Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  I didn’t read about Eleanor’s greatest trouble in the newspapers, though. I heard it from Tommy, one morning at breakfast at the White House. When Joe finished basic training early that year, he was sent to Weather Observer School at Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois. One Friday in March, Eleanor and Tommy checked into a hotel in nearby Urbana. Joe spent two nights in Eleanor’s room, while Tommy slept in the adjacent room.

  “Bad idea,” I muttered under my breath. It was one thing for Eleanor to share a room with me when we were traveling; that didn’t raise many eyebrows. But the First Lady and an unmarried man—a much younger man, a soldier! “They weren’t seen, were they?” I asked quickly. “I haven’t read anything in the newspapers about—”

  Tommy held up her hand. “There’s more. A couple of weeks after the Urbana episode, the Boss and I were in Chicago. She paid for Joe’s bus ticket from Chanute and he met us at the Hotel Blackstone. We stayed for the weekend. I had a separate room. Joe and the Boss shared a room.”

  I frowned. “I’m surprised that McCormick didn’t send somebody to sniff around.” Robert McCormick, the owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, hated liberals, the New Deal, and everything the Roosevelts stood for. He took every opportunity to lay the ills of the country at their feet. I gave her a quick glance. “He didn’t, did he?” Maybe he had. Maybe he was holding the story as blackmail.

  She shook her head. “It’s worse than that, Hick. The Boss and I stayed at the Blackstone again, on our way back from a trip to the West Coast. While we were there, a hotel employee told her that the room she and Joe had shared was bugged.”

  I gasped. “Bugged?”

  “Yes, bugged,” Tommy said grimly, and told me the rest of the story.

  Because of Joe’s pre-war left-wing advocacy, the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps was keeping an eye on him—a suspicious eye. They searched his footlocker, read his mail, and put him under surveillance. The CIC had been watching when he went to the Urbana hotel where he stayed with the First Lady. When they intercepted and read Mrs. Roosevelt’s telegram inviting him to Chicago, they bugged her hotel room.

  “Joe and the Boss didn’t leave the room all weekend,” Tommy said bleakly. “So there were hours of talk. Pillow talk. Behind closed doors. And they got it all on tape.”

  On tape! I remembered how she loved to be touched, and what we had said when we were touching. I didn’t think she and Joe would share such intimacies, but I couldn’t be sure. “Just… talk?” I asked.

  Tommy darted me a glance. “I didn’t hear the tapes, so I can’t say.” She paused to take out a cigarette. “Anyway, when the Boss heard what had happened, she was terribly worried for Joe, but also for herself—and the president. She was thinking about blackmail, of course. When we got back to the White House, she went to Harry Hopkins and asked him to find out what was going on. Harry went to General Marshall, the Army chief of staff, who dug around and discovered that it was true. The CIC actually bugged her room. They had hours and hours of tapes.” She picked up a matchbook on the table. “And not just tapes, but typed transcripts. Somebody typed up the whole damned thing. Pages and pages of it.”

  I took a deep breath, bracing myself. “And then what?”

  “Hopkins and General Marshall knew they had to tell the president, of course. FDR blew his stack. He ordered the tapes and transcripts destroyed and told Marshall to clean house at the CIC.”

  “Good for FDR!” I exclaimed, relieved. “He did the right thing.” I didn’t ask what he had said to his wife. I didn’t want to know.

  “Yes, the right thing—although somebody might have been tempted to keep a copy. Or give one to the FBI for Hoover’s files. You know how J. Edgar hates Mrs. Roosevelt. He could leak it, out of pure malice.” Tommy shuddered. “Can’t you just imagine what would happen if Westbrook Pegler got hold of this?”

  “Oh, God, yes,” I muttered. Pegler, a right-wing columnist for the Washington Post, was a vocal critic of the administration. Recently, he had written that Mrs. Roosevelt was “impudent, presumptuous, and conspiratorial,” and that “her withdrawal from public life at this time would be a fine public service.” I got up to pour myself another cup of coffee and sat back down again. “But at least the CIC files have been cleaned out.”

  “We can hope.” Tommy opened the matchbook and lit her cigarette. “But there’s more, I’m afraid. The Boss got a letter from Joe yesterday. He’d been expecting to go to Grand Rapids, where his Weather Observers class was assigned to a six-months advanced school.” She dropped the match in an ashtray. “But he and several others got different orders. They’re going overseas.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Overseas?”

  Tommy blew out a stream of smoke. “To the Pacific. He’s already on his way.”

  It was that left hook again.

  As 1943 ended and 1944 began, the war ground on endlessly, battle after battle. In January, the German siege of Leningrad finally ended. But the same month, the Germans pinned down 150,000 Allied soldiers at Anzio, and it wasn’t until May that they could break free and liberate Rome. In February, Allied air forces began an intensive bombing of German cities. The next month, German forces occupied Hungary. All the while, subterranean whispers about Operation Overlord—the invasion of German-occupied Western Europe—blew like a chilly wind through government corridors. While none of us knew when or where, we knew that Eisenhower and his generals were planning to send an Allied army across the channel. If the invasion succeeded, it could end the war.

  But what if it failed? Washington was seized by a shivering anxiety. War Department workers wore grim faces. Newspapers fretted. Pastors preached anxious sermons. In May, Eleanor told me that for weeks, she hadn’t been able to sleep through the night. “I feel as though a terrible sword is hanging over our heads,” she told me. “It has to fall, and I dread it.”

  The sword fell on June 6, D-day. War correspondent Ernie Pyle reported that the invasion had turned from “a vague anticipatory dread into a horrible reality,” as tens of thousands of soldiers poured out of their landing crafts onto the beaches of Normandy. INVASION! Allied Armies Land in France. The headline was cried by newsboys and shouted from radios that morning. Vast Sea and Air Operation. Armada of 4,000 Ships. Church bells tolled, school bells rang. Horns blared. Hitler’s Sea Wall Is Breached. Stores closed, people filled the churches and synagogues, and FDR offered a national prayer on the radio. Mighty Allied Force Fighting Way Inland. Three weeks after D-day, a million men had been put ashore, and Americans were coming to realize that the war wouldn’t be over overnight. It would be eleven more months before the Allies reached Berlin and the war in Europe ended.

  And in July, just six weeks after D-day, FDR was nominated for a fourth term.

  The 1944 presidential campaign was a hard one for me. After the July convention, I worked for the president’s campaign against his Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey, whose pencil-thin black moustache made him look like the “little man on the wedding cake,” in the scathing words of Alice Longworth. But the president looked like a cadaver, and his health was a constant worry. Despite that, and the usual opposition from conservatives, Americans could not imagine the leadership of the country and the war in any hands but Roosevelt’s. He led Dewey in the polls throughout the campaign and on election day, scored a comfortable victory, taking 36 states for 432 electoral votes to Dewey’s 12 states and 99 electoral votes. FDR—and Eleanor—were committed to four more years in the White House.

  But I was leaving Washington. Now that the election was over, it was time for me to give up the travel, the late nights, the political confrontations, the exhausting work. I had saved enough money to support a six-month sabbatical, and my health demanded it. I was fifty-two, severely diabetic, and ready for some peace and quiet. I resigned from the DNC, wrote farewell notes to all my friends, and a deeply felt letter of thanks to Eleanor. Dearest, I wish I had the words to tell you how grateful I am for your many kindnesses these last fou
r years—and especially for letting me stay at the White House. It did two wonderful things—kept me near you and made it possible for me to hang on to my Little House, which is so infinitely precious to me.

  The Little House. I had made up my mind to live there fulltime, with the woods and meadows all around me, the open sky like a blessing over my head, and the wild Atlantic at my door. There, I would have time to myself, all the time I needed to read, to write, to think, to just be.

  To Marion, my decision was inexplicable. “You can certainly leave the DNC, Hick, if that’s what you want to do.” She said this in her firm, executive tone. “But I simply cannot see why you have to move to Long Island. We have a lovely apartment here in D.C. You can read and write here just as easily as there. And we’ll be together.”

  Strictly speaking, the apartment wasn’t ours, it was Marion’s. She had at last moved out of her mother’s Chevy Chase house, found a very nice place to live, and furnished it beautifully. We lived together there for a month or so after the election, and it went well enough. We liked the same music, food, books. We enjoyed each other and we liked each other’s friends. We were compatible.

  But I knew it was time for a change, and I chose the Little House. Marion was ten years younger than I, energetic, ambitious. Her career was—or ought to be—her highest priority. She couldn’t live with me on Long Island, and I couldn’t live with her in the city.

  So, in August, when she came to spend her two-week vacation at the Little House, I told her it was time to end our exclusive relationship. I tried to make it as easy as I could, saying once again that it wasn’t her, it was me. I simply didn’t want to live in Washington, and I needed to step back and be quiet for a time. And there was my health. I’d had a diabetic crisis just a few weeks before. I’d had to learn how to give myself daily insulin injections—not an easy matter for somebody who’s always been afraid of needles.

  “I want to be friends,” I said. “I want to see you often, dear. But I can’t make a commitment to a life together. It wouldn’t be fair to you—or to me, either, come to that.”

  She wasn’t going to make it easy. “But I don’t want us to end it, Hick.” She reached for my hand. “I love you. I’m not ready to give you up.”

  I shook my head. “We don’t have to give each other up. You’re a sweet, warm generous person and I’m terribly fond of you. I just can’t manage an exclusive commitment, that’s all. I want you to feel free to—”

  Her eyes darkened and her jaw was working. “It’s Eleanor, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No, of course it’s not Eleanor,” I said, quickly, but she was rushing on, the anger building.

  “Don’t try to fool me, Hick. Val-Kill and her New York apartment are both a lot closer to you here at the Little House than in Washington. You have that arrangement to work on her papers, which brings you together often. And after what happened in April, everything’s changed. You’re thinking that the two of you will—”

  “No,” I said. “No, really, Marion, please. It’s not like that at all.”

  But Marion was right, of course. Eleanor and I were working together on the papers she wanted to give to the FDR Library, now established at Hyde Park. And in April, everything had changed.

  The disappointment brought out the worst in Marion, and I replied with the worst in me. We ended our relationship. It was just a few days after America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing a quarter of a million people outright. The long, terrible Pacific war was over. Life could begin again.

  Many Americans felt the single death that happened on April 12 far more deeply than the hundreds of thousands of Japanese deaths four months later.

  I had left Washington on the twenty-first of March. For the next three weeks, I relaxed at the Little House, catching up on my reading, puttering in the garden, enjoying the sunshine. It was a lovely April, with the dogwoods blooming in the woods and the lilacs a feast of lavender blossoms along the edge of the garden. Mr. Choate was with me then, a frisky English spaniel that Eleanor had given me after Prinz died, and he danced beside me that late Thursday afternoon as I walked to the mailbox on the main road to post a letter to Eleanor. She was in Washington that week, coping with the usual infinite succession of things. That afternoon, I knew, she was with Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, giving a talk at the Sulgrave Club.

  Back home, I was brewing a cup of tea when Clarence appeared at the kitchen door, out of breath and frantic. The Little House still didn’t have a telephone, but I had left Clarence’s number with several friends, in case they needed to reach me. One look at his face told me that the message was a terrible one.

  “It’s the president,” he said, barely able to get the words out. “He’s dead.”

  Howard Haycraft had called to tell me. He was in Washington, in the Army Special Services, where it had just been announced that the president had been fatally stricken in Warm Springs. It was as if the sky had suddenly splintered and crashed to the ground and lay in slivers and crazed shards around my feet. I sat for a long while, trying to get used to the idea of a world without FDR in it, then walked to Clarence’s and telephoned Tommy at the White House. She told me that Eleanor was getting ready to go downstairs to the Cabinet Room, where Harry Truman would be sworn in at seven. When the ceremony was over, she was leaving for Warm Springs. She had asked Tommy to wire me with the news.

  After a sleepless night, I called Warm Springs in the morning. Within a moment, I was talking to her. “I love you,” I said. “And I’m so very, very sorry, dear.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “We’re all sorry.” There was a long pause, and a breath, and I heard the heartbreak in her voice when she said, “Lucy was here, Hick. With him. When he died.”

  “Oh,” I said, and then there was nothing left to say. Nothing at all.

  FDR was buried at the Big House in Hyde Park, in his mother’s rose garden. At the Little House, I sat outside in the sunshine and read aloud Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, dead on that same day, April 15, eighty years before:

  When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

  And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

  I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring…

  As I read, I thought of FDR, of the man I had known and the president I had worked for, of his strength and vitality and magnetism—and his cunning and secretiveness and willingness to use people for his own ends, some good, some bad. And like millions of others in our country around the world I felt bewilderment and terror at the thought of the then-unfinished war and could not imagine how it could be won without him. But it would be, of course. Peace in Europe would come in only three more weeks; in the Pacific, four more months. Life and death go on, love goes on.

  A week later, I gathered an armload of lilac and peonies from the garden and went to the Washington Square apartment Eleanor had rented in 1942, when she was looking ahead to the end of Franklin’s third term. I was arranging the flowers when she and Tommy arrived, both of them utterly exhausted. They had packed up all the Roosevelt furniture and possessions at the White House, had it loaded into Army trucks (eleven, Tommy said), and sent to Hyde Park. Eleanor’s next job was the unpacking and all the decisions that had to be made—while all around her people were celebrating the announcement of Hitler’s April 30 suicide and the German surrender on May 7. Things were happening too quickly, too much, too overwhelming. It was hard to make sense of it all.

  For Eleanor and her future, I had no worries, just the hope that she would find the time for rest and a little peace. Joe Lash married his Trude and the controversy over Eleanor’s friendship with him died down after the war. But another one quickly erupted. After the annulment of his second marriage, Earl Miller (then a Navy reserve lieutenant commander) had married for the third time in 1941. When his wife Simone filed for divorce in 1947, she threatened to name Eleanor as a co-respondent, and her lawyer gave the court co
pies of Eleanor’s letters to Earl. The judge awarded a substantial settlement to Simone, along with the custody of the two children, named Eleanor and Earl. He also ordered the letters sealed. Westbrook Pegler would later write several nasty columns about the divorce. But at the time, the only publicity was a single exclamatory sentence in Ed Sullivan’s New York Daily News column: “Navy commander’s wife will rock the country if she names the co-respondent in her divorce action!!!”

  But most of the newspaper coverage of Eleanor’s activities was positive and she would be revered for her efforts as First Lady. She was her own agent now and freer to act than she had been for more than forty years. When she spoke to me about her plans, not long after the president’s death, she was very firm.

  “I am nearly sixty-one,” she said emphatically. “I’m going to be a homebody and enjoy my friends. I want to spend time with my children, and with you. Tommy is getting my papers together so you can start organizing them for the library. It’ll be good to get that job finished.”

  Did I hope, as Marion believed, that with Franklin gone, Eleanor and I would at last be able live together? Perhaps I did, in some secret cranny of my heart. But I knew very well that the person I had loved had become a personage. Too many now loved her—and she them—to allow herself to love and be loved by one.

  And a homebody? I smiled at that. I wanted to believe her, but I couldn’t. I had no idea what new projects, large and small, might land on her desk, but I was sure they would come, and they wouldn’t be projects she could manage at home. I could only nod and smile and remember what she had written in her “My Day” column after her brother died, that the only way we can ever hold anyone is to let them go. Loving Eleanor had been a work in progress for more than a decade. For me, it would go on for nearly two more decades.

  The projects weren’t long in coming. Some months later, President Harry Truman asked her to serve in the American delegation to the United Nations. No longer First Lady of the United States, she was embarking on a new journey—this time, a journey of her own. “First Lady of the World,” President Truman called her.