No Ordinary Time, Page 91

  Eleanor remained in town until Monday morning, when she left on a four-day trip that would take her to New York and then to Greensboro, North Carolina, to attend a seminar on “The Returning Black Serviceman” at Bennett College and to meet with twenty-five hundred young women at the women’s college of the state university. These were just the kind of gatherings Eleanor relished. “This world of young people, especially of young women,” she wrote in her column, “is a very exciting world, for in their hands lies so much of the promise of this nation.”

  With Eleanor away, Roosevelt acted once more, writer Jim Bishop observed, “like a boy on vacation from school.” He and Lucy took a long drive together through the countryside on Monday afternoon, dined with Anna and John on Tuesday, and were served tea together in the study on Wednesday. At the Gridiron dinner the following night, just after Lucy’s weeklong visit had come to an end, reporter Allen Drury, who had been saddened at first to see how old the president looked, found a definite spark of the old FDR as Roosevelt passed by, “the head going up with a toss, the smile breaking out, the hand uplifted and waving in the old familiar way.”

  • • •

  When Eleanor returned from North Carolina, she was saddened to discover that Hick had packed up her things and moved back to Long Island. Hick had been suffering for several months from diabetes, and the stress of her position at the Democratic National Committee was draining her limited energy. Under doctor’s orders, she had quit her job and made arrangements to leave Washington for good.

  Before leaving, Hick had penned a long farewell note to Eleanor. “The goodbyes have all been said,” Hick wrote, “and presently I shall be on the way out of Washington with two orchids pinned to my shoulder . . . . With you as an example, I tried awfully hard to do a good job, and most of the time, I think I honestly did give the Women’s division the best that was in me. But many times I was irritable and impatient and intolerant. One of the qualities I loved most in you is your tolerance . . . .

  “I wish I had the words to tell you how grateful I am for your many kindnesses these past four years. It did two wonderful things—kept me near you and made it possible for me to hang on to my house, which is infinitely precious to me. I shall miss you. Yet I shall feel that you are near. After all these years, we could never drift very far apart. You are a very wonderful friend, my dear.” Though Hick’s love for Eleanor had not turned into a lasting romance, as Hick had originally hoped, their friendship had remained constant.

  Now the curious double life Hick had led while she lived in the White House could be brought to an end. Fearing that the politicians she worked with at the Democratic National Committee would expect her to produce favors for them if they realized she was actually staying at the White House, she had pretended she was living at the Mayflower Hotel. If someone escorted her home from a party, she would say goodbye in the lobby, walk toward the elevators, wait until her escort had departed, and then take a cab to the White House. Her closest friends, including Judge Marion Harron and a few of her former female colleagues, knew of her residence, but never once did a single reporter mention Hick’s living arrangements in a story. Her secret was protected.

  For Eleanor, Hick’s continuing friendship had been invaluable. Never would Eleanor forget that it was Hick who had originally suggested to her that her nightly letters to her friends could be transformed into a newspaper column. Now Eleanor’s syndicated column was a daily fixture, appearing six times a week in hundreds of papers in cities and towns throughout the country. Indeed, that same March, as Hick was leaving Washington, the syndicate asked Eleanor to sign up for another five years, until December 1950. She was especially pleased by the length of the contract. Since it carried her two years past the 1948 election, she would finally, she believed, be able to write without the constraints of being first lady.

  But if Eleanor’s career had been helped by friendship with Hick, Hick’s career had suffered. By giving up her identity as a newspaperwoman, Hick later acknowledged, she had paid a terrible price. She was particularly reminded of her loss, she said, when Madame Chiang was at the White House. Eleanor had invited Hick to attend Chiang’s joint press conference with the president in the Oval Office. Hick was anxious to meet Chiang but felt compelled to decline the invitation. “The office would be packed,” Hick wrote. “Probably not all of the working people could get inside. I could imagine some of my former colleagues muttering, ‘What’s she doing, taking up room in there. She’s no longer a reporter.’”

  Yet, even though Hick had surrendered to her passion, she had not lost her pride. Years later, when Eleanor completed the second installment of her autobiography, she sent Hick a draft of the pages covering the first inauguration, including a description of the interview she had given Hick on inaugural day. At the end of the inaugural paragraph, Eleanor had commented: “Later I came to realize that in the White House one must not play favorites.” Thinking it sounded as if she had gotten the chance to cover Eleanor Roosevelt just because she was “a nice tame pet reporter,” Hick dashed off a letter to Tommy.

  “Tommy, I didn’t get that story because I was anybody’s pet reporter . . . . In those days (pardon an old lady her conceit) I was somebody in my own right. I was just about the top gal reporter in the country. Forgive me but I was good, I knew it . . . . I got the story because I earned it . . . . Maybe I’m being silly. But I just can’t let the high spot of my newspaper career—the only thing in my whole life I’m really proud of—fizzle out like a wet fire-cracker, as though I was a nice tame little girl who was somebody’s pet until she learned that she didn’t play favorites!”

  Eleanor changed the paragraph to read: “Soon after the inaugural ceremonies Lorena Hickok, to whom I had promised an interview, came up to my sitting room. Both my husband and Louis Howe had agreed to the interview because she was the outstanding woman reporter for the Associated Press and they both had known her and recognized her ability in New York.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “EVERYBODY IS CRYING”

  On Saturday night, March 24, 1945, after dinner with Crown Princess Martha and Crown Prince Olav, Franklin and Eleanor took the overnight train to Hyde Park, where the president planned to relax, get a lot of sleep, and do a few things at the library. “Hope he responds to good air and quiet,” Hassett noted the morning after their arrival.

  “Everything is just beginning to grow,” Eleanor observed happily. The sight of budding trees and young flowers poking through the ground combined to produce a sense of serenity and a feeling of renewal. On Sunday afternoon, Franklin spoke with Eleanor of something that had long been in his mind. He wanted her to travel with him on April 20 to San Francisco for the opening session of the United Nations, and then, sometime in late May or early June, he wanted her to accompany him to London, Holland, and the front.

  They would travel by ship to Southampton and then by train to Buckingham Palace, where they would stay with the king and queen for several days. He owed a return visit to the royal family, he said, and this seemed to be the best time. Then he would like to drive with the king through the streets of London, give an address before the houses of Parliament, and spend time with Churchill at Chequers. He had already told Churchill of his plans, and the prime minister was enthusiastic.

  Roosevelt, Churchill predicted, “is going to get from the British people the greatest reception ever accorded to any human being since Lord Nelson made his triumphant return to London . . . . It will come genuinely and spontaneously from the hearts of the British people; they all love him for what he has done to save them from destruction by the Huns; they love him also for what he has done to relieve their fear that the horrors they have been through for five years might come upon them again in increased fury.”

  After London, they would visit men on the battlefields, call on Queen Wilhelmina in Holland, stay at the Hague, and end up in Paris. So excited was Roosevelt at the thought of the trip that he had been unable to keep it a secret. He had brough
t it up in recent conversations with MacKenzie King and Frances Perkins and seemed as happy as he had been in months. “I have long wanted to do it,” he said to Perkins. “I want to see the British people myself. Eleanor’s visit in wartime was a great success. I mean a success for her and for me so that we understood more about their problems . . . . I told Eleanor to order her clothes and get some fine things so that she will make a really handsome appearance.”

  When Perkins protested that a trip to Europe would be too dangerous, that the Germans would be out to get him, Roosevelt put his hand over his mouth and whispered, “The war in Europe will be over by the end of May.” It comforted Perkins, she said later, to know that Roosevelt realized this. “I’ve always remembered it.”

  Eleanor listened eagerly to Franklin’s plans. When her husband was like this, brimful of ideas, flushed, and triumphant, there was no one like him. Perhaps, in the closeness of the moment, she, too, began imagining the trip in all its splendid detail, erasing the painful knowledge, made even more vivid in recent days, of Franklin’s considerable decline.

  For the first time, Eleanor sadly noted that weekend, Franklin no longer wanted to drive his own car. He let her drive, which he had never done before, and he let her mix the cocktails, something that would have been inconceivable only a few months earlier. Nor, she observed, was he able to enjoy her usual way of arguing with him on a matter of public policy. In the midst of a heated discussion on peacetime conscription, she “suddenly realized he was upset,” that he “was no longer the calm and imperturbable person” who had always goaded her on to vehement arguments. “It was just another indication of the change which we were all so unwilling to acknowledge.”

  Yet here he was talking with such enthusiasm about plans for the future that she, too, began to believe all these trips would come to pass. Beyond San Francisco and London, he still had dreams of taking her around the world with him, and of spending a couple of years in the Middle East to help bring parts of the desert to life with reforestation, irrigation, proper farming, and conservation.

  When Eleanor laughingly suggested that he might like “to enjoy life for a few years without responsibility,” without taking on “new and perplexing problems,” he turned to her and with very characteristic emphasis said, “No, I like to be where things are growing.” His comment reminded her of something he had said years before, when they first visited the Grand Canyon. She thought it “the most beautiful and majestic sight” she had ever seen, but he disagreed. “No, it looks dead,” he said. “I like my green trees at Hyde Park better. They are alive and growing.”

  “That sense of continuing growth and development was always keenly present with him,” Eleanor observed. “He never liked to dwell on the past, always wanted to go forward.” So now, though she worried about signs of ebbing strength, she took heart in his crazy plans to help straighten out the Middle East and Asia. “Does that sound tired to you?” she said to a friend who had commented on his sunken appearance. “I’m all ready to sit back. He’s still looking forward to more work.”

  While the president was at Hyde Park, relations with Stalin reached a point of crisis. Roosevelt had been trying for weeks to put the best light on the deteriorating situation in Poland, where, in spite of Stalin’s solemn agreements at Yalta, the communist regime in Warsaw was refusing to broaden its base or hold free elections. Churchill had been urging Roosevelt to intervene, warning that if forceful action were not taken soon their hopes for democracy in Poland would vanish. Roosevelt had been slow to respond, fearing that a direct confrontation with Stalin on Poland would defeat his larger dream for the United Nations.

  But as continuing reports, each more disturbing than the last, filtered in from Harriman and Stettinius, Roosevelt finally agreed with Churchill that the time had come to address Stalin directly. “I cannot conceal from you,” Roosevelt cabled Stalin on March 29, “the concern with which I view the developments of mutual interest since our fruitful meetings at Yalta . . . . I must make it quite plain to you that any solution which would result in a thinly disguised continuance of the present Warsaw regime would be unacceptable and would cause the people of the United States to regard the Yalta agreements as having failed.”

  Though Stalin evaded the issue in an unsatisfactory reply, Churchill was much relieved to know that he and Roosevelt were now acting in concert. “Our friendship,” he assured the president, “is the rock on which I build for the future so long as I am one of the builders. I always think of those tremendous days when you devised Lend-Lease, when we met at Argentia, when you decided, with my heartfelt agreement, to launch the invasion of Africa and when you comforted me for the loss of Tobruk by giving me the 300 Shermans of subsequent Alamein fame. I remember the part our personal relations have played in the advance of the world cause now nearing its first military goal.”

  • • •

  When the president returned from Hyde Park the morning of March 29, Grace Tully was saddened to see that his four-day weekend “had failed to erase any of the fatigue from his face.” He looked drawn and gray, and the shadows under his eyes seemed to have darkened. “Did you get any rest at Hyde Park?” Tully asked. “Yes, child, but not nearly enough. I shall be glad to get down south.”

  At four that afternoon, Roosevelt was scheduled to leave for Warm Springs for a two-week rest, accompanied by Laura, Margaret, Tully, and Bruenn. He had packed his “usual leisure time paraphernalia,” Tully recalled, “his stamp collection, catalogue and equipment,” and was looking forward to the trip. Anna had planned to go, too, but at the last minute her six-year-old son, Johnny, had come down with a serious gland infection and had to be hospitalized at Walter Reed, where he was being administered daily doses of penicillin, a radical new drug still in a stage of experimental use.

  Unable to accompany her father, Anna made arrangements for Lucy Rutherfurd to come to Warm Springs the second week of his stay. Knowing this, Franklin gently dissuaded Eleanor from coming. “He was very amusing about it,” Eleanor recalled years later. “He loved going to Warm Springs but he said to me that he felt that there were certain things I had to do, and I’d better wait and come down later. He would take two people whom he enjoyed having with him, Margaret Suckley and Laura Delano, and he said, in an amusing way, that he did not have to make any effort with either of them.”

  The train pulled into the tiny station at Warm Springs at 2 p.m. “The President was the worst looking man I ever saw who was still alive,” the station agent recalled. Mike Reilly, too, had an inkling that something was wrong when he went to transfer the president into a car. Normally the process was “pretty simple, despite his 180 pounds and his complete inability to use his legs. He depended entirely upon his hands and arms and shoulders. Usually he’d turn his back to the auto and one of the Detail would lift him. He’d reach backward until his hands had secured a firm grip on each side of the car door, and then he’d actually surge out of your arms into the car and onto the jump seat.” But on this day, it took every bit of Reilly’s strength to make the transfer, for the president was “absolutely dead weight.”

  But Reilly took heart in the knowledge that “Warm Springs had saved his life once” and could do so again. “I always felt he looked upon it as a miraculous source of strength and health,” Reilly noted. So, when Roosevelt headed toward the Little White House, “it wasn’t just a matter of our hoping the trip would help the Boss, we just naturally assumed it would.”

  By the end of a week in the warm Georgia sun, the old magic seemed to be working. “The days flowed peacefully by,” Margaret Suckley recalled, “with FDR getting slowly but steadily more rested. His appetite, too, improved from day to day and his spirits rose as he felt less tired.” During the mornings, he would work on his papers and give dictation; after lunch, a nap and a drive through the rolling countryside, where the peach trees were covered with fruit.

  On Thursday, April 5, Sergio Osmeña, the president of the Philippines came for lunch. After Osmeña
left, Roosevelt held a leisurely press conference in his living room. “He was in fine form,” Suckley noted, “and looked so much better than a week ago that we almost forgot he was still not his old self. He looked as though he had put on some weight, and his face looked fuller and much less tired.”

  “It was a beautiful, tranquil afternoon,” Merriman Smith noted; “the President was in a friendly and easy mood.” While Fala waddled from one person to the next, sniffing trouser cuffs and wagging his tail, Roosevelt told reporters that he and Osmeña had discussed the war in the Pacific and the not-too-distant day of complete Philippine independence. The relaxed interview was just about over when a reporter abruptly shifted ground, asking Roosevelt to comment on a news leak that Russia was going to get three votes in the United Nations General Assembly.

  “That,” Roosevelt said, with a roaring laugh, “is not even subtle.” But, in the genial atmosphere of his living room, Roosevelt went on to explain how the controversial three-vote situation had come about. “As a matter of fact, the plea for votes was done in a very quiet way. Stalin said to me—and this is the essence of it—‘You know, there are two parts of Russia that have been completely devastated . . . . One is the Ukraine, and the other is White Russia. In these sections, millions have been killed, and we think it would be very heartening—would help build them up—if we could get them a vote in the Assembly.’ It is not really of any great importance. It is an investigatory body only.” With this, Roosevelt drew the conference to an end and went for a nap.

  While Franklin was away, Eleanor had much to keep her busy, between her usual rounds of beneficent activities and her commitments to her friends. On the weekend of April 6, she and Tommy went to Hyde Park to begin the process of opening up the Big House for the summer. Franklin called her there that Saturday night but, as she explained in a long, chatty letter the next day, she had been half asleep when he called, having put in a long day unpacking barrels, rearranging china, and clearing off shelves. She ached from the unwonted exercise, she told him, though it had been fun.