No Ordinary Time, Page 75

  So, while everyone else’s nerves became jittery, Roosevelt kept his dispute with Congress in perspective. Remaining at Hyde Park for a full week after the great explosion, he managed, Hassett recorded, to confound his enemies by sleeping ten hours a night, though they “supposed he was lying awake nights worrying about their machinations.”

  While Roosevelt was in Hyde Park that last week of February, the Eighth Air Force, in Europe, was enjoying what later came to be called “the Big Week,” seven days of unparalleled success during which thirty-eight hundred bombers dropped nearly ten thousand tons of bombs, which damaged or destroyed more than 70 percent of the German war plants involved in aircraft production. The tonnage dropped in this single week was equal to the total bomb tonnage dropped by the Eighth Air Force in its entire first year of operation. In contrast to “Black October,” 1943, when American losses were so devastating, amounting to more than half of the sorties, that pilots had come to accept as a fact that “you would be shot down eventually . . . that it is impossible to complete a full tour of duty,” the Big Week pilots enjoyed the critical advantage of new and improved escort planes. These new planes, P-47 Thunderbolt “Jugs,” were equipped with droppable fuel tanks that allowed them to fly much faster and farther than ever before.

  Though German industry would show remarkable recuperative powers after the bombing of Big Week, the German air force had been permanently damaged. Over six hundred German fighters had been downed, and nearly a thousand German pilots and crewmen had been killed or wounded. “This was a turning point in the air war against Germany,” Churchill later wrote. “From now onwards the U.S. 8th Air Force was able to bomb targets in Germany by day with high accuracy and ever increasing freedom.” The back of the Luftwaffe had been broken.

  • • •

  Returning from Hyde Park on the first of March, Roosevelt found to his great delight that Anna had moved from the guest quarters on the third floor to the spacious Lincoln Suite on the second floor, where Harry Hopkins had lived for three and a half years. The move signaled Anna’s commitment to stay with her father for the duration of the war, to serve as the hostess of the White House in her mother’s absence, to provide the warm, relaxed companionship he had missed since Missy was taken ill.

  Neither father nor daughter had imagined this outcome when Anna first arrived for the Christmas holidays. She had originally intended to return to Seattle in early January, but as the time for her departure approached, she found that her father did not want her to go. In the four weeks she had been at the White House, he had come to rely on her.

  “With no preliminary talks or discussions,” Anna recalled years later in a published article, “I found myself trying to take over little chores that I felt would relieve Father of some of the pressure under which he was constantly working.” Conquering the old fears and insecurities that had previously diminished her personality in her father’s presence, she entertained guests at the cocktail hour, arranged the seating at the dinner table, made suggestions on speeches and saw people her father was too busy to see.

  “Father could relax more easily with Anna than with Mother,” Elliott observed. “He could enjoy his drink without feeling guilty. Though Mother had gotten to the point where she would think she was relaxing, she was always working.”

  Blessed with a radiant smile and a ribald sense of humor, Anna took pleasure in the same silly hair-down jokes that her father relished. When she and her father were together, the valets recalled, laughter would ring out. “She could tell a great story,” her son Johnny Boettiger said; “she loved gossip and when she laughed, it was a real laugh; she threw her head back and let the laugh out.”

  And she was beautiful, tall and blonde with long, shapely legs, blue eyes, and healthy skin. Eleanor’s friend Justine Polier recalled being with the president in his study one morning when Anna came in. “She walked in in her riding boots after a ride. His whole face lighted up; the world’s problems stopped for a few minutes. He just adored her.”

  What would she think, he inquired as she was preparing to leave, about quitting her job at the Post-Intelligencer and coming to work for him? For Anna, the timing of the request was perfect. After months of effort, John Boettiger had finally succeeded in securing a transfer from North Africa to the Pentagon. Working in the White House would allow her not only to be with her father on a daily basis, but to be with her husband as well. Yes, Anna agreed, she would love to move into the White House and help him, “but not until I have talked with mother.”

  Anna’s caution was well advised, knowing as she did from conversations with Tommy that her mother had invariably clashed with every woman who had presumed to fill her role as mistress of the White House—with Jimmy’s first wife, Betsey Cushing, and with Missy LeHand and Louise Hopkins. “Louise would arrange dinner parties, and seat the table,” Anna was told. “Mother would be home. This would annoy the pants off her.” This was not ordinary jealousy at work; the threat Eleanor perceived was to her position, not her marriage. Though she cherished her independence and her freedom to travel she did not want anyone taking over her position as mistress of the White House.

  Eleanor was very frank with her daughter. If Anna came to stay, “it would be wonderful,” Eleanor said. “She personally would love it,” but she did not want to go through with her daughter what she had gone through with Louise Hopkins and others in the White House.

  Just recently, an awkward situation had developed when, without telling Eleanor, Grace Tully and Franklin had invited Missy to spend the second week of March at the White House. When Eleanor discovered this, she wrote to Missy canceling the invitation. “I was away last week when Grace and Franklin arranged for you to come down on the 7th of March. I am terribly sorry that they did not realize that I want to be here when you come. Therefore, as I have to go on this Caribbean trip, it will be necessary for you to postpone your trip. I am very sorry that they did not consult me before making plans but it is hard to get everyone together.”

  Though Eleanor’s insistence on being home during Missy’s visit reflected a valid desire to make sure that Missy was well taken care of while she was there, the postponement was devastating to Missy, coming as it did on the heels of learning that all her things had been removed from her third-floor bedroom and stored in the East Wing attic. “I know that you will realize,” Eleanor had written, “that in order to keep your belongings from being harmed by nurses and children and casual guests I have had them temporarily put where they are safe.”

  Though Eleanor suggested an alternative date in April, Missy refused to reconsider. “I hope you understand,” Missy’s sister Ann Rochon wrote Eleanor, “that we did everything we possibly could to make her go to Washington this month but she simply wouldn’t allow us to talk about it. We felt the change would do her so much good and of course she always considered it home.”

  When Anna assured her mother that she understood the ground rules, Eleanor embraced her daughter’s decision to move to Washington. In February, Anna put her home in Seattle on the rental market. Her first weeks in the White House proved delightful for everyone, including Eleanor. Whenever Eleanor had to travel, she was glad to know, she admitted, there would be “young life in the White House as it makes it a more cheerful place to anyone who happens to stay there.” And when she was home, Eleanor took pleasure in Anna’s vibrant personality, which “brought to all her contacts a gaiety and buoyance that made everybody feel just a little happier because she was around.”

  Though Anna was never given an official title or salary, her assignments, she joked, grew “like Topsy, because I was there all the time and it was easy for Father to tell someone to ‘ask Anna to do that’ or to look over at me and say, ‘Sis, you handle that.’” When it became clear to her that she couldn’t write fast enough to take accurate notes on all the things her father asked her to do, she taught herself shorthand at night, when the day’s work was done. “It was immaterial to me whether my job was helping to pl
an the 1944 campaign, pouring tea for General de Gaulle or filling Father’s empty cigarette case.”

  “It was an ideal match for both of them,” Anna’s son Johnny Boettiger observed, “a perfect fit, hand in glove.” For the little girl who still adored her father, there was endless pleasure in the observation that he enjoyed her beauty, her laugh, her pretty dress. For the awkward adolescent who had been so worried about making mistakes in front of her father that she fled from the library one day in tears when an armful of books he had handed her slipped from her grasp, there was the chance to deal with him now from a position of strength and confidence, to take pride in the mastery of a job well done. “She is really in finer health and spirits,” her husband reported to Jimmy Roosevelt, “than at any time since the war began.”

  “Anna’s day at the White House begins at 6:45 a.m.,” Time reported in a glowing portrait of the president’s daughter later that spring. She took breakfast with her husband and her five-year-old son, Johnny, in the Lincoln Suite; then Major Boettiger went off to the Pentagon while Johnny headed for kindergarten, accompanied by a Secret Service man. For the rest of the day, until 4 p.m., she was at her father’s side, “until Johnny comes marching home,” at which point she broke off from work for a quick game of Ping-Pong with him or a swim in the White House pool. Then back to the oval study to work, while Johnny, dressed in a little khaki uniform and cap, strolled the White House grounds, a toy wagon under his arm, pursuing his ambition to become a White House guard. An early supper for Johnny was followed by cocktails and dinner with her father. “The President’s daughter will preside over social engagements and welcome visitors of state any time Eleanor Roosevelt is off on a trip,” Time concluded, “but she has made it plain that she will not be [officially] considered an assistant hostess. She has reiterated . . . instructions to the State Department’s protocol office: at White House guest dinners, ‘Put me anywhere, I’m not official.’”

  • • •

  The more time Anna spent with her father in the spring of 1944, the more conscious she became of the darkening hollows under his eyes, the loss of color in his face, the soft cough that accompanied him day and night. To her observant eye, his strength seemed to be failing him; he was abnormally tired even in the morning hours; he complained of frequent headaches and had trouble sleeping at night. Sitting beside him in the movies, she noticed for the first time that his mouth hung open for long periods; joining him at his cocktail hour, she saw the convulsive shake of his hand as he tried to light his cigarette; once, as he was signing his name to a letter, he blanked out halfway through, leaving a long illegible scrawl. At first, Anna attributed her father’s troubles to the prolonged bout of influenza he had suffered during the winter, but when spring came and he failed to bounce back, she began to worry.

  That same spring, Grace Tully noted with alarm that her boss was nodding more frequently over his mail, even dozing off during dictation. “He would grin in slight embarrassment as he caught himself,” she recalled, and though she saw “no diminution of clarity or sparkle,” she worried nonetheless. In mid-March, former NYA Administrator Aubrey Williams dined with the president in the White House and was “shocked” at how “tired and worn” he looked. Even the ever-faithful Hassett admitted on March 24, “President not looking so well . . . . This latest cold has taken lots out of him. Every morning in response to inquiry as to how he felt a characteristic reply has been rotten or like hell.”

  Anna confided her concerns about her father’s health to her mother, but Eleanor refused to acknowledge that anything was seriously wrong. “I don’t think Mother saw it,” Anna told writer Bernard Asbell years later. “She wasn’t looking for him to be any different.”

  If Eleanor failed to see in her husband the alarming changes Anna saw, it was in part because she was hundreds of miles away from him much of the time. In February, she made two extended trips to New York, one to Clarksburg, West Virginia, and one to Pittsburgh. In March, she was in the Caribbean from the 4th to the 28th, inspecting bases and visiting soldiers. And even when she was home, she was so busy—testifying against the deplorable conditions of Negro housing in Washington, D.C.; speaking out against discrimination in the armed forces; calling for the inclusion of women at the peace table—that she had no time simply to sit with her husband and relax.

  Even if she had seen her husband more often, it is not clear that Eleanor would have understood what was happening to him. She simply wasn’t “interested in physiology,” Anna insisted, “that was all there was to it. She seemed to be cerebrating one hundred percent, all the time.” Having shared so completely in her husband’s triumph over polio, “she still believed,” as her grandson Johnny Boettiger put it, that “iron will and courage could conquer any illness. Though she was an unusually compassionate woman, she was never patient with illness—her own or anyone else’s. This made it hard for her and hard for others.”

  Reluctant to admit even to herself that Franklin was really sick, Eleanor ascribed his fatigue to psychological factors. For one thing, the spring had brought the disturbing news that Elliott’s second marriage, to Ruth Googins, was falling apart. Though Ruth had initially agreed to wait until the war was over to file for divorce, the agreement had broken down, and by the end of March the papers had been filed. “I think the constant tension must tell,” Eleanor confided in Joe Lash, “and though [Franklin] has said nothing I think he’s been upset by Elliott and Ruth.”

  Beyond the family problems, there remained in Roosevelt, Eleanor believed, an unspoken anxiety about the forthcoming invasion. “The President hasn’t been well,” she told her readers in “My Day,” “but I think it is probably as much the weariness that assails everyone who grasps the full meaning of war as it is a physical ailment.”

  Something more than internal stress was at work, however; by the last week of March, Roosevelt’s health was deteriorating so steadily that he canceled all appointments and confined himself to his bedroom, taking all his meals on a bed tray with Anna at his side. As always, Roosevelt worked to keep up appearances, summoning his energy to be pleasant. “He is cheerful in spirit,” Hassett noted on a day when his temperature reached 104 degrees, “always good natured, none of the ill temper that sick folks are entitled to display.”

  Though Roosevelt’s good spirits fooled reporters and visitors, Anna, who was with him most of his waking hours, could not ignore the discernible signs of trouble. There were too many times in the course of the day when she could see that “the blood was not pumping the way it should through one hundred percent of the body.”

  After comparing notes with Grace Tully, Anna took it upon herself to summon Dr. Ross McIntire to her quarters to discuss her father’s health. A stiff man who zealously guarded his authority as the president’s personal physician, McIntire submitted reluctantly to Anna’s cross-examination. What was happening to her father? Anna wanted to know. Clearly, something was very wrong. Not to worry, McIntire said. He was recovering from a combination of influenza and bronchitis. A week or two in the sun and he would be his old carefree self again.

  McIntire’s response did not sit well with Anna. Knowing that McIntire was not a general internist but, rather, an ear-nose-and-throat man chosen to treat her father’s chronic sinus condition, Anna feared that his narrow focus had blinded him to larger concerns. “I didn’t think,” Anna later confessed, that he “really knew what he was talking about.” Pushing further, Anna asked if he ever took her father’s blood pressure. “When I think it necessary,” McIntire replied.

  Softening her tone, Anna told McIntire that she was worried. She, too, had seen her father bounce back from many illnesses, but this time he seemed to be losing the struggle. His body seemed to be breaking down little by little. Could McIntire please send the president to the hospital for a thorough checkup? And would he promise not to tell her father that she had suggested it?

  • • •

  McIntire grudgingly acceded to Anna’s request, arranging
a checkup for the afternoon of March 28, 1944, at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Anna accompanied her father in the car as the cavalcade headed up Wisconsin Avenue. When they reached the hospital grounds, Roosevelt pointed through the trees to a tall, elegant building. “I designed that one,” he told Anna joyfully, fancying a greater contribution to the building than he had really made. Loving architecture as he did, Roosevelt had occasionally submitted drawings for certain public buildings, but there his participation usually stopped. This was probably just as well, for he had a tendency to overlook critical items in his plans, such as closet space and bathrooms.

  At the door of the hospital, Anna smiled and waved goodbye. Her mother was returning that same afternoon from her Caribbean tour, and Anna had promised to meet her at the airport. As the president rolled down the corridor in his wheelchair, he waved cheerfully to the patients and the members of the staff who had gathered round to see him. There was nothing in his demeanor to indicate the disturbing symptoms that had brought him to the hospital.

  Inside the medical suite, Dr. Howard Bruenn, a young cardiologist, waited anxiously for his famous patient. Bruenn had been told only that the president was not recovering well from a bout of influenza and bronchitis, that a more thorough checkup was needed. “It was a warm day,” Bruenn recalled years later, “and I was perspiring a lot. I felt I had a big weight on my shoulders.” Having never met the president before, Bruenn had requested from McIntire earlier that day the results of previous heart and chest exams. McIntire wasn’t sure he could find them, but when Bruenn pressed him, arguing that without previous results there was no way to make comparisons, McIntire promised to look carefully and send them by messenger if they were found.

  The records had not yet arrived as the president was lifted onto the examining table, leaving Bruenn with no comprehension of the patient’s history. “I suspected something was terribly wrong as soon as I looked at him,” Bruenn recalled. “His face was pallid and there was a bluish discoloration of his skin, lips and nail beds. When the hemoglobin is fully oxygenated, it is red. When it is impaired, it has a bluish tint. The bluish color meant the tissues were not being supplied with adequate oxygen.”