Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  Henry’s fall, when he was only six years old, “derailed the whole family,” Henry wrote in his book, Mostly Morgenthaus: “My left foot caught in the stirrup, and at the gallop I was dragged with my head bouncing on the ground … I had a fractured skull and a paralyzed left leg.” His mother took him south to warmer Augusta, Georgia, along with her other children, and after a winter there he regained use of his leg.

  Meanwhile, she cast Bob as the solid, dependable child, the one who needed her less. He developed independence at an early age, finding a plethora of ways to assuage his loneliness. At the family farm in upstate New York, he wandered and experimented at will. He cut off the heads of chickens when he was six; used a shotgun and killed a grizzly bear at sixteen. He secretly started driving around the yard when he was twelve; unable to see over the steering wheel, he drove the car right up onto the stoop. Before anyone found out, he had jacked it up and gotten it back down to the driveway.

  Bob lived such an unsupervised life, he came to feel he could do anything alone. He developed a propensity to follow his own rules; roguery bred itself into his heart. He tied sheets together and lowered Joan down from the second-story window to see if the contraption would hold. In the city, at his apartment on West Eighty-First Street, he had a pocketful of pranks. When it was raining, he would fill balloons with water and propel them out of his twelfth-floor window to see if he could collapse umbrellas below. He stole road signs and put them up on his wall; if his parents noticed the booty, they never commented on it.

  * * *

  When Bob was six, he developed serious ear problems that would plague his childhood. Doctors diagnosed his aching, suppurating auditory canal as a simple infection, but when it got worse, they threw up their hands in the face of the nasty sepsis deep in his ear. It was 1925, long before sulfa drugs and penicillin had been invented. There was simply no cure. For want of any better treatment, the doctor confined him to bed and ordered draining and hot compresses.

  Bob’s eardrum was in danger of bursting, so finally the doctor lanced it to ease the pressure. Before he did, however, he gave Bob chloroform, which terrified him. The staff had to hold him down so a mask could be put over his face. The compound hissed into Bob, sounding to him like a sawmill, and he thought he saw the blade coming down toward his neck. He shouted and cried until the gas finally put him to sleep.

  His mother had left on a monthlong round-the-world tour with her husband and was not there to care for him. The future presidential First Lady, however, was. Eleanor Roosevelt came to see Bob nearly every day, and he loved her; she was jolly and, unlike his mother, loved to hear his jokes. He looked forward to the little presents she would bring him. One time she gave him a tan kimono, which Bob wore long after he had outgrown it.

  Henry junior and Franklin, whose respective estates were only miles from each other in the lower Hudson Valley, became good friends from the time they met in 1914. Henry helped lead FDR’s political campaigns for governor of New York State and then president of the country and increasingly became a trusted adviser. In the ethnically segregated society of the times, the friendship was unusual; indeed, the Morgenthaus were the Roosevelts’ only Jewish friends. Elinor Morgenthau and Eleanor Roosevelt, who laughed about the different spellings of their names, grew to be close confidantes. They would ride horseback together, and the delight they experienced in the similarity of their lively minds is illustrated in an old photograph that still hangs in the Morgenthau home: their horses have been airbrushed to look alike.

  When Bob was nine, another infection raged. It was so severe his grandfather Morgenthau, who lived near the family on New York City’s West Side and who was now involved with Jewish charities, sat at his bedside constantly. Bob’s fever spiked to 105, then 106 degrees. The doctors said he might not make it, and Janet, the chambermaid who helped look after him, couldn’t stop weeping. This time his mother and father were vacationing in Spain.

  Bob survived, but in the summer of 1932, when he was just thirteen, he suffered another devastating setback. This time his mother was home. She took him to his pediatrician, who declared the discharge from her son’s ear was nothing to worry about; she didn’t believe him and consulted a society surgeon, a champion polo player, who confirmed her suspicions. He said the infection was a serious mastoiditis that had come within a centimeter of Bob’s jugular vein, and he promptly removed part of the ear bone closest to the brain. The surgeon ordered Bob to stay home for a year, skipping the eighth grade, so he wouldn’t be exposed to his classmates’ germs. People had died from mastoiditis, famous people such as Margaret, the crown princess of Sweden, and Sam Warner of Warner Bros., the infections spreading and poisoning their systems. As it was, Bob lost the hearing in his right ear.

  But he was resourceful during his year of confinement to the farm. He wandered the woodlands with a tutor, studying wildlife, and by the time he went back to school, he had learned to identify forty birds.

  In January 1933, about five months after Bob’s surgery, with their children ensconced in boarding schools, Bob’s parents moved to Washington so Henry junior could assume his post as FDR’s newly appointed head of the Farm Credit Administration. About a year later, he would become his secretary of the Treasury. Bob’s mother claimed that the town was not a good place to bring up children. She knew she would be busy with a round of balls, parties, and political events.

  When Bob visited their Washington home, his mother put him to work. She had him drive around town in her Ford Roadster, complete with rumble seat, to deposit her calling cards at various important residences, including those of cabinet members like Cordell Hull and Henry Wallace. She didn’t seem to care that her son, who at age fourteen had no driver’s license, was breaking the law.

  * * *

  Bob wanted so badly to join the navy and fight in World War II that when he graduated from Amherst in the spring of 1941, he submitted himself for the required physical examination—and cheated on the hearing test.

  He was commissioned as an ensign, then a lieutenant, and off to Europe he went. He requested destroyer duty, one of the most hazardous assignments in the war. He soon became an executive officer who often acted as captain with responsibility for an entire ship. In such a position, where following orders was a strict rule, he often followed his own sense of right and wrong. Some of his moves could have gotten him court-martialed. Once, the captain of his first destroyer, a drunk, a bigot, and a bad sailor, tried to bring a prostitute on board during an alcoholic binge and began complaining of chest pains. During the quiet of the night, Bob and the communications officer signed a statement claiming the captain had suffered a heart attack and sent it off to the admiral, who swiftly relieved him of his command.

  Bob went on to fight in the Battle of Anzio in 1944. German aerial torpedo bombers came swooping down at sunset and bombarded his ship, the USS Lansdale, sinking it off the port of Algiers. He spent four hours in the icy Mediterranean, and though he never mentions this, he saved the life of a radar operator by giving him his life jacket. When he saw a distant Coast Guard boat, he set out on an impossibly long swim for help, but before he reached it, the boat spotted the sinking Lansdale and steamed to the rescue. After that experience, Bob hated to go into the ocean.

  Bob repeatedly championed African American sailors. At the time, the military wouldn’t let people of color be anything but mess attendants, he explained, “the theory being that if they were below deck, they wouldn’t get scared by the fighting.” So Lieutenant Morgenthau, executive officer, persuaded the captains of two of his destroyers to let black sailors come up top at battle stations and join the white gunnery mates in manning the 20-millimeter guns “instead of staying down making sandwiches.” His last ship, the USS Harry F. Bauer, was attacked by kamikazes during the Battle of Okinawa, and when the smoke cleared, the white gun crew had abandoned its post and jumped to take cover on the deck below. The black sailors were still at their guns. Bob wanted to recommend them for Silver Stars,
but his captain claimed that “they had been too scared to jump” and agreed only to the Bronze Star.

  Bob himself, during the ship’s tour, directed the shooting down of seventeen kamikazes and was awarded two Bronze Stars. The Harry F. Bauer received the rare Presidential Unit Citation, equivalent to a Silver Star for every member of the crew. Bob never mentions the honors and claims that he has forgotten where he put the medals.

  * * *

  Of his three children, Henry, Bob, and Joan, Henry junior was particularly devoted to the middle one. Before Henry junior met FDR, he ran the American Agriculturist magazine, but his first love was his 1,500-acre apple and dairy farm in Dutchess County (later the dairy farm and much of the land were sold off, and the children were left with only about 960 acres of apple orchards). Bob was the only one of his children interested in the farm. He and his father would tromp through the rows of trees, planting year-old whips and pruning the abundance of apple trees—Baldwins, greenings, Spies.

  Bob was also the one who shared his father’s ironic and often wicked sense of humor. In rich, bottomless voices, they would entertain the family by belting out old Broadway tunes.

  For a long time, it was just Bob and his dad. That changed when Bob turned ten. Though their bond always remained strong, with his new appointment as state commissioner of conservation, his father became heavily involved with his political career. Three years later, in 1933, when FDR summoned him to Washington and he became the president’s trusted adviser, Bob, thirteen, would pick him up at the airport from Washington on weekends just so he could spend a little bit of time with him.

  Bob tells his father’s story with pride, how he had learning disabilities that forced him to leave Cornell University, but was able to think out of the box, to become an innovator. When he took over Treasury, he helped FDR design and carry out the New Deal. He investigated corruption that caused the fall of crooked public officials and crime syndicates. When no one else in Roosevelt’s cabinet anticipated that Germany was going to force us into war, Henry junior nudged FDR into taking emergency measures. By 1940, with the Nazis taking over Europe, he had persuaded the president to make a massive effort to build up the navy, army, and air force. Moreover, he helped finance this by initiating the war bonds campaign; it eventually raised almost fifty billion dollars. Without it, the United States would not have had the means to defeat the Third Reich.

  Henry junior wasn’t above bending the law in the service of what he thought was right. Congress was under pressure from the members of America First to let Europe fight the Nazis alone and had passed a neutrality act. To circumvent it, Henry junior and FDR hatched a plan to secretly send tanks and planes to Britain and France: they took fighter planes up to Plattsburgh, New York, and rolled them across the border into Canada so it couldn’t be said that they had been flown out from U.S. soil. Other creative actions and the increasing power of Hitler led Congress in 1941 to finally give in and approve the Lend-Lease Act, which, through loans and bartering, supplied England in its lonely fight against Germany.

  As early as 1939, Henry junior was quietly acting to try to arm France. He arranged to have a French pilot test a Douglas bomber in California, and when Congress found out, it began to plan impeachment proceedings against the Treasury secretary. FDR quashed the effort.

  Morgenthau protected the dollar against Nazi Germany’s efforts to devalue it, and at the end of the war it was the strongest currency in the world.

  The State Department was filled with anti-Semites, and Henry junior fought hard to persuade FDR to focus on saving Jews, getting him to set up the War Refugee Board, even though the president’s primary goal was to win the war. Henry junior himself surreptitiously set up a Jewish refugee community in Oswego.

  Bob has always expressed bitterness about what he feels was the unjust reception of the Morgenthau Plan—his father’s proposal to prevent a belligerent Germany from starting another war by turning it from a military power into an agricultural state. The plan was eventually distorted by the press, criticized, pilloried, and it perished unceremoniously.

  After FDR died, President Truman had a difficult relationship with Henry junior and finally removed him from office. Though Truman considered the Morgenthau Plan vindictive and strategically unwise, Bob discovered other reasons why FDR’s successor disliked Henry junior.

  Leafing through the papers of the former secretary of war Henry Stimson decades later, Bob would do a double take. There, in ink, was an entry from Stimson’s diary, recounting the day Truman had invited him to the postwar meeting of Allied leaders in Potsdam. Stimson replied, “Is Secretary Morgenthau coming?” The president growled, “I’m not taking any of those jew boys, not Morgenthau, not Baruch.”

  Years after Bob’s discovery, a handwritten note was found on a shelf in the Truman Library. It revealed that President Truman, a hero to the Jews for supporting Israel, had a vicious side not widely known. Written in 1947, it derided Henry junior for still trying to help the millions of displaced, sick Jewish refugees: “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. When they have power, physical, financial or political, neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog.”

  Henry junior was criticized by some of his Treasury staff for being disorganized and lacking executive abilities. Most admit, however, that he was generous and frank and commanded abiding loyalty from his workers—the very qualities that would eventually appear in his son Robert.

  He was Bob’s first hero, someone who stood up for what he believed in, who helped the little person, who always did the right thing. He was the man Bob wanted to be.

  At the end, Bob was the only one of Henry junior’s children who could be consistently found by his side. He visited him regularly and finally cared for him at the farm when the hardening of his arteries caused his brilliant mind to go.

  This paternal devotion was in Bob’s blood. Henry junior had also been deeply attached to his father, the first Henry Morgenthau. In the late nineteenth century, Henry’s family had left a successful cigar-making business in Mannheim, Germany, to immigrate to America. Henry had just a few dollars in his pocket, enrolled in school, and then had to quit to help support his parents and eleven siblings. Eventually, he saved enough to go to law school, made money in real estate, and was awarded his ambassadorship to the Ottoman Empire by President Woodrow Wilson.

  Ambassador or not, there was nothing more important to this distinguished statesman than his only son. He bought him a large dairy and fruit farm and instructed him on business, politics, morals, charity, and gin rummy. They were like ships of discovery riding on a grand sea. In fact, Henry junior sometimes felt so tethered, he tried to slip away to find companions his own age.

  * * *

  Henry junior derived much of his success from his wife, who taught herself to become a superior strategist in realpolitik. She was the major influence over Bob’s father; she guided his moves and honed his instincts, and he was dependent on her. But she never let anyone know the role she played; she stood very ladylike behind him, but she was an iron fist in a velvet glove.

  On the program of FDR’s fiftieth-birthday party in January 1932, Franklin wrote Mrs. Morgenthau a poem tinged with irony about her quiet power:

  Elinor, I want to know

  What makes Henry argue so

  Don’t he get a chance at home

  To make his opinions known?

  By all accounts Elinor wasn’t a particularly warm person, nor did she have very much of a sense of humor. Indeed, in photographs, one can’t help but notice her impassive, often dour expression. It hardly revealed what I later discovered: behind that hard exterior was an insecure and tender heart.

  Bob was proud of his mother’s insight and articulate intelligence, which impressed even the likes of Winston Churchill. At a time when few women of her German Jewish community went to college, she had insisted on going to Vassar, where she became a talented actor. When she supported a Democrat,
Woodrow Wilson, for president, her father, who, as owner of a woolen mill, was literally a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, was infuriated. Elinor took after her politically skilled uncle Herbert Lehman, governor of New York, and went on to become a speaker for the state Democratic Committee Women’s Division and an advocate for women’s rights. She also was active in the war effort and later became the First Lady’s assistant in the Office of Civilian Defense.

  Elinor seems to have been a kind of proving ground where Bob developed one aspect of his character. Frequently, he deceived her without really deceiving her. He would take out the family’s Ford Touring Car, for instance, and go zooming at over seventy-five miles an hour on back roads. When he came home and told her what he had done, she didn’t believe him—she thought he was teasing her. After all, he was “the responsible child.”

  Letters often reveal the marrow of the soul. Old letters, new letters, any letters that have been left for others to discover, are treasure. After we were married, Pauline Wais, the family secretary who became my friend, gave me a box of her correspondence with the young Bob that spanned his schooling from Deerfield Academy to Amherst College. She had saved them in shoe boxes and never shown them to anyone before. A tiny, peppy woman, unusually generous with her time, she was a stand-in for his mother; Bob and she wrote ironic notes to each other, shared confidences, and even had a secret code. It was Pauline whom he asked to send books and other paraphernalia he needed; Pauline whom he notified of his comings and goings. He once wrote a letter to her from college with this pitiful ending: “Rumor has it that I’m going to go to New York sometime between Jan 31 and Feb 4. Nobody gives a d—— but I thought you might like to have it in your files.”

  Henry junior was as reticent about Elinor as Bob, declining to talk about his wife even to John Morton Blum, who put together three of the Morgenthau Diaries. She stood like a ghost star in the family firmament.

  How little we know our parents, what they suffered, how they became who they were. If we did, perhaps we could forgive them more quickly for their failings. Many years after Bob and I were married, I became curious about what his mother, behind her somewhat flat and reserved personality, was truly like. I imagined I would find Elinor’s true feelings the same way I had found young Bob’s—from personal letters. So I went to the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park and read through correspondence between Eleanor Roosevelt and Bob’s mother. Here I found a hidden woman, not Elinor the “iron fist,” but Elinor the vulnerable woman who seemed depressed over the health problems that debilitated her until her untimely death in 1949 and who had a loving and somewhat enigmatic relationship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.