Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  Despite painful attacks of what may have been angina, FDR pulled off several campaign marathons in the fall of 1944, touring four of the five boroughs of New York City in an open car in pouring rain and traveling through seven states in three days, stopping to make major addresses in Philadelphia and Chicago.

  Had he made no other speech, FDR might have been able to win the election on the strength of an address he delivered to the Teamsters Union on September 23, 1944, in which he defended his irresistible little black Scottie, Fala. “Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family don’t resent attacks,” he told the union members, “but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I’d left him behind on an Aleutian island and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.” FDR hadn’t forgotten how to deliver a story: the union audience loved him.

  After that, some observers claimed the contest was between New York governor Dewey, stiffly handsome with his mustache and neatly parted black hair, and Fala, who was all black hair, and more endearing.

  On election night, Hick escaped the noise and excitement at Democratic headquarters to listen to the results on the radio at the home of Belle Roosevelt, daughter-in-law of Teddy Roosevelt and one of the most popular speakers for the Democratic Women’s Division. After Dewey finally conceded, at 3:13 a.m., she left for home and bed, only to be awakened by Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was thrilled to report that FDR was going to carry California by 250,000 votes. Much later that day, Hick learned that Helen herself had been elected for the first time to the U.S. Congress. “Was I happy!” Hick wrote Eleanor.

  The popular vote in the presidential election was closer than ever, but FDR won big in the electoral college: 432 to Thomas Dewey’s 99.

  “Darling,” Hick wrote Eleanor after the results came in, “I don’t like to think about the next four years for you. Rotten luck—but, my God, we couldn’t let that little man with the mustache be president! Not now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THERE IS ONLY ONE PRESIDENT

  “THERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS I don’t like to think about just now,” Eleanor wrote Hick shortly after Franklin was reelected, “but perhaps the answers will come as we go along.” She had been troubled by FDR’s abandoning Henry Wallace, and she was lobbying now to make Wallace secretary of commerce. But Franklin was tired and not in the mood to listen to Eleanor’s unending demands. “I have a feeling,” Wallace wrote Henry Morgenthau, “that at the present time he fights everything she is for.”

  There were obvious signs by now that Franklin was seriously ill, but Eleanor resisted the idea, even complaining about his need for a special diet. At the same time, she wondered, as she wrote Esther Lape, if she would be most “useful” if she became a “good wife” and waited on FDR, as Daisy Suckley had done and as Anna was now doing. “I’d hate it but I’d soon get accustomed to it,” she wrote. But she added, in another letter four days later, that Lape was wrong to think her caring would be motivated by love. “There is no fundamental love to draw on, just respect and affection. . . . On my part there is often a great weariness and a sense of futility.”

  Eleanor’s letter to Hick around the same time made clear that she had no intention of becoming the good wife. Franklin, she wrote Hick, was going on to Warm Springs for Thanksgiving, taking along Daisy Suckley and Laura Delano, “so I won’t have to go.” Eleanor was hoping to spend Thanksgiving with Joe and Trude Lash instead. When that didn’t work out, she substituted a maelstrom of activity involving a visit with veterans, an evening with a British war correspondent, a visit to her ailing friend Elinor Morgenthau, cocktails with Hick, and a dinner for nine guests on the South Portico.

  She also fit in several phone calls to Franklin in Warm Springs to complain about conservative appointments in the State Department and pressure him about a new cause: Yugoslavia. A visit with two young Yugoslavs had convinced her that something needed to be done to support the Tito partisans in their desperate fight against the Nazis. Eleanor’s persistence upset Dr. Bruenn, who was in Warm Springs watching over FDR’s precarious health. The phone calls sent FDR’s blood pressure through the roof, according to Bruenn. “He got more and more upset, as did I.” He complained that Eleanor had “tunnel vision” when it came to lobbying for her causes.

  It seems likely that Eleanor’s “tunnel vision” at this point included refusal not only to accept the gravity of Franklin’s illness but also to notice what was by now fairly widely known in the inner circle: Franklin was seeing Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd on a regular basis, and indeed was with her during this Thanksgiving visit to Warm Springs. In fact, Anna Roosevelt had been arranging the meetings, at her father’s request, since July.

  Anna was angry at first about her father’s thoughtlessness in putting her in the middle. She knew that the Lucy Mercer affair had hurt her mother like nothing else in her life. But Anna also liked Lucy, and understood that she provided her father with the kind of intelligent and sympathetic company that might help keep him alive.

  On one occasion that summer, FDR actually picked up Lucy Mercer in Georgetown and drove with her through the streets of Washington in his open car en route to the White House. There had been a dozen trysts since then, at the White House when Eleanor was out of town and now at Warm Springs.

  Everyone in Warm Springs knew that FDR and Lucy were spending a fair amount of time together. Maids, cooks, and butlers knew, reporters who traveled with FDR knew, and of course secretaries and assistants to FDR knew. In September 1944, FDR’s train to Hyde Park detoured onto a siding so that he could visit briefly with Lucy at her summer estate in northern New Jersey. Yet when he arrived at Highland Station in Hyde Park, Eleanor was there to greet him and they spent a quiet evening together at Val-Kill. Is it really possible that Eleanor knew nothing of what was going on with Lucy?

  Eleanor had a knack for keeping painful realities at bay until she could deny them no longer. She had refused to acknowledge her father’s errant ways until long after his death. She had ignored FDR’s flirtation with Lucy Mercer until she was confronted with the irrefutable evidence of the love letters. Now, once again, she chose not to notice what was apparent to many around her. In the same way, she must have suspected, without really wanting to admit it, that FDR was fatally ill.

  Eleanor had entirely different attitudes toward illness in the family and illness outside the family. When it came to the Roosevelt children, she tended to be shockingly indifferent. Once, when she was on a camping trip with the boys, Elliott, who was wearing corrective metal braces, got too close to the campfire and severely burned his legs. Her casual reaction may have led to the infection he got afterward. James recalled coming home from college with a high fever and being ignored for hours while his parents continued entertaining guests. Afterward, he developed double pneumonia.

  When a friend was ill, on the other hand, Eleanor was quick to take action. Hick claimed that one of the best presents she ever got from her was a trip to the doctor shortly before Christmas in 1944. She had refused to go for months, insisting she didn’t want to turn into a hypochondriac like her friend Mary Norton, who worried obsessively about her blood pressure. Finally, when Eleanor offered to take Hick to her doctor, she relented, only to discover that her diabetes was dangerously out of control.

  “Were you ever right!” she wrote Eleanor just before Christmas. The doctor put her on a strict diet and told her she might need insulin in the future. He also told her that her heart sounded like “a tired old man,” that she needed to sleep nine or ten hours a night, and that it would be a good idea for her to take a long rest at the Little House.

  “Darling,” she wrote Eleanor, “thanks for making me go to the doctor. He says you pr
obably saved my life.” The diagnosis explained Hick’s complaints of “cumulative fatigue,” and gave her a strong justification for leaving her job once FDR began his fourth term.

  —

  ON THE WEEKEND of the inauguration, in January 1945, the White House was full to bursting with the sounds of thirteen children, ranging in age from two to eighteen. FDR insisted that every grandchild be on hand for his fourth inaugural. It was, of course, a historic occasion. But perhaps the president also wanted an opportunity to be with all of them for what he sensed was the last time.

  He looked pale as he gripped James’s arm and pulled himself up to the lectern to deliver his speech from the South Portico of the White House. His smile, as he completed the oath of office, was faint. The speech itself was only five minutes long, and the entire ceremony lasted only a quarter hour. “Today, in this year of war, 1945,” he told the crowd of seven thousand assembled on the snowy White House lawn, “we have learned lessons—at a fearful cost—and we shall profit by them. . . . We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community. We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that ‘the only way to have a friend is to be one.’”

  Even if FDR had been entirely healthy, an elaborate ceremony would have been inappropriate. It was no time, as his assistant Bill Hassett noted, for “fuss and feathers or peacock parades.” On December 16, Hitler’s troops had launched a surprise offensive on the Western Front. The monthlong Battle of the Bulge, in which nineteen thousand Americans would die, was going on as Roosevelt spoke. Victory in Europe was still a ways off; victory in the Pacific would take even longer.

  Nonetheless, two days after the inauguration, FDR left Washington on a secret and lengthy journey to Soviet Crimea, to negotiate the future of Europe after Allied victory. Much to Eleanor’s chagrin, Franklin invited Anna to go with him to Yalta. It made sense in several ways: Anna was now the caretaker, watching over his regimen. Anna was easier to be with. Eleanor, as she acknowledged in retrospect, hadn’t yet accepted the fact “he could no longer bear to have a real discussion, such as we had always had.” The tension between Franklin, who felt tired and burdened, and Eleanor, who could not stop pushing her agenda, was heightened by this choice. Eleanor received few letters from her husband during the conference, and was skeptical, when an underling delivered orchids, that the flowers had really been his idea. “Many thanks dear but I rather doubt his truth since you wouldn’t order orchids and so I suggest you don’t forget to pay him!”

  The Yalta meeting itself ended in great optimism. At the final dinner, Stalin toasted the alliance, proposing that relations in peacetime should be as strong as they had been in war. Churchill said he felt they were all standing on the crest of a hill, with the glories of future possibility stretching out before them. FDR said he felt the atmosphere at the dinner was that of a family, and that was how he liked to characterize the relations among the three great nations.

  Back home, the press hailed Yalta as a marvelous accomplishment—“a landmark in human history,” in the words of veteran journalist William L. Shirer. Yalta turned out to be a landmark, but not of the kind so ardently celebrated at that final dinner. Some historians have blamed FDR’s waning powers for the Soviet territorial gains agreed to at Yalta. But Eleanor pointed out that her husband rose to occasions when he needed to bargain. She was convinced that “the necessity of matching his wits against other people’s stimulated him and kept him alert and interested,” even at the Yalta Conference. FDR himself explained that Soviet occupation of much of Eastern Europe was a fait accompli that could not have been reversed without armed conflict. “At this stage of the war in Europe,” historian David Kennedy has observed, “political decisions could do little more than ratify military realities.”

  Like the farewell dinner at Yalta, FDR’s reception, when he addressed Congress on his return, was overwhelmingly positive. For the first time in his many years in office, Roosevelt spoke to the joint session sitting down. “I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture,” he began, going on to explain that it was easier not to carry “ten pounds of steel” on each of his legs, and that he had also just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile journey. It was the first time FDR had made explicit public reference to his disability. Eleanor viewed it as a surrender, noting that he had “accepted a certain degree of invalidism.” The applause from Congress was heartfelt.

  The speech, however, was uncharacteristically long and rambling, replete with unfortunate ad-libbing. Those who knew FDR best were worried. Equally alarming was a new tendency to repeat the same stories to the same person in the same sitting. Sometimes he would greet one visitor with a cold, blank stare, only to return to his usual warm style for the next.

  —

  HICK LEFT HER JOB as executive secretary of the Democratic Women’s Division that March, just as she celebrated her fifty-second birthday. Gladys Tillett organized a surprise farewell party for Hick at which her colleagues sang her praises. “I wish I could live up to the nice things that have been said to me,” she wrote Eleanor. She faulted herself, as always, for her intolerance and lack of patience, and she felt “awkward and inadequate when people say nice things to me—even though I love to hear them.”

  The best praise came from those she most respected. “I guess I did not make any mistake in picking you either,” Molly Dewson wrote her, pointing out that Eleanor had thought “it was not a job suited to you.” In the Democratic Digest, Dewson wrote of “our friend ‘Hick,’” who can write “battle pages during a campaign in which facts live.” Hick’s passion for anonymity meant that much of her work went unattributed. Yet, as the Digest noted in a final profile, Hick was “a gifted writer, a politically wise and realistic advisor, and one of the warmest and most penetrating personalities who has ever been with the National Committee.

  “She knows how to present even the most complicated subjects with simplicity, and yet with drama and force. Much that has come out of the Women’s Division in print these past few years came first out of Lorena Hickok’s typewriter.”

  Hick would continue to ply her trade, using her typewriter. But after she left the Women’s Division that March, she would never work in a salaried job again.

  —

  BY THE TIME FDR LEFT for Warm Springs at the end of March 1945, he was a man in desperate need of rest. Daisy Suckley and Laura Delano went along to keep him company, just as they had at Thanksgiving. Lucy Mercer joined them a week later, this time accompanied by her friend Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who planned to paint the president’s portrait.

  On April 11, FDR was in high spirits. He took all four women—Daisy, Laura, Lucy, and Elizabeth Shoumatoff—on a drive around the property in his customized ’38 Ford. He also worked on his Jefferson Day speech with Grace Tully. “Let us move forward with strong and active faith,” he wrote.

  The next day, the president dealt with the mail pouch, as usual, signing and handing over documents to his aide Bill Hassett, who laid them out separately until the ink dried. FDR referred to this as “doing the laundry.” At noon on April 12, he finished off a particularly large stack of mail by affixing his signature with a flourish to a piece of legislation. Daisy and Lucy were in the room with him. Elizabeth Shoumatoff was at her easel. “There,” he told the women, “there is where I make a law.”

  An hour later, as lunch was about to be served, FDR’s head drooped forward. Daisy hurried to his side, thinking he had dropped something. “He looked at me,” Suckley remembered, “his forehead furrowed with pain, and tried to smile. He put his left hand up to the back of his head and said, ‘I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.’ And then he collapsed.”

  By the time Dr. Bruenn arrived, the president’s valet and butler had carried the unconscious president into the bedroom and laid him down on the bed. Dr. Bruenn realized, as soon as he saw him, that Roosevelt had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Three and a half hou
rs later, he was dead.

  Back in Washington, Steve Early, who had served as FDR’s press secretary throughout all his years in the White House, delivered the news by telephone to the three major news services. “Here is a flash,” he began. “The President died suddenly early this afternoon.”

  There was a long silence on the line. Then one of the reporters asked, in disbelief, “Do you mean President Roosevelt?”

  “Of course,” Early answered. “There is only one President.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE GREATEST CATASTROPHE FOR THE WORLD

  EARLY ON THE FATEFUL DAY, Eleanor Roosevelt got a call from Laura Delano reporting that FDR had fainted. She decided to carry on with her afternoon engagements anyway, since any cancellation would arouse suspicion. She was at a thrift shop benefit when she was called to the phone by Steve Early, who asked her to return to the White House at once. She rode all the way there “with clenched hands,” knowing in her heart what had happened. Soon after she arrived at the White House and went to her sitting room, Steve Early and Dr. McIntyre came in to tell her that FDR had died.

  Eleanor was at her best in such crisis situations. She immediately cabled her four sons with the news: “Darlings. Pa slept away this afternoon. He did his job to the end as he would want you to do. Bless you. All our love. Mother.”

  Then she summoned Vice President Harry Truman to the White House. “Harry,” she told him when he arrived, “the President is dead.” Truman was too stunned to speak at first. Then he asked Eleanor if there was anything he could do for her. Her reply was characteristic: “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”