Eleanor and Franklin (156 page)

§
The U.S. decision to recognize the authority in French North Africa of the Vichyite Admiral Jean Darlan when Allied troops landed there had provoked an uproar that only abated when Darlan was assassinated a few weeks after the invasion began.

¶
“As to your feelings about ‘unconditional surrender,'” Eleanor wrote Helena Hirst in London (Sept. 28, 1943),

I think that was my husband's phrase because he uses it very often. I think the feeling is that Germany needs to be made to feel that civilized people do not associate with people who accept brutality such as they have meted out to the Jews and other conquered peoples. One can not pin all the blame on Hitler. The people accepted him and though it was done through education, they will have to take the consequences I fear, until new generations have grown up. I am afraid I have very little sympathy for any people or any nationality whether German, Italian or Japanese, who accept tamely, actions of their governments and then think they are not to blame for them.

#
There was “a complete disregard of the rest regimen” in October, Dr. Bruenn wrote. “He really enjoyed going to the ‘hustings,' and despite this his blood pressure levels, if anything, were lower than before.”

56.
DEATH OF THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

E
LEANOR WAS
“
IN FOR IT
”
FOR ANOTHER FOUR YEARS,
E
STHER
Lape wrote her on Election Day, adding that Eleanor had an obligation to think of how she could use her power most effectively. “She's not the only one to tell me I have a responsibility but I feel inadequate,” Eleanor wrote on Esther's letter.
¹
Her sense of inadequacy did not keep her from expressing her views to Franklin more forcefully than ever.

At the time of the Democratic convention when Eleanor had protested the party's “pussyfooting” on all controversial issues, the president had put her off with the plea “wait till November.” She was fearful then that in November there would be other “compelling reasons . . . for tactics which may be wise but which I feel are just appeasement.”
²
That was what now happened. The reorganization of the State Department that followed Hull's resignation alarmed and outraged her. She expressed herself forcefully in a letter to her husband, who had left for Warm Springs. The letter is worth quoting in some detail for it shows how tough, relentless, and perhaps unfair, she could be:

December 4, 1944

Dearest Franklin:

I realize very well that I do not know the reasons why certain things may be necessary nor whether you intend to do them or do not intend to do them.

It does, however, make me rather nervous for you to say that you do not care what Jimmy Dunne thinks because he will do what you tell him to do and that for three years you have carried the State Department and you expect to go on doing it. I am quite sure that Jimmy Dunne is clever enough to tell you that he will do what you want and to allow his subordinates to accomplish things which will get by and which will pretty well come up in the long time results to what he actually wants to do.

In addition, it seems to me pretty poor administration to have a man in whom you know you can not put any trust, to carry out
the things which you tell him to do. The reason I feel we can not trust Dunne is that we know he backed Franco and his regime in Spain. We know that now he is arguing Mr. Winant and the War Department in favor of using German industrialists to rehabilitate Germany because he belongs to the group which Will Clayton represents, plus others, who believe we must have business going in Germany for the sake of business here.

I sent you a memo on Yugoslavia, not because I want it sent to Mr. Stettinius because he has a duplicate, but just because I want you to read it while you have the time. This does not look as though Tito refused to send for things which would relieve his civilian population.

One of the young officers who worked for Gen. Donovan in Yugoslavia and who is now on leave, came to see me and said he had written a report which they promised to send you. He is afraid you have never seen it. In it he tells certain things which are gradually turning most of the people against us and toward Russia. He said that at first, Europeans everywhere thought America would help them but if we really want Russian influence to be paramount, we are going about it in the best possible way.

Neither you nor I can, of course, tell Bill Donovan that this young man told me these things, but you might ask whether there are any conflicting reports on the situation in Spain. The fine Catholic hand is visible in Europe and in our State Department.

With Dunne, Clayton and Acheson under Secretary Stettinius, I can hardly see that the set-up will be very much different from what it might have been under Dewey.

I hope the weather will be warmer and that you are getting some swimming and I am glad you are going to stay a little bit longer.

I suppose I should trust blindly when I can't know and be neither worried or scared and yet I am both and when Harry Hopkins tells me he is for Clayton, etc. I'm even more worried. I hate to irritate you and I won't speak of any of this again but I wouldn't feel honest if I didn't tell you now.

Much love,

E. R.

Two days later she was back at him again. The United States had protested Churchill's veto of Count Carlo Sforza, the distinguished Italian anti-fascist, as foreign minister in the new Italian cabinet:

I like the statement on Sforza and our attitude toward the other governments very much indeed, but, are we going to use any real pressure on Winston? I am afraid words will not have much effect.

All of the newspapers which were agin you and all of the people who were agin you in the election are now loudly praising the State Department set-up. It does make me nervous and perhaps it is all right if you can make them all behave like reformed characters so the rest of us who have been doubting Thomases will have to take our hats off to them.

While the president gave his wife the impression that he did not agree with her criticism of the new command group in the State Department, in Warm Springs some of his actions showed that her criticisms had struck home. He refused to approve a press release submitted to him by Secretary of State Stettinius announcing the appointment of six new assistant secretaries because the name of Archibald MacLeish was not included. William D. Hassett, his press secretary, quoted him as saying that “Archie was the only liberal in the bunch, which is top-heavy with Old Dealers.”
³
Who rendered him a greater service of love—Eleanor with her criticism, or Laura and Daisy, who were at Warm Springs (as was Lucy Rutherfurd the first few days of his stay) and who were concerned only with making this overburdened man's life as pleasant as possible and introducing no jarring political note?

Eleanor wanted to see him on his return from Warm Springs, she warned him, “before you begin to look weary!”
⁴
But he was in no hurry to see her. She, haunted by the fear of a war fought in vain, pressed her husband more strongly than ever. He, with the responsibility for victory or defeat, not to mention ten million lives, his energy and patience quickly exhausted, put her off more abruptly than ever before, sometimes without even a softening jollification. Anna, caught in the middle, sympathized with her father:

Although she knew the doctors had said he should have half an hour of relaxation, no business, just sitting around, maybe a drink, she would come in more and more frequently with an enormous bundle of letters which she wanted to discuss with him immediately and have a decision.
⁵

On one occasion when Anna was mixing cocktails and her mother came in with her usual budget of questions and problems, “Father
blew his top. He took the bundle of letters and pushed it over to me. ‘Sis, you handle this.' And here I was striving to be neutral. What she wanted was o.k. but for him it was one more thing at the end of a tough day.”

Yet more than anyone else Eleanor helped him conserve his physical energy and emotional vitality. Missy had died in August while the president was in the Pacific,
*
and it was Eleanor who had attended the funeral, as she did the Mass for Alfred E. Smith in October and the memorial service for Wendell Willkie a few days later. At the inaugural receptions, while the president saw only a few intimates in the Green Room—chiefly family and Princess Martha and her entourage—she stood for hours, until she was drawn and exhausted doing the ceremonial things, shaking hands with hundreds of her husband's supporters, visiting the National Democratic Club to shake more hands, then moving on to a gathering of the Democratic faithful at Oscar Ewing's and ending the evening at the Electors' Dinner. She was always ready to ease Franklin's burdens by taking them on herself, but problems had to be faced and decisions made, and she could not remain silent when it seemed to her, as in the case of the State Department appointments, that he was following “the line of least resistance.”
⁶
With an invincible belief that will and spirit could transcend infirmity, she was reluctant to treat him as an invalid or to have him accept invalidism. Indelibly engraved in her memory was the precedent to be avoided, if humanly possible, of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson standing between a nation calling for leadership and her invalid husband.

He had rallied so often before, but this time it seemed to be different:

For the first time I was beginning to realize that he could no longer bear to have a real discussion such as he always had. This was impressed on me one night when we were discussing with Harry
Hooker the question of compulsory military service for all young men as a peacetime measure. Harry Hooker had long believed in this and had worked for it. I disliked the idea thoroughly and argued against it heatedly, probably because I felt Harry was so much in favor of it that Franklin seemed to be getting only one side of the picture. In the end, I evidently made Franklin feel I was really arguing against him and I suddenly realized he was upset. I stopped at once, but afterwards Harry Hooker took me to task and said I must not do that to Franklin again. I knew only too well that in discussing the issue I had forgotten that Franklin was no longer the calm and imperturbable person who, in the past, had always goaded me to vehement arguments when questions of policy came up. It was just another indication of the change which we were all so unwilling to acknowledge.
⁷

Two days after the inauguration the president left for the Yalta Conference. Eleanor had asked to go along, but as in the case of the Cairo and Teheran conferences he had turned her down:

Franklin felt that if I went it would only add to the difficulties as everyone would feel they had to pay attention to me, but since Sarah Churchill was going, Franklin thought Anna would be a help and a comfort and I am sure she will be. I am very proud of her, she has grown into such an extremely capable person and a fine person as well as a lovely one.
⁸

So Eleanor wrote to Lady Willert two weeks after the travelers left, but what she said of her pride and pleasure in Anna's having accompanied her father only partially disclosed her feelings. She was worried about Franklin's condition, his irritability, his impatience, his tendency to follow the path of least resistance. “FDR and Anna go tomorrow night and I'm not really happy about this trip but one can't live in fear, can one?”

Just before his departure Roosevelt sent to Congress his nomination of Wallace to succeed Jesse Jones as secretary of commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The battle that broke out in Congress seemed to Eleanor symptomatic of the “bigger” fight: “Are we to be Liberal or Conservative?” Roosevelt's letter dismissing Jones did not help Wallace because it made it appear that the only reason he
was asking Jones to take another job in his administration was to repay Wallace for a political loyalty in 1944 that entitled him to whatever job he wanted—except secretary of state. “The Jones-Wallace fight is on,” Eleanor reported to her husband in Yalta:

Of course Jones has behaved horribly & your letter when published was hard on Wallace. I know you wrote it hoping to make Jones feel better but I guess he's the kind of dog you should have ousted the day after election & given him the reasons. He would not have published that letter! . . . People like Oscar Ewing are telling newspaper men that “Henry is a nice fellow, but he shouldn't have R.F.C.” So to-morrow I'm going to call Mr. Hannegan & ask what he and the Com. are doing to back Wallace.
⁹

It was time to stop being blackmailed by the conservatives, she wrote a soldier correspondent stationed in China: “Either we are going to give in to our diehard Southern Congressmen or we are going to be the liberal party.”
¹⁰

She tried to get more help from her husband for Wallace: “Your message came through to Barkley but we wish you had added a little word for Wallace. We assume you take it for granted we know you believe Wallace will help you to do the job, but a little reassurance would be helpful!” But Roosevelt was unresponsive. As cabled messages came in about the Wallace situation from Sam Rosenman as well as from Eleanor, Roosevelt handed them on to James Byrnes, who was with him, with “little indication of personal interest.”
¹¹