No Ordinary Time, Page 58

  Lucy brought warmth and grace to the Rutherfurd household. Within weeks of her arrival, the children and the father alike had fallen in love with her. And the feeling was mutual; on February 13, 1920, Winthrop Rutherfurd and Lucy became man and wife. Two days later, Eleanor took note of the marriage in a letter to her mother-in-law. “Did you know Lucy Mercer married Mr. Wintie Rutherfurd . . . ?” she asked, in a chatty tone that gave no hint of the immense relief the news of the marriage must have brought.

  With the removal of Lucy Mercer, Franklin and Eleanor made a renewed commitment to their marriage. For months thereafter, Franklin tried to do the things he knew would please Eleanor. He took to coming home earlier in the evenings, spending more time with the children, accompanying Eleanor to church. For her part, Eleanor made an effort to enjoy herself at parties, to be the gay companion he so desired her to be. Their life resumed. In appearance, everything was as it had been.

  Beneath the surface, however, everything had changed, in both their individual lives and their relations to each other. Franklin’s friends believed that his love affair had had a permanent effect upon his personality. “Up to the time that Lucy Mercer came into Franklin’s life,” Corinne Robinson Alsop observed, “he seemed to look at human relationships coolly, calmly, and without depth. He viewed his family dispassionately, and enjoyed them, but he had in my opinion a loveless quality as if he were incapable of emotion . . . . It is difficult to describe,” Corinne said, “but to me it [the affair] seemed to release something in him.” Corinne’s husband, Joe Alsop, agreed, observing that Roosevelt’s disappointment in this great love helped to banish the superficial aspects of his personality; “he emerged tougher and more resilient, wiser and more profound even before his struggle with polio.”

  Though the discovery of the affair had liberating dimensions for Eleanor, leading her to forge a new sense of herself in the world, the hurt would endure forever, finding expression in sudden flashes of anger, unpredictable changes of mood, immobilizing depressions. “I have the memory of an elephant,” she once told a friend. “I can forgive but I cannot forget.” Among the belongings on her bedside table when she died in her New York apartment in 1962, seventeen years after her husband had died, was a faded clipping of the poem “Psyche” by Virginia Moore.

  The soul that has believed

  And is deceived

  Thinks nothing for a while,

  All thoughts are vile.

  And then because the sun

  Is mute persuasion,

  And hope in Spring and Fall

  Most natural,

  The soul grows calm and mild,

  A little child,

  Finding the pull of breath

  Better than death . . .

  The soul that had believed

  And was deceived

  Ends by believing more

  Than ever before.

  Across the top of the clipping, in Eleanor’s scrawled hand, was a single notation: “1918.”

  • • •

  In the end, it was yet again Eleanor’s inability to forget that proved the stumbling block to her acceptance of her husband’s proposal that they live together again as man and wife. Though she still loved him deeply, she was afraid to open herself once more to the devastating hurt she had suffered before.

  Nor, after establishing her independence, could she go back to depending on one person for fulfillment and satisfaction. Moreover, she knew that if she stayed at home the lack of productive activity and contacts with new people would be deadly, and she would undoubtedly find herself irritated by the adoring women who surrounded Franklin—Princess Martha, Laura Delano, Margaret Suckley.

  When the time came to answer, Eleanor, in characteristic fashion, never mentioned the proposal directly. Instead, she opened the conversation with an impassioned plea for a new war-related assignment that would allow her to move about the country and to travel abroad. She wanted desperately, she said, to be given the chance to visit American troops in England.

  It must have been immediately obvious to Roosevelt what his wife was trying to say. With no further discussion, he told her she could travel to England on an extended inspection tour as soon as the proper arrangements were made.

  So it happened, in a twist of irony, that the consequence of Franklin and Eleanor’s renewed closeness in the summer of 1942 was Franklin’s willingness, after months of Eleanor’s fruitless pleading, to let her undertake a journey to the war front that would take her thousands of miles away for many weeks. And from Eleanor’s excited reaction to the news it was clear that Franklin’s attempt to forge a new bond between them had come to a gracious but definite end.

  CHAPTER 15

  “WE ARE STRIKING BACK”

  “I confide my Missus to the care of you and Mrs. Churchill,” the president wrote the prime minister just before Eleanor set off on October 21, 1942, for the inspection trip to England she had longed to take for more than two years. “I know our better halves will hit it off beautifully.”

  It was twilight when Eleanor arrived at London’s cavernous Paddington Station, where a large crowd awaited the special train the prime minister had sent to carry her from the coastal city of Bristol. For days, Eleanor’s forthcoming visit had provoked much comment in the London press. “After nine years as [first lady],” the Evening Standard observed, “she is more popular than at the beginning of her first term.” To residents of London’s East End, Eleanor’s trip was much anticipated. Impressed by stories of her commitment to the poor, they hoped she would visit them to hear their troubles.

  As the first lady stepped from the train, a tall and smiling figure in a long black coat and blue-fox furs, she was met by an official welcoming party which included the king and queen, the duke of Kent, Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, and General Eisenhower, who was in London preparing for the Allied invasion of North Africa, which he had been chosen to lead. “We welcome you with all our hearts,” the queen said. As Eleanor drove away in the royal Daimler, the conductor on the train on which she had ridden shook his head in wonderment. “Mrs. Roosevelt never stopped talking and writing for one moment,” he said. “I’ve never seen such energy.”

  At Buckingham Palace, Eleanor was given an enormous suite specially restored for her visit after a German bombing attack. “We are lost in space, Tommy and I,” she wrote Hick that evening, “but we have a nice sitting room with a coal fire and a page takes us hither and yon.” The signs of war were everywhere. Before dinner the first night, Eleanor was handed her own ration card and assigned a bed in a shelter; the tub in her bathroom bore a five-inch mark above which the water was not allowed to go, and the heat in the palace was off until the first of November.

  Anxious to get out among the people, Eleanor drove with the king and queen on a tour of London. “I was struck by the area of destruction in the City,” she recorded in her diary. “Street after street of destruction of small shop buildings, with people living over them.” The queen told Eleanor that the wrecked houses they were passing had been very bad in the first place, but Eleanor, revealing once again her capacity to imagine herself in other people’s shoes, observed that, “no matter how bad they had been, they were the homes of people.” In one crowded section of the city, where only a third of the population was left, she noted sadly that “each empty building speaks of a personal tragedy.”

  Refreshed after a night’s sleep, Eleanor went to the Red Cross Club in London, where hundreds of American soldiers gathered to join in conversation, with shouts of “Hi Eleanor” rising from all parts of the packed room. The morale of the boys was good, she observed; their chief complaints related to the slowness of the mail service from home and the lack of warm woolen socks. With only thin cotton socks, their feet were constantly blistered, and this was one of the reasons, they told her, that they had colds. Eleanor promised to see what she could do. “I know you want heavier socks but don’t expect this change too soon,” she warned. “You know how the Army hates to change.”
With this remark, which proved her a “regular,” the assembled doughboys gave her a standing ovation.

  True to her word, Eleanor approached General Eisenhower the next evening. Eisenhower checked with his quartermasters the following day and discovered there were two and a half million pairs of woolen socks waiting in the warehouses. He promised the first lady they would be distributed at once. “I have already started the various commanders on a check-up to see that no man needs to march without proper footgear,” he pledged. Feeling useful at last, Eleanor was overjoyed.

  In the days that followed, Eleanor was on the go, visiting army camps and talking with women in every line of work. The previous December, over Churchill’s resistance, civilian conscription of women had begun, and as a result the British women, even more than their American counterparts, were doing all manner of jobs that had previously been limited to men: repairing trucks, servicing planes, driving tractors, digging ditches, cutting kale, building ships. “I can feel the exhilaration,” Eleanor told her readers. “Many of them were hairdressers, typists or housewives once upon a time. They love their new work.” In one factory she visited, 80 percent of the workers were women; in the countryside, a female “land army” had been formed to carry out the work of the farmers who had gone off to war; at the Air Transport Auxiliary, women were ferrying new planes from factories to battle stations. “We have not used women as much as you,” Eleanor told the British. This was just the sort of thing, she added, that the president would like to know about.

  Everywhere she went, Eleanor made a particular effort to visit the day nurseries that had been set up in factories, government buildings, churches, and community centers. As far as she could learn, the British mothers had been reluctant to use the nurseries at first, but the numbers were increasing steadily. Searching for the human details that she knew her husband relished, she questioned teachers, mothers, and children alike, listening attentively as they spoke.

  Mrs. Churchill accompanied Eleanor on part of the tour, but the pace was so strenuous that the prime minister’s wife found it impossible to keep up. During a visit to the Women’s Voluntary Services, a group engaged in the task of distributing clothing sent from America to victims of the bombings, Mrs. Churchill sat down on a marble staircase and waited as her intrepid companion climbed four flights of stairs to chat with the workers. At one point, an English reporter asked Eleanor whether she ever relaxed, slept late, or forgot her obligations. “Not since I can remember,” she said. “Why do you ask?” The reporter smiled. “Because I wish you would [rest] now—because I’m tired out.”

  When the touring party reached the countryside, Eleanor climbed on a farm wagon which had only bales of hay for seats; when they arrived at Bovington Airport, she insisted on climbing into a B-17. “I saw every inch of it, even squeezed up into the pilot’s seat,” she remarked. She looked down into the nose, where the bombardier and the navigator crouched “like animals at bay.” She looked past the bomb bays, where the ball-turret gunner was stuffed, “his feet on a level with his ears.” She peered into the tail, where the tail gunner rested on his knees. “I found I’m very fat for the pilot’s seat,” she laughingly noted; “it wasn’t made to accommodate an old lady well over 50. I wondered once or twice whether I would ever be able to move forward or backward again.”

  But it was well worth doing, Eleanor said, even if she got a little muddy and untidy, for it let her feel what each boy in a bombing mission did, and with that image in her mind she could better understand what they were thinking and feeling.

  Eleanor enjoyed her time with Mrs. Churchill. She “is very attractive, and has a charming personality—young looking for her age,” she noted in her diary, but it was hard to know what she really believed, because she never voiced any opinions publicly. “One feels that she has had to assume a role because of being in public life, and that the role is now part of her, but one wonders what she is like underneath.”

  She spent a night at Chequers, the prime minister’s country home, and dined with the Churchills in London on several occasions. She was particularly amused to see the prime minister with his little grandson, Winston, “who is a sweet baby, and exactly like the PM,” she noted. “They sat on the floor and played a game and the resemblance was ridiculous.” But tensions between her and Churchill inevitably flared when the conversation turned to politics.

  One night, at a small dinner party which included Churchill and his wife, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Minister of Information Brendan Bracken, and Lady Limerick of the British Red Cross, the prime minister brought up the subject of Spain. Why couldn’t we have done something to help the Loyalists, the antifascist faction in the Spanish Civil War? Eleanor asked Churchill, repeating an argument she had often had with her husband. The prime minister replied that the two of them would have been the first to lose their heads if the Loyalists had won. Eleanor replied that she cared not a whit about losing her head, whereupon the prime minister said: “I don’t want you to lose your head and neither do I want to lose mine.” At this point, Mrs. Churchill leaned across the table and said, “I think perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt is right.” His wife’s intervention only increased Churchill’s agitation. “I have held certain beliefs for sixty years and I’m not going to change now,” he growled. With that he got up, an abrupt signal that dinner was over.

  Unaccustomed to having women argue with him in public, Churchill did not know what to make of Eleanor Roosevelt. It was still difficult for him to absorb the extent to which she was an independent force, the most famous woman in America, a person whose opinions were sought after and quoted. Nonetheless, he could see that the British people had fallen in love with her. In his cables to Roosevelt, he described her visit as a triumphant success. “Mrs. Roosevelt has been winning golden opinions here from all for her kindness and her unfailing interest in everything we are doing,” he wrote. “We are most grateful for the visit and for all the encouragement it is giving to our women workers. I did my best to advise a reduction of her programme and also interspersing it with blank days, but I have not met with success and Mrs. Roosevelt proceeds indefatigably . . . . I only wish you were here yourself.”

  Determined to see as many soldiers as she could, Eleanor spent long, tiring days traveling to Red Cross clubs and army camps across the country. “Every soldier I see is a friend from home,” she noted in her column, displaying her trademark sincere sentiment, “and I want to stop and talk with him whether I know him or not. When I find we really have some point of contact, it gives me a warm feeling around the heart for the rest of the day.”

  At an army camp in Liverpool, she inspected a regiment of Negro troops; she visited their sick bay, cook house, and mess, and was pleased to note that they seemed to be doing very well. Before Eleanor left America, she had heard from several sources that racial tensions were rising in English camps because white Southerners “were very indignant” to find out that the Negro soldiers were not looked upon with terror by English girls. “I think we will have to do a little educating among our Southern white men and officers,” she had written Henry Stimson. “It is important for them to recognize that in different parts of the world, certain situations differ and have to be treated differently.” Fearful that Eleanor would fan the flames of controversy once she got to England, Stimson had gone to see the president shortly before the first lady was scheduled to leave. In confidence, he asked the president to caution his wife against making any public comment about “the differential treatment which Negroes receive in the United Kingdom from what they receive in the U.S.” The president promised to pass the word along, and most likely he did; the only thing Eleanor said about Negroes while she was in England was how well the troops seemed to be.

  For Eleanor, a special aspect of her trip was the chance it provided to spend time with her son Elliott, who was stationed with his photo-reconnaissance unit at Steeple Morton, not far from Cambridge. Elliott had come to Buckingham Palace the first night his mother arrive
d, and the two of them had talked by the fire in her sitting room until 2 a.m. She was delighted to see that her son’s snap judgments about the British were being revised in the wake of his growing admiration for the way they were taking the war. Elliott also joined his mother at Chequers, and she journeyed to Steeple Morton to meet his fellow soldiers. After years of worrying about her father’s namesake, Eleanor liked the man he was becoming. “He has matured,” she wrote Hick, “and will be a good citizen I think.”

  As Eleanor continued her remarkable ramblings through Bath to Birmingham and back to London, she found herself even more of a celebrity abroad than at home. “The First Lady is receiving the greatest ovation ever paid any American touring Britain,” a reporter on the London staff of Newsweek observed. “Groups loiter about the American Embassy all day long hoping to catch a glimpse of her. There are spontaneous outbursts of cheers and clapping at stations when she unexpectedly appears.”

  So positive was Eleanor’s press that Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, felt compelled to issue a directive to all German journalists. “The hullabaloo about Eleanor Roosevelt should be left to die down gradually and should not result in Mrs. Roosevelt’s journey being popularized or invested with a certain importance.” But Goebbels held no power over the British and American press, which followed Eleanor day after day, quoting her remarks and observations as if she were an elected official in her own right. Back in Washington, Hick was thrilled. “I’m simply delighted with the press you are getting,” she wrote Eleanor. “I’m awfully happy about it and so proud of you.”

  The president, too, was delighted by the success of Eleanor’s trip. From Hyde Park, where he had gone for the weekend before the November offyear elections, he cabled Churchill to thank him for helping to make his wife’s visit a triumph. “She has had what I would call an almost unanimously favorable press in this country,” Roosevelt proudly announced.