The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (36 page)

I resented criticisms of this kind deeply for him and for our other children, but it is useless to resent anything; one must learn to look on whatever happens as part of one’s education and make it serve a good purpose. At the same time I could be amused at the attacks on me personally, especially the large campaign buttons announcing “We don’t want Eleanor either,” which many women wore.

Neither Franklin nor I ever minded the disagreeable things my cousin Alice Longworth used to say during the various campaigns. When the social season started after the third campaign, in which she had been particularly outspoken, she was invited as usual to the diplomatic reception. General Watson, Franklin’s aide, wondered if she would have the face to come; in fact, he was sure she would not. Franklin was equally sure that she would be there, so he and Pa Watson made a bet on it. On the night of the reception, when Alice was announced, Franklin looked at Pa with a grin, and said in a loud voice: “Pa, you lose!”

It was during this campaign that the “guru letters” were brought to light and there was great excitement about the chance of their being used against Mr. Wallace. I did not know Henry Wallace well, but my feeling was that he had simply been carried away by his intellectual curiosity. He was not realistic enough to appreciate how these letters would look to people who did not have the same kind of curiosity.

When it came to Mr. Wallace’s renomination in 1944, the men who went out through the country to get the feeling of the people reported back that there was a strong belief that Wallace was too impractical to help the ticket. Franklin’s faith in Wallace was shaken by that time, anyway; he said that Wallace had had his chance to make his mark, and since he had not been able to convince the party leaders that he was the right person for the job, it was not possible to dictate again who was to be the candidate. Franklin had a fatalistic feeling that if there was work for him to do he would be here to do it. If not, he believed the leaders should have a man of their own choice with whom to carry on.

Franklin had intended to make no speeches in this campaign except over the radio, but he finally was persuaded to make a few. He liked Wendell Willkie very much; he never felt the bitterness toward him that he felt toward some of his other opponents, and I do not remember his ever saying anything derogatory of him in private conversation. I myself thought Mr. Willkie courageous and sincere, and I liked the way he stood for certain principles.

Franklin was always fairly confident of success, though he said one could never be sure until the votes were counted. However, this was the election he was least certain of winning, not only because Mr. Willkie was a strong candidate but because he thought the third term issue would be a greater hurdle than it proved to be. As usual, I wanted him to win, since that was what he wanted, and I would have been sorry for his sake if he had been defeated. I knew, though, that if he lost he would go on living a good and full life, for he was a philosophical person who accepted and made the best of whatever happened.

Twenty-two
    

The Coming of War: 1941

IN FEBRUARY
, 1941, the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg came to stay and we had the customary parties. In that month, too, Harry Hopkins was sent to England to maintain personal contact between Franklin and the British government, for Ambassador Kennedy was about to resign and the new ambassador had not been appointed. I recalled Harry’s disgust with some of our career diplomats during a previous trip to observe living conditions in various European countries. He had said to me on his return: “They are so busy socially that they haven’t time to find out anything about working or agricultural conditions.”

Mr. Willkie came to see my husband one day and the household was so anxious to get a glimpse of him while he sat waiting in Franklin’s study on the second floor of the White House that suddenly many people had errands that took them down the hall. I would have gone myself, but I didn’t hear of his visit until Franklin told me of it later.

June was a difficult month, because Missy LeHand was taken ill, the beginning of her long, last illness. However, life in the White House had to go on just the same. On the 17th, Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands and her husband, Prince Bernhard, came to stay, and through the summer we had a number of other visitors, including, in August, the Duke of Kent and, in October, Lord and Lady Mountbatten. Later, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor came to lunch with my husband, though I had to be away to keep a long-standing engagement.

Early in August my husband, after many mysterious consultations, told me that he was going to take a little trip up through the Cape Cod Canal and that he wished to do some fishing. Then he smiled and I knew he was not telling me all that he was going to do.

I had already learned never to ask questions when information was not volunteered, and it became almost an obsession with me as the war went on. Because I saw a great many people I might let something slip that should not be told, so I used to beg my husband to tell me no secrets. Many times it was impossible not to know something was afoot, but if I made no effort to find out what, my knowledge was pretty vague.

Franklin invited some friends to go with him for the first few days of this Cape Cod cruise, and the trip was well covered in the news. He was seen by crowds of people from the shores of the canal and then—blank! Later he loved to tell the story of how he changed from the presidential yacht to the U.S.S.
Augusta
, which steamed up the coast and into the harbor of Argentia, where he met Prime Minister Churchill.

The story of that meeting has been told often and Franklin Junior and Elliott, who were there, could describe their part in it far better than I. To both boys the meeting with their father came as a pleasant surprise. Elliott had been doing exciting work. After he enlisted he had been sent to Wright Field for training and then assigned to a group going to Gander Lake Field. Because he was in that area, he was ordered to Argentia in August when his father and Prime Minister Churchill met to discuss the Atlantic Charter. Elliott had no idea why he was being hauled off the job he was on and sent to Argentia, and when he saw all the ships lying in the harbor he was a most surprised young man.

The same surprise awaited Franklin Junior. Being in the Naval Reserve, he had been called into the Navy before we were in the war and was executive officer on a destroyer, convoying merchant ships to England, and a most unpleasant job it was. It can be very cold in the North Atlantic in late winter and the early spring, so he had been beseeching all the family to send him warm clothes, and told tales of coming into Portland, Maine, practically encased in ice. Because of this duty, however, his ship had the good luck to be assigned to guard the President and the prime minister. Arriving in Argentia, he received word that he was to report to the commander in chief on board such-and-such a ship. He was considerably uneasy and thought to himself: “Now, what have I done?” It never occurred to him that the commander in chief was not Admiral King, so when he walked on board and saw his father it was a pleasant surprise and a great relief.

On his return, Franklin seemed happy that the Atlantic Charter had been agreed upon and announced and that he and Mr. Churchill had had the chance to begin to know and to like each other. He had met Mr. Churchill before, but had not really known him. He felt that this meeting had broken the ice and said he knew now that Churchill, who he thought was typical of John Bull, was a man with whom he could really work.

The fact that he had pulled off the trip without being discovered gave him a keen sense of satisfaction. He used to chuckle as he told of the presidential yacht sailing quietly through the Cape Cod Canal for a whole day with a gentleman more or less like Franklin in size, wearing a cap pulled well down over his eyes, sitting on the deck waving.

As the years went on, I was more and more careful to know as few secrets as possible, and Miss Thompson, whose office was off the main hall near the elevator on the second floor, became practically a recluse, making it a point to tell everybody that she knew nothing about my husband’s business.

Even in my press conferences I established the fairly well-understood pattern that affairs of state were not in my bailiwick but were dealt with by my husband in his news conferences. Occasionally, when I was asked for my personal opinion on some matter I would give it, and later I would be told that a good correspondent could not afford to miss my press conferences because I often foreshadowed my husband’s point of view. As a matter of fact, Franklin and I would rarely have discussed the subject, and only when it was one on which I felt justified in expressing my own point of view did I answer questions on affairs of state. I suppose long association makes people think along the same lines on certain subjects, so these coincidences were not so very extraordinary.

After he came back from Argentia, Franklin was increasingly busy; but fortunately he decided to go to Hyde Park for the weekend of September 4, because his mother, who had seemed to pick up after her return from Campobello and to be well again except for a slight cold, took a turn for the worse. On September 7 she died. It was a great sorrow to my husband. There was a close bond between them in spite of the fact that he had grown away from her in some ways and that in later years they had often not been in sympathy about policies on public affairs.

Franklin’s mother had always wanted to die in her own room at Hyde Park, and to be buried simply in the churchyard, with the men who had worked for her on the place for many years carrying the casket. Her wishes were carefully observed.

The same night that my mother-in-law was dying, my brother Hall, who had a little house not far from my cottage at Hyde Park, was taken ill. We took him to Vassar Hospital in Poughkeepsie, and the day of my mother-in-law’s funeral I had him moved to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington at his insistence. Having been there for treatments made necessary by his service in World War I, he wished to go back to the same doctors.

As soon as we could, after my mother-in-law’s funeral was over, we returned to the White House, and the next few weeks I spent watching my brother die. He was so strong that his heart kept him alive long after most people would have peacefully sunk into oblivion, and now and then he would recognize me when I went into his room. On September 25 he died, and the funeral was held in the White House. Franklin and I took his body to Tivoli, New York, to be buried in the Hall family vault there.

The loss of a brother is always a sad breaking of a family tie, but in the case of my brother it was like losing a child. He had come to live with us when we were first married and from then on Franklin and I had been his closest family; whatever happened to him, in spite of his great desire for independence, he always came to us. I had watched with great anxiety a fine mind gradually deteriorate. He had such a strong physique that he was sure he could always regain his self-control, even though he voluntarily relaxed it for a while. You could never convince him that it is hard to shake a habit you have once let get hold of you.

Fundamentally, I think Hall always lacked self-control. He had great energy, great physical strength, and great brilliance of mind but he never learned self-discipline. Whenever his responsibilities became irksome he tended to thrust them aside and to feel that it was unfair that he should be asked to make any concessions to circumstances that he did not wish to make. As a result of this attitude, his first marriage went on the rocks. While there were undoubtedly many contributing factors, I always felt that a major one was his lack of discipline and his unwillingness to compromise or make adjustments in the light of other people’s needs. In fact, he saw only with great difficulty any point of view but his own and then only when his respect for a person’s strength of character was deeper than his instinctive desire to attain his particular objective.

As I look back on the life of this man whom I dearly loved, who never reached the heights he was capable of reaching, I cannot help having a great sense of sorrow for him, knowing that he must often have felt deeply frustrated and disappointed by his own failure to use the wonderful gifts that were his.

Sorrow in itself and the loss of someone whom you love is hard to bear, but when sorrow is mixed with regret and a consciousness of waste there is added a touch of bitterness which is even more difficult to carry, day in and day out. I think it was in an attempt to numb this feeling that I worked so hard at the Office of Civilian Defense that fall.

On September 22, a few days before Hall died, I agreed to take charge for Mayor LaGuardia of the activities that were not strictly defense activities but allied and necessary for the protection of the civilian population as a whole.

Elinor Morgenthau volunteered to work as my assistant. I soon found that every activity which Mayor LaGuardia did not want in his part of the program was thrust into my division. His work as mayor of New York City prevented him from giving his full time to organizing civilian defense. The few group meetings we had left me with the impression of great hurry and a feeling that decisions were taken which had not been carefully thought out. Frequently heads of divisions, including myself, were unable to discuss with him some of the things we hoped to get settled. The mayor was more interested in the dramatic aspects of civilan defense, such as whether or not cities had good fire-fighting equipment, than in such things as building morale.

One day, while I was staying in my small apartment on 11th Street in New York, I invited Mr. LaGuardia to luncheon with me, for there was something I particularly wanted to talk with him about. I planned a simple lunch, but in the midst of the preparations my maid, who had worked with me off and on for years, went to Miss Thompson completely upset and said she could not cook for the mayor. Miss Thompson reminded her that she had cooked for the President and that the mayor was an easy person to please.