Eleanor (48 page)

I would think it might well be considered of mutual interest to obtain withdrawal of troops on either side for a demilitarized central Europe. I realize that it would be considered that we were weakening NATO by not having Germany in, and therefore weakening our western defense, but if we get equal concessions on the other side, is this perhaps not a good way to beginning disarmament? Negotiations must go on, and that means give and take, and we had better be preparing our people not to look upon anything which pleases both sides as appeasement on our part.

He was giving the problem of nuclear testing his close personal attention, the president assured her, and, as she could tell from his speeches, he had little use for those who equated negotiation with appeasement.
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Mrs. Roosevelt’s last letter to President Kennedy, written from Campobello, suggested that the Roosevelt home there, which was then owned by Victor Hammer, be acquired by the government in connection with U.S.-Canadian plans to convert the island into an international Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial.

It would be nice to feel that the house might be an F.D.R. Memorial Conference site because he was interested in friendship between Canada and the United States and made considerable efforts to promote it.
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She was in touch, too, with Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, mostly about civil rights in the South. The government was trying to do what it could, he wrote her, after his aides had persuaded local officials in Albany, Georgia, to drop charges against
the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights protesters, but the federal government’s powers were extremely limited. “You are doing very well and the results are gratifying,” she wrote on the margin of his letter.
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She liked to see the White House inhabited again by a young family that was obviously enjoying itself. Before the Kennedys had moved in, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote a warm and understanding letter to Mrs. Kennedy:

I know that there will be difficulties in store for you in the White House life but perhaps also you will find some compensations. Most things are made easier, though I think on the whole life is rather difficult for both the children and their parents in the “fish bowl” that lies before you.
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A tender correspondence developed between the two. Mrs. Kennedy thanked her for her wise words of advice and enclosed a drawing made by Caroline, to whom she had read a book about Fala. She had begun to learn what Mrs. Roosevelt meant about the difficulty of making new friends while in the White House.

It was wonderful to have “so young, intelligent, and attractive” a First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt observed, and the changes Mrs. Kennedy was making in the White House showed a sense of art and history, she thought.

Jacqueline Kennedy had served her country well when she accompanied her husband to his meetings with de Gaulle and Khrushchev:

To smile no matter how weary one is, to look well-dressed and interested at all times is a remarkable feat, especially when it is considered that we do not have the long training given to royalty to meet these situations.

Then in a postscript that, as a First Lady who had faced the exacting test and more than met it, she alone could write, she added:

I think back to the days of my husband’s Presidency and realize that the problems of that time—first of the depression and then of the war—required a background and understanding of social justice and social needs. That is still needed by the woman in the White House, but much more is required.

Both the President and his wife can never give way to apprehension even though they are probably more aware than most citizens of the dangers which may surround us. If the country is to be confident, they must be confident. They cannot afford to harbor resentment, or to have enemies where it is possible to turn these enemies into friends. This demands from both the President and his wife a high order of intelligence, of self-discipline and a dedication to the public good. We are extremely fortunate to find these qualifications in the White House at the present time.
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To the world Mrs. Roosevelt still seemed a marvel of energy, but she was slowing down. “I know you think she never tires,” Nina said in London during her trip with her grandmother. “Well, one of the reasons is that she’s got the knack of falling off to sleep wherever she is, even on her feet. It can be awkward if she’s in company. I keep a very close watch. If I can catch her just as her head is nodding, one tap of the ankle is enough. But once her head reaches her chest, it takes a good old-fashioned shake.”
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But it was not only age that was causing her to doze off and reach gratefully for a chair. In early 1960 an anguished David Gurewitsch diagnosed the flare-up of a blood disease as aplastic anemia. “You have to realize,” Jim Halsted told his wife, Anna, when they heard the news on their return from Iran, “this will shorten her life. You will get to broken down veins and transfusions.”
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Mrs. Roosevelt knew. She had called on Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion during his 1960 visit to the United States. A friend mentioned Ben-Gurion’s well-known interest in longevity. She had no such interest, she said firmly. There were a few things she still wanted to do, such as taking some of her grandchildren
to her favorite places in Europe. She would take them that summer. Otherwise, it was interesting to do things, saying to yourself, “This is the last time you will do them.” It was an excuse to do a great many things you might not otherwise feel free to do. She had left a memorandum on her funeral and burial. She wanted a plain wooden coffin, covered with pine boughs from her woods, no embalming, and her veins cut (because she had an irrational fear of waking up with piles of earth on top of her).
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The illness would flicker and subside—infections, fevers, chills, and aches. She dealt with them by ignoring them. Doctor, children, friends told her repeatedly that by any standard she was overdoing things, but she had her own firm ideas on how she wished to live—and die.

In February, 1962, she went to Europe to meet Henry Morgenthau II and to do some recordings for her “Prospects of Mankind” series on “Europe: Rival or Partners?” In London she stayed, as always, at Claridge’s and dined with Lord Elibank one night and the next with Lady Reading, who brought along six ladies in policy-making positions in government. She lunched with Hilda Fitzwilliams, an Allenswood schoolmate, and Louise Morley Cochrane and her children came to tea. In Paris she checked in at the Crillon and took her “crew,” as she called them, to “different good, little French restaurants.” There was a quick trip to Israel (“They are still dreamers, but they make their dreams come true”) and a stay at St. Moritz with the Gurewitsches and Maureen Corr, whom she entertained with reminiscences of her honeymoon stay there in 1905.
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She had a sense that her time on earth was drawing to a close. She sent out checks six months early—to godchildren whose school tuition she was paying, to friends who had come on hard times, to favorite organizations. A Tacoma housewife received a birthday check for $10 after Mrs. Roosevelt died. She was the daughter of Al Kresse, a hitchhiker whom Mrs. Roosevelt had picked up in the depths of the Depression and had sent to her Sixty-fifth Street house with a note that he should be fed and helped to find a job. He named his daughter after her, and Mrs. Roosevelt asked to be her godmother, sending her a $10 check on each birthday. She used a
bequest of $25,000 from Mrs. Parish (“Cousin Susie”) to purchase Liberian mining stock, which Lansdell Christie assured her would pay fantastic dividends, and left the stock in her will to Maureen Corr and a few others to whom she felt especially grateful.

She was still going strong in late spring, 1962, lending a hand and her apartment to a group of liberals whom James Wechsler, editor of the
New York Post,
brought together to purchase that newspaper when, for a brief moment, Dorothy Schiff thought she wished to sell it; joining two other lifelong champions of the underdog, Norman Thomas and Roger Baldwin, to hold hearings in Washington on police and judicial harassment of the Negro protest movement in the South—“horrifying,” she called it; spending a day in Hartford speaking for Mrs. Beatrice Fox Auerbach, organizing a birthday party for Faye Emerson’s son Scoop; bantering on a plane flight up from Georgia with Governor Rockefeller, who wanted her to tell him who the Democratic candidate for governor was going to be; asking Tom Stix to investigate the possibilities of a fall TV program about books, “as I am afraid I must reluctantly admit that I am not quite as young as I was. . .[and] I think I shall have to give up lecture trips,” adding, however, that she would not want to compete with Faye Emerson’s anticipated book program.
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Her strength was flowing out, but in the moments that it returned she was back at the old schedule, touring the borough of Queens for the Committee for Democratic Voters. “My head is heavy and if I go, you’ll have to steady me when I get out of the car,” she told the young man who came to get her. “You see I had to come,” she remarked when a little Negro girl gave her an armful of flowers at one of their speech stops. “I was expected.”

David had been giving her antibiotics to combat her recurring aches and fevers but thought she was well enough, and she insisted that he go through with his commitment to spend a month on the hospital ship
Hope
in Peru. He placed her in the charge of another doctor. A few months earlier, when Jim Halsted suggested that an internist be brought in to take charge, she had rebuffed David, who had transmitted the message to her, with a terse “Very well, then, I’ll have no doctor.” He remained the only physician whose advice she would follow, but would not hear of his not going off on an
assignment where he might do good for others. “To me all goodbyes are poignant now,” she wrote him as he left for Peru. “I like less & less to be long separated from those few whom I deeply love.”

Although she began to feel really unwell in the middle of July, it was an effort to get in touch with a doctor whom she really did not know, and she tried, as she had so often in the past, to shake off her illness by sheer will power. But the pain rarely left her now, and she was always so weary that if she saw a chair she was unable not to sit down.

All summer she had been working with Elinore Denniston on a new book,
Tomorrow Is Now
. One day she got as far as the desk and lifted a shaking hand for Miss Denniston to see. “I can’t work. I don’t understand it,” she said and added apologetically, “and you have come so far.”
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Finally, since she had to go to New York City for the meeting of a committee that was advising the Board of Education on the selection of a new school superintendent, she went to see the doctor.

“You go right home and go to bed,” he ordered.

She was happy to receive the order. She got into bed, relieved that she would not have to get up again and dress. The next day the doctor insisted on a blood transfusion. She tried to put him off. Could it not be postponed until Sunday when David was returning? The doctor insisted. The transfusion was a disaster. Her fever, instead of abating, shot up, and by the time David returned it had reached 105.5 degrees. She felt like “a fiery furnace,” she said later. And when David ordered an ambulance to take her to the hospital, she was scarcely able to recognize her son James, who had flown up from Washington to be with her.

Her first days in the hospital were unmitigated torture. There were injections in order to take samples of her blood and injections to fill her with medication. Every half hour nurses recorded her blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, and hospital attendants came with questionnaires. She complained to David about the endless tests. If it were not for the tests, why would they want her in the hospital, David replied. “Eureka!” was her answer to this. “They have you there! You get well but is it really worth it?”
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There were days of the deepest depression triggered by new anxieties over Elliott as well as her illness. One dream left her shaken and emotionally spent. Her brother Hall and her son Elliott somehow seemed combined into one figure, like a Picasso drawing, and were smothering her. She no longer wished to go on living, she told the few friends whom she allowed to visit her.
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But then her spirits began to revive. She was permitted to get out of bed for a half hour. She found herself interested again in the newspapers. Why had not Maureen brought the mail, she wanted to know one day. Maureen produced two fat brown envelopes. “Oh, you are efficient,” she beamed. Among the letters was one from Thomas Stix, reporting that he had lined up a sponsor for a new television show along the lines of her “Prospects of Mankind” series, for which she would receive $1,000 an appearance. “Oh, dear. Tell Tom Stix I can’t see him till I feel better. Tell him I’m in the hospital.”
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As soon as she was allowed to sit up, Mrs. Roosevelt began to plan again a trip to Campobello for the dedication of an FDR Memorial Bridge, linking the United States with this Canadian island. She overruled David’s protests; she conceded that her constitution no longer could take the punishment she meted out to it, but she insisted on going. She wanted David and his wife to fly up with her, and the author’s wife, Trude, would drive down with her.

Trude, who had joined her in Campobello on the last day of her stay there, wrote of their trip back:

For the first time that morning she walked up and down in front of the Campo house “so that I can manage the steps of the Scarlett house,” she said. She was terribly frail and complained that she had forgotten how to take a deep breath and had to learn again. She said that she learned that Friday night (when she had 105.6 temperature) how easy it was to die. She was just slipping away without regret or pain, and she was pleading with David to let her go.