Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  After the visit, Eleanor wrote the soldier’s commanding officer to say that the young man was welcome to practice on the White House piano when he got better. After seventeen months of recovery, Hardie Robbins took up the invitation, practicing on the White House Steinway for an entire year, working to get the suppleness back in his hands so that he could again earn his living as a pianist. Naturally, he was invited to join the Roosevelts for dinner. He became yet another of Eleanor Roosevelt’s friends for life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A FIGHT FOR LOVE AND GLORY

  ONE NIGHT IN 1942, Hick returned home to the White House while the Roosevelts and their dinner guests were watching a movie in the West Hall. The film, In Which We Serve, starred Noël Coward and was based on the true story of a British destroyer sunk by German warplanes. “The screen was so placed that one could get an oblique view by standing squeezed in a corner just outside the elevator door,” Hick remembered. She stood transfixed, undetected by the dinner guests, through the rest of the movie, watching at an angle that left her eyes hurting and her legs cramped.

  Movies about the war were a welcome distraction from the war itself. But sometimes movies and real life overlapped. On New Year’s Day 1943, FDR and his guests watched the movie Casablanca with old friends. The Casablanca they saw on the screen was peopled by French and German soldiers, shady opportunists, a beautiful girl, and a couple of suave gents who stood up to the Nazis. Everybody in that Casablanca was trying to escape to America. Nine days later, FDR headed in the opposite direction, toward the real Casablanca, to meet up with Churchill and work out plans for the real war.

  Like the movie version, the real Casablanca was swarming with Vichy and Axis agents, and Roosevelt’s advisers worried that Berlin would find out about the meeting. So FDR traveled once again by a circuitous route—first heading north by train as though going to Hyde Park, then turning around in Baltimore and heading south on another line to Miami, and finally taking off by plane for North Africa. As it turned out, the deception didn’t work: the Germans discovered that Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting in Casablanca. But they translated “Casablanca” as “white house,” and assumed the meeting was at the White House in Washington.

  Despite the grave circumstances surrounding the meeting, Roosevelt and Churchill thoroughly enjoyed themselves. As one of Churchill’s aides noted, neither man had ever completely grown up, and they welcomed this chance for an adventure. They also welcomed the chance to put distance between themselves and the relentless demands back home.

  Both delegations were housed in sumptuous villas: FDR’s had a sunken bath and a view of lush orange groves. Roosevelt and Churchill dined with a sultan in white silk robes who presented a beautiful golden tiara to Mrs. Roosevelt in absentia, and they took the time to travel together to Marrakech, an ancient city of mosques and gardens. Churchill insisted that his friend be carried up six hundred narrow steps to the top of a tower so he could take in the spectacular view of the magical city and snowcapped mountains beyond. The two men sat for half an hour, watching the changing light.

  The final farewell was in comic contrast to Rick and Ilsa’s rain- and tear-soaked farewell on the tarmac. Churchill had planned to get up in time to see Roosevelt off early the next morning. But he overslept and had no time to get dressed. At the last possible moment, he rushed out to wave goodbye, attired in his red-dragon dressing gown and black velvet slippers.

  As the plane disappeared into the blue yonder, Churchill grew solemn: “If anything happened to that man,” he told an aide, “I couldn’t stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I have ever known.”

  —

  HICK COULD ALWAYS TELL, during the war years, when the president left town. She just had to peek out the tall window in her room and take a look at the machine gun on the roof of the swimming pool. When he was out of town, the gun was covered and unattended. It may have been during that January trip to Casablanca that Howard Crim, the head usher, informed Hick that she was “the sole occupant of the White House tonight—with forty-seven men to guard you.”

  Both Roosevelts were frequently away from the White House in 1943. FDR traveled abroad that year more than at any other time in his presidency: to Casablanca at the beginning of the year, then in August to Quebec, to meet once again with Churchill and develop plans for the European offensive. Then in November he embarked on a long and exhausting trip to Tehran, where he met, at last, with Stalin.

  Casablanca, though beautiful, turned out to be the least satisfactory of the gatherings, from the American point of view. Churchill and FDR did agree that they would join forces on a bombing campaign over Germany and that the Allies would settle for nothing less than “unconditional surrender.” But the Americans, who had not yet assumed control of the alliance, wound up going along, reluctantly, with Churchill’s strong preference for a continuation of the war in Sicily. That decision meant further delaying a cross-Channel invasion. Stalin, whose forces were still fighting the bloodiest battle of the war in Stalingrad, was enraged by the news that the second front had been put off once again.

  Soon after Casablanca, however, the war began to turn decisively in favor of the Allies. In February, at long last, the Russians turned back the German offensive at Stalingrad. Around the same time, the Allies began to win the Battle of the Atlantic, sinking German U-boats at a crippling pace. The continuation of the war in Sicily and then in Italy was costly and slow. But in July, Benito Mussolini’s reign ended.

  “The plans we made for the knocking out of Mussolini and his gang have largely succeeded,” FDR announced. “But we still have to knock out Hitler and his gang, and Tojo and his gang. No one pretends that this will be an easy matter.” By August 1943, when FDR went off to Quebec, Americans were making headway against the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, including, most important, Guadalcanal.

  The battle for control of Guadalcanal, a two-thousand-square-mile island of great strategic importance to both sides, was one of the longest of the war in the Pacific. American Marines began landing on the island in August 1942 and slowly overwhelmed the Japanese with superior arms and sheer numbers. Finally, late in the year, the Japanese abandoned their fight for the island. For the Allies, Guadalcanal became essentially an unsinkable aircraft carrier, critical to bringing in men and supplies for the war in the Pacific.

  Guadalcanal had a particular importance in the mind, and heart, of Eleanor Roosevelt: Joe Lash was sent there in May 1943 with his unit of weather forecasters. Even before that, Eleanor had been making tentative plans to visit the troops in the Pacific theater. After that, her plans took on a new urgency. She was determined, she wrote Joe, to visit “your island.”

  Publicly, her reason for touring the Pacific was to bring a message of support and gratitude from the commander in chief to American troops stationed in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as numerous Pacific islands. But she wrote Lash that the thing she cared most about was the chance to have a few hours with him. It was, she wrote him, “the one happy and personal thing.” There were only very few people who mattered to her, and Joe was one of them.

  After her successful tour of England, Eleanor traveled and spoke around the country more than ever. Most of the time she traveled with Tommy, fitting in visits to Anna or her sons when they landed somewhere between military assignments. Because Hick was another of the few people who mattered, she paid a visit to her that June at her Little House. It was, she wrote Lash, “a journey undertaken for friendship’s sake,” adding, “I enjoyed . . . seeing Hick in the one place she really enjoys.”

  But the main focus of her attention and concern in 1943 was Lash. Because of Lash’s earlier radicalism, the FBI was keeping an eye on him, and seems to have bugged a hotel room in Chicago where he and Eleanor met. In his extensive writings about the relationship, Lash insists, convincingly, that he and Eleanor were simply good friends,
not lovers; Lash was in love with Trude Pratt, as Eleanor well knew. But Lash believed the FBI used the hotel recording, no doubt filled with expressions of affection, to threaten exposure and embarrassment to him and to Eleanor. That may well have been the reason why orders came from above (the source was never clear) to dispatch Lash and his unit off to Guadalcanal abruptly, without explanation. For Eleanor, Joe’s sudden departure added another layer of concern, especially when reports came of continued Japanese bombing of the island.

  In July, for Joe’s sake, Eleanor traveled with Trude Pratt to Reno, keeping her company while she filed for divorce so that she could marry Joe. She wrote Hick while she was there, remembering the time they had accompanied Anna Roosevelt on a similar errand ten years earlier, and also “what fun we had” at Yosemite. When her muscles grew stiff from horseback riding, it made her realize that she had been “brutal” in expecting Hick to keep up with her on the steep trails.

  In mid-August, right around the time that FDR left for the Quebec meeting, Eleanor finally embarked on her visit to the Pacific theater. She was traveling in her official capacity as First Lady, of course, but with a private plan to see Joe as well. “I wish so that you could be in my pocket,” she wrote Trude Pratt shortly before she left. The crew for the trip named her plane Love, Eleanor.

  It was the first time in years that Eleanor had embarked on a long trip without Tommy, and it gave her loyal secretary a “queer feeling.” Tommy wondered what it meant that Eleanor had left all her jewelry behind. She hadn’t done that when they went together to England. Eleanor was uneasy too, especially since she didn’t know what kind of reception she would get from the military authorities.

  The initial encounters weren’t promising. In Samoa, a Marine general kept her away from the troops entirely. And at headquarters for the South Pacific, in Nouméa, New Caledonia, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey seemed annoyed that he was going to have to shuttle this do-gooder from island to island, taking time and energy away from the war effort. Halsey became a convert, however, when he saw Eleanor in action, going into every ward and paying real attention to every soldier. What was his name? How did he feel? What did he need? “I marveled most,” Admiral Halsey said, “at their expressions as she leaned over them. It was a sight I will never forget.”

  Eleanor had decided to go on the trip as a representative of the Red Cross, and so she wore the official uniform: a summery blue-gray three-button jacket over a flared skirt. Standing tall and straight in her officer’s billed cap, with white gloves, black purse, and clipboard in hand, she looked both sympathetic and eager to learn. In a hospital in Wellington, New Zealand, she met a soldier from Poughkeepsie who had lost an arm. He assured Eleanor that he was going to be okay—he could already tie his tie with one arm. “When you get home tell the boys at the toll booth on the Midhudson Bridge that you saw Nick,” he said. Of course she took down Nick’s address, along with many others, so she could report to his family when she got back.

  “These boys break your heart,” she wrote Hick, “they’re so young and so tired. Malaria is almost as bad as bullets.” And yet they were hardly out of the hospital before they were back at the Red Cross clubs, dancing and enjoying themselves.

  Eleanor’s view of the trip swung wildly between optimism and despair. She felt best when she was able to talk with the men. Some of them told her what it was like moving forward through swamp water up to your waist, balancing on slippery mango roots and knowing that if you stumbled and fell you would drown. At the same time, you had to hold your machine gun up high to keep it dry and try to shoot a Jap up ahead, well camouflaged in a tree.

  “I do camps, hospitals, Red Cross services day and evening,” she wrote Hick. She saw men “who have either been into New Guinea and come out with a shadow on their faces . . . or new men going in to something they know nothing about and are ill prepared for.” Their hatred of “the Japs,” although alien to her, seemed to help them fight.

  What frustrated her most was being insulated from the troops by official greeters and protectors. “I’m surrounded by Generals and Admirals and M.P.’s wherever I go,” she complained to Hick, “and you know how that would please me. . . . I’ll need a long dose of the cottage and N.Y. City to forget this pomp and ceremony!” In her letters to Franklin she was even more indignant: “I have all the pomp and restriction and none of the power! I’m coming home this time and go [sic] into a factory!”

  Nothing pleased her—or the troops—more than a chance to defy protocol. She arrived at a Red Cross Club unannounced and encountered two young privates standing in their underwear near a radiator, waiting for their trousers to be repaired. Without blinking, she “coolly and graciously chatted with the two boys,” a soldier reported in a letter sent back home, “both paralyzed with amazement and chagrin but thrilled thru and thru.” After she left, the two “grasped their scorched legs and burst into all sorts of excited exclamations. . . . One of the kids, eyes big as pool-balls, said ‘She—the wife of the President—talked to me!’”

  “It’s sumpin’,” the correspondent concluded, “when half a dozen general officers wait gasping for someone to complete a casual talk with two privates! It’s sumpin’ and it’s Eleanor.”

  This writer was convinced that Eleanor’s trip made a difference. “I keep thinking of those two boys without any pants and how they’ll remember that morning perhaps when they’re in a nasty fox hole trying not to do anything foolish or panicky.” He maintained that “Eleanor created two damn good Marines in a few minutes that morning and I don’t know an officer in the battalion who could do the same.”

  But as Eleanor suspected, there was plenty of grumbling about her visit behind her back. “They caricature her speech,” the letter writer reported, “estimate the cost of the trip and . . . ask what the hell she’s doing tearing around; why doesn’t she stay home.”

  Eleanor still hoped most of all that she would get to Guadalcanal to see Lash. The ostensible reason for going to the island was that it was a powerful symbol of the war in the southwest Pacific. But the problem with Guadalcanal was that it remained vulnerable to Japanese bombing. Admiral Halsey didn’t want to do anything that would draw unwelcome attention to the island, with its vital airstrip and major hospitals. FDR, it turned out later, had given orders that she must not go. Finally, however, at the very end of her trip, Admiral Halsey gave her permission. “Happy tonight for we are going to Guadalcanal,” she wrote Tommy.

  She left in the belly of a huge bomber at two in the morning, because there had been air raids on previous nights, and sat shivering in the dark. One of the boys, “a baby it seemed to me,” brought her coffee and a blanket.

  Eleanor spent one long hectic day on the island, touring the hospitals and the strategic airstrip. When she saw Lash, she gave him a public kiss, in defiance of the gossips. She spent several hours with Joe, paying a visit to his tent and meeting the other members of his weather forecasting group.

  Eleanor’s visit with Lash provided fodder for her archenemy Westbrook Pegler’s column: he condemned the entire trip as a waste of taxpayers’ money and an excuse for her rendezvous. But Eleanor also wrote her own column, including a touching account of a visit to the Guadalcanal cemetery. “The little white crosses climb up the hill, on the summit of which stands a high flagpole from which floats our flag. . . . I thought of the women at home whose hearts are partly buried here, too, with the men they loved. I think they would feel not only peace on this spot, but pride in the cause for which so many made the greatest possible sacrifice.”

  Seven thousand Americans died in the battle to take Guadalcanal, and perhaps three times that number of Japanese. It was the kind of statistic that made Eleanor insist, as she so often did both publicly and privately, that there should never be another war like this one.

  By the time she left for home, Eleanor had visited New Zealand, Australia, and seventeen islands, and seen about four hundred
thousand men in camps and hospitals. She had lost weight, and she was exhausted. But she came to the conclusion, despite criticism from some quarters, that the trip to the Pacific theater had been worthwhile. Over time, it became one of the most storied and important trips of her public life.

  Back at the White House, Eleanor spent two hours with FDR over lunch, telling him of her experiences. She invited Hick to join them that night and continued her account. They likely also talked about Hick’s pressing issue at the Women’s Division: women were being completely ignored on postwar planning commissions. Very soon after Eleanor’s return, that began to turn around.

  Within a month of Eleanor’s return from the Pacific, FDR was off again—this time to the most important Allied gatherings yet, first at Cairo, and then Tehran. In the past, these conferences had been top secret, with minimal coverage afterward. But the meeting of the Big Three in Tehran was different. The Democratic Digest, along with every other news outlet, published results of the proceedings not long after the conference adjourned.

  Hick never signed her name to any of the Democratic Digest articles when she worked at the Women’s Division. But the report on the Tehran meeting sounds like it went through her typewriter: “At the foot of snow-capped Damavend, in Iran, the three leaders met on a spot which had played a role in the lives of empire builders of ancient times—Alexander, Darius, Xerxes and Genghis Khan, and there mapped out destruction for those who dreamed of world empire in our time.”

  The big news from the Tehran Conference was that the Allied leaders planned to launch a second front in the spring of 1944, to be called Overlord. “We have reached a complete agreement as to the scope and timing of operations,” the Tehran document declared. “The common understanding which we have here reached guarantees that victory will be ours.” The fact of the invasion was out there for all to know, including the enemy; the time and place were not.