murder, and prostitution flourished while judges were paid to look the other way.
La Guardia cleaned up New York through the force of his personality and the strength of his character. When he yelled at people, it was because of some festering corruption, inefficiency, or sloppiness. He drove himself hard and expected the same from the people around him. He didn’t hesitate to call people in the middle of the night to demand that something be ready for him by a certain time the next day.
He was also a showman: His huge seven-passenger Chrysler limousine was equipped with flashing lights, siren, and a police radio to keep him informed about major accidents and fires around the City. When he heard about a fire, he would change course and race off to the scene, put on his fireman’s hat, and start giving orders. He was so colorful that the firemen didn’t mind, and the people of New York—and the newspapers—loved it. La Guardia could be heroic, too; he once helped rescue a firefighter pinned under a burning beam. He took an intensel
y personal interest in every aspect of the City—even on occasion flagging down speeding motorists and lecturing them on safe driving.
The Chrysler was a movable office. Not uncommonly he would grab me as he left City Hall so that I could ride with him to edit his correspondence or to discuss a project of interest to him. We would spend the trip engrossed in business, and then he would jump out as we arrived at the next event on his schedule and with no preparation—sometimes I doubt he knew where he was going till he got there—deliver a speech perfectly tailored to his audience. And he was sincere, but not with the false sincerity that is the stock in trade of so many politicians. La Guardia was a believer, and it showed.
I remember accompanying the Mayor to the opening of a new Sanitation Department facility somewhere in Brooklyn built with money provided by the federal government. The audience was the student body of a local grade school. I know for a fact that he had no idea he was going to be talking to children that day. But he launched into a description of, first, the value of the Works Progress Administration and its role in providing jobs during the Depression, and then of the Sanitation Department and its critical importance to the working of the City. From there he moved smoothly into a celebration of democracy, of which the Sanitation Department was clearly a vital element, and then of America itself. The children were spellbound. I’m sure all the sanitation workers felt like heroes. By the end of the speech I had tears in my eyes. It had all been impromptu, but it came from La Guardia’s heart and was enormously effective.
The one commissioner who held his own with La Guardia was Robert Moses. Moses was a power in his own right. He had been a legislative aide to Al Smith when Smith was in the New York State Assembly and worked closely with him after Smith became governor in the 1920s. Moses was an intense man, the driving force behind the creation of New York’s impressive system of state parks, and a large part of its transportation system as well. Indeed, Moses remained a power in the City and the State for more than fifty years. During that time he held a variety of posts, but regardless of the titles, Moses was always a doer and a builder. There were few things related to the City’s infrastructure that did not go through one or another agency controlled by him. I would have firsthand experience with this after the war when I worked with him to redevelop both Morningside Heights and lower Manhattan.
Moses was a Yale graduate, and unlike many politicians he was personally incorruptible. He was a dedicated public servant who demonstrated what well-designed and well-managed government programs could accomplish, but he could often be ruthless and autocratic in reaching his goals.
Moses was a match for La Guardia in every way, in intellect as well as in sheer strength of character. He would casually say hello to me as he entered the Mayor’s office in a calm and gentlemanly manner. A few moments later I would hear the two of them start a shouting match that reverberated to the ends of the halls. But these arguments had a different outcome when Moses was involved; La Guardia respected him, and though he would get angry, he treated Moses as an equal and wouldn’t try to humiliate him the way he did others.
During my year and a half with the Mayor, my biggest project was renting commercial space at La Guardia Airport, which had opened in 1939. The airport was the Mayor’s pride and joy, and he wanted it to be economically self-sustaining. The main terminal had been designed without the inclusion of rentable commercial space, an omission that made the Mayor’s goal difficult to achieve. William A. Delano, the architect, and I found areas where stores and display cases could be placed, and then I went out and leased the spaces. I turned out to be a pretty good salesman. Cartier took a small area at the head of a curved stairway for a jewelry counter, and I sold other space to a flower shop, a bank, a haberdashery, a brokerage office, and a beauty salon.
Airplanes were still a novelty in 1940, and thousands of people visited the airport daily just to watch them land and take off. We installed an observation deck on an enclosed balcony overlooking the runways and charged a modest admission fee. The “Skywalk” was an immediate success and generated almost $100,000 a year in revenue.
In late May 1940, a month after I began work, I was alone in the car with the Mayor and told him of my plans to marry. Assuming that Peggy accepted, I told the Mayor we would be married in the early fall and that I would like time off for a honeymoon. The Mayor expressed enthusiasm and wished me success. A few weeks later I told him that Peggy had accepted my proposal, and he took us out to dinner at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park and then to an open-air concert at City College’s Guggenheim Stadium to celebrate. He also agreed to give me time off for my honeymoon!
Peggy and I married on September 7, 1940, in a charming little Episcopal church, Saint Matthew’s, in Bedford, New York. My brother John served as best man, and my other brothers and college roommates were ushers. The McGraths held the reception at their home, and there were more than two hundred guests, including Henry Ford, his son Edsel, and a number of older friends of both families.
We honeymooned at the JY Ranch in the Grand Tetons, one of the most beautiful places in the world. We took a five-day pack trip through Yellowstone National Forest, where we each shot a bull elk. (In later years both of us lost our interest in hunting, but our love for wilderness pack trips continued unabated.) But mostly Peggy and I spent time with each other, enjoying the first experience of marriage and making plans for our future. It was a time that I still treasure in my heart. All too soon we had to return to New York.
“PREPAREDNESS”
While I continued to work for La Guardia after my marriage, by the late summer of 1941, American entry into either the European war or a hostile confrontation with Japan became more and more of a possibility. Defense spending increased dramatically in mid-1940 after the fall of France, both to increase our own “preparedness” and to supply the British (and later the Russians) with armaments and other supplies.
Government contracts for every imaginable item—from tanks to chocolate bars—stimulated the conversion of old factories to new uses and the construction of many new ones all across the country. The speed with which all of this was done spawned a number of unanticipated problems: inadequate medical facilities, nonexistent housing for war workers, strains on the local water and food supplies, and overwhelmed school districts. To cope with these and many other problems, the Roosevelt administration set up the Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services (ODHWS), another of the hundreds of “alphabet agencies” that existed at the time. Regional offices were established across the United States, and Roosevelt asked Anna Rosenberg to head the New York region.
Anna was a frequent visitor to City Hall, and one day she stopped in my office to say that perhaps the time had come for me to become involved with the “preparedness” effort and work with her as assistant regional director of ODHWS. The timing seemed good to me. I had enjoyed working for La Guardia and had learned a great deal about City government, but a year and a half seemed long enough. The job Anna offered me was salaried, and I felt it would give me the administrative experience that I never had with La Guardia.
Anna assigned me responsibility for a large area of upstate New York. The companies opening factories there faced a number of problems, but employee housing was the most acute. At the tail end of the Depression, people were still willing to move long distances to find a good job, and the housing in many of the small cities and towns along the Saint Lawrence River and Canadian border—Watertown, Massena, and Ogdensburg—was inadequate to meet this large influx. I spent most of my time trying to mediate among impatient businessmen, harassed local officials, and the federal bureaucrats who controlled the funds needed to build the housing. I learned to negotiate and to cope with the unexpected on a daily basis.
Less than three months after I took the job, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. A new and very different chapter of my life was about to begin.
CHAPTER 9
THE WAR
It was a wintry afternoon in Ne
w York, and Peggy, Dick Gilder, and I were in a cab on Fifth Avenue headed to the Frick Museum. The cabby had his radio on when the announcer interrupted to tell of the attack on Pearl Harbor. We were all in shock. The three of us went on to the Frick and walked through the rooms in silence. Dick especially liked the Vermeers, and we looked at them together. Their beauty calmed us for the moment.
The next day Dick quit his job at Tiffany’s and enlisted in the Air Force. His action didn’t surprise me. Dick had believed war with Hitler was inevitable since our trip to Germany six years before. His views were not popular; most of the people I knew, including many of my family and most of Dick’s, were opposed to the United States entering the European war. That was natural enough given the horrors of World War I, and it was a much more widely held sentiment than we acknowledge today. The year before, Dick and I had been asked to join the Council on Foreign Relations, and I remember Dick arguing strongly for intervention on the side of the British. Many of our elders at the council vehemently disagreed.
Shortly after college Dick had married his childhood sweetheart, Ann Alsop, and they had two small children, George and Comfort. Dick was devoted to his family, but duty to his country and to the principles he believed in had to come first. After Germany invaded Poland, he started flying lessons so that he would be prepared when war came. He rose at five in the morning, drove to Floyd Bennett Field on Long Island, and flew for an hour or so before reporting for work at Tiffany’s at nine.
In early 1942, before he left for flight training, Dick and I had lunch at the Harvard Club. Neither of us had any experience with war, but we had heard the reports from Europe and knew the life expectancy of combat pilots was not great. Dick said he thought it unlikely that he would return from the war. I remember his words: “David, I have a wonderful wife and two beautiful children. I hope I can count on you and Peggy to look after them if anything does happen to me.” For the first time I fully understood the depth of his convictions and realized that I might soon be losing my best friend forever. In a subdued and shaken voice I assured him: “Of course we will, Dick. You can count on us.”
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