No Ordinary Time, Page 94

  Then Eleanor returned to the bedroom to select the clothes for her husband’s burial—a double-breasted blue business suit flecked with gray, a soft white shirt, and a dark-blue-and-white four-in-hand tie. The president’s valet finished dressing the body. He tenderly parted the hair and combed it back. Eleanor nodded her approval, and the body was brought into the living room and placed in a casket. “Oh, he was handsome,” Lizzie McDuffie exclaimed. “You wouldn’t have thought he had a day’s illness.”

  The next morning, thousands of villagers were gathered at the little railroad station in Warm Springs to say goodbye to their president. They stood in clusters, heads bowed, openly weeping, as a military guard of honor lifted the bronze coffin into the rear car of the presidential train. A special cradle had been erected so the casket could be seen through the window as the train moved slowly eight hundred miles north toward the nation’s capital. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the tracks along the way. “They came from the fields and the farms,” INS reporter Robert Nixon wrote, “from hamlets and crossroads: and in the cities they thronged by the thousands to stare in humble reverence and awe.”

  “Men stood with their arms around the shoulders of their wives and mothers,” Merriman Smith noted. “Men and women openly wept. Church choirs gathered at the trackside and sang Rock of Ages and Abide with Me.” As the train made its way through Georgia’s valleys and hills, Smith noticed four Negro women in a cotton field working on a spring planting. They were “kneeling near the edge of the field. Their hands were clasped together in prayerful supplication.”

  Several times during the long trip, various members of the president’s staff walked through the train to the lounge car where Eleanor was seated. Was there anything they could do to help? they wanted to know. Each time, Eleanor thanked them but said there was nothing she needed.

  As night fell, the rest of the train was dimmed so the president’s catafalque could be seen for miles. “I lay in my berth all night with the window shade up,” Eleanor recalled, “looking out at the countryside he had loved and watching the faces of the people at stations, and even at the crossroads, who came to pay their last tribute all through the night.”

  In the early morning, Eleanor sent for Grace Tully. “Did Franklin ever give you any instructions about his burial?” she asked. “She had difficulty saying that,” Tully recalled. “Her eyes welled and her voice broke. It was only momentary. It was the only time during the whole ordeal I ever saw her almost lose her control.” Tully recalled for Eleanor a conversation she had had with the president a year before. He had asked to be buried in the green-hedged garden of his ancestral home. He had also placed a memo outlining his wishes in his bedroom safe, asking for a plain white monument containing no carving or decoration, only the dates of his birth and his death. He wanted the monument to be placed on the grave from east to west. He hoped “my dear wife will on her death be buried there also.”

  Tully went on to recount other requests the president had made, including that Fala be given to Margaret Suckley. He assumed that Mrs. Roosevelt would be too busy to look after him. Unable to hide her disappointment, Eleanor hurried on to the next subject—she needed Tully’s help, she said, in drafting a form letter to acknowledge the thousands of condolence messages.

  The funeral train crossed the Potomac River and pulled into Union Station. Thousands stood in silence as Anna, Elliott, and Elliott’s wife entered the rear car. (FDR, Jr., and John were in the midst of battle and unable to leave their ships; Jimmy was still en route from San Diego.) President Truman and the Cabinet were there, along with General Marshall, Admiral King, and members of Congress. As two military bands played and army bombers thundered overhead, the funeral procession moved down Constitution Avenue to 18th Street, to Pennsylvania Avenue, and finally to the White House.

  Never, Truman later wrote, would he forget the sight of so many people in grief. “The streets,” recalled General Marshall’s wife, Katherine, “were lined on both sides with troops. In back of them could be seen the faces of the crowds. At each intersection the crowds extended down the side streets as far as you could see. Complete silence spread like a pall over the city, broken only by the funeral dirge and the sobs of the people.”

  The White House was in a state of confusion when the cavalcade arrived at the South Portico. Reporters were jamming the lobby, and the staff members were standing around in tears. The coffin was lifted from the caisson and carried up the front stairs. Eleanor alighted first. She walked slowly by herself into the mansion, her face composed. Whenever she was in trouble, Hick later observed, “she would walk unusually erect with her head held high. She was walking very erect that day.”

  The coffin was wheeled down a long red carpet to the East Room, where an honor guard was waiting to watch over the body until the funeral service at four that afternoon. “Can you dispense with the Honor Guard for a few moments and have the casket opened?” Eleanor asked White House usher J. B. West. “I would like to have a few moments alone with my husband.”

  “Please don’t let anybody come in,” Eleanor instructed as West and two other ushers guarded the doors. “Mrs. Roosevelt stood at the casket,” West recalled, “gazing down into her husband’s face. Then she took a gold ring from her finger and tenderly placed it on the President’s hand. She straightened, eyes dry, and she left the room. The coffin was never opened again.”

  Now the time had come to confront Anna. Returning to the family quarters, Eleanor asked her daughter to come into her sitting room. Her face was “as stern as it could get when she was angry,” Anna recalled. She demanded to know why she had never been told about Mrs. Rutherfurd. Was it true that Mrs. Rutherfurd had been at the White House and that Anna had made the arrangements? Yes, Anna nodded, explaining that one evening, when she was taking notes from her father on things he wanted done, he had mentioned to her that he would like to invite his old friend Mrs. Rutherfurd to dinner. Would she object? he had asked her. She hadn’t known how to respond at first, Anna said, but in the end, when she thought of all the burdens her father was facing and of his declining health, she decided it was not up to her to deny him. “It was all above board,” she assured her mother. “There were always people around.”

  “Mother was so upset about everything and now so upset with me,” Anna later recalled. Indeed, so intense was the confrontation that Anna feared her mother would never be able to forgive her, and that their close relationship would no longer be the same.

  “Mother was angry with Anna,” Jimmy acknowledged, “but what was Anna to do? Should she have refused Father what he wanted? She was not in a position to do so even had she wanted to. Accepting the confidence of Father, should she have betrayed him by running to report to Mother every move he made? A child caught between two parents can only pursue as honorable a course as possible. Anna could no more serve as Mother’s spy than she could as Father’s spy on Mother.”

  Yet Anna’s son Curtis understood some of what Eleanor must have been feeling. “He was her husband,” Curtis said. “She was his wife. He was president. She was first lady. And now Anna had walked into the picture and made it possible for Lucy to return to the president’s life. It must have seemed an unforgivable act.”

  • • •

  The East Room was filled with flowers at 4 p.m. as the simple service began. Mrs. Roosevelt and the Roosevelt family sat in the front row, across the aisle from President Truman, Mrs. Truman, and their daughter, Margaret. Behind the president’s family sat Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, labor leaders, agency heads, politicians, and diplomats from all the countries of the United Nations, including British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Andrei Gromyko. “It was the final roll call of the Roosevelt era,” reporter Bess Furman noted.

  At Eleanor’s request, the ceremony began with “Faith of Our Fathers,” a hymn the president loved, and closed with the celebrated lines of Roosevelt’s first inaugural: “The only thing we have to
fear is fear itself.” Throughout the service, Eleanor remained dry-eyed, her calmness in sharp contrast to the sobs of those around her. Harry Hopkins, Time reported, “stood almost fainting beside his chair, white as death and racked with sobs.”

  “After everyone left,” Secret Service agent Milton Lipson recalled, “Mrs. Roosevelt took a last look at all the flowers and asked us if we’d arrange to have them all taken to a mental hospital. Then, seeing us teary-eyed, she added, ‘Oh, of course, if any of you want a souvenir, please help yourself.’ I still have my pressed flower.”

  Later that evening, the funeral train headed north toward Hyde Park, curving along the east bank of the Hudson, the route Roosevelt had taken so many times. “I’ll never forget that train trip,” Anna recalled. “As usual, the Secret Service had assigned staterooms and berths to each individual. I’ve never known who assigned it to me but I was given Father’s stateroom. All night I sat on the foot of that berth and watched the people who had come to see the train pass by. There were little children, fathers, grandparents. They were there at 11 at night, at 2 in the morning, at 4—at all hours during that long night.”

  The president’s coffin was lifted from the train at the riverfront and placed in a caisson, which was brought up the steep hill by six black-draped horses. Directly behind it walked a hooded horse, its saddle empty, its stirrups reversed—the traditional symbol of the fallen leader. As the cortege made its way up the hill, past the ice pond and the open field, the music started getting louder and louder, with cannons booming until the caisson stopped outside the hedge where a large assembly waited: President Truman and the Cabinet, General Marshall and Admiral King, James Farley and Edward Flynn, congressmen and senators, family and friends.

  The four hedge walls of the rectangular garden were lined with West Point cadets in scarlet capes as the president’s body was carried to the grave. “The funeral was very beautiful,” Trude Lash wrote Joe. “The day was gloriously snappy, very sunny and blue, white lilacs were in bloom,” and “the birds were singing.”

  The president’s seventy-eight-year-old pastor, the Reverend George Anthony, recited the familiar lines: “We commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, dust to dust.” The West Point cadets raised their rifles and fired three volleys. After each volley, Trude noted, Fala barked, a child whimpered, and then it was over.

  As the crowd dispersed, Eleanor remained in the garden. She stood quietly, her head bowed, watching the workmen as they shoveled soil onto her husband’s grave. Then, silent and alone, she walked away.

  As Eleanor left, Moses Smith, an old tenant farmer on the estate, picked up a bucket and walked over to water a row of young maples. “He wanted me to plant these trees,” he said. “I planted them for him. He’ll never see them now.”

  CHAPTER 25

  “A NEW COUNTRY IS BEING BORN”

  Eleanor returned to the White House immediately after the funeral to begin the task of packing up the family furniture and all the personal possessions that had accumulated over a period of twelve years. She had promised the Trumans she would be out by Friday night, and she intended to keep her word. Monday morning, Henrietta Nesbitt came into Mrs. Roosevelt’s bedroom. “She had all her clothes out of wardrobes and over chairs, and was sorting them,” Nesbitt recalled. “I was thinking she’d never make it, with all there was to do, but at the same time I knew she would.” The next morning, Jimmy Byrnes found her in the president’s bedroom, packing books and personal belongings. She saved the president’s study, crammed with pictures, models of ships, Currier and Ives prints, and tiny souvenirs from all over the world for last. “My husband was a collector with a great interest in history,” she explained to her readers, “so there were many things to go over.” Eventually a thousand boxes would be sealed, filling twenty army trucks. She was “a bit keyed up,” she admitted to Joe Lash, “because there is so much to do and to think about.” Her eyes were tired, one reporter noted, and she was pale, but she worked without pause.

  In the midst of the packing, Eleanor took Bess and Margaret Truman on a tour of the White House. “In the years I have been here I have taken many people through,” Eleanor wrote in her column that day. “I always have a pride in the beauty of the rooms, their proportions, the woodwork and the historically interesting furnishings which remain the same no matter what individuals may live here. It was good to find Mrs. Truman appreciative of the things that I have loved.”

  In private, Bess and Margaret Truman were appalled at what they saw: walls streaked with dust and faded along the outlines of all the pictures that had been taken down, shabby furniture badly in need of upholstering, threadbare carpets that hadn’t been cleaned in years, draperies that were actually rotting. Eleanor had been so busy that she had not paid much attention to the physical condition of the mansion, leaving untouched a $50,000 congressional allocation for upkeep and repair. “Mrs. Roosevelt was more concerned about people being swept under the national rug due to injustice than she was about someone finding dirt under the White House rug,” White House butler Alonzo Fields explained. “The White House upstairs is a mess,” Margaret Truman wrote. “I was so depressed.” White House usher J. B. West confirmed Margaret Truman’s impression. “It was like a ghost house,” he recalled. “What little was left in the White House gave it the appearance of an abandoned hotel.”

  While talking with Mrs. Truman, Eleanor suggested that she hold a press conference that week. Eleanor promised to sit by her side and introduce her to the women reporters. “Do you think I ought to do that?” a worried Bess Truman queried Frances Perkins. “It terrifies me. I don’t even think of public affairs.”

  “No, Mrs. Truman,” Perkins replied. “I don’t think you ought to feel the slightest obligation to do it. Mrs. Roosevelt is an unusual person. She enjoys it. There certainly isn’t anything the press has a right to ask you.”

  Eleanor Roosevelt was more than “an unusual person”; she was unique. She had seized the power inherent in the position of first lady, to become, in the words of a contemporary reporter, “a Cabinet Minister without portfolio,” an influential advocate for social reform. In her efforts to reach a mass audience, she had become the first president’s wife to hold regular press conferences, to write a syndicated daily column, to deliver sponsored radio broadcasts, to enter the lecture circuit. She had broken precedent time and again—when she spoke before the Democratic National Convention in 1940, traveled overseas to visit American troops in England and the South Pacific, and journeyed twice to Capitol Hill to testify before congressional committees on the plight of migrant workers and the conditions of life in the District of Columbia. No first lady before had ever become such a public figure. Her breadth of activities created new expectations against which her successors would be measured.

  • • •

  On her last full day in the White House, Eleanor invited all the members of the Women’s Press Corps to a farewell tea in the State Dining Room. She stood at the door shaking each hand warmly as fifty-seven newswomen filed in. “Traces of grief” were etched on her pale features, one reporter noted, “her black costume relieved only by a pearl necklace and the small fleurde-lis pin.”

  The newswomen had brought their notebooks. She lifted her hand. It was shaking uncontrollably. “This is a social thing,” she said, “not a press conference. If you want to say Mrs. Roosevelt said this or that in conversation, that is your privilege but I do not want to be quoted directly.” She talked in a low voice, twisting her tortoiseshell glasses in her hand, telling reporters how much she had enjoyed the press conferences over the years. The experiment begun twelve years earlier had, she believed, been a good thing. Her insistence on having only female reporters at her press conferences had forced newspapers to hire women and enhanced the careers of dozens of women reporters. She now told them that her apartment in New York and her cottage at Hyde Park were all she wanted to take care of. The Big House, she hoped, if the children agreed, would be turned over to the nat
ion.

  “Nearly all that I can do is done,” Eleanor wrote Hick later that day. “The upstairs looks desolate and I will be glad to leave tomorrow. It is empty and without purpose to be here now.” With everything gone that makes a home, she wrote Lash, she couldn’t wait to leave. “I never did like to be where I no longer belonged. I am weary and yet I cannot rest. When do you think that will cease?”

  Before falling asleep that night in the White House, Eleanor looked out her bedroom window for the last time. “I have always looked out at the Washington monument the last thing at night,” she confided to her readers, “and the little red light at the top of it has twinkled at me in friendly fashion.”

  The next morning, Eleanor had her last breakfast on the sun porch and said goodbye to the office staff and the house staff. “We were all in tears,” Mrs. Nesbitt recalled. “There is always a certain emotional strain about the last time for anything,” Eleanor wrote in her column. “When you have lived twelve years in a house, even though you have always known that it belonged to the nation, you grow fond of the house itself and fonder still of all the people connected with your life in that house.” She rode down in the old cage elevator that morning, she admitted, “with a feeling of melancholy and I suppose something of uncertainty because I was saying goodbye to an unforgettable era” and, from that day forward, “I would be on my own.”

  As she walked out the door, Eleanor waved to onlooking journalists and “without a backward glance,” according to a Newsweek reporter, headed for Union Station, where a train was waiting to take her to New York. “Her departure,” the Boston Evening American noted, “signified the end of an era for a generation which has never known any President but Franklin Delano Roosevelt or any First Lady but Mrs. Roosevelt.”