Franklin and Lucy

by Joseph E. Persico

Quentin had flown his French Nieuport 28 behind German lines near Château-Thierry where a Fokker shot him out of the sky and to his death.

Meanwhile at the Roosevelt estate, Hyde Park, Eleanor received an alarming phone call from Elliot Brown, a socially prominent builder, whom Franklin had lured into the Navy with a commander’s commission. Brown was calling to warn Eleanor that when the ship docked in New York harbor, on September 19, she should be prepared to meet it with a doctor and an ambulance. By now, the flu epidemic was raging. Soon, over 1,350 New Yorkers would succumb to the disease in a single day. Draft calls were being postponed to hold down the contagion.

The Roosevelts had a townhouse at 47 East 65th Street, a wedding gift from Franklin’s mother and adjacent to her twin townhouse. The couple’s home was currently rented, and so, to Eleanor’s disappointment and his mother’s satisfaction, the sailors carried Franklin to a guest bedroom on Sara’s side. While her husband was put to bed, a distraught Eleanor tried to be helpful by unpacking his luggage. Her hand fell upon the packet of letters tied with the velvet ribbon, faintly scented, and addressed to Franklin in a familiar hand. An uneasy curiosity overcame her ingrained good breeding and she opened the first letter. What she read struck her like a body blow. Every succeeding letter hammered home what was unmistakable. Her husband was involved in a love affair. The letters were signed by the young woman she had for a time employed as her social secretary and made part of her family, Lucy Mercer. As she later described the moment, “The bottom dropped out of my particular world.”

James Roosevelt, the man who would become Franklin’s father, was fifty-two and four years a widower in 1880 when he too suffered disappointment in love. The object of his affection was a distantly related Roosevelt named Alice, age twenty-two, known to her family as “Bye” and whose younger brother, Theodore, would, twenty-one years later, become president of the United States.

One day when Franklin was four he came bounding into the living room to find a younger child standing awkwardly in the doorway, her finger in her mouth. With her were her parents, Elliott and Anna Roosevelt, houseguests from the Oyster Bay branch of the family. However genealogically remote, five generations by this time, the two clans clung together. Elliott and Anna had been engaged at a house party at Algonac given by Laura Delano, Sara’s younger sister. Elliott Roosevelt was Franklin’s godfather. The boy immediately took the child by the hand, led her to the nursery, where he dropped down on all fours and ordered her to climb onto his back. He then took her on a wild romp of “horsey.” The little girl’s full name was Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

In 1890, when Franklin was eight, his father suffered the first of recurring heart attacks and James gradually retreated into invalidism.

FEW CHILDHOODS could have been less alike than that of Franklin Roosevelt and the woman whose heart he would one day win, then break. If Franklin was raised as the Little Prince, Eleanor Roosevelt’s childhood combines elements of Little Nell, Griselda, and the Little Match Girl.

Vice President Roosevelt was returning from a summer trip to Europe when on the morning of September 18, 1901, as the ship passed the Nantucket Shoals, a man came out of the lightship and bellowed through a megaphone that President McKinley had died the previous Saturday. Franklin, now a Harvard sophomore, wrote in a letter home, “Terrible shock to all,” with no mention of what the tragedy meant for the Roosevelt family’s political fortunes. TR’s daughter, Alice, made no bones about her reaction to the news: “My brother Ted and I danced a little war dance. Shameful! Then we put on long faces.” Publicly still loyal to TR, Franklin had confided to Alice Sohier during their romance that since promising Republicans were thick on the ground, he would revert to the Democrat fold where his chances of standing out were better.

At the second commencement, along with his mother and numerous other family, he invited one more Roosevelt fast emerging in his life, his distant cousin Eleanor.

Eventually handling this checking account and paying the bills for the profligate Franklin was Lucy Mercer.

Lucy Mercer had begun moving beyond scheduler and bill payer, occasionally becoming part of the Roosevelts’ social circle.

The Lucy Mercer who had entered Franklin’s orbit shared certain qualities with Eleanor. Both were tall, with abundant hair, translucent complexions, blue-eyed, bosomy, and well bred. There the similarities ended. Lucy was far more appealing. Her teeth did not protrude, her chin did not recede, as did Eleanor’s, most noticeably in profile. Lucy’s posture was regal while Eleanor’s was stooped. She had a velvety, soothing voice, while Eleanor’s was high-pitched, flutey, with every word, no matter how banal, seemingly freighted with meaning. When stressed her voice turned shrill. Lucy was poised while Eleanor was insecure. She was vivacious, Eleanor earnest.

But by mid-1916 at least attraction had ripened into a love affair.

As for Lucy, this warmhearted young woman found herself in constant contact with an older man who was the fulfillment of her girlish ideals and whose breathtaking good looks exuded virility. She had witnessed the way he lit up a room or a boatful of guests by his very presence, by his humor and lively imagination. Further he was important, made visible in the deference paid him by his peers, even superiors. To Lucy, Franklin Roosevelt was godlike, and this prince among men gave her every reason to believe that he loved her. Those who contend that her Catholicism would have barred illicit love, that her religion would act as a chastity belt, are according Catholics an unlikely exemption from the passions that consume others.

The family histories of neither Franklin nor Lucy would have left them innocent of human fallibility.

Her foreboding was assuaged by the hope that someday they might marry. But what if in the end Franklin would not leave his wife? Their lives had become a mélange of happiness and anxiety, pleasure and guilt, risk and deception. Yet, the price was paid and the affair went on.

ON THE EVE of the presidential election of 1932, nearly a third of American workers had no job and no recourse but dwindling savings or charity. When the Soviet Union advertised for six thousand skilled Americans to work in Russia, 100,000 people applied. Over five thousand banks had failed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had plummeted 90 percent from its heady 1929 highs. Families were being thrown out of their homes through bank foreclosures at the rate of one thousand a day.

At this dark hour Franklin Roosevelt was voted into office by the greatest electoral tide up to that point in American history. He beat Herbert Hoover by over seven million votes, won forty-two of the forty-eight states, and took 472 electoral college votes to Hoover’s 59.

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

With the outbreak of war in 1939, the concern he had expressed in his second inaugural address four years before about Nazi Germany’s menace to peace had proven all too prescient. When France fell on June 20, 1940, after only a six-week battle, with Poland, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway all under the Nazi heel, Roosevelt recognized

On election day FDR shattered a century-and-a-half tradition, winning a third term and defeating Willkie by a comfortable five million votes and an electoral college rout of 449 to 82.

That morning the president was awake at 8:30, reasonably well rested but complaining of a slight headache and a stiff neck.

FDR looked up and said, “We have got just about fifteen minutes more to work.”

The room had gone silent when Daisy saw Franklin’s head suddenly slump forward, his hands thrashing at his side.

He “looked at me with his forehead furrowed in pain and tried to smile.

He put his left hand up to the back of his head & said, ‘I have a terrific pain ...

Within minutes he fell unconscious. Lucy hurried in and began waving smelling salts under the president’s nose, to no avail. Within a few minutes, Bruenn arrived.

She found the operator in tears and returned to Lucy, waiting in the hotel lobby, to tell her what the woman had just heard on the radio.

“The President is dead,” Shoumatoff said. Lucy, she remembered, “sat motionless and remained utterly silent.” Dr. Bruenn’s terse notes recorded

The president had died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. At his death he had served eighty-three days into his fourth term.

Vice President Harry Truman had just returned from presiding over the Senate and had gone to Room H-128, a high-ceilinged after-hours hideaway, to sip bourbon with the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn. At 5:15 P.M. he received the call from Mrs. Roosevelt telling him that the president was dead. He snatched his hat and ran from the room. Upon arriving at the White House, face taut, mouth set in a thin line, wearing a gray suit and a polka dot tie, he asked Eleanor, “What can I do?” She answered, “Is there anything we can do for you? You are the one in trouble now.” She sent off a message to her four sons in uniform, Marine Colonel James Roosevelt, Navy lieutenants Franklin Jr. and John, all in the Pacific, and Brigadier General Elliott Roosevelt in Europe. “Darlings,” she wrote, “Pa slept away this afternoon. He did his job to the end as he would want you to do. Bless you. All our love, Mother.”

With the flag over the White House lowered to half-mast, Truman was sworn in as president at 7:00 P.M. by Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone, his hand on a Bible Truman had found on the table in the president’s cabinet room.

While the funeral train rolled slowly north, Eleanor remembered, “I lay in my berth all night with the window shade up, looking out at the countryside he had loved and watching the faces of the people at stations, and even at the crossroads, who came to pay their last tribute all through the night. The only recollection I clearly have is thinking about ‘The Lonesome Train,’ the musical poem about Lincoln’s death. ‘A lonesome train on a lonesome track / Seven coaches painted black / A slow train, a quiet train / Carrying Lincoln home again…’ I had always liked it so well—and now this was so much like it.”

Eleanor had told friends that after the Lucy Mercer affair, she no longer loved her husband. However, what she had experienced was not the death of love, but enduring unhappiness because Franklin’s behavior had imposed on her the necessity to suppress her love for him if she were to survive emotionally.

Franklin Roosevelt was never to know the triumphal journey to Britain of which he had dreamed. The wild reception that Churchill had predicted yielded instead to posthumous homage. Five days after FDR’s death the prime minister stood before Parliament, benches full, galleries overflowing, ordinary Britons crowding the entranceways, as he pronounced Franklin Roosevelt the greatest of all Americans, perhaps above Washington and Lincoln, because his leadership had influenced not just America, but the entire world. “What an enviable death was his,” the prime minister intoned. “He had brought his country through the worst of its perils and the heaviest of its toil. Victory had cast its sure and steady beam upon him…. He had raised the strength, might, and glory of the great Republic to a height never attained by any nation in history.”

Churchill, who had sat alongside the crippled president through grueling journeys and exhausting negotiations abroad, understood better than most Americans, shielded from their leader’s handicap, what FDR had overcome. “Not one man in ten millions…would have attempted to plunge into a life of physical and mental exertion,” he said. “Not one in a generation would have succeeded…in becoming indisputable master of the scene.”

Churchill recalled his last moments with Roosevelt: “At Yalta, I noticed the President was ailing. His captivating smile, his gay and charming manner had not deserted him, but his face had a transparency, an air of purification, and often there was a faraway look ...

To the American people, the sudden removal from their midst of their leader of the past twelve years struck like a thunderclap, leaving them numb and uncomprehending. The shock struck across the political spectrum from worshippers to detractors. “The President’s death,” said the arch-Republican Senator Robert...

THE YEAR 1997 saw publication of a book, Rating the Presidents, a sophisticated calculation weighing five factors—leadership, accomplishments, political skill, appointments, and character—in judging the nation’s forty-one chief executives through 1996. Ranked first was Abraham Lincoln. Second was Franklin D. Roosevelt, rated ahead of George Washington. Another survey of fifty eminent historians polled by Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. of Harvard rated only Lincoln and Washington ahead of FDR.

“In Franklin Roosevelt,” Churchill said, there died “the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old.”

Franklin as a member of the Harvard class of 1904. His grades rarely rose above the “gentlemanly C.” But he achieved campus prominence as editor of the school newspaper, The Crimson. FDR LIBRARY

Lucy, about age fifteen. Though the Mercer family was now in straitened circumstances, a titled aunt supported Lucy and her older sister, Violetta, for a year at a fashionable girls’ school in Austria.

Lucy Mercer shortly before she became Eleanor Roosevelt’s social secretary in 1913.

Lucy Mercer at the time of her romance with FDR.

The braces Roosevelt was compelled to wear throughout his life. He could not stand or walk unaided. FDR LIBRARY

Missy LeHand, who would essentially live with FDR during his years aboard a Florida houseboat and in Warm Springs, Georgia, while he struggled to recover from polio. As his closest White House intimate,

Eleanor with her state trooper bodyguard, Earl Miller. Rumors about the intimacy of their relationship would swirl around Mrs. Roosevelt for years. FDR LIBRARY

Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd in her fifties, at about the time she came back into President Roosevelt’s life, visiting him at the White House, Hyde Park, and Warm Springs. KNOWLES FAMILY

FDR in one of only two known photos of him in his wheelchair. So well respected by the press was his wish not to be seen as impaired that many Americans never realized their president was crippled. WILDERSTEIN PRESERVATION