Kati Marton (13 page)

An important part of “his” White House was the cocktail hour, when FDR would mix strong drinks for his friends. It was a time for unwinding and storytelling. For a man confined to his wheelchair, who could not indulge in other presidential pastimes such as golf, horseback riding or even a brisk walk, the cocktail hour was an essential escape from the day’s cares. Eleanor, whose father, brother and two uncles had died of alcoholism, and who had no gift for banter, could not share in this pastime. Hearing her husband’s rolling laughter mingled with peals of female mirth wafting from his study tapped into her old insecurities. She knew her presence would instantly alter the chemistry of the room. Occasionally, Eleanor would force herself to breach his world, but these efforts were awkward for both of them. She would quickly knock back a drink, as if taking medicine. Her zeal for not wasting time sometimes clouded her judgment. “Now just leave me alone,” Franklin sometimes chided Eleanor if she became too serious. “It’ll get done as fast as I can get it done.” Once, when she pushed too hard, he flung her pile of papers at Anna and commanded her, “Sis, you see about this.” Like a chastened child, Eleanor retreated.

Eleanor and Franklin, circa 1933.

As first lady, Eleanor’s top priority was not her husband. Other roles and obligations consumed her. If, as she later wrote, she was “one of those who served his purposes,” he, too, served hers. The platform he provided her was powerful, and she was adept at using it. Returning from trips to Appalachia or the Dust Bowl, she flooded Franklin with so many memos that he imposed a three-memo-a-night limit. Just as her husband used his Fireside Chats to reach into American homes, Eleanor’s column, “My Day,” erased the distance between the White House and ordinary people. With her artless, unpolished prose, she made the First Family seem like just an average household facing average problems, with perhaps an above-average head of household.

On the eve of FDR’s first Fireside Chat, on March 12, 1933, when he explained his plan for turning the economy around, his wife wrote in “My Day”:

“To the prisoners of newspapers where wars are always raging,” the
Nation
observed, “[Eleanor Roosevelt’s column] is like a sunny square where children and aunts and grandmothers go about their trivial but absorbing pursuits and security reigns. In the sense of security it generates lies the deepest appeal of ‘My Day.’” Long before CNN and the networks wired the country into an electronic village, Eleanor’s deft use of the press catapulted her to national, then global, fame. With her
unthreatening, low-key style, she embraced causes as controversial as civil rights, then absorbed the brunt of the criticism and kept the president at one remove from the heat. But they were working toward the same ends. In part as a result of Eleanor’s relentless agitation, by the end of World War II, African Americans were in the workforce and integrated into the armed forces. Partly because of her own feelings of being an “outsider” to her own society, this highborn woman identified with the deprived and the disenfranchised, not as Lady Bountiful, but as one of
them.
“The unemployed are not a strange race,” she wrote to a sympathetic audience. “They are like we would be if we had not had a fortunate chance at life.”

FDR and his wife often differed over how far and how fast social reforms should proceed. In some respects Franklin was still the prisoner of his class, age and, above all, of politics. Thurgood Marshall, the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court, bore witness to their differences. Marshall had called on Attorney General Francis Biddle to plead the case of a black man accused of shooting a sheriff in Virginia. During the meeting, Biddle phoned the president and asked Marshall to pick up an extension so he could hear what Roosevelt had to say. “I warned you not to call me again about any of Eleanor’s niggers,” FDR threatened Biddle, oblivious to the black lawyer’s presence on the line. “Call me one more time and you are fired.”

Part of the secret of Eleanor’s success as first lady was that she was remarkably free of self-importance or a sense of entitlement. “Almost any woman in the White House during these years of need would have done what I have done,” she wrote. In appearance she was the most unthreatening woman imaginable. Her hair was always slightly unkempt and her clothes were bought off the rack in seven-minute shopping expeditions. She looked like Everywoman. She wanted attention focused on causes, not on her. She was incapable of being anything other than who she was. On that point, her detractors and her husband agreed.

In July 1940, Eleanor and Franklin shattered two ironclad traditions of American politics and demonstrated the depth of their interdependence. The occasion was the Chicago Democratic Convention. The Roosevelts were far away at Hyde Park, each in a separate house on the estate, listening to the reports from Chicago. The president wanted
the convention to nominate him by acclamation for an unprecedented third term. With neither Roosevelt in attendance, the mood in the hall had turned sour. FDR was the party’s choice, but not without certain misgivings. Where was the president? Why hadn’t he declared himself if he wanted a third term? An insurrection was in the making.

FDR had the solution to the impasse. “Send Eleanor,” the president told Frances Perkins, on the line from Chicago. “She always makes people feel right.” Perkins called Eleanor. “Things look black here,” she told the first lady. “I think you should come.” Eleanor was reluctant. She felt her appearance would smack of “petticoat government.” It would harm the president to have his wife seem to be making up his mind for him. Besides, her husband had not asked her directly. Persuaded he must, FDR finally called her. “Would you like to go?” he asked, reluctant to admit he needed her. “No, I would not,” she replied. “Do you really want me to go?” she asked. “Perhaps it would be a good idea,” her husband said at last, completing their awkward dance. So she went, and became the first wife of a president to address a national political convention.

The audience rose to its feet in a rousing cheer at the familiar sight of Eleanor. But the floor erupted in a wild chorus of shouts and boos when FDR’s choice of running mate, Henry Wallace, was presented for confirmation. It took Eleanor’s intervention to soothe the delegates. When she reached the rostrum, the floor fell quiet. She spoke without a text. “This,” she told the delegates, was “no ordinary nomination in an ordinary time, no time for weighing anything except what we can best do for the country as a whole …. No man who is a candidate or who is President can carry this situation alone.” In times like these, she cautioned the delegates, the candidate must be allowed to choose his own running mate. With those simple words, Eleanor altered the chemistry of the convention, turning hostility into pride at the party’s choice. Like her husband, Eleanor knew how to reach people by speaking to them directly, and they followed her because they sensed these were
her
words.

FDR finally spoke to the delegates via radio from Hyde Park. “Like most men of my age,” FDR told the delegates, “I had made plans for myself, plans for a private life of my own choice and my own satisfactions to begin in January 1941. These plans like so many other plans, had been
made in a world which now seems as distant as another planet.” His wife sprang to her feet along with thousands of others when Franklin’s last words came across the convention’s loudspeaker. The band played “Hail to the Chief” as Eleanor slipped out of the hall to catch her flight back to Hyde Park.

IN 1940,
when German paratroopers surprised neutral Holland, and Nazi forces targeted Belgium, Eleanor embarked on a new role: preparing the country for war. She wrote in her column, “Much has been said in this country about not wanting to participate in foreign wars …. But when force not only rules in certain countries, but is as menacing to all the world as it is today, one cannot live in a Utopia which prays for different conditions and ignores those which exist ….”

The war changed Eleanor and Franklin’s partnership yet again. The New Deal had brought them closer: their goals were the same; they were in the trenches together. The war shifted FDR’s focus to mobilizing and winning, and away from the New Deal. Eleanor’s insecurity about not being “useful” surfaced, along with the fear that the war effort would weaken the bond she and Franklin had forged. This insecurity led Eleanor to make one of her rare mistakes as first lady. She took an official position in her husband’s administration.

As a member of the Office of Civilian Defense, Eleanor worked with New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia to prepare the civilian population for war.
Time
magazine dubbed her the “OCDiva.” Eleanor, who had learned to brush off criticism, was unprepared for the intensity of the barrage. After five months of criticism, Eleanor discovered that there was simply no way the wife of a president could ever be treated as anything else. She resigned, ruefully noting in her column,

More than half a century later, Hillary Rodham Clinton would come under similar fire when she, too, assumed a formal position in her husband’s first administration.

With FDR’s total focus on the war, Eleanor felt sidelined. There were now many things Franklin could not share with his wife. Eleanor did not even know when her husband was about to meet Winston Churchill to discuss the shape of postwar Europe in the historic Atlantic Conference. Franklin had told her only that he was going “fishing in the Cape Cod Canal.” Eleanor’s activism also took its toll on their partnership. “I was conscious of the fact that because I saw a great many people I might let slip something that should not be told, so I used to beg my husband not to tell me any secrets,” she wrote in “My Day.”

Churchill was struck by the distance between the two Roosevelts. “Mrs. Roosevelt … was away practically all the time,” Churchill wrote his wife during one of his extended White House visits. “I think she was offended at the President not telling her until a few hours before I arrived of what was pouring down on her. He does not tell her secrets because she is always making speeches and writing articles and he is afraid she might forget what was secret and what was not ….”

Their son James claimed that around 1942, Franklin approached Eleanor about spending more time as husband and wife. Sara Delano Roosevelt had recently died, and Missy had suffered a disabling stroke, and the president was lonely. Eleanor, meanwhile, had lost her close bond to Harry Hopkins, and Lorena Hickock had become too fiercely possessive of her and had been delicately put off. But for Eleanor the painful memory of Lucy Mercer had never quite faded. She would not leave herself open to another hurt. It is unlikely that Franklin and Eleanor ever articulated these things to each other. Fearlessness and imperviousness to any foe—the qualities with which FDR fought polio and that he conveyed to the country at war—blocked deep emotional
connections. So much of his presidential aura was based on performance rather than intimacy.