Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  Ironies aside, my new job was a tonic, improving my disposition and even my health. I worked with the DNC in Washington during the week and took the train to Long Island on weekends. It was a glorious spring in the Little House garden, especially splendid because I didn’t have a radio to tell me that the world was going to hell—as it was. Hitler’s forces overran Scandinavia, and his armies simultaneously invaded Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. In June, the British army was evacuated from Dunkirk by a fragile armada of small boats. On the campaign trail, Eleanor wrote despairingly: With the state of the world as it is, campaigns seem unimportant.

  But my heart was in that campaign, for I believed (and still do, to this day) that FDR was the only man who could lead the United States through the wilderness of war. When I boarded the Liberty Limited for Chicago ten days before the 1940 Democratic convention began, I was on a mission. A third term wasn’t in my best interest, but for the sake of the country, I would do everything I could to see that it happened.

  Eleanor wasn’t expected to attend the convention—at least, not until her husband was nominated. And that nomination, it began to appear, was no sure thing. The fifty thousand delegates at the Chicago Stadium were nearly unanimous in their support of FDR, and he was speedily nominated. But conservative Southern and Midwestern Democrats were fiercely opposed to Henry Wallace, the president’s choice as a running mate. They insisted that Wallace was too liberal, and as agriculture secretary, his New Deal farm programs had been disastrous. They threatened revolt unless he withdrew.

  It was the First Lady who settled the matter. She was at Val-Kill with Joe Lash when Jim Farley, FDR’s convention manager and chair of the DNC, telephoned and asked her to come to Chicago and talk with the delegates. She told Farley no, she wouldn’t come. “I have a guest, and I’m very busy,” she said.

  I was in the room, so Farley handed the phone to me. “She’s your friend, Hick—see what you can do.”

  Eleanor and I talked, she checked with FDR, and a little later, she boarded a plane to Chicago. She was on the platform when Wallace’s name was entered into nomination and the rebellious delegates began to boo. But when she stepped up to the podium, the huge audience fell silent. She spoke for only a few moments, without a prepared text, without notes. At the end, she reminded the delegates that, with war everywhere beyond our shores, no one knew what might come.

  “This is no ordinary time,” she said. “No time for weighing anything except what we can do best for the country.”

  No ordinary time. The organist began to play “God Bless America,” the crowd erupted into a wild cheering, and the convention united behind the Roosevelt-Wallace ticket. I was prouder of that amazing woman—that personage—than I had ever been. And proud of myself, for whatever role I had played in her growth.

  But when the cheering was all done, Eleanor returned to Val-Kill, where Joe Lash was waiting for her. He spent most of that summer at the cottage, and she was there as often as she could get away.

  In good conscience, though, I couldn’t lecture Eleanor about Joe. That summer—the summer of 1940—was no ordinary time for me, either. I began a relationship that would anchor me during the emotionally difficult years of the war. Did I do this because Eleanor was otherwise preoccupied? Was I feeling left out, abandoned? Did I need someone to ease the pain? Perhaps, but that was long ago and time does dull some darker feelings. All I know is that when I met Judge Marion Harron, I found her irresistibly charming, a smart, funny woman who wasn’t afraid of her emotions. She made it easy for me to care for her, and for the next five years, there would be no barrier to our caring, deeply and in all ways, for one another.

  Marion had taken her law degree at the University of California at Berkeley, filled several banking positions, worked for the National Recovery Administration, and—when she was only thirty-three—won a much-coveted presidential appointment to a twelve-year term on the U.S. Board of Tax Appeals. As a judge, she traveled extensively across the U.S., hearing tax cases in various cities. In 1942, she was nominated for a vacancy on a federal district court and endorsed by then Attorney General Francis Biddle. But FDR didn’t appoint her. I’ve always wondered if that was another left hook.

  In Washington, Marion had an office not far from the White House and lived with her mother in an attractive little home in Chevy Chase. We met at a Democratic fundraiser and it wasn’t long before we were seeing each other for lunch when we were both in town. By August, she was taking weekends with me at the Little House, and when we traveled, we exchanged letters. Eleanor met Marion and found her “interesting.” But Joe was much more interesting, and that’s all there was to it.

  I had been relieved when Eleanor suggested that I stay at the White House, for as the probability of war rose, national defense spending ratcheted up and people began crowding into Washington. Apartments were nearly impossible to find and rents were sky-high. I was making six thousand a year, but I couldn’t have afforded to rent an apartment in D.C. and keep the Little House. As well, living at the White House gave me the chance to see Eleanor at breakfast when she was in town, or slip across the hall to say goodnight. We were even able, occasionally, to set aside an hour just to sit and talk, as we used to.

  And we continued to exchange letters. During 1940, when we were both working on the campaign, we wrote some 350; during the next four years, more than 260. But these letters were different from the earlier ones because our relationship had changed. She was infatuated with Joe, and I had Marion. But Eleanor and I still loved one another, with a sweet, distant echo of the old passion. Her letters to me were filled with her political doings, worries about the international situation, family news—but always there was a personal paragraph of concern about my health, a plan (often more wishful than not) to get together, a regret that the plan had to be canceled. They were signed Much love or Devotedly or A world of love, dear.

  My letters to her in those years reported my work activities; my weekends at the Little House; thanks for her frequent gifts (a turkey at Thanksgiving, a box of handkerchiefs, material for a new suit); and White House activities. I signed them Much, much love, always and All my love and My love to Tommy and you. One bright July day in 1943, I sent sad news: The thing I’ve dreaded for a long time has finally happened. Dear old Prinz died Wednesday afternoon. Clarence and I buried him at the Little House, near the path where we always took our walks. We had been together for fifteen years. I would miss him the rest of my life.

  But that was later. 1940 brought its own trials and tribulations, and 1941 would be almost too much to bear.

  If the president was concerned about my living at the White House, I didn’t hear about it, and I was pleased when Eleanor told me, “Franklin says he never even knows when you are in the house.” That was the way I wanted it. I tried not to call attention to myself, and I went to some lengths to keep my friends and colleagues from learning my real address. I didn’t need to be bombarded by appeals from people who wanted something from the president and might try to use me to get it. I didn’t want a return of the old gossip, either. I no longer feared Alice Longworth; even Republicans were offended when she told the press that FDR really stood for “Fuehrer, Duce, Roosevelt” and that she’d “rather vote for Hitler than for Franklin” for a third term. But Eleanor’s friendship with Joe Lash (a “former Communist-Front leader, close friend of the First Lady,” according to the newspapers) was causing her a great deal of grief. I didn’t want to cause her any more.

  So I created the fiction that I was living at the Mayflower, where I worked. When someone offered to give me a lift home from a party or a dinner, I said good night in the hotel lobby and when the coast was clear, I walked or taxied to the White House. When my job required me to escort a group of Democratic ladies to the White House for a formal tea, the ushers had instructions not to recognize me as a resident. And if Eleanor happened to be presiding behind the silver teapot, she would smile at me and say, with evident surprise, “Wh
y, hello, Miss Hickok, so good to see you again!”—just as if we hadn’t had breakfast together that very morning.

  I enjoyed my job, and I enjoyed working for the presidential campaign—not an easy task, because while the First Lady had silenced the party rivalries at the convention, they were out in full force a week or two later, prompting me to stew and fret. My God, dear, I wrote to her, these men are children, small quarrelsome children…They don’t deserve to win this election if they keep on the way they’ve been going.

  And FDR’s election was not a sure thing. The isolationists were in full cry, pushing for a negotiated peace in Europe. On August 4, at Soldier Field in Chicago, Charles Lindbergh spoke to forty thousand cheering opponents of the war, most of whom were suspicious of a Britain they saw as irredeemably imperialist and dominated by a discredited ruling class. Conscription was another hotly debated issue. When the House of Representatives stopped bickering and managed to pass the first peace-time draft in the nation’s history, the isolationists saw it as another straw in the winds of war.

  And while Americans had supported the president during the summer, when Hitler’s advances struck fear into their hearts, that support faded in October, when German troops appeared to be stalled. Joe Kennedy, ambassador to Great Britain (and rumored to have his eye on the presidency), was hinting that FDR had made a “secret deal” with Winston Churchill to bring the U.S. into war as soon as he was reelected. FDR was forced to promise an audience that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” When his adviser, Sam Rosenman, objected that it was a promise that couldn’t be kept, the president replied grimly: “If we’re attacked, it’s no longer a foreign war.”

  Given the challenges and uncertainties, and especially given the strength of the GOP candidate, the liberal Republican Wendell Willkie, I wasn’t at all sure that FDR would win in 1940. On election night, I couldn’t eat any dinner, and when I went to the press headquarters on the Biltmore’s mezzanine, I was glad to be kept on the run, gathering the numbers. Willkie had been polling well, gaining momentum in the last weeks with the charge that the president had been scheming for years to take the country to war. The first returns looked bleak. Willkie was winning in small towns and rural areas.

  But the balloting in the big states—New York, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania—was heavily Democratic, and I began to breathe easier. By midnight, it was nearly over, and by two a.m., it was only a question of how many states the president would carry. Lynn Bryce, one of my DNC colleagues, invited me to her apartment, where we had two stiff brandies and a plate of bacon and eggs. When I got up around noon, I saw the headlines. FDR had gathered 55 percent of the popular vote and 85 percent of the electoral votes. He had won his third term, and I was out of a job.

  But not for long. I had done good work for the DNC on the election, and as 1941 dawned, I was named executive secretary of the Women’s Division. This time, Eleanor had nothing to do with it. I had earned the position myself.

  Later, I wrote to tell her how proud I was of the woman she had become in the eight years since that 1932 election night at the Biltmore. My trouble, I wrote, has always been that I’ve been so much more interested in the person than the personage… I still prefer the person, but I admire and respect the personage with all my heart!

  It was true. Loving Eleanor, I still very much preferred the person. And by the autumn of 1940, as her husband began his third term in office, I always felt blessed when I caught a glimpse of her behind or inside the personage she had become.

  No ordinary time. For the Roosevelts, 1941 was a year of extraordinary personal losses.

  On June 4, Missy LeHand collapsed at the annual office party that she and FDR always hosted for his top staffers. Lillian Parks, the White House seamstress and my favorite of the backstairs gang, told me she remembered the evening clearly because she’d had to hunt for the chef’s apron she’d made for the president. He liked to wear it, along with a tall chef’s hat from the kitchen, to serve the party food, which was catered by the Willard Hotel. (He didn’t trust Mrs. Nesbitt to cook for this event.) After drinks and a buffet dinner, an aide began to play the president’s favorite songs on a piano and everybody happily sang along. Suddenly, Missy gave a little scream and slumped to the floor, which put an end “real fast,” Lillian said, to the party. She was carried to her apartment on the third floor, where Dr. McIntire, the president’s physician, examined her.

  “She’s apparently had a slight heart attack,” he said, although he was obviously puzzled.

  The week that Missy was stricken, Eleanor was at Campobello with Joe Lash. When I phoned to tell her what had happened, she sighed. “This isn’t the first time,” she said. In 1927, Missy had suffered a perplexing illness, followed by a depression that was so acute that she was hospitalized and placed on a suicide watch. It had happened at Warm Springs, where Eff-dee (as Missy called FDR) was working with Helena Mahoney, an attractive physiotherapist. Eleanor thought that Missy collapsed because she feared that her boss had fallen in love with Mahoney.

  Lillian, who knew about that episode, thought that this later collapse might have been triggered by a similar threat. FDR had promised his wife that he would never see Lucy Mercer again. But the backstairs gang knew that he was seeing her. He had invited her to his inaugurations in 1933, 1937, and 1941. He had received private telephone calls and letters from her—calls and letters that he apparently kept from Missy. Now, Lucy was appearing on the president’s calendar, under the name of Mrs. Paul Johnson. On June 5, she was scheduled to spend two hours with him in the residence.

  “June fifth,” Lillian told me, waggling her eyebrows to emphasize the date. “Missy’s attack was on June fourth, the night before.”

  I frowned. Since I’d become a White House resident, I had heard the servants whispering about FDR’s sexual abilities, in which they took a great interest. It was the majority opinion that FDR was fully capable.

  “A man’s got no secrets from his valet,” Lillian said. “And the valets know that it’s only his legs that’re paralyzed.” Irvin McDuffie, the president’s long-term valet, had once made this perfectly clear. The kitchen crew, Lillian said, had been laughing at a sleazy tabloid cartoon with the caption, “Hoover was dead from the waist up. Roosevelt’s dead from the waist down.” McDuffie cast one scornful look at it and said, “I’ll be damned if he is,” and walked away.

  Pale and grim, FDR was clearly devastated by Missy’s loss. Whatever else they had been to one another, she had always been available to him. He had relied on her calm, quiet presence for twenty years. Bereft, he visited her and tried to cheer her up, but the visits were difficult for both of them, and after a few days, he simply stopped going to her apartment. He was convinced—and I was too, when I visited her—that Missy would never again be the person she had been.

  I brought flowers and newspapers and tried to cheer her up, but Missy could only say how desperately she missed Eff-dee. I remembered something that Eleanor had said once, long ago, about herself and the children and Missy. They were like little moons, she’d said, all orbiting, inescapably, around a giant planet, around Franklin. Even Missy couldn’t break away.

  Two weeks after the first episode, on the day that Grace Tully officially became the president’s private secretary, Missy had what was clearly a massive stroke. Unable to speak, partially paralyzed, she was moved to Doctors Hospital, where she stayed for several months, then—at FDR’s urging—went to Warm Springs, with full-time nursing care. She returned to the White House after six months or so, but her speech was slurred and everyone knew that she would never go back to work. At last, FDR asked Missy’s sister to take her home to Boston. There, she suffered another stroke and died, just forty-six years old. Franklin was on a ship in the Pacific when it happened. It was Eleanor who put on black and went to her funeral—the last sad irony of Missy’s life.

  When Missy collapsed, Franklin lost the one person in the White House on whom he could depend for uncri
tical, unconditional, unquestioning love. Just three months later, he lost the only other person who gave him that kind of love. Sara Roosevelt had been slowly failing for some time, like an old soldier in sad decline but still unwilling to give up her post. In early September, Eleanor phoned her husband and asked him to come to Hyde Park. He was with his mother when she died and for her burial next to his father in the graveyard at St. James Episcopal Church. He returned to Washington looking haggard and desolate, with a black armband on the left sleeve of his coat.

  I noticed, though, that Daisy Suckley, FDR’s cousin, began coming more frequently to the White House and staying for longer visits. Eleanor said that they often saw one another at Hyde Park, where Daisy was helping FDR plan his own retreat, which he called Top Cottage. Daisy couldn’t make up for the loss of Missy or his mother, but Franklin must have found that he could count on her for at least some of what the other two women had given him—and which his wife would not.

  Just two weeks later, Eleanor suffered her own terrible loss, the death of her fifty-year-old brother Hall, an alcoholic. He had been her special charge since they were children, abandoned by their parents’ deaths to the care of their strict Victorian grandmother. That night, when I went to her room, she was crying, and I held her until she grew quiet, thinking that I had never seen her cry before. In her “My Day” column for the next day, she wrote: I remember him very vividly as a very small boy with curls and a round roly-poly face; whom my young aunts made much of and called the “cherub,” thereby creating much jealousy in me because I could not aspire to any such name. By the time my brother was eighteen, he was an entirely independent person, and from that time on, the only way that anyone could hold him, was to let him go.