No Ordinary Time, Page 90

  The applause at this point was sustained. Seated in the front row, Frances Perkins found herself close to tears. “It was the first reference he had ever made to his incapacity, to his impediment, and he did it in the most charming way. I remember choking up to realize that he was actually saying, ‘You see, I’m a crippled man.’ He had never said it before and it was one of the things that nobody ever said to him or even mentioned in his presence. It wasn’t done. It couldn’t be done. He had to bring himself to full humility to say it before Congress.”

  For twelve years, Roosevelt had engaged in what writer Hugh Gallagher has felicitously called “a splendid deception.” The public had no idea that their president could stand only for short periods of time, that he could walk only when pushed along by the momentum of another person, that he had to be carried up and down steps and helped into bed at night by his valet. Eleanor’s young friend Jane Plakias remembered her shock when she first realized the extent of Roosevelt’s paralysis. “I was at a picnic at Val-Kill. I saw a car drive up and two big Secret Service agents lifted Roosevelt out of the backseat and carried him into his wheelchair. It never occurred to me he couldn’t walk. I never got over that.”

  There was an unspoken code of honor on the part of the White House photographers that the president was never to be photographed looking crippled. In twelve years, not a single picture was ever printed of the president in his wheelchair. No newsreel had ever captured him being lifted into or out of his car. When he was shown in public, he appeared either standing behind a podium, seated in an ordinary chair, or leaning on the arm of a colleague. If, as occasionally happened, one of the members of the press corps sought to violate the code by sneaking a picture of the president looking helpless, one of the older photographers would “accidentally” block the shot or gently knock the camera to the ground. But such incidents were rare; by and large, the “veil of silence” about the extent of Roosevelt’s handicap was accepted by everyone—Roosevelt, the press, and the American people.

  But now the energy required to sustain the deception was no longer there. The effect on the listeners was electric. Even though the speech itself was too long and rambling, the reaction to it was overwhelmingly favorable. Freed from the burden of his braces, Roosevelt delivered an intimate, chatty address that sounded, Eleanor noted, as if he were in his private study talking to a small group of friends.

  For years, Roosevelt’s handicap had been regarded as a badge of courage by those who had worked closely with him, witnessing the extraordinary effort he had to make every day to overcome his physical affliction. And now, for a brief moment, the entire chamber was allowed to see what Roosevelt’s colleagues had always seen. But rather than lessening their regard for him, as Roosevelt had always feared it might, this glimpse of Roosevelt’s vulnerability only magnified the power and charm of his personality.

  “First of all,” Roosevelt said, opening the formal part of his speech, “I want to say, it is good to be home.” He then went on to discuss the work of the conference, the plans to bring defeat to Germany with the greatest possible speed, the design for the new United Nations. “This time,” he insisted, as he outlined the plans for the April 25 meeting in San Francisco, “we are not making the mistake of waiting until the end of the war to set up the machinery of peace. This time, as we fight together to win the war finally we work together to keep it from happening again.”

  In preparing his address, Sam Rosenman later conceded, Roosevelt made “one of his major mistakes in public relations.” He chose, unwisely, to keep secret for the time being that part of the Yalta agreement that granted the Soviet Union three votes in the Assembly. By deciding not to take the American people into his confidence, explaining to them how insignificant a concession this really was, Roosevelt opened himself to sharp attack when the news eventually leaked. Perhaps if Harry Hopkins had been able to work on the speech the mistake would not have been made, but Hopkins was in such terrible condition by the time his plane landed that he was forced to go straight to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

  Nevertheless, the speech that day was a great success, and the president, Perkins thought, looked “really well.” He had a slight sunburn, which gave his skin color and vitality; his eyes were bright and his voice was strong.

  • • •

  Roosevelt, of course, was not well. When Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King visited the White House in mid-March, he was left with the distinct impression that the president was failing. “He looked much older,” King observed, and “I noticed in looking at his eyes very closely that one eye had a clear direct look” while the other one was “not quite on the square.”

  Nonetheless, after a long talk with Roosevelt on the first evening of his visit, King was reassured. The president and the Canadian prime minister “talked steadily from 8:30 until twenty past 11,” when King looked at the clock. “The President said he was not tired; was enjoying the talk.” He spoke of Churchill and Stalin, of Yalta and the United Nations. And “on the whole,” King concluded, “I found more strength in him than I had expected. In fact, I felt less concerned than I had at the beginning.”

  It was the conversation at lunch the next day that disturbed King. Word for word, Roosevelt repeated two long stories about Jimmy Byrnes’ converting to Catholicism and Winston Churchill’s swimming in the ocean that he had told King the night before. King noticed that Mrs. Roosevelt and Anna “seemed a little embarrassed,” but nothing was said.

  King was not alone in his worries. “I saw the President today,” former OPA chief Leon Henderson recorded in his diary a few days later. “And I’m scared.” After leaving the government, Henderson had gone into private business, and had not seen the president since 1942. “It wasn’t only his appearance as an old man . . . . It wasn’t just his preoccupation with other affairs. It was the whole atmosphere of incredibility . . . . It was agonizing to me to see his plain difficulty in conversation. He wandered from topic to topic. I had a horrible vision that he might grow weaker and weaker, that his enemies would trample him underfoot as they did Woodrow Wilson.”

  The following week, speechwriter Robert Sherwood emerged from a weekly meeting with Roosevelt feeling “profoundly depressed.” Never before, Sherwood noted, had he seen the president so unnaturally quiet and even querulous. Never had he found himself “in the strange position of carrying on most of the conversation with him.” The only time the president perked up, Sherwood observed, was during lunch on the sun porch, when, “under the sparkling influence of his daughter Anna,” he almost seemed to be his old self.

  The five-week trip to Yalta had brought Roosevelt closer to Anna than ever before, and the old man reveled in the warmth of his daughter’s love. For her part, Anna had returned from Yalta full of self-possession. She had handled her responsibilities extremely well, and her father could not have asked for a better companion. And she had enjoyed herself thoroughly. “The other meetings have all been tiddlywinks compared with this one,” her husband, John, happily pointed out. “So you can say fiddlesticks to your brothers.”

  Though Anna was never given an office in the West Wing (she worked at a desk in her bedroom), never had an official title, and never took a salary, unlike her brother Jimmy, who got $10,000 a year for assisting his father, there was no question, Life magazine reported that spring, that Washington considered her the one to call to get through to the Big Boss. First Louis Howe had controlled access to the throne, later it was Missy, and still later Harry Hopkins. “But for weeks now,” Life reporter John Chamberlain observed, “the rumor mongers have been busy whispering a new secret: control of access has passed to Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, the long-legged, energetic and handsome eldest child,” the “free-speaking, free-cursing” daughter of President Roosevelt. “Anna,” Jim Farley once remarked, “has the most political savvy of all the Roosevelt children.”

  “For purposes of public consumption,” Chamberlain concluded, “she may continue to pose as someone simply living i
n the White House in prolonged transit from and to a newspaper job. But no matter what the White House press agents may say, it is a fair bet that Missy LeHand’s shoes have at last found a permanent occupant. Daddy’s girl has her work cut out for her, running Daddy.”

  • • •

  A great deal of work had piled up while Roosevelt was at Yalta. On the domestic front, the president’s first priority was passage of the National Service Act, which he had once again called upon Congress to enact in his State of the Union speech on January 6, 1945. Having come to believe that a total mobilization of all the country’s human resources was needed to bring a speedy end to the war, Roosevelt was now convinced that the “work or fight” bill was essential.

  The House had passed the national-service bill in February, but it was stuck in the upper chamber, where a majority of senators bridled at the thought of any further extension of controls over individuals. The Senate delay infuriated Roosevelt. “He seemed to feel,” Budget Director Harold Smith reported on March 12, “he did not want to send anything more to the Congress until it had disposed of the manpower issue . . . . He felt [Congress] was kicking the manpower situation around and said that in almost every battle of the war if there had been just a little more in the way of men and materials the result could have been a little more decisively on our side.”

  But Roosevelt’s disappointments at home that spring were more than balanced by victories abroad. In Germany, the Third Army was advancing rapidly toward the Rhine. “Don’t tell anyone,” General Patton telephoned General Omar Bradley, commander of the Twelfth Army Group, on the morning of March 23, “but I’m across. I sneaked a division over last night. But there are so few Krauts around here, they don’t know it yet.” And in the Pacific, the Battle of Iwo Jima, begun on February 19, 1945, was finally won. Halfway between Tokyo and the U.S. base on Saipan in the Marianas, the island of Iwo Jima was critical to the United States as a base from which heavily loaded B-29s could bomb Japan. To make Iwo Jima theirs, the U.S. Marines had stormed what was probably the most heavily defended spot per acre of ground in the world. Battling through caves and dugouts forty feet deep, the marines had absorbed terrible losses—more than six thousand were killed and fifteen thousand wounded, representing the greatest number of casualties in a single encounter of the Pacific war to date. But with the taking of Iwo Jima, a great victory was achieved, for American planes could now begin to bomb Japan with their full weight.

  Still, the specter of Japan’s zeal made it clear that the war in the Pacific would be even longer and bloodier than anyone had projected. Only two hundred of the 20,700 Japanese troops on Iwo’s garrison remained alive at the end of the battle; so humiliating was the thought of capture that hundreds, perhaps thousands, committed suicide, some by leaping into the Suribachi volcano.

  As reports of the Iwo Jima fighting reached Washington, Stimson met with Roosevelt to discuss the A-bomb project. Apparently several people at the State Department, including Jimmy Dunn, had become alarmed about rumors that the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Vannevar Bush, and Harvard President James Conant had, at extravagant cost, sold the president a lemon. Stimson wanted to assure the president that substantial progress was indeed being made, that “practically every physicist of standing,” including four Nobel Prize winners, was engaged on the project. Indeed, “the bomb was expected to be ready for testing in mid summer,” Stimson promised, in plenty of time to have a major impact on the Pacific war.

  Stimson went on to explain the opposing schools of thought regarding the bomb’s use and future control. Though there was no question that America was developing the weapon in order to use it, the question remained: Could a demonstration of the bomb precede the military drop, “with subsequent notice to Japan that [it] would be used against the Japanese mainland unless surrender was forthcoming”?

  In a conversation with economist Alexander Sachs the previous December, Roosevelt purportedly agreed with Sachs that the first step should be a nonmilitary demonstration before a team of international scientists. The next step would be a warning, outlining exactly where and when the bomb would be dropped, so civilians could escape. In a similar conversation with Vannevar Bush, Roosevelt questioned whether the bomb should actually be dropped on the Japanese or used simply as a threat. But either option remained premature until the bomb was ready.

  Nor was any decision reached with regard to future control, after the war. General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, and the military were on one side, wanting the project to remain solely in America’s hands; Bush and Conant were on the other, favoring international control and free access to laboratories around the world. Whichever way the president went, Stimson argued, his policy must be in place before the bomb was ready for use. Roosevelt agreed, but nothing more was said. Feeling good about this wide-ranging conversation, Stimson left, never imagining that this was the last time he would see his boss.

  • • •

  In the middle of March, Lucy Rutherfurd came to Washington for a week. She stayed in Georgetown with her sister, Violetta, and her brother-in-law, William Marbury. The timing of the visit, arranged most likely with Anna’s help, coincided with a three-day trip Eleanor was taking to North Carolina to speak to the legislative assembly in Raleigh and attend a conference on “Education in the Mountains” in Montreat, North Carolina.

  In preparation for Lucy’s arrival on Monday afternoon, March 12, Roosevelt approved a long list of visitors in the morning, including U.S. Ambassador to China Patrick Hurley, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Adolf Berle, and Budget Director Harold Smith. Smith told the president he looked well but seemed to have lost some weight. “Do you think so?” the president asked, with a look that suggested to Smith that he might be a bit sensitive about the subject.

  If Roosevelt was concerned about his appearance for Lucy’s sake, his worries were quickly dispelled that afternoon, when he motored to pick her up, for Lucy thought he looked more handsome than ever. While everyone else lamented his extreme thinness, Lucy told her friend Madame Shoumatoff that there was “something about his face that shows the way he looked when he was young,” the way he looked when she first fell in love with him. “Having lost so much weight,” Lucy said, “his features, always handsome, are more definitely chiseled.”

  Secret Service agents later recalled riding behind the president’s car as he and Lucy headed off for a leisurely drive through the Virginia countryside before returning to the White House for dinner. Seated together in the back seat, sealed by a glass partition from the chauffeur, the two old friends enjoyed a few moments of privacy. For Roosevelt, Hick once observed, motoring was not only a favorite form of recreation, it was almost a necessity, for he had so few ways of getting a change of scene. Watching his excitement as he readied himself to leave on a drive, one visitor recalled that “he was like a little boy going to the circus.”

  Anna and John joined Lucy and the president for dinner that night in his study. “Never was there anything clandestine about these occasions,” Anna later insisted. “On the contrary, they were occasions which I welcomed for my father because they were light-hearted and gay, affording a few hours of much needed relaxation for a loved father and world leader in a time of crisis.”

  Yet, if nothing underhanded was intended, the fact remained that Lucy’s visits were kept strictly secret from Eleanor. “I doubt that father felt he was doing anything wrong in seeing Lucy,” Jimmy observed, “but I certainly can understand his keeping it a secret because he believed mother would take it badly and would be hurt.”

  Lucy came to dinner again the following night, along with Anna, John, and MacKenzie King. King made no specific reference to Lucy in his diary that night, saying only that the dinner that evening was “strictly a family affair,” which he “greatly enjoyed.” As King got up to leave at nine-thirty, Roosevelt said that, if there was any way he could help in the prime minister’s upcoming ele
ction, he would gladly do so. Warmly shaking King’s hand, Roosevelt invited him to return any time to the White House, Warm Springs, or Hyde Park. Lucy remained with the president in the study another hour and then Roosevelt went to bed.

  The next day, after a busy round of appointments, Roosevelt was wheeled into the sun parlor for lunch with Lucy and Anna. Anna later recalled welcoming these rare, relaxed meals “because I felt the pressure of the war, with constant decisions to be made, must be relegated to the background occasionally.” Lucy was “a wonderful person,” Anna said, and “I was grateful to her.” At seven-thirty that night, Lucy returned, to enjoy a three-hour dinner alone with the president.

  When Eleanor came back to the White House on Thursday morning, Lucy’s visits stopped. On Saturday, Eleanor and Franklin celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary at a small family luncheon with Anna, Franklin’s old friend and law partner Harry Hooker, and the Morgenthaus. If Anna felt in any way self-conscious about her curious role as go-between for her father and Lucy, she gave no evidence to anyone, remaining open and warm with both her parents. Hassett noted the “complete contrast in the position of the principals to the scene forty years ago when the bride was given away by her ‘Uncle Ted,’” who, “in the very hey day of his popularity, stole the whole picture.”

  That evening, Franklin and Eleanor celebrated again with a small formal dinner in the State Dining Room. The guests included Crown Princess Juliana of Holland; the Dutch ambassador, Alexander Loudon, and his wife, Elizabeth; Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller; and Anna and John. The dinner was followed by a movie, The Suspect, an Edwardian murder mystery about a man driven to kill his nagging wife. The party dispersed sometime after midnight. “Thus,” Hassett observed, “another milestone is passed in the career of an extraordinary man and wife.”