No Ordinary Time, Page 77

  Roosevelt explained to reporters that the doctors were keeping him in South Carolina a little longer, “lest his recovery from a bad coughing winter be interrupted.” Once the discussion of Knox was out of the way, Smith noted, Roosevelt “chatted gaily,” about fishing. He asked the three reporters how they were getting along and, upon hearing that they had to pay $12.50 for a bottle of poor rye at the Prince Georges Hotel, he ordered Pa Watson to serve a round of Baruch’s bourbon at once, “lest the reporters feel poorly on their return to the city.”

  In Washington, Eleanor was disappointed to hear that Franklin had delayed his return until May 7. “You will come home just as I leave which is sad,” she wrote, explaining that, because she had switched her appointments around the previous week, she now had to be in New York from the 5th to the 12th. “I hate to be away when you come back!”

  It helped, however, to know that Anna would be there, able to take her mother’s place in welcoming the president home. Just before Eleanor left, Anna celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday. “Nothing I could give you dear could ever tell you how much I love you,” Eleanor wrote in a note accompanying her gifts, “but I hope you and John know what a joy it is to have you near and how much I cherish all our pleasant happy times.”

  • • •

  Roosevelt’s return to the White House on Sunday morning, May 7, marked the end of the most complete vacation he had had during his eleven years in the presidency. “I had a really grand time at Bernie’s,” Roosevelt wrote Hopkins, who was convalescing from an operation at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, “slept 12 hours out of 24, sat in the sun, never lost my temper, and decided to let the world go hang.”

  It had been a rough five months for the president’s old friend. In January, Hopkins had entered the hospital with a recurrence of his old intestinal troubles. In February, en route to Florida to recuperate, he had received word from Roosevelt that his eighteen-year-old Marine Corps son, Stephen, had been killed in the Marshall Islands. Then, after his abdominal surgery at the Mayo Clinic in March, he had developed jaundice. Finally, at White Sulphur Springs, he seemed to be getting better.

  “It is grand to get the reports of how well you are getting on,” Roosevelt wrote, “and I have had a mighty nice letter from [Dr. Andrew] Rivers—couched mostly in medical terms, which, however, I have had translated!

  “The main things I get from it are two. First, that it is a good thing to connect up the plumbing and put your sewerage system into operating condition. The second is (and this comes from others in authority) that you have got to lead not the life of an invalid but the life of common or garden sense. I, too, over one hundred years older than you are, have come to the same realization and I have cut my drinks down to one and a half cocktails per evening and nothing else—not one complimentary highball or night cap. Also, I have cut my cigarettes down from twenty or thirty a day to five or six a day. Luckily they still taste rotten but it can be done. The main gist of this is to plead with you to stay away until the middle of June at the earliest. I don’t want you back until then. If you do come back before then you will be extremely unpopular in Washington, with the exception of [Washington Times Herald Publisher] Cissy Patterson who wants to kill you off as soon as possible—just as she does me . . . .”

  “We can all be glad,” The New York Times editorialized the day after the president returned, that “he has had a chance to enjoy a month of rest and relaxation from the almost overwhelming burdens which his office forces him to carry. He earned every hour of it.” Writing in a similar vein, New York Times correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick remarked that the vacation was “good news for the American people,” since Roosevelt would need “all the strength, serenity and fortitude of spirit he could muster” to face the climactic days ahead when Allied armies began pouring into Europe for a fight to the finish.

  Hassett found the president “brown as a berry, radiant and happy, insisting he has had a complete rest.” But Anna was still worried. Though his color was good and his spirits were high, she could see that he was not his old self. “Anna was afraid,” Dr. Bruenn recalled, “that her father would fall back into his old habits now that he was back in the White House. She had read up on cardiovascular disease and she understood how important rest and diet were. She was a great help to me. She became his protector. It was Anna who enforced the new regime.”

  In the weeks that followed, Anna was by her father’s side from the moment he awakened until he went to bed at night, making sure that his workload was kept to six hours a day. “You would find many changes here,” Ickes wrote Missy on May 23. “He makes only a few appointments a day—not enough in fact for us to transmit important business—and then goes back to house where he usually lunches alone with Anna. He is supposed to go to bed at 9:30 at night but Anna told me she has difficulty in persuading him to do that . . . . Then he goes away for weekends.”

  A sampling of the usher diaries for May reveals meetings with Cabinet and congressional leaders in the mornings, lunch with Anna and sometimes Margaret Suckley under the magnolia tree on the southern grounds at 1:30 or 2 p.m., additional meetings in the afternoons, followed by a drive in the countryside or a swim in the pool, cocktails and dinner with Anna and John, bed by 10 or 10:30.

  For a man who could not be alone, who relished people as his major source of relaxation, Anna’s company was vital. For a while, Princess Martha had been able to take up where Missy and Harry had left off, providing Roosevelt with lively companionship and good cheer. But as Roosevelt’s health weakened, his meetings with Martha diminished. Though he continued to see her occasionally during the spring and summer of 1944, their “romance” faded. “With people like Martha,” Anna’s son Johnny Boettiger speculated, “his performance always had to be on. Surely, it was second nature to him and he loved it, but as his energy decreased, their sparkling conversation left him somewhat depleted. With Anna, who loved to tell stories almost as much as he did, he could sit back and let himself be.”

  Anna’s continuing presence in the White House freed Eleanor to do what she wanted, and “what she wanted,” Johnny Boettiger observed, “was to be out on her own. She had an opportunity to develop her character and to enjoy a range of experiences few women had.” For Eleanor, being on the road and meeting new people was life itself. “I am always waiting for the day to appear when I shall put on my lace cap and sit by the fire,” Eleanor once wrote. “But when I am with a number of young people I become so interested I put off that day a little longer.”

  Returning home from her trips, Eleanor observed the growing bond between Franklin and Anna with mixed emotions. It was hard for Eleanor to accept that Anna now knew things she did not. In a conversation one day with Eleanor about political possibilities in 1944 and what Roosevelt might think about them, Trude Pratt was struck by Eleanor’s wistful comment: “Anna is the only one who would know about that.”

  The tensions multiplied as the weeks went by. “Anna tried to be as protective as she could with her father’s health,” Dr. Bruenn observed, “but Eleanor was a different kind of person, more driven, more insistent. She couldn’t accept that he was really sick or that he needed to cut down his activities, especially if they related to her concerns. I would sit with the family telling everyone how important it was not to annoy him or upset him at the dinner table but she couldn’t stop herself.”

  Of course, Eleanor drove Franklin no harder than she drove herself; there were just too many things to accomplish, and at some level, even if she couldn’t admit it openly, she must have worried that time was running out for both of them. The condition of black Americans remained closest to her heart. It seemed that, the more criticism she received about her advocacy of blacks, the more committed she became. In February, she had attended the opening of the first non-Jim Crow servicemen’s canteen in Washington, D.C. When a picture of her appeared in the papers surrounded by a group of white and Negro servicemen and their dates, a bitter controversy flared. “How ca
n anyone,” Representative Charles McKenzie of Louisiana argued on the floor of the House, “be a party to encouraging white girls into the arms of Negro soldiers at a canteen dance while singing ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart?’”

  “I know, of course, you are bidding for negro votes for your good husband,” an “outraged” woman wrote Eleanor, “but isn’t it rather a costly price to pay? . . . Would you have enjoyed seeing your daughter Anna being hugged by those negroes . . . . You are the most dangerous woman in America today and may I beg you to stop and think before you are guilty of such a thing again.”

  Though Eleanor did not doubt her husband’s ultimate commitment to racial equality, she believed constant reminders were essential to counter the rising pressures from the conservative coalition in Congress. Her commitment to women required equal vigilance. When she came home from her Caribbean tour, she was upset to find that only men were being sent to an international conference in London on education. She got one woman added at the last moment, but that was not good enough. “Women should be represented in every international conference,” she insisted.

  When the president was strong and healthy, he had enjoyed and even invited Eleanor’s advocacy. “She pushed him terrifically, this I know,” Anna admitted. “But you can’t ask somebody to be your eyes and ears and then not . . .” Grace Tully recalls a tense moment when Eleanor was cross-examining Franklin at a dinner party. “Mother, can’t you see you are giving Father indigestion?” Anna pleaded.

  “She couldn’t see why,” Anna recalled, “at a moment when he was relaxing—I remember one day when we were having cocktails . . . . A fair number of people were in the room, an informal group . . . . I was mixing the cocktails. Mother always came in at the end so she would only have to have one cocktail—that was her concession. She would wolf it—she never took it slowly. She came in and sat down across the desk from Father. And she had a sheaf of papers this high and she said, ‘Now, Franklin, I want to talk to you about this.’ I have permanently blocked out of my mind what it was she wanted to bring up. I just remember, like lightning, that I thought, ‘Oh God, he’s going to blow.’ And sure enough, he blew his top. He took every single speck of that whole pile of papers, threw them across the desk at me and said, ‘Sis, you handle these tomorrow morning.’ I almost went through the floor. She got up. She was the most controlled person in the world. And she just stood there a half second and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then she took her glass and walked toward somebody else and started talking. And he picked up his glass and started a story. And that was the end of it.

  “Intuitively I understood that here was a man plagued with God knows how many problems and right now he had twenty minutes to have two cocktails—in very small glasses—because dinner was served at a certain hour. They called you and out you went. He wanted to tell stories and relax and enjoy himself—period. I don’t think Mother had the slightest realization.”

  Earlier in the spring, almost as if she were anticipating this terrible moment, Anna had written to John, “I pray I don’t get caught in the crossfire between those two.” Over the years, Anna had come to understand the pain her mother had endured from being placed in an emotional triangle with her mother-in-law, competing with the older woman for the love of the same man. And she knew about her father’s affair with Lucy Mercer. The last thing Anna wanted was to create a situation that would recapitulate her mother’s earlier dilemma. But so deep was Anna’s pleasure in playing the role of caretaker to her father that there was no way she could give it up, even if it jeopardized her relationship with her mother.

  CHAPTER 20

  “SUSPENDED IN SPACE”

  Through the last days of May and the early days of June, Eleanor observed, everyone seemed to live “suspended in space, waiting for the invasion, dreading it and yet wishing it could begin successfully.” In the hush of the moment, Roosevelt tried to maintain a pretense of normal activity, but his secretary Grace Tully noticed that “every movement of his face and hands reflected the tightly contained state of his nerves.”

  He had done all he could to make sure that the young soldiers who crossed the Channel would have the greatest possible chance of success. From factories in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and New York had come the overwhelming majority of the vehicles—the trucks, tanks, armored cars, jeeps, ambulances—that were now carrying the men and supplies to the embarkation posts in southern England. From assembly plants in Ohio, Oregon, and California had come the bombers and the fighter planes that would provide life-sustaining air cover for the invading force. And from shipyards on both coasts had come the largest fleet ever assembled—900 warships in all, including 9 battleships, 23 heavy cruisers, 104 destroyers, and, perhaps most important, from Andrew Higgins in New Orleans had come the landing craft needed to carry the troops onto the beaches. Indeed, so much time had the Allied high command spent worrying about landing craft that Eisenhower once said that, “when he is buried, his coffin should be in the shape of a landing craft, as they are practically killing him with worry.”

  Yet, with the target date now only days away, there was little either Roosevelt or Eisenhower could do except sit back and wait. “The nearer H hour approached,” army historian Gordon Harrison explained in the official army history of the cross-Channel attack, “the more heavily and exclusively the responsibility for the invasion settled on the lower commanders.” For the few—Roosevelt, Churchill, Eisenhower, Marshall, Montgomery, and Brooke—would now be substituted the many, “as the battlefield so long seen as a single conceptual problem, becomes a confused and disparate fact—a maze of unrelated orchards and strange roads, hedgerows, villages, streams and woods, each temporarily bounding for the soldier the whole horizon of the war.”

  Once the order to “go” was given, the chief burden of the fighting would reside with the individual soldier; the advance of each unit would depend in large measure on his courage and skill, on his willingness to jump from the landing craft into water which was sometimes up to his neck, or higher; to wade through the bloodstained waves onto the beach, amid bloated bodies and bullets; and then to walk or crawl up the hill where the vaunted German army was waiting with rifles, mortars, and machine guns. Months of training and experience on other fronts in North Africa or Italy had brought each soldier to this point, but in the hearts of many, fighter pilot and military historian William Emerson admitted, “there was a question of whether we could make it against the big leagues. Till then we’d been fooling around the periphery. Now we were going into the center of things. Beneath the bravado, there was an undercurrent of concern, even fear.”

  Eisenhower determined that only four days in June provided the combination of conditions necessary for the assault—a late-rising moon for the paratroopers, and, shortly after dawn, a low tide. The invasion was set for Monday, June 5, a month later than originally planned.

  Roosevelt had intended to fly to England in early June so that he could be close to Churchill and Eisenhower as the invasion began. When his health prevented the trip, Churchill was sorely disappointed. Even at this late date, the prime minister was still anxious about the whole operation, still oppressed by “the dangers and disasters that could flow from Overlord if the landings should fail.” If only Roosevelt were there; then at least some of the tension might be eased. “Our friendship is my greatest stand-by amid the ever-increasing complications of this exacting war,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt on June 4, as he journeyed south to be near Eisenhower and the troops. “How I wish you were here.”

  For his part, Roosevelt decided to spend the weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the home of his military aide Pa Watson. In the quiet of Watson’s elegant estate, Roosevelt hoped to prepare a speech to the nation to be delivered once the invasion began. Eleanor was invited to join her husband, but she elected to stay in Washington instead, knowing perhaps that her own anxiety would only contribute to his. For weeks, Eleanor had been unable to sleep through the night. “I feel as though a sword were han
ging over my head,” she had written in mid-May, “dreading its fall and yet knowing it must fall to end the war.”

  Several months earlier, Eleanor had received a haunting letter from a woman whose favorite nephew had just been killed while serving in the navy. “It is too bad that you and your husband have not been punished by some deadly disease,” the distraught woman wrote. “Maybe though you and your husband will have to look into the faces of the dead corpses of your four sons . . . . God always punishes the wicked in some way.” Eleanor published the letter in her column, along with a simple reply. “Neither my husband nor I brought on this war,” she wrote, but “I quite understood her bitterness.” Now that the target date was drawing near, Eleanor could not free herself from monstrous thoughts of the battlefield, of the dead and the wounded. “Soon the invasion will be upon us,” she wrote on June 3; “I dread it.”

  What is more, Eleanor had no confidence that she could help her husband on this critical speech. The Office of War Information had asked her to prepare a radio speech of her own to be used after the invasion began, but she had declined. It was supposed to be addressed to the mothers of the U.S.A., and she couldn’t think of what she wanted to say, she explained to Joe Lash. “I only know I don’t want to say any of the things they suggested!”

  In Eleanor’s absence, Anna and John accompanied Roosevelt to Charlottesville, where the three of them worked together on a draft of the president’s speech. Years later, Anna recalled with pleasure the role she and John had played in suggesting that the speech be in the form of a prayer instead of a regular speech. “We all started making our contributions. Father would take a little from all of us and then write it as his own.”