Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  Mrs. Roosevelt was shaken, but calm, and when FDR telephoned to tell her that the Secret Service was insisting on assigning agents to her, she refused, firmly.

  “I understand that you have to have security, Franklin. But I don’t—and I won’t. I am not going to have men following me around. That’s all there is to it.” At the time, the law mandated that the president (and president-elect) be protected. But agents were assigned to family members only at the president’s request. If FDR didn’t insist, the Service was out of luck.

  Her voice may have sounded firm enough to her husband, but I heard the strain in it. I knew why she didn’t want the Secret Service keeping tabs on her. So far, I had been just another female reporter assigned to the new First Lady, and nobody paid much attention to our comings and goings together, especially early in the morning or late at night. Both of us were relieved when FDR gave a resigned sigh and said, “Well, if that’s the way you want it, Babs.”

  “That’s the way I want it,” she said. “Thank you, Franklin.”

  We took a later train to Ithaca. The next day, she spoke at a faculty breakfast, gave a talk to a crowd of three thousand people, and attended a luncheon, an afternoon tea, and a dinner at which the governor spoke. Sometime that day, answering a reporter’s question, she said, “A man in public life has to face the possibility that he’ll be a target. He can’t live in fear, and neither can his family.” I couldn’t have been prouder.

  That wasn’t the end of it, of course. When she moved into the White House, the Secret Service code-named her “Rover” and the chief, Bill Moran, increased his efforts to get her to accept protection. (She said she didn’t know whether to be pleased that they knew she was always on the move or annoyed that they had named her for somebody’s pooch.) She managed to keep the Service at bay in the summer of that first year, when the two of us took our long driving trip into the Canadian provinces. As time went on, however, it wouldn’t be just the Secret Service keeping tabs on her. It would be the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover.

  I have often wondered what would have happened if one of those five anarchist bullets had killed FDR. John Nance Garner, Roosevelt’s vice president, would have moved into the White House. The “new deal,” if there was one, would certainly have been different, for Garner was a conservative Texan who supported the poll tax, opposed the executive branch’s “meddling” in congressional affairs, and, as Time magazine later characterized him, stood for “oil derricks, sheriffs who use airplanes, prairie skyscrapers, mechanized farms, and $100 Stetson hats.”

  Mrs. R was already on her way to a public life, so I think it’s fair to say that she would never have become Mrs. Jane Doe. But if she hadn’t moved into the White House, her life, and mine, would have been very different.

  Most certainly mine.

  I had a great deal on my mind as the inauguration drew closer. Much of it was personal, of course. My relationship with Eleanor lightened my days and lit my nights with a fierce joy. Love has a way of creating its own truth, of writing its own story.

  But love couldn’t change the truth of what was happening across the country. The nation was living through its darkest days, and as a reporter, I saw them firsthand. More than a quarter of the American workforce was out of a job, and homes and farms were being lost by the thousands each week. The newspapers were an avalanche of bad news. Well over a billion dollars in gold had flown out of the country. The banks were falling like November leaves, taking with them the failed economies of towns all across the country. Businesses and industries could not pay their creditors, and the creditors could not pay their creditors. Cities—New York, Chicago, and Cleveland among them—couldn’t meet their payrolls. Mayors across the country were expecting riots, and some state governors predicted a violent revolution.

  “If the nation can get past the inaugural without blowing itself all to hell,” Louis Howe told me, quite seriously, “we may have a chance. But right now, the whole country is scared to death. Anything can happen. I don’t give a good goddamn what else Franklin says in his inaugural address as long as he tells the people that the only thing they have to fear is fear.”

  Mrs. R and I had planned to drive to Washington for the inaugural, loading up her Buick with the family’s two dogs—Meggie and Major—and her personal belongings. I had even written a story that made the front pages of many newspapers under the headline, “Wife of Next President to Drive Alone to Capital.”

  But FDR vetoed the plan. He had already arranged for a train party, with the press, cabinet members, and special guests, and he insisted that his wife go with him as his hostess, adding flatly, “No argument, Babs.” Louis Howe said FDR was concerned about the possibility of an accident, but in a moment of personal paranoia—it wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last—I wondered whether he was trying to separate Mrs. R and me. But that was silly, I told myself. The man had more on his mind than his wife’s friendships. Anyway, if that was his (or Howe’s) intention, it didn’t work. She asked me to go with her on the train and to stay with her at the Mayflower.

  The day before the inauguration, Washington was an armed camp. Army machine gunners and sharpshooters were installed at strategic locations along the parade route, and armed police guarded federal buildings. Rumors swirled like dust devils from office building to office building. Roosevelt was going to impose martial law. He would seize control of the country and assume dictatorial powers, like Mussolini (which some thought would be a very good idea). The inaugural bunting that hung everywhere reminded me of a brightly colored shroud, and “Happy Days Are Here Again” sounded like an unfunny parody.

  That night, the ornate Mayflower Hotel lobby was jammed with reporters from newspapers all over the country. I was headed for the elevator when I was waylaid by Mack Petrie, who had been night city editor of the Minneapolis Tribune when I left. Mack was a big man, burly, with a voice like an auctioneer. He and I had been on a number of assignments together over the years. He knew Ellie—and he knew that we had lived together for the eight years I’d worked at the Trib.

  “Hey, Hick!” Mack cried, and heads turned. “How the hell are you, kiddo? The Trib’s been running your AP pieces almost every day. You’re doing swell—all kinds of great access to the Roosevelts.” He flashed me a broad wink. “Especially Eleanor, huh? Kinda tight with the old girl, aintcha?”

  I gave him what passed for a smile. “Good to see you, Mack. In town for the big day, huh?” I glanced around the crowded room. They had the look of hungry hyenas, keen to snatch up any juicy bit that another hyena might miss. They were just doing their job, but all of a sudden, their job seemed ugly, menacing.

  Stepping closer, Mack pulled out his notebook and lowered his voice. “Say, Hick, do you remember that tip I gave you on the Carter arraignment, years back? You told me then that you owed me one. Now’s your chance to pay up.” He took his pencil from behind his ear and poised it over his open notebook. “I need a couple of names, like who’s upstairs in that suite with Roosevelt. I’m guessing his boy Jimmy. Likely Louis Howe—maybe Woodin, too, huh?” William Woodin, a Republican businessman, had been a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. FDR had named him secretary of the treasury. “Maybe you’ve got some word on how he and FDR intend to handle the banking crisis.” He was already scribbling. “I won’t identify you, of course—just ‘a source close to the family.’”

  “Sorry.” I was backing toward the elevator, hands out, demonstrating that they were empty. “Wish I could help you out, Mack, but I don’t know any more than you do.”

  It was a lie, of course. I’d been in the suite all afternoon and I knew who was there and what they were doing. But if I handed out any inside dope, it would go to the AP, not the Trib. I didn’t blame Mack for trying, though, and if I’d thought for a moment, I would have wondered why I felt so defensive. Who was I protecting? Why? And what did it say about me, as a reporter?

  Mack wasn’t buying my refusal. “Come on, kiddo, you’ve got access
. You’ve got a wire service byline. You’re a star.” He raised his voice, teasing, mocking—with Mack, it was always hard to tell the difference. “Ain’t she, boys? Ain’t Hick a star?”

  I looked up and realized that we were encircled by reporters watching and listening with avid attention, waiting for the kill, for the carcass, for some little scrap of news they could pounce on and snap up.

  A star? I didn’t want to be a star. I just wanted to get away.

  An hour later, Mrs. R and I were poking at the dinner she’d had sent up for us to her sitting room in the Mayflower’s presidential suite, where we had stayed on our earlier trip to Washington. Neither of us felt much like eating, or even admiring the new suit—a brown, beige, and blue tweed—that Anna (in charge of the First Lady’s wardrobe) had brought for her mother to wear the next morning. Inauguration Day promised to be cold, and Mrs. R would be outdoors for the ceremony, the address, and the parade. For the inaugural ball, she would wear an evening gown that the press was calling “Eleanor blue,” sleeveless, with simple lines and a deep décolleté back, of silk crepe embroidered with a leaf-and-flower design in gold thread. I admired its severity and felt that it matched the temper of the time. However, my hired-girl self thought that too much money had been spent on Mrs. R’s new clothes—two ball gowns, several daywear ensembles, nine dresses, four hats, and three pairs of shoes—when too many people didn’t have a warm winter coat. Reasonably, Eleanor retorted that her spending had boosted both the economy and the careers of a couple of designers, as well as giving work to a number of people in the clothing business.

  She was right, of course. Her new job as First Lady required more than the ten-dollar off-the-rack dresses, and she had to meet the expectations of the people who wielded power in the city. But our exchange reminded me, once again, that Eleanor and I came from different places in the world of haves and have-nots.

  Mrs. R settled down with her knitting, as usual. But I’m a pacer, and I prowled, listening to the rise and fall of men’s voices that came from the next room. Finally, I went to stand in the open door, where I could watch FDR working on his inaugural address. There was a continuous stream of traffic in and out of the suite that night—Brain Trusters, advisers, new cabinet members, Roosevelt sons, waiters with food and mixers for the smuggled-in liquor, people with urgent messages for the president-elect about the dire financial conditions around the country. President Hoover telephoned twice, urging FDR (“begging him,” according to Louis Howe) to issue a joint statement halting the disastrous flow of gold out of the banks and overseas. FDR refused. He was playing his cards even closer to the chest than usual. Nobody knew what he intended to do.

  Finally, at midnight, at the moment when Hoover’s term officially ended, Roosevelt announced to the hushed gathering that he would declare a four-day bank holiday and call Congress into extraordinary session to pass an emergency banking bill. There was a loud whoosh, as everybody in the room let out his breath. Watching from the door, I knew that the president’s declaration would generate banner headlines in newspapers across the country. It would be a career-topping grand slam for any reporter, and I was within arm’s reach of the telephone. I could pick it up and call Byron Price, chief of the AP’s Washington bureau, and tip him off. I looked at it for a moment, put out my hand, and then pulled it back.

  Hours later, I would realize that this was a remarkable moment. But just as remarkable was the fact that not one of FDR’s team appeared to notice that an AP reporter was in the suite. Perhaps I had been seen with Mrs. R on so many occasions that I was accepted as part of the Roosevelt family, rather than as a reporter. Or perhaps—and this is the explanation I eventually settled on—the president’s team paid no attention to me that night for the same reason that they paid no attention to Mrs. R. We were both women, and when it came to politics, governance, and the gold crisis, women didn’t count.

  But at two a.m., when we were about to go to bed, Louis Howe brought us the final draft of FDR’s inaugural address. Mrs. R read it aloud to me, pausing to emphasize the ten words that everyone would remember: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I recognized the sentence from an earlier conversation. It was Howe’s, a memorable turn of phrase that would soon be repeated like a mantra everywhere. I took the draft back to Louis, who went off with it to the hotel business office, which he had put on standby. To make sure there were no leaks, he would wait there until it was retyped and mimeographed, then bring it back to the suite for distribution to the press the next morning.

  The rooms emptied out as everybody finished their drinks and headed for bed. Eleanor went to say goodnight to her husband, and I went into the bedroom, got ready for bed, and lay down. On the small table between our beds was a telephone, and I looked at it for a moment, considering whether to call Byron. But I was weary to the bone and I chose to do… nothing. I turned over and pulled up the covers. I was asleep by the time Eleanor came back to the room.

  It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that I realized what I had done—or rather, what I had failed to do. I hadn’t phoned the AP with FDR’s plan to declare a bank holiday and call an emergency session of Congress. I hadn’t phoned in a synopsis of FDR’s inaugural speech or Howe’s memorable line: “The only thing we have to fear…” I was standing in the middle of the biggest breaking news on the planet. If I had filed even a couple of paragraphs, I would have scooped every single reporter and cemented my reputation as the best newshawk in the country.

  But I didn’t do it. As far as I was concerned, everything that went on in the presidential suite that night, no matter how newsworthy, was off the record.

  I could go on working for the AP, but I knew I could no longer consider myself a journalist.

  The next day, Saturday, March 4, was Inauguration Day, and I had one more official story to file: the first-ever on-the-record interview by a First Lady on her first night in residence in the White House. We began the interview in Eleanor’s bedroom after we got back from the parade, but there were so many interruptions that we moved to her bathroom and shut the door. I learned afterward that this raised quite a few eyebrows among the backstairs gang, who had never before seen a First Lady retreat to a White House bathroom with a reporter. They were sure that there was more to our interview than would appear in print.

  It was a day for raised eyebrows. Old-time Washington socialites were aghast when Mrs. Roosevelt opened the august East Room to accommodate the overflow crowd of three thousand—including the press—who came to tea. Nothing quite so shocking had happened in that room since Abigail Adams hung the family undies there to dry, or Andrew Jackson parked his giant cheese in the middle of the floor and invited the common folk to help themselves. And when the Roosevelts’ seventy-five guests arrived for dinner that evening, the First Lady greeted them at the door of the Red Room rather than making a grand entrance after everyone was seated, as previous First Ladies had done. She was making it clear that if Washington wanted to visit the White House, it would be on her terms.

  After dinner, the president went back upstairs—to work, he said, although the backstairs gang whispered later that he met for a little while and privately with a very pretty lady. Mrs. Rutherfurd, I assumed. Eleanor and I went to her suite, which included Abraham Lincoln’s bedroom, a spacious room with a brick fireplace and windows overlooking the Rose Garden and Andrew Jackson’s magnolia tree, and a smaller room that she would use for a bedroom. There, I helped her get ready for the inaugural ball. She looked stunning, I thought, as I watched her get into the limousine—the only First Lady to go to the gala without the president. And she didn’t get home until nearly two a.m.

  I know, because I was waiting up for her, with a plate of cookies and a pitcher of hot chocolate. I wanted Cinderella to tell me all about her ball.

  Before I left the White House on Sunday evening, Eleanor and I talked about our letters.

  Ah, the letters, those dangerous handwritten pages that record the progress of a
love affair, two people coming together, holding on, falling apart. The letters, which, if I’d followed Bess Furman’s advice, I would have burned. The letters that will be locked up for a good long time after I’m dead. The letters that are the reason I’m writing this memoir.

  Well, then, to the letters. Eleanor and I began writing to one another after our night on the train from Potsdam. In those first few months, the letters were intensely, passionately personal, and neither of us were very discreet. They were too revealing, and we kept only a few. But we had agreed that I would write her biography, so when the new First Lady assumed her public duties, I asked her to be sure that every letter included an account of what she had done that day. Staying in touch in this way would help to ease our separation, and later, I could excerpt the material I needed for her biography.

  Eleanor wrote her first letter after I left on Sunday night, on both sides of two large, thick sheets of cream-colored stationery embossed with the gold White House seal. Hick, my dearest, she began. I cannot go to bed to-night without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving to-night, you have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you even though I’m busy every minute.

  “Empty without you”—yes, oh, yes, how I understood that! The next evening, we talked on the phone for a full hour, and the letter she wrote afterward rejoiced. Hick darling, Oh! how good it was to hear your voice, it was so inadequate to try and tell you what it meant, Jimmy was near and I couldn’t say “je t’aime et je t’adore” as I longed to do…

  The next day, March 7, was my birthday. She had thought of us all day, she wrote that evening. Another birthday I will be with you… oh! I want to put my arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort, I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it!