Eleanor and Franklin (153 page)

What a pathetic request. It was over forty years since Franklin had first brought her to Hyde Park, and Sara had been dead three years, yet Eleanor still felt she had to ask his permission to rearrange the furniture in Sara's bedroom.

She had made it pleasant, she announced triumphantly, in time for the first big week end in June when the president came up, accompanied as he often was by Princess Martha and her entourage: “I can work in it & not feel her [Sara's] presence in the room but over here there is no getting away from the bigness of the house & the multitude of people.” There were compensations. Anna's children—Sistie, Buzz, and Johnny—were there, as was Elliott's first child, Bill. “It is years since I've had to see children go to bed & I love it & am having a good time.”
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Franklin was more dependent, but he was also more in need of an uncritical companionship that she could not give. The surest sign was the way he turned to his daughter, Anna Boettiger, whose husband was overseas with the Army's military-government branch. When Hearst officials used his absence to bring the
Post-Intelligencer
's editorial policies into line with the chain's, Roosevelt suggested that Anna come
back East, live at the White House, and help him. He was a lonely man—Missy was gone; the Hopkinses had moved to their own house in Georgetown, and, moreover, there was at this time some estrangement in his relationship with Harry; Eleanor was too independent, too strong, ethically too unrelenting to provide him with the kind of relaxed, unjudging company that he wanted. The one thing she was not able to bring him, wrote her son, James, “was that touch of triviality he needed to lighten his burden.”
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Yes, Anna said, she would love to move into the White House and help him, “‘but not until I have talked with mother.' She was very frank with me. It would be wonderful for her. She personally would love it but she did not want to go through with me what she had gone through with Louise Hopkins.”
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It was the old story. Eleanor did not want another woman, even her daughter, pre-empting her prerogatives as mistress of the White House. Just before her trip to the Caribbean, Eleanor had discovered that Missy, a helpless invalid since 1941 when she had suffered a stroke and now under constant care in Massachusetts, had been invited to stay at the White House during her absence. She canceled the visit. “I was away last week when Grace [Tully] and Franklin arranged for you to come down on the 7th of March,” she wrote Missy. “I am terribly sorry that they did not realize that I want to be here when you come.” She should come for a week in April: “I am very sorry that they did not consult me before making plans but it is hard to get everyone together and I have been away for a few days at a time.” She instructed Tommy to “show Grace letter & my answer. FDR has seen & approved answer.”
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Since Anna had no wish to make life more difficult for her mother, there seemed to be no problem, and so Anna, with Johnny Boettiger, her youngest child, moved into the White House in the spring of 1944. But whatever mother and daughter's intentions, the relationship was shaped by the president—his needs, his weariness, his desire to be shielded from the one person who knew him beyond all masquerade and stratagem. More and more he lunched and dined alone with “Sis.” More and more frequently Eleanor was heard to say, “Anna is the only one who would know about that”; “I'll have to ask Anna”; “We'll have to get Anna to ask the President.”

There were other ladies whose company he liked. Princess Martha continued to entertain him, as did two spinster cousins, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley and Laura “Polly” Delano. Laura Delano was full of spice, snobbery, and malice, but like Daisy she did not contradict the
president. Eleanor might remonstrate quietly about de Gaulle, whom the president detested and ridiculed, but Laura would egg him on. He should be tough on “that unspeakable person.”
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Someone else who came to dinner at the White House—when Eleanor was away—was Lucy Rutherfurd, she of the “Mona Lisa smile.” Mrs. Rutherfurd was another good listener. There was, too, when she and Franklin saw each other, the magic of remembered love to cast its glow over their present encounters. There were always other people around—Anna, Daisy Suckley, Laura Delano, the Secret Service, White House secretaries like Pa Watson, Steve Early, and Bill Hassett. It was all aboveboard, except that Eleanor was not told. They said to themselves that they were protecting her and they wanted to do so, for she was a woman of commanding dignity and of an almost saintly selflessness, whom all admired and some even loved. Within the limits of their loyalty to Franklin they were eager to do everything possible to protect her from hurt and humiliation. Yet for a woman who was intransigent about knowing the truth and facing up to it, such a deception, if and when she learned of it, would prove to be almost the final indignity. Franklin knew that even if no one else did.

May, 1944, was dominated by the impending invasion of Europe: “I feel as though a sword were hanging over my head, dreading its fall and yet know it must fall to end the war. I pray that Germany will give up now that the Russians are approaching and our drive in Italy has begun. However, I have seen no encouraging signs.”
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A service at the tomb of the unknown soldier at Arlington was almost more than she could bear—“I dread the invasion so much that it is getting on my nerves a bit I guess.” The OWI asked her to prepare a radio speech to be used after the invasion began. “It is addressed to the mothers of the U.S.A.,” she wrote, “& I can't think of what I want to say. I only know I don't want to say any of the things they suggested!”

She heard the invasion news from Franklin on June 5 before she went to bed, and she slept very little that night. Although it could not be a happy day because of the inevitable suffering, loss, and destruction, the tension was eased. The president seemed to her to be his old self again: he “keeps us all a bit undecided by saying he doesn't know what he will do & that when he hears Hitler is ready to surrender he will go to England at once & then in the next breath that he may go to Honolulu & the Aleutians!” If he did go to London, he informed Eleanor a few weeks later, he wanted her to accompany him.

There was other news in June that indicated a turning point in the
war. Rome fell to the Allied armies and Marshall Pietro Badoglio's government, which had been denounced by liberal opinion as fascist-tainted, was replaced with a cabinet headed by a prominent anti-fascist. “I'm beginning to think I ought to be more patient for in the end FDR does seem to get pretty much what we want.”
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The State Department began to move faster on its postwar planning. Eleanor wanted women to be drawn in and presided over a conference at the White House on “How Women May Share in Post-War Policy Making.” “I wish very much,” she wrote Jonathan Daniels, now one of the president's secretaries, “that you and Judge Rosenman would divide the day and come in as observers.” Daniels did attend, and one of the items he received was “a roster of qualified women.” It was clear from the comments of the participants that Eleanor Roosevelt led the list, even though her name was not on it.
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She was deeply concerned with the issue of full employment after the war. She invited Walter Reuther, whom she described to Baruch as “a rather intelligent young labor leader,” to come to Hyde Park to discuss with her his ideas about industrial reconversion. She passed on Reuther's suggestions to the president, who advised her that “Jimmy Byrnes should really look this over and have a talk with Reuther.” She also transmitted to Baruch, whose own recommendations on “War and Postwar Adjustment Policies” were then languishing in Congress, Reuther's point-by-point questions and disagreements with Baruch's approach. “You will notice that he thinks you will have to be worked on,” her accompanying note said. “I do not think you really need that, but I would love to have a chance to talk over these questions and suggestions with you sometimes.”

“Perhaps I do need to be worked on,” Baruch replied, “but he needs better to understand the report.” At Eleanor's instigation a correspondence sprang up between Reuther and Baruch with Eleanor acting as mailman, believing that each could educate the other and, in the process of doing so, educate her and give her some voice in what was shaping up as the key domestic issue. “To speak to Baruch,” a memo that Tommy typed out for her began: “In regard to the sale of war plants is Aluminum Company, for example, going to be allowed to expand its monopoly or is the government going to reconvert the plants so as to break their monopoly?”

Harry Hopkins, who, because of illness, had been away from Washington since January, shared Reuther's concern about full employment but did not like Baruch's recommendations. “After being away for six
months and reading and thinking of the kind of world we would like to have,” he wrote Eleanor, who was in Hyde Park, “I am appalled at what must be done in this country if we are to accomplish anything like full employment. I am persuaded that the Baruch Plan will not do as a pattern, largely because it completely ignores all the human aspects for whose benefit our great industrial system should be organized.” Eleanor advised Hopkins to talk with Baruch, adding with some asperity, “He does have more influence at the present time than any of us. We do have to work with Congress, you know, and he has more influence than you or I or the CIO, or most people who feel as we do, that the human things and full employment are the most important thing before us.” She believed that Baruch was ready “to go along on anything that will be helpful, if he is convinced that it is good.”
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Eleanor also served as mailman between her husband and Earl Browder, the leader of the American Communists.
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In this case it was a form of reluctant servitude. “I do not like American Communists,” she wrote Josephine Truslow Adams—painter, descendant of John Adams, and inveterate fellow-traveler—“because they have caused a great deal of trouble here and did all they could to hamper us before Germany went into Russia. Now that it suits their purposes they cooperate.” That was written in November, 1943.

It was through Miss Adams that Browder's messages were being sent to the president via Eleanor. Because of her impeccable genealogical credentials, the Communists had given her a stellar role in the campaign to release Browder from the Atlanta penitentiary where he had been serving a four-year sentence for traveling on a false passport. Miss Adams was a middle-aged lady in tennis shoes, a vivid personality with flashes of imaginative brilliance that sometimes shaded into hallucination. She had taught art at Swarthmore College in the thirties, had an encyclopedic knowledge of flowers, and did first-rate flower paintings, one of which Esther Lape, who knew her, had given to Eleanor. On the basis of this frail connection, Miss Adams had written Eleanor after Pearl Harbor pleading for the release of Browder in the interests of national unity. Paul Robeson, one of her letters stated, felt that Browder was the only man who could overcome Negro bitterness because of their exclusion from defense jobs. But Eleanor could not forget Communist behavior during the Nazi-Soviet Pact. “I have
your letter,” she replied, “but I do not feel I should ask the President about Mr. Browder.”

In May, 1942, the president did commute Browder's prison term on the ground that a four-year sentence was far in excess of what was usual in passport-fraud cases. “I am sure now that the whole left wing is working only for victory,” Miss Adams wrote Eleanor.

Browder, after his release, wanted a discreet channel of communication with Roosevelt, and Miss Adams, who was known among her friends as something of a fabulist, sold herself to the Communist leader as a person who had access to the president, even though the only time she had entered the White House was in 1939 as a member of a Philadelphia delegation that presented a petition to one of the president's secretaries. But Eleanor Roosevelt had answered her letters, and out of such flimsy materials Miss Adams managed to weave a persuasive picture of an intimate relationship with the White House.

By the end of 1943 Miss Adams's letters increasingly quoted Browder. “Willkie flirts heavily with the left,” Miss Adams reported Browder as saying, “but those I know made up their minds to keep certain promises we made on national unity in case of the ending of the Atlanta situation.” A month later a penciled note from Miss Adams described how “E.B.” had kept James Patton, president of the National Farmers Union, who was leaning toward Willkie, in line for Roosevelt. To be sure, Mrs. Roosevelt understood this was a message intended for the president, Miss Adams ended her letter. “It would be tragic I think if the President did not have this story.” Evidently Eleanor did not grasp who “E.B.” was, or did not wish to, and replied as she did to all communications about a 1944 candidacy: “I am sure the President is only concerned with winning the war and not about who is the candidate.”

“The man who argued Patton into supporting the President is a prominent left-wing leader,” Miss Adams wrote back, scarcely able to conceal her vexation with the First Lady's obtuseness. “It would be quite natural perhaps if you did not trust him. . . . The President would I am sure take into consideration at least what he said and what he did from the point of view of realistic and practical politics without the least being sold on him or his ideas.”

By the beginning of January, 1944, it was clear to Eleanor that Miss Adams's letters were intended for the president. “Type,” she instructed Tommy, “give FDR & say I know nothing about her reliability.” Evidently Roosevelt was interested, for from that time on all the letters
from Miss Adams were sent over to him. There was every reason for the president to be intrigued, since Browder was well informed on what was going on in left and labor circles and the information that he transmitted, along with reports on what the Communists were doing to build national unity behind the war effort, including their moves to cool the ghettos and to keep labor from striking, clearly served the country's purposes.