Eleanor and Franklin (157 page)

Eleanor sensed that: “I wish I knew what you really thought & really wanted. I've explained your letter to Jones & wondered if I was doing some wishful thinking & Mary Norton asked me the other day if you really wanted Wallace.”

This was written on February 13. The few messages he sent her from Yalta were, although affectionate, either silent or equivocal on the subject of Wallace. “Dearest Babs,” he wrote her the day he left the Crimea:

We have wound up the conference—successfully I think and this is just a line to tell you that we are off for the Suez Canal and then home but I doubt if we get back till the 28th. I am a bit exhausted but really all right.

I do hope all goes well. It has been grand hearing from you and I expect another pouch tomorrow.

Ever so much love.

Devotedly

F
¹²

On February 11 the results of the Yalta Conference were announced in a joint statement by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. “We seem to be almost united as a country in approval of the results of the Conference,” Eleanor reported to her husband, happy to be able to send him good tidings for a change:

I think you must be very well satisfied & your diplomatic abilities must have been colossal! Jonathan is happy. John is happy. All the world looks smiling! I think having the first U.N. meeting in San Francisco is a stroke of genius. At last will Marshal Stalin leave his own country, or won't you three have to be on hand?
¹³

The travelers returned, and Eleanor was grateful that the president seemed ruddy and rested and stoical about the death of Pa Watson, which had occurred at sea:

He says he felt well all the time & he feels evidently that all went well. He liked Stalin better & felt they got on better than before. He says his one complete failure was with Ibn Saud on Palestine but says F. “he is 75 & has been wounded 9 times, it will be easier to deal with the son who comes to power.” I believe there are 49 sons! He does not seem upset over DeGaulle. We do go out to open the San Francisco Conference.
¹⁴

She liked his report to Congress on Yalta partly because he was conciliatory and resisted the temptation to strike back at his critics. But a few weeks later when the news about the agreement to give Soviet Russia three votes in the UN General Assembly was leaked, she began to have misgivings:

The secret agreement at Yalta sounds to me very improbable but I do know F. remarked Molotoff was interpreting certain things differently from the way they had been understood. Of course I don't
know what happened & can't ask over the telephone but I just don't think FDR would be stupid enough to make secret agreements!
¹⁵

U.S. differences with Russia over what had been agreed to at Yalta, she later learned, related to the more vital matters of Poland and the liberated areas generally and not to Russia's three UN votes, to which the president had acquiesced. It is doubtful that Eleanor's presence at Yalta would have changed the course of events there. In later years she said that Franklin got as good an agreement from the Russians as was possible given the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe and the desire of U.S. military leaders to insure Russian's entry into the war against Japan once Hitler was defeated.
†
¹⁶

The president's willingness to address Congress sitting down, because of the weight of his steel braces, had meant to her that he was accepting “a certain degree of invalidism.” All through March he had been impatient to get away to Warm Springs, and she was pleased when he decided to do so, taking Laura Delano and Margaret Suckley with him. “I know they would not bother him as I should have by discussing questions of state; he would be allowed to get a real rest and yet would have companionship—and that was what I felt he most needed.”
¹⁷

Margaret Fayerweather was at the White House when he arrived from Hyde Park on his way to Warm Springs. The president seemed to her “terribly thin and worn and gray,” and it was painful to her to watch the way his hands shook. She asked Eleanor about it. “She says a loss of muscular control is noticeable,” Mrs. Fayerweather noted in
her diary. “He no longer
wants
to drive his own car at Hyde Park—lets her drive, which he never did before, and lets her mix cocktails if Colonel Boettiger is not present.” And yet, added Eleanor, she had to smile when people spoke of how tired Franklin must be:

I am all ready to hand over to others now in all that I do and go home to live in retirement; but Franklin said to me last Sunday, “You know, Eleanor, I've seen so much now of the Near East and Ibn Saud and all of them, when we get through here, I believe I'd like to go and live there. I feel quite an expert, I believe I could help to straighten out the Near East.” “Can't you think of something harder to do?” I asked. “Well, yes,” he answered quite seriously. “It's going to be awfully hard to straighten out Asia, what with India and China and Thailand and Indo-China. I'd like to get into that.” Does
that
sound tired to you, Margaret?
I'm
all ready to sit back.
He's
still looking forward to more work.
¹⁸

Her letter to Maude was gloomier:

FDR with whom I talked to-day seems settled in Warm Springs & the rest will do him good. He should gain weight but he hates his food. I say a prayer daily that he may be able to carry on till we have peace & our feet are set in the right direction. . . . Elliott cables that he hopes the end will come soon in Germany. The boys in the Pacific are not so optimistic. All three are there now & I suppose in this battle. I can't help worrying about them all, they've been in so long, will their luck hold.
¹⁹

With the president in Warm Springs and less accessible than ever, the calls on Eleanor for help were greater than ever. Mrs. Gladys Tillett, assistant chairman of the Democratic National Committee, wanted her to ask Stettinius to appoint women as advisers to the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco Conference; she did. Charl Williams of the National Education Association was worried about a bill that might permit federal aid to church-related schools; off went a memo to the president: “It seems to me unwise to strengthen the sectarian and private schools.” James Carey, who had attended the founding conference of the World Federation of Trade Unions in London, sent her his report; “Frances dear,” Eleanor wrote the secretary of labor, “what do you think of these recommendations?” She asked
Ugo Carusi, the commissioner of immigration, why unused quotas could not be added to current quotas to ease the barriers against refugees, a thought-provoking question, even though the commissioner felt legislation would be needed. The sharecroppers in southeastern Missouri, whom she had helped before, were now threatened with eviction from their FSA homes; Eleanor asked presidential assistant James Barnes to see what he could do on the Hill to stop it. She conferred with Senator J. W. Fulbright and Assistant Secretary of State MacLeish about the proposed International Education and Cultural Organization. She attended Mary Bethune's meeting of the National Council of Negro Women and left with a new batch of assignments. She went after General Frank J. Hines for his stale and unimaginative management of the Veterans Administration, using an article in
Harper's
—“The Veterans' Runaround” by Charles Bolte, head of the fledgling American Veterans Committee—to instigate a discussion that involved Byrnes, Baruch, and her husband. She transmitted to General George C. Marshall and other military leaders her weekly accumulation of complaints and appeals from GIs, their mothers, and their wives. She saw Algernon Black of the Ethical Culture Society, who wanted to go overseas to work with Negro troops, and gave him a letter to the undersecretary of war. A young Nigerian prince told her of a plan to obtain scholarships for Nigerian boys and girls, and she promised to help him set up his committee. Rabbi Isaac H. Steinberg came to see her about a proposal to settle Jewish refugees in Australia; she sent it on to the president. There was a request from nuclear physicist Leo Szilard to see her. He had composed a memorandum on how to avoid a nuclear-arms race with Russia. “I was not certain that this memorandum would reach the president if I sent it ‘through channels.' . . . I intended to transmit my memorandum through her—in a sealed envelope—to the President.” He was informed Mrs. Roosevelt would see him on April 12.

She had told Margaret Fayerweather that she was quite willing to hand over all that she was doing to someone else, but that reflected her yearning to step out of the public spotlight, not a readiness for a career of idleness. This was made clear in a reaction she expressed after a long day of seeing petitioners: “I was wondering yesterday when I leave the White House what my value will be in any of these things & what people will still be around!”
²⁰

That was April 6. Soon she would discover that the tasks she discharged as ombudsman were self-imposed, rooted in her sense of duty
and her need to be of service, not in her position as the wife of the president. The week end of April 8 she and Tommy went to Hyde Park to unpack cases and barrels of china and glass. “We ache from our unwonted exercise,” she wrote her husband, “but we've had fun too! In May I'll finish the job.” She had seen Franklin Jr.'s wife, Ethel: “I think she'd be very pleased if you asked her to come & bring Joe [Franklin III] to San Francisco.” She did not feel sleepy, her letter went on, so she had written “James, Elliott, & Frankie, Elinor Morgenthau [who had had a heart attack in Florida], Rommie & Sisty” She asked to be remembered to Margaret Suckley and Laura Delano. “I'm so glad you are gaining, you sounded cheerful for the first time last night & I hope you'll weigh 170 pounds when you return. Devotedly, E.R.” That was the last letter between them.

On the morning of April 12 Eleanor had her regular press conference. She was asked about San Francisco, and some of the questions seemed to assume that the power of decision lay in the hands of the United States alone. “We will have to get over the habit of saying what we as a single nation will do,” Eleanor said, once again using her news conference as a school for the country. “When we say ‘we' on international questions in the future, we will mean all the people who have an interest in the question. A United Nations organization is for the very purpose of making it possible that all the world's opinion will have a clearing place.” Her luncheon guest that day was Nila Magidoff, a lecturer for Russian War Relief, whose excited crossbreeding of Slavic phrases with English was such a delight to listen to that Eleanor persuaded Anna to forsake her little Johnny at the Navy Hospital to come to lunch to meet her. Afterward she saw Malcolm Ross of the Fair Employment Practices Commission.

At three o'clock Charles Taussig, an adviser to the U.S. delegation to San Francisco, was ushered into her sitting room. He wanted her help in ascertaining the President's wishes on trusteeships. She would call the President, she said, and try to find out. At this point Tommy signaled her urgently to take the phone. It was Laura Delano calling from Warm Springs to say the President had fainted and had been carried to his bed. Eleanor asked a few questions guardedly, in order not to alarm Taussig, hung up, and, ending the interview immediately, spoke with Dr. McIntire. He was in touch with Warm Springs, he said, and although he gave her the impression that he was not alarmed, he suggested that they fly down to Warm Springs later in the day. She should not cancel her next engagement, the annual benefit for the
Thrift Shop at the Sulgrave Club, he advised her, since to do so and then depart for Warm Springs would inevitably set the rumors flying. So she drove to the Sulgrave Club and made her little speech. The entertainment had just begun when she was called to the telephone. “Steve Early, very much upset, asked me to come home at once. I did not even ask why. I knew in my heart that something dreadful had happened.” But the amenities had to be preserved, so she went back to the party, made her apologies, and left. “I got into the car and sat with clenched hands all the way to the White House. In my heart of hearts I knew what had happened, but one does not actually formulate these terrible thoughts until they are spoken.”
²¹

“When she came back,” Early later was to tell the press, “Admiral McIntire and I went to her sitting room and told her the President had slipped away. She was silent for a minute and her first words were: ‘I am more sorry for the people of this country and of the world than I am for ourselves.'” Although later Eleanor could not remember that she had made this statement and doubted that she had, it was characteristic of the selflessness and self-command with which she responded to the news of her husband's death. “A lesser human being would have been prostrated by the sudden and calamitous tidings,” the
Times
wrote, “but Mrs. Roosevelt at once entered upon her responsibilities.” Her first thought was of others and what had to be done. She sent for Vice President Harry Truman. Her cable to her sons—

HE DID HIS JOB TO THE END AS HE WOULD WANT YOU TO DO

—became the order of the day for a stricken people and their government. She asked Steve Early to hold up the announcement of the president's death for fifteen minutes so that Henry Morgenthau could have a doctor break the news to his wife because she did not want her ailing friend to hear the news over the radio. She arranged to fly down to Warm Springs with Early and McIntire.
²²

The vice president, who did not know why he had been summoned to the White House so urgently, soon arrived and was ushered into Eleanor's sitting room. Anna and John Boettiger were with her, as was Early. Eleanor came forward and placed her arm gently on the vice president's shoulder.

“Harry,” she said quietly, “the President is dead.”

For a moment a stunned Truman could not bring himself to speak.
Finally, finding his voice, he asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He would never forget, he later wrote, her “deeply understanding” reply.