THE NIGHT AFTER PEARL HARBOR, a fleet of thirty Japanese planes crossed the California coastline west of San Jose, flying inland. The waning moon, still more than three-quarters full, offset the statewide blackout, making San Francisco’s industrial rooftops crystal bright. Circling the port town, the enemy aircraft split into two squadrons, flying north and south—too high to be caught by searchlights but triggering air-raid warnings.
On the westbound night flight from Washington, the pilot handed Eleanor a wire report: San Francisco was under air attack.1 She woke up Mayor La Guardia, who abruptly ordered their route changed—they would bypass Los Angeles and fly directly to the “target zone.”
When their plane descended to refuel in Nashville, Eleanor telephoned the White House to find that the enemy raiders had flown back to their offshore carrier without bombing San Francisco.2 The army, however, had failed to inform local officials, and a rumor-fueled frenzy had surged up the coast, broadcast by the police radio system. Banner headlines in War Extra editions of San Francisco newspapers chased the story in every direction: NAVY HUNTS JAPS OFF PACIFIC COAST…
War hysteria was in full cry when they landed for scheduled meetings in Los Angeles. To Eleanor, the Burbank airfield appeared deserted; to La Guardia, dangerously undefended. Consulting with public officials downtown, Eleanor emphasized that she had not flown west to deliver alarmist warnings. She had come seeking insight on how best to assist local defense councils in protecting all citizens in these early stages of the military crisis: “I came to find out from you what are the most helpful things we in Washington can do to help you. Tell me what you found lacking and what you want.”3
Mayor La Guardia wanted to militarize coastal cities with a rapid buildup of guns.4 Before Pearl Harbor, the mayor had lent his authority to an FBI initiative to put military sidearms such as the Smith & Wesson six-shot service revolver into the hands of auxiliary police forces made up of OCD volunteers. Together with J. Edgar Hoover, La Guardia had estimated that keeping the peace after air raids and defending against a coastal invasion would require arming civilian volunteers with a quarter of a million handguns.5
Fixated on any plausible rumor of aerial attack or coastal invasion, La Guardia focused entirely on the protective category of OCD’s mission, leaving Eleanor to establish the health, recreational, and social activities that the home front would require, to say nothing of providing low-cost housing, recreation centers, even additional sewers.
The mayor did not support Eleanor’s proposal for mandatory national service for women or appear much interested in what community sewing groups could do if they turned their needles to sandbags and parachutes. Even so obvious a wartime need as nursery and day-care centers for young mothers pulling long shifts in defense work escaped the OCD director. La Guardia decided to follow the English model of fitting women for emergency nursing positions and air-raid assistance; and so, he commanded New York’s fashion world to come up with cheesecake uniforms decorated with stylish insignia—costumes, really. Eleanor urged La Guardia to decide what women volunteers were going to do before spending another nickel on what they would wear.
Eleanor’s plan for defense stewardship on the West Coast sent her to city, county, and state defense council offices from San Diego to Sacramento to register, train, and put volunteers into the field. Mainly, she listened, soliciting ideas particular to each community, then linking leaders in a naturally developing coalition as she made her way.
The mayor followed a separate itinerary, chasing alarms, meeting the press, and frantically waving his hands as he wrung high drama from every “red warning” that signified enemy planes overhead.
“The situation is serious, very serious,” bawled La Guardia to San Francisco. “This is no time for speculation as to what is going to happen. It is happening now. It has happened here.”6
La Guardia thrilled to the changeover. He no longer had to warn Americans to be ready to defend their cities “if anything hits us.”7 The months of quasi-military preparation of warning systems, practice blackouts, and fire precautions had at last become “real,” and this former member of the House Military Affairs Committee had no interest in discussions. Before his train had even stopped at San Francisco, the mayor had jumped off, blaring, “I don’t want any blah-blah meeting, I want to see your police and fire chiefs first!”8
Eleanor spoke in one broadcast after another about the supreme un-drama of preparing one’s house for effective blackouts: Don’t be alarmed when you hear the air-raid siren. And don’t be silly enough to be caught by surprise. Be ready. Don’t say, “Nothing can happen to us.” Pray that it doesn’t, but be prepared if it does.
La Guardia spread fear: “We are not as well prepared at this moment as those of us who know would like us to be.” Eleanor conveyed a steely belief in the system, urging trust in authorities and alert reporting of suspicious activity: “But don’t try to be the FBI yourself.”9
Nine days had passed since Pearl Harbor. Federal agents had raided homes and businesses, kicking in doors and forcing at gunpoint the removal and automatic deportation of more than a thousand Japanese Americans deemed a threat to national security, including Buddhist and Shinto ministers, Japanese-language schoolteachers, and instructors in jukendo, the art of Japanese sword fighting. The U.S. Navy had seized all Japanese American fishing boats.
Californians wanted to punish any Japanese, including U.S. residents and U.S. citizens. “Lock up the Japs!” overnight became the rallying cry up and down the coast.
ELEANOR’S CHALLENGE, UNLIKE THAT OF any first lady before, was to offer answers in coastal communities where the shock and fury was only rising as Japan went on winning and conquering in the Pacific. In addition to seizing British and Dutch-held Southeast Asian oil fields, Nippon imperial forces bombed U.S. air and naval bases around Manila, plundered Malaya, and occupied Guam, beheading, raping, and torturing Guamanians, and those were only the barely speakable horrors that Japanese soldiers inflicted on Americans.
The “dastardly, inhuman attack” that left thousands of soldiers and civilians slaughtered on U.S. soil now stoked decades of local racial resentment into a hatred so profound that every law-abiding citizen of Japanese ancestry was suddenly under suspicion not just for being a spy or saboteur but for not being human at all.10
At every stop, Eleanor passed along the assurances she had received earlier in December from the Departments of State and Justice that there was “absolutely no reason” why any law-abiding foreign-born person need have any feeling of anxiety in the United States.11 She pressed local audiences: “Give American born Japanese, and even Japanese nationals who lived in this country for years, who have children and grandchildren and who have bought defense bonds—give them every consideration.”12
After visiting a poultry farm, she used her conversation with five American-born Japanese teenagers to remind Californians that these loyal citizens were serving in the U.S. Army and responding to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s demands for a massive increase in pullets so that many more billions of eggs could be dried and shipped to Nazi-encircled England.13 What she didn’t or couldn’t say was that the government had warned that Japanese American poultry farmers who didn’t maintain egg production would be treated as wartime saboteurs.
“Let’s be honest,” she said to her readers, after returning to the White House on December 15, the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights:
“There is a chance now for great hysteria against minority groups—loyal American-born Japanese and Germans.” She acknowledged that covert spying by Axis agents from Germany, Italy, and Japan had been “very active in this country during the past few years, just as the Communists have been.” Gradually, the FBI and the Secret Service had been rounding up these infiltrators. But, she emphasized, “the great mass of our people, stemming from these various national ties, must not feel that they have suddenly ceased to be Americans.14
“This,” ventured Eleanor, would be “the greatest test this country has ever met.” It would prove to a world in chaos whether democracy in the United States could offer a pattern to other pluralistic countries in a postwar Europe, Asia, Central and South America.
“If we cannot meet the challenge of really believing in the Bill of Rights,” said Eleanor, “and make it a reality for all loyal American citizens, regardless of race, creed or color; if we cannot keep in check anti-Semitism, anti-racial feelings as well as anti-religious feelings, then we shall have removed from the world, the one real hope for the future on which all humanity must now rely.”
ELEANOR HATED TO SEE THE People’s House twisted by wartime fears into the President’s fortress. Members of the public were barred; only men in uniform now admitted to the state floor as Saturday-morning sightseers. Gone were the inclusive openness and informality of the neighborly President and Mrs. Roosevelt of 1937: shaking hands with 16,650 members of the public, offering tea to as many as 22,353, receiving another 4,346 for dinner, giving the freedom of the house to 319 overnight guests.15 Some of those last had slept in reproduction American beds supplied by the furniture factory at Val-Kill, which had given the Roosevelt White House a general air of small-town ease and visitors a sense of belonging.16
Now Eleanor and the wartime skeleton staff were fingerprinted, the kitchen crew assigned gas masks, all hands required on deck for air raid drills. Ushers stood mainly idle, since the comings and goings of wartime officials were kept under wraps, and a machine gun nest defended the roof. At night, blackout curtains pinned shut the stately windows of the old presidential mansion. “It could hardly be deader,” remarked columnist Drew Pearson, “if it had been bombed.”17
Democracy’s endless struggle between openness and security seemed personified in Eleanor and Franklin’s tense wartime balance of civil defense and civil liberties. As niece and wife of two American Presidents shot at by close-range assassins, Eleanor was the first to say, “A man must be protected while he is the President of the United States.”18
Washington was in the grip of wartime paranoia. Congressman Dies had just issued his latest warning to Nazi sympathizers on government payrolls. Dies had already submitted a list of nearly three thousand “known Communists” holding “key positions”19 in the administration, or on the federal payroll, including Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Harold Glasser. It was time, declared Dies, for a long-overdue purge.
WHILE ELEANOR WAS ON THE West Coast, Hitler had made Franklin’s job a lot simpler. On December 11, the German dictator declared war on America, a pointless act since this handed the neutral United States unrestricted entry into “Europe’s war” and personally freed the President from having to keep his word about sending armies overseas. Defeating Germany before it got any stronger (by swallowing England, for instance) meant that FDR would now not have to overreach in the Pacific; he could build up the required airpower, manpower, and firepower before lunging to satisfy the American thirst for vengeance in the Far East.
Hitler had made it personal, too. Unable to conquer Soviet Russia and needing to distract the Reichstag and the German people from the costly failure of Operation Barbarossa, the führer now blamed Roosevelt for starting the war. Raging in front of Germany’s impotent lawmakers, Hitler attacked the American President and his lazy wife and corruptible, gallivanting sons. He paused to sneer at Eleanor: “Ours is a world of work and not one of deceit and racketeering.”20
Hitler knew his people. Rank-and-file Germans loved to feel superior to those they imagined to be decadent princes. In reality, all four Roosevelt sons had waived desk jobs and string-pulling: Elliott, first of the family to volunteer, had taken the riskiest assignment he could with an army air force bomber squadron in England. Jimmy, executive officer of Merritt “Red Mike” Edson’s 1st Marine Raider Battalion, a seaborne special-force commando unit, was bound for jungle fighting in Guadalcanal. Franklin Jr., aboard his destroyer Mayrant, was seeing action in the North Atlantic. John, an ensign stationed at the naval air station in San Diego, would also get sea duty on a destroyer. Even forty-one-year-old John Boettiger could easily have remained exempt as the President’s son-in-law. A navy enlistee in the earlier war, Boettiger was unable to remain comfortable in a civilian newspaper job when his brothers-in-law were exposing themselves to the most hazardous combat conditions, and would soon join the army.
Eleanor wished they had all not felt forced into such extreme fighting assignments by the double standard to which press and public held accountable the strapping, sometimes feckless sons of the first family. As Christmas 1941 approached, she felt she had only Joe Lash. “I’ve grown to feel closer and closer to you, & depend on you greatly & it’s a great pleasure & a source of real contentment to be with you,” she told him, admitting, as she had to Franklin long ago: “I know I grow greedy, for instead of just being thankful for the time I have with you, I always want more!”21 Looking ahead to the coming year, she was “sure of one thing,” Eleanor told Joe: “the knowledge that you love me will bring me happiness no matter what else may come.”22
THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, CHECKING in with Franklin during his usual breakfast in bed, Eleanor learned that an important visitor was arriving at the White House early that evening for a three-week stay.23 They would be twenty for dinner, at an hour still unknown. She would need to change some of her Christmas plans and lay in a large supply of French champagne, sherry, Scotch whisky, and ninety-year-old brandy.
“Oh,” remembered Franklin, blandly adding to Eleanor’s lengthening list of assignments the better-known names of the British prime minister’s entourage, including Lord Beaverbrook, “Of course you’ll see to it that under the Christmas tree everybody has presents.”
Furious, but smoothly playing her supporting role in a White House now on war footing, she struck a withering note before moving on: “You should have told me. Why didn’t you tell me?”24
Churchill had invited himself, was one reason. The prime minister had originally expected to stay at the British Embassy, anticipating that war-planning with the President might get “stiff.”25 Eleanor had been in Seattle when the meeting was set, and “Naval Person,” as Churchill code-named himself in telegrams to Franklin, had already begun bravely dodging his way across heavy North Atlantic seas in a thick double-breasted sea overcoat and navy cap.
Franklin signaled his confidence and resolve to Churchill by coming out to meet his plane on the tarmac, locking his legs into their braces and pushing down hard on his cane when the DC-3 from Hampton Roads landed at the Anacostia Flats Naval Air Station across the Potomac from the new National Airport. Eleanor greeted the two heads of state and Harry Hopkins at the elevator door on the second floor at the White House. She had “thought of everything that could make our stay agreeable,” recorded Churchill.26
The famously demanding houseguest had met his match in the legendarily thoughtful hostess. “Mrs. Roosevelt runs the best theatrical boarding house in Washington,” the critic Alexander Woollcott advised Ethel Barrymore. But even Woollcott, who once moved into the White House long enough to welcome Eleanor home from her travels, never stayed longer than two weeks.
With her champion three-week houseguest from England, Eleanor was her usual wonderful and only somewhat critical hostess, later admitting that she had been “frightened” by Churchill’s boozing. From the tumbler of sherry served the moment he awoke, through eighteen-hour days of valets keeping the prime minister’s glass freshly charged with scotch and soda, Churchill’s exacting requirements about French champagne were followed by his appalling filibustering about the need to maintain “the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race.”27
Churchill even managed to suffer a mild heart attack, kept secret by his personal physician; for how would it look to a world at war if the British prime minister was injured trying to open a sticky window in the Rose Room? Had the story been in the next morning’s news, the world would have seen “a cripple” and an invalid with a heart condition working together to face the Axis Powers. If Churchill had succumbed then and there, it is likely that the popular idea of Eleanor as an indifferent homemaker would have been blamed for the sudden, shocking end of what was later recorded as the most intimate wartime alliance in history.
Eleanor made exceptions for everything the prime minister, his entourage, and her husband threw at her. “We may be called upon to forgive much in the coming months,” she told her radio listeners, “but that should not be so difficult if we keep in mind our own failings and our own mistakes. We have a hard task and a costly one to perform, and when it is over we will have an even harder task to deal justly and mercifully and to lay the foundations for a new world order.”28
To Anna, she explained, “I like Mr. Churchill, he’s loveable & emotional & very human, but I don’t want him to write the peace or carry it out.”29
In Eleanor’s ears, Churchill’s war often sounded as much like a racial war as Hitler’s. The meeting, of course, was for Franklin to put forth his Grand Strategy to Churchill, especially his decision to pour American might into a “Germany First” policy, but though the prime minister agreed, he also preferred to come at it from the periphery—from North Africa. What was to the American view peripheral was to Churchill essential. When the Far East came under discussion, the prime minister declared himself shocked by the President’s admiring view of China as a postwar power to equal the British Empire.30 For Roosevelt, China meant “four hundred million people who are going to count in the world of tomorrow,” observed Churchill’s doctor, Sir Charles Wilson. “But Winston thinks only of the color of their skins.”
To Eleanor, their guest’s unashamedly patronizing view of colonial peoples offset his steely understanding of the depths of Nazi aggression, which would be crucial to Allied leadership. There was nothing to do about Mr. Churchill at this momentous hour except to hold out for a postcolonial world in which he would be out of power.
On this, she and Franklin were in agreement. When Roosevelt and Churchill had met in secret off Newfoundland to sign the Atlantic Charter that summer, the President had made clear his disdain for British imperialism. Churchill had become “apoplectic” when his grandly cherished ally observed, “I can’t believe that we can fight a war against Fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.”31
Toward the end of the White House visit, FDR and Churchill discussed the choice of a name for the new Anglo-American-Soviet alliance. They had not yet found the right one, when FDR, having his breakfast in bed thought of something. At once he summoned his valet and had himself wheeled over to Churchill’s room, where the prime minister was taking another of his working baths.
“How about United Nations,” Roosevelt called through the door.
Churchill answered without hesitation: “That should do it.”32
For now, however—much to Eleanor’s chagrin—Franklin seemed to share ever more freely in their guest’s unreconstructed sense of white racial superiority. His mother was gone; and with her the shadow history of the Delanos’ commercial ventures in China. The entire Pacific Rim was now in play, and Hitler had relieved the President of his promise to American mothers to keep their sons out of Europe’s war. FDR played his accustomed role of champion of colonial peoples, but felt somehow freer to indulge in officers-club rants about having “never liked the Burmese,” wishfully urging Winston to “put the whole bunch of them into a frying pan with a wall around it and let them stew in their own juice.”33
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, CHURCHILL spoke from the Blue Room balcony to a crowd assembled on the South Lawn. A crescent moon hung overhead as the prime minister put aside his “might is right” rhetoric, replacing it with warmer imagery of local Christmastide revels among cottage dwelling people.
It was the first Christmas Eve without her mother-in-law, and Eleanor had been dreading it for Franklin. She felt her own lingering sadness at her brother’s absence from the holiday, which also lacked Missy LeHand’s comforting presence and cheery, knowing ways: her calming effect on Franklin.
Missy’s breakdown kept her in Warm Springs. Before Christmas, she had tried to end her life by choking to death on a chicken bone. “There’s an easier way,” said her friend Mabel Irwin, whose husband was the Warm Springs medical director, “but maybe she couldn’t take the easier way.”34 In a strange irony, when FDR had choked on a chicken bone just before the 1932 convention, the dislodging of the obstruction from the candidate’s windpipe pivoted the history of the twentieth century.35 Missy may have known all too well how little the freeing of a chicken bone from her throat was going to change the history that “F.D.” was now going to make with or without her.
When Eleanor asked Franklin during cocktails in the Red Room whether he had telephoned to wish Missy a Merry Christmas, he admitted that he had not and did not plan to try. She took this disconnect in stride; the old story: she could see Franklin as he was, but that did not stop her from advocating for the man Missy needed him to be, or, afterward, discussing with Joe Lash her never-ending shock that whereas she had to have contact with the people she loved, needing to be refreshed and strengthened by her closest relationships, Franklin “seemed to have no bond to people, not even his children.”36
He did acknowledge their new circumstances in one way that Christmas Eve. FDR declined to take up his traditional reading of A Christmas Carol, as if Scrooge’s hauntings would add one too many ghosts to the President’s ever more complicated relationship to past, present, and future. How could anyone bear to hear Dickens’s final blessing when the lucky ones among the millions of young men now enlisting in the biggest war in human history would come home as Tiny Tims, if they came home at all.
On Christmas morning, they took Winston, almost as if he had become their great big child, for services at Washington’s Foundry Methodist Church. Christmas itself “was a very sad day for me,”37 admitted Eleanor. None of the Roosevelt boys had been able to get leave. Anna and John remained in Seattle, and Eleanor sorely missed the room-pounding energy of the grandchildren. She was grateful to her friend Mayris Chaney for coming to Christmas dinner, but still wished, as so often before, that she could take things lightly, could be more like FDR—“could be less personal”38—or, like their houseguest, could splash through a White House Christmas and an address to Congress like a boy in a tub full of toy boats.
Upon returning from her West Coast trip, she had initiated conversations with FDR about Japanese Americans and their rights as citizens, urging the President to make a clear move toward an official antidiscrimination policy. FDR agreed—or so Eleanor thought—and suggested that the time had also come for the United States to compel England to give self-governing status to India. Further, it was time, said the President, “to get more equal rights for Negroes here.” Afterward, Eleanor told Tommy how surprised she was by FDR’s inclination to move on these problems.
All through the early days of 1942, Eleanor appealed to the nation’s conscience: “I think almost the biggest obligation we have today is to prove that in a time of stress we can still live up to our beliefs and maintain the civil liberties we have established as the rights of human beings everywhere.”39
In January, the attorney general of California, Earl Warren, declared his support for imprisoning Japanese Americans. “I have come to the conclusion that the Japanese situation as it exists in this state today may well be the Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort. Unless something is done it may bring about a repetition of Pearl Harbor.”40
Walter Lippmann toured the West Coast and interviewed Warren, then reported the likelihood of an all-out raid by Japanese air units combined with fifth-column saboteurs on the ground. Lippman’s February 12 syndicated column changed the debate by framing it as a federal military matter, therefore inarguable by civilians. It began to seem logical that loyal Japanese American families needed to be isolated for their own protection.41
Westbrook Pegler, the reactionary Hearst columnist, took his cue to thunder: “The Japanese should be under guard to the last man and woman, and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”42 The attorneys general of Western states, consulted by the army, favored incarceration: Troy Smith of the state of Washington and Charles A. Sprague of Oregon both recommended martial law; Bert Miller of Idaho wanted “all Japanese be put in concentration camps for the remainder of the war.” And in case anyone had missed his real point: “We want to keep this a white man’s country.”43
U.S. Attorney General Biddle remained opposed, declaring that the Department of Justice would have nothing to do with the unconstitutional rounding up and incarceration of citizens. Only enemy aliens could be removed under existing laws. The President, however, could proclaim the entire West Coast a militarized zone and then place it under martial law. Or the army could legally evacuate all people in a specified territory if such mass removal was deemed essential from a military point of view. But, held Biddle, American citizens of Japanese origin could not be “singled out of an area and evacuated with other Japanese.”44
And yet, of course, they were. Senator Lodge had been dead right. The Immigration Act of 1924, which had banned Japanese from entering the U.S., established for the whole country what the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had done for the West Coast—a normalization of racial fears that would allow two generations of government officials to systematize atrocities of the kind that American armies were sent overseas to fight.
“There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger,” FDR had told Congress the day after Pearl Harbor. Nothing had changed his mind about the country’s safety coming first. In the War Department, Secretary Henry L. Stimson acknowledged that a “tragedy” was in the making,45 but with the backing of Assistant Secretary John J. McCloy, a staunch believer in the imprisonment if “reasonably undertaken and humanely conducted,”46 Stimson persuaded the President of the “military necessity of a wholesale evacuation.”
General John L. DeWitt, commanding general of the Western Defense Command and the Fourth Army, sent his recommendation to the War Department on February 14: remove the Japanese from “sensitive areas” and restrict their right to enter, remain in, or leave such areas. His message to Congress was clear: “A jap is a jap. It makes no difference whether he is theoretically an American citizen, he is still a Japanese.”47
THE SECOND WORLD WAR HAD looked like a war against racism. But on February 19, 1942, the President went ahead and ordered every person of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast be driven out of his or her home, stripped of businesses, yanked from schools and colleges, blocked from bank accounts, ganged into trucks, and herded to “assembly centers.” The ripe horse stalls at the Santa Anita racetrack served as one three-month detention facility for parents and their small children. The prisoners were then transported under armed guard to one of ten hastily constructed concentration camps, called “relocation centers,” from California to Arkansas.
Executive Order 9066 removed from as many as 120,000 persons their constitutional rights to basic freedoms and to equal justice under the law. More than 70,000 were natural-born American citizens; altogether, they represented almost 90 percent of Japanese Americans in the United States,48 although as Eleanor would painfully come to acknowledge in 1943, the victims did not have to be of Japanese ancestry to be hauled off without charges or trials. In the actual carrying out of the President’s order on “Evacuation Day,” they simply had to be “Oriental looking people”49 to be flushed from their homes.
This most inhumane and un-American decision appalled Eleanor. Yet she loyally defended the administration in public; in private, her government and her husband embarrassed her. Imprisoning American citizens in concentration camps diminished Franklin in her eyes, but also raised the ghost of their marriage’s oldest question: What did she expect? Her husband had been raised by a mother brought up in Southeast Asia, who, when Franklin had been quarantined with scarlet fever at Groton School, adopted as an endearment—“my little reconcentrado”—a term applied by one of her neighbors, explained Sara, “to groups of starving Cubans.”50
In intent, Roosevelt’s camps were like those of the Spanish in Cuba in 1897. Unlike many concentration camps in the twentieth century, the idea was to keep the Cuban civilians alive and protected until the Spanish were victorious. At least 30 percent perished from lack of proper food, sanitary conditions, and medicines.
With East Asia as his next battleground, Roosevelt privately revealed his own “racial arrogancies.” As president, FDR believed that it was vital to the world order to keep China within Western influence. He envisioned putting a stop to Japanese conquest by repopulating the Pacific Rim with certain choice “cross-breedings” that he believed would create a “stock” less aggressive than the Japanese. Dutch-Javanese “crossings,” for example, were “good,” as were Javanese-Chinese. Chinese-Malaysian was a “bad mixture,” the Japanese-European “cross” worst of all, and the Chinese-European “not at all bad.”51
British Embassy ministers and foreign correspondents hardly knew what to make of a president so casually asserting such claims by “burbling away in his hare-brained fashion,”52 according to one; “bagatellising,” said another.53
In 1942, FDR set a Smithsonian scientist to work on a private study of the effect of racial crossing. The Czech anthropologist Dr. Alex Hrdlicka, founder and forty-year curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology, fielded the President’s questions about Japanese “racial characteristics”—nefariousness, for example, and trickiness, and ruthlessness—and was only too eager to reinforce FDR’s notion that the development of the Japanese cranium accounted for these traits.
Hrdlicka’s specialty, embedded in the larger field of eugenics and “scientific” racism, was the study of racial anatomy, physiology and pathology.54 His conclusion that the shape of the skull held the keys to intelligence and behavior provided additional confirmation of “superior race” legislation, such as Virginia’s 1924 Eugenical Sterilization Act, signed into law just as Franklin was publishing his first “race mixing” column in Georgia’s Macon Telegraph, and later becoming the model sterilization law for other states and for Nazi Germany.
The Smithsonian was the authority informing—corrupting—the war president’s differing ways of handling Atlantic and Pacific theaters, as well as, most shamefully, his Executive Order 9066. Public opinion was also on FDR’s side.55 As many as 59 percent of Americans viewed as necessary the President’s precautionary bypassing of constitutional rights.56 Protest came from such Socialists as Norman Thomas (imprisoning California’s Japanese Americans, he said, was “like burning down Chicago to get rid of gangsters”57) and academics like Monroe Deutsch, provost of the University of California, who wired dissent to Justice Felix Frankfurter, arguing that the evacuation struck “an unprecedented blow at all our American principles.”58 Frankfurter, meanwhile, praised John J. McCloy at the War Department for handling “a delicate matter with both wisdom and appropriate hard-headedness.”59
As for Roosevelt himself, “I do not think he was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step,” reflected Attorney General Francis Biddle. “He was never theoretical about things. What must be done to defend the country must be done.”60
Eleanor’s bewilderment at her husband’s abandonment of basic American rights and freedoms took the form of private objection. She made her opposition known to Attorney General Biddle and scanned her mail for any signs of distress coming from what one of ER’s young associates at OCD tried calling “humane concentration camps.”61
The President, meanwhile, had appointed Milton Eisenhower, younger brother of assistant army chief of staff General Dwight Eisenhower, to carry out Executive Order 9066. Deeply troubled by the assignment, Eisenhower put aside his opposition to the President’s order, and, as first director of the War Relocation Authority, declared himself “determined to carry it out as effectively and humanely as possible.”62
Eleanor walked roughly the same tightrope when she announced in March: “I am very happy to see that there is established a War Relocation Authority, which will have charge of the program for relocation and employment of persons who must be moved out of military areas. Unfortunately, in a war, many innocent people must suffer hardships to safeguard the nation. One feels that a program which provides work is certainly better than having nothing to do.”63
Clarence Pickett’s American Friends Service had volunteered to help run the camps, and Eleanor hoped that the Quakers would make a life of wrongful imprisonment somehow more bearable. But for families and individuals stripped of everything except that which they could carry, nothing softened the barbed-wire fences, the blocks of ramshackle barracks, stone-cold in winter, furnace-hot in summer, whole families confined to single rooms, each gritty year piled on top of the bleaker year before, at a cost to the 120,000 victims of more than $400 million (about $7 billion today) and to the already overburdened wartime taxpayers of $350 million.
Eleanor found herself shocked by the scale of Franklin’s mistake, and as time went on, and the future invasion of the American mainland failed to materialize, she remained aghast at the nonexistence of any case of spying or sabotage brought against any Japanese American in the United States. Strangest of all, California’s top law enforcer—the next governor of the state and the future chief justice of the United States—took this absence of evidence as “the most ominous sign of our whole situation.”
It was the Salem witch trials echoing across the continent and back again. Asked at a congressional hearing on February 21 how the California authorities knew which among the state’s Japanese Americans could be trusted as loyal, Warren explained that with the “Caucasian race,” they could “arrive at some fairly sound conclusions,” but Japanese were, and here Warren unpacked all the stereotypes: inscrutable, clannish, sneaky, impossible to tell one from another.64
As letters reached Eleanor from among the imprisoned, she gave as much individual help as she could to smooth opportunities for jobs, college, the military. When she discovered that frozen bank accounts were causing unnecessary hardship to thousands of Issei farmers and small businesses, she notified Henry Morgenthau, arguing that these farmers were irreplaceable, since they produced 75 percent of the country’s winter vegetables. She asked that the Treasury Department permit them to withdraw at least $100 per month, and Morgenthau agreed to relax the orders and release funds for living expenses.65
There was nothing new about Eleanor disagreeing sharply with the President. His repeated caving to Southern lawmakers on any form of anti-lynching legislation had deeply shaken her, as did FDR’s unwillingness to make any straightforward statement or offer any program to integrate the armed services, which was the same story as lynching: “He must not irritate the Southern leaders,” she told Joe Lash, “as he feels he needs their votes for essential war bills.”66 Incarceration of Japanese Americans now put a lasting wedge between them as Eleanor’s primary role in Franklin’s wartime presidency became that of a self-appointed agitator.
The Smith Act in 1940 had begun the process in earnest. When FDR signed legislation requiring the nation’s three-and-a-half-million resident aliens to register and be fingerprinted at post offices throughout the country, lamely expressing his hope that no “loyal” aliens would be subject to harassment because of fingerprinting, Eleanor, appalled, had spoken up: “Something curious is happening to us in this country, and I think it is time we stopped and took stock of ourselves. Are we going to be swept away from our traditional attitude toward civil liberties by hysteria about ‘Fifth Columnists’?”67
This time, the administration’s use of government to destroy both individual lives and a whole subpopulation of the United States left Eleanor aghast at her husband. Franklin firmly believed that the U.S. was embedded with Nazi sympathizers who, in the event of a German invasion, would upend the country through Fifth Column activity. But if he was willing, throughout the war years, to detain eleven thousand Germans and more than three thousand Italians, why hadn’t Franklin ordered Attorney General Biddle to throw the Germans into camps? The Germans were the ones blaring their traitorous Bund rallies from Madison Square Garden. Why were the Italians dropped from the official list of enemy aliens as early as Columbus Day 1943—when FDR personally opposed letting anyone out of his concentration camps to return home before the end of the war? (“I don’t care about the Italians,” FDR told Biddle. “They are a lot of opera singers.”68) And for what? One of the war’s bravest and most highly decorated army units, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, had been made from the second-generation sons of Japanese immigrants. Their valor and sacrifices to save their fellow soldiers would mock the senselessness of Franklin’s Executive Order 9066.
IN THE WHITE-HOT SUMMER OF 1943, rioting broke out in the Poston and Manzanar relocation camps. The war still on, there was no new advantage to admitting to one of the biggest mistakes ever made by the government of the United States. But FDR wanted to know what was going on in the camps, and Eleanor agreed to go and see.
Meanwhile, she had heard from women of New Zealand and Australia that their strained and anxious countries, through which had passed hordes of U.S. servicemen, would welcome a transpacific visit similar to her transatlantic tour to England in 1942. The idea of another journey to see war work done by women made sense to her, especially if she could also report on the needs of American soldiers, whom she knew from Joe Lash felt neglected in their Pacific backwaters. In one 1943 panel, a hardboiled sergeant, having just dressed down a raw recruit, warns, “Now don’t go writing letters to Mrs. Roosevelt.”69
Letters and rumors swirled around her plans for the South Pacific, one source advising Vice President Wallace, “She [does] not want to go. She was ordered to go. The Negro situation was too hot.”70 In June, when racial tensions erupted into violence in California, in between riots in Mobile, Alabama, and Detroit, Michigan, Eleanor told reporters blaming young Latinos that the situation in Los Angeles had been provoked by “elements which had little to do with youth.”71 In her column, she described the rioting among white servicemen, police, and Latinos in Los Angeles as “a racial protest… a problem with roots going a long way back,” pointing out that “we do not always face these problems as we should,”72 the Los Angeles Times headlined, “Mrs. Roosevelt Blindly Stirs Race Discord,” while accusing her of communist sympathies in an accompanying editorial.
Vile “Eleanor stories” proliferated,73 especially in the South. In Virginia, the belief that “when white men go to the Army, the Negro men will have all the white women,” gave way to reports that “a Negro made the remark that he had his white girl ‘picked out’ just as soon as the Negroes take over,” while in Georgia an African American allegedly boasted, “Aren’t we going to have a time with these white women, when all these white men go off to war!”74
Among GIs in the South Pacific Eleanor was already the subject of constant field rumors, such as the one that had begun appearing in her mail early that summer: Was it true that Mrs. Roosevelt denounced marines who had contracted venereal disease in the Pacific? Had she really condemned them to six months quarantine on an offshore island?75
These stories did her no harm, she reflected. “The people who spread [them] are evidently too stupid to realize that my only concern would be that such a story would hurt the men themselves. If our boys think that here at home the wife of the President, or any other woman, says or writes such arrant nonsense, they must be made extremely unhappy by it.”76
Eleanor had seen the Pacific war’s earliest casualties in West Coast hospitals. The wounded from her son Jimmy’s outfit—the 2nd Marine Raider group at Guadalcanal—had taught her that if she wanted to understand how men like her own sons had suffered she must visit the scene of the first major Allied offensive against the Japanese, “the Rock,” as Marines had dubbed volcanic Guadalcanal. She would only worsen it by making uninformed visits. The Guadalcanal survivors she had met in California had been in no mood for bromides or deference. Japan had seized the island to control sea lanes to the United States and as a transit airfield to Australia and New Zealand; the stakes could not have been higher for either side.
On July 10, she received an additional V-mail incentive to get to Guadalcanal. “You know I would be desolate if Rover came to this part of the world and left without seeing me,” wrote Joe Lash from a Quonset hut stationed on the island. Joe was then serving on Guadalcanal for eighteen months as a weather forecaster with flying status. Eleanor’s feelings of responsibility for the circumstances of his banishment had made her hypersensitive to his needs, even when they amounted to nothing more than ordinary GI gripes, loneliness chief among them. “I am entirely amenable to any arrangement that can be made.”77
She pleaded with her husband to send her as far as possible into the war zone. Seeing the Western Front of the last world war with her own eyes had helped her grasp the nature of shell shock before going into the wards at St. Elizabeth’s. To know at all what it meant to repel a suicide attack—to be even moderately useful as she went on visiting men in field hospitals—she would need to get as close as she could to the islands where dug-in defenders were still fighting to the last inch.
ON JULY 13, 1943, FDR confided in Belle Willard Roosevelt, spouse of Eleanor’s cousin Kermit, in whose struggles with depression and drinking Franklin had tried to help: “I am having a hell of a time with Eleanor. She is determined to go to the Pacific War Zone and I say she can’t—the Army would never sanction such a trip. She wants to go to Australia, which would be a good thing, but she says once there, that she will wangle her way to the front, and I am not going to let her go unless I have it in writing, because she is quite capable of getting there. At the moment, it is a stalemate.”78
In the end, having rejected Eleanor’s earlier request to visit the Soviet Union and China, FDR saw the South Pacific as a good trade for them both, Eleanor took additional leverage from offering to pay her own travel expenses, and more when she persuaded the chairman of the Red Cross to allow her to inspect the organization’s installations in the Pacific. Franklin had to cave then. He offered Eleanor letters of transit on the condition that she vow not to meddle with the running of the war. He who was running the war, in grand alliance with the leaders of the United Nations, never stopped using Eleanor’s high profile and extended reach for advantage or just to make other aristocratic women visiting at Hyde Park feel less guilty by comparison to such an exasperating pot-stirrer, since what else could Zita of Austria-Hungary think of Eleanor, when the former empress asked the President if his wife wouldn’t be exhausted by such a trip, and Franklin replied, “No, but she will tire everybody else”?79
She kept her trip—especially her hope that it would include a jungle visit with Joe Lash—secret from everyone but Tommy, with whom she left her best jewelry and instructions for its distribution should she fail to return. “Your mother is so pleased with herself,” reported Tommy to Anna. “She has lost twenty-five pounds and looks very slim and young, and it has not made her face look drawn. She looks very well and seems to be in good spirits.”80 The White House reporters had not heard even a rumor when the AP’s Edith Asbury spotted what she thought was the mark of a vaccination. Asbury asked about it, and Eleanor slowly replied, “Oh, I was picking raspberries and scratched my arm.”81
Uncertainty about her itinerary kept her guessing to the last minute, even about packing—until she realized that two blue-gray Red Cross uniforms and a typewriter would be just about all she needed for her five-week, thirty-thousand-mile journey.82
When at last she departed from San Francisco on August 17, she strongly doubted that she was doing the right thing by making a kite-tail of island arrivals—all leading to fleet headquarters east of Australia. It was reassuring that “Mother” had won by a landslide when GIs at a San Pedro training camp voted to find out for whom American soldiers stood ready to fight. And that Eleanor was cited for “combining all the best attributes of a mother, grandmother, and First Lady of the Land.”83 But it did nothing to improve her confidence to find herself ranked after the boys’ wives, daughters, and sisters, and before Mrs. MacArthur; Queen Elizabeth; Queen Wilhelmina; Madame Chiang Kai-shek; and Hollywood’s “Oomph Girl,” Ann Sheridan, “because she typifies the type of girl we left behind us.”
The farther she flew—Oahu to Christmas Island to Tongareva, Bora-Bora, Aitutaki, Samoa, and Fiji—the longer the soldiers at mid-Pacific and South Pacific American outposts had gone without seeing a woman. Each time Eleanor’s plane descended upon another airfield slashed over coral, she felt apprehension knowing that every dogface peering from a jungle tent had heard that a female VIP was expected and had laid bets on which film star or pinup girl was going to step out onto the tarmac: legs first (Betty Grable); in a thin summer dress mildewed and falling apart in the humidity (Ann Sheridan); or full-lipped and decked out in a Hawaiian tablecloth (Dorothy Lamour).84
Instead, here was smiling Mrs. FDR, necklaced in native beads, wryly tying a grass skirt to the waist of her Red Cross uniform.85 She would afterward recall the men looking at her as if she were “some astronomical phenomenon.”86 As had been true in civilian life, action became her. “In person,” said a medic, “she was better looking than the pictures showed.”
MOST OF WAR, EVEN IN the Solomon Islands, was preparing for war: stringing barbed wire, getting supplies through the jungle, cutting brush, sending out patrols. Sweat saves blood, went the Marine Corps expression.87 Eleanor was nothing if not the personification of daily toil.
Following her sons’ advice not to take every meal with the brass, she ate one meal with the noncommissioned officers and another with the enlisted men, and the only way to pull off this last was to be up at five when the men got breakfast.
Island-hopping from base to base, one crimson dawn after another, Eleanor absorbed the central trauma of the Pacific war’s benumbed, blood-soaked fighters. Young marines, in particular, caught in the bitterest horrors of the endless island-after-island meat grinder, were shocked to discover a frenzied brutality in themselves, despite their steely Corps training. For some, it was an ironclad faith in their own goodness that was most bitterly tested. One such marine survivor, Corporal Eugene B. Sledge, justified their disturbing mirroring with a suicidal enemy: “We had to be just as dedicated to America as they were to their emperor.”88
LANDING AT FLEET ADMIRAL WILLIAM F. “Bull” Halsey’s headquarters on Noumea, New Caledonia, on August 26, Eleanor presented her letters from the President.
The admiral had dreaded her coming no less than she had dreaded arriving.89 Halsey had crossed paths with Eleanor a number of times over the years and had admired her but classed her as a do-gooder. When she arrived at Noumea, he hated having to wrench his attention from the New Georgia campaign, nearing its climax, much less “put on a necktie” to honor the President’s wife with appropriate hospitality.
“Bull” Halsey could find “no excuse for her entering my area and monopolizing planes, crews, and fuel that were needed for military purposes.”90 He told Eleanor that he could not promise to allow her to visit Guadalcanal and said that the decision would be made after she completed her trip to Australia and New Zealand. “He sounded so doubtful,” she told Tommy, “that I am discouraged & really sorry that I came.”91
She was particularly upset about Joe Lash. He had been “terribly keyed up” by the prospect of her visit, promising to “keep myself shaven and in a clean set of [khakis] on all the days you mention, so that not only shall I be presentable on a moment’s notice, but so that you will bring back a good report to Trude. After the glowing accounts you have written about her radiance and beauty, I can’t afford to have you bring a sad tale about a decaying, sallow-looking G.I.”92
She settled for making a package for Joe and writing him. “I’m sorry,” she told Tommy, “as seeing all these masses of boys who seem pleased just to see me as a stranger makes me realize it might have meant something to Joe.” She added, “I simply will never face another hospital at home & while I’ll write the column I don’t think I’ll bother to talk of anything but the Red Cross when I come home. I’m going to feel ashamed to have been so nearby & yet not to have gone there & want to forget about it as soon as possible.”93
BACK ON NEW CALEDONIA ON September 14—Australia and New Zealand had been flag-waving successes—Eleanor still did not know whether Guadalcanal was off limits. Pessimistically, she guessed she would be starting homeward the following morning. Admiral Halsey had assigned her to Wicky-Wacky Lodge, his safest billet, where he could keep a cordon of MPs stationed around the place the whole time she was there. The first night he gave a small reception and dinner for her, and early next morning started Eleanor on her rounds.
“Here,” recalled Halsey, “is what she did in 12 hours: She inspected two Navy hospitals, took a boat to an officers’ rest home and had lunch there, returned and inspected an Army hospital, reviewed the 2d Marine Raider Battalion—her son, Jimmy, had been its executive officer—made a speech at a service club, attended a reception, and was guest of honor at a dinner given by Gen. Harmon.”94
During the course of her transpacific trip, she visited the men on seventeen islands and saw more than four hundred thousand soldiers, always reminding them that they were very much on the President’s mind and that he had asked her to tell them that every day when he went down to the map room in the White House, “He notes on the maps where you are and what you are doing.”
On the hospital wards, she took the hand of each soldier, looked him in the face, asked his name and where he was from. “May I phone your mother when I get home?” she would ask. “With your permission, I will write and tell your parents that you’re all right.”95
She lingered with each prematurely aged boy, getting to know him a little—enough, anyway, so that, as one doctor said, “She was Mother personified,” speaking to patients as if the world was still a gracious place, while also saying I know you can handle this.
After observing Eleanor on the hospital wards, speaking to the men of their hometowns, Halsey acknowledged, “It was a sight I shall never forget.” When she left, said one doctor, “there was moisture in every eye,” and the ward sounded with men blowing their noses, loudly swearing at “the cold” they had recently picked up.96 Halsey further admitted, “I was ashamed of my surliness. She alone accomplished more good than any other person or any group of civilians who had passed through my area.”97
Her last evening on New Caledonia, Halsey announced that Mrs. Roosevelt was to be ready the next morning to leave under strictest secrecy for the big hospitals on Efate, which the Japanese had never bombed and Halsey hoped would remain under their radar. Providing all went well, Eleanor could expect to continue up to Henderson Field on Guadalcanal the following day.
Up at 3:45 and off at 5:00, she landed at 9:20, her official tours of three Guadalcanal hospitals, a recreation field, and a cemetery occupied her through a long, hot morning. Shortly after 2:00, a note reached her in a briefing tent announcing that Sgt. Lash was waiting for her outside, and all her weariness turned instantly to excitement as she hurried out to hug and kiss Joe. He noticed she was weary. Nonetheless, she visited his weather forecasting station and his corner of the tent where she could see that he was using the moccasins and reading lamp she had sent.98 They returned to the mess hall and sat happily talking until a big yellow Pacific moon came up—perfect air raid conditions, so that Joe had to report back to his unit, leaving Eleanor to relive “every minute” they had had together.99
“How I hated to see you leave last night,” she told him. “When the war is over I hope I never have to be long away from you. It was so wonderful to be with you, the whole trip now seems to me worthwhile. It is bad to be so personal, but I care first for those few people I love deeply and then for the rest of the world I fear.”100
DAWN ON D-DAY, JUNE 6, 1944, brought the largest amphibious invasion force in history across the chop of the English Channel. Ahead of the great armada stood Hitler’s Fortress Europe, concrete bunkers, land mines, and machine-gun nests defending the Normandy coast. Roosevelt and Churchill, sea rovers and gamblers both, prayed that the Allied invasion of northern France would establish the long-awaited second front and turn the tide of war.
Six months later, on December 16, 1944, the day of Hitler’s Ardennes Counteroffensive and the start of the Battle of the Bulge, Eleanor’s widowed Aunt Tissie died of a heart attack at 1105 Park Avenue: without illness or pain, wired Eleanor to Aunt Maude in Ireland.
Four days later, when Eleanor returned to New York to attend Tissie’s funeral, she finally had time to read a document sent by former Supreme Court Justice Joseph M. Proskauer, approved by FDR and endorsed by some thirteen hundred prominent Americans, calling for an international charter intended to serve as a postwar guarantee of individual liberties.101 This “Declaration of Human Rights,” identified six points, including the “recognition of the individual human being as the cornerstone of our culture and civilization” and the establishment of the new postwar world “on the basis of the dignity and inviolability of the person.” The document also demanded a “recognition of the fact that bigotry and persecution by a barbarous nation is a matter of international concern because it eventually throws upon the peace loving nations the burden of relief and redress.” It demanded policies for repatriation and rehabilitation, as well as “an international machinery” to provide new homes for “those who wander the earth unable or unwilling to return to the scenes of unforgettable horror from which they fled.”
“All the points seem to me to be excellent,” Eleanor told her readers, “but to make them worth the paper on which they are written will require some really concentrated work, not only on the part of those who signed the document, but on the part of many other people in this nation and throughout the world.”102
On the eve of America’s fourth wartime Christmas, FDR delivered his Yule message to a crowd, fifteen thousand strong, gathered around the national community Christmas tree on the South Lawn: “We cannot say when our victory will come. Our enemies still fight fanatically. They still have reserves of men and military power. But, they themselves know that they and their evil works are doomed. We may hasten the day of that doom if we here at home continue to do our full share.”103
THREE MONTHS PASSED. FDR WEAKENED dramatically.
He took Anna with him to the Crimea conference on the reorganization of postwar Europe. His achievement at Yalta— persuading an increasingly fragile Big Three to agree to do, as one observer put it, “most of the things we failed to do in 1919”104—had been hailed by one London newspaper as “a landmark of human history.”105 Even Herbert Hoover pronounced the Yalta agreement “a strong foundation on which to rebuild the world.”106 When the President reported to Congress after returning to Washington, Eleanor registered shock from the visitors’ gallery to see Franklin let himself be wheeled into the House chamber. She was not surprised to hear him mask his real condition by appearing to ask for, and warmly receiving, his audience’s indulgence for “an unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say.”107 That was vintage FDR deflection, the candid toss off: just too beat from his fourteen-thousand-mile journey to “carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs.”
But it was the first time in his career that he had exposed his dependence on leg braces. His slowed voice, the words thickened and subdued, signaled a slide into invalidism. If his command confidence had not continued supreme—“It’s a long, tough road to Tokyo!”108—Eleanor might have taken the seated speech as a sign that he was dying.
Into the first month of the fourth term, she noticed that his eyes were dulling to a sun-bleached glaze. Her responses to his drop-off in strength puzzled others. To Anna it seemed that there was no clear sign that her mother was permitting herself to be aware of the dramatic decline.109
Yet as so often for Eleanor with FDR, her courage had to be invisible. From the paralysis of 1921 had come their essential compact: Franklin D. Roosevelt would never be an invalid, even when seriously ill. Also, their mystique as a couple: Roosevelts didn’t scare. Eleanor wasn’t denying her husband’s deterioration, only keeping up her end of it.
THE BIGGEST WAR IN HUMAN history made forty years of March Seventeenths just another remembrance. With the U.S. Ninth Army now sixty miles west of Berlin, and the Red Army ready to converge from the East, Franklin could confidently predict the fall of Berlin and Allied victory in Europe. He spoke of traveling together again when he made peace visits to England, Holland, and France and of traveling with Eleanor. He wanted her at his side when he opened the United Nations in San Francisco on April 25.
They were alike in recognizing that a new international organization was vital to the United States’ chances for a peaceful world. Roosevelt on his own would have a hard time persuading other nations, particularly Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, to feel secure in a world dominated by a single superpower. Franklin must also avoid the brittle inflexibility of Woodrow Wilson with the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations, and the U.S. Congress. At the same time, neither Franklin nor Eleanor could completely ignore his thinning, pale condition.
Once Franklin had recovered from his deep post-Yalta weariness to see the Pacific fighting to its finish, the work of moderating a hard and bitter peace would begin. Roosevelt could leave the balance of the fourth term to the vice president, and Eleanor would happily see him home to Hyde Park to watch the ships on the river from Top Cottage, as he had promised Daisy Suckley he would.
Eleanor’s own clear-sightedness had long-since resigned her to the outside. “He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical,” she decided. “That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in other people.”110 Nevertheless, she had consciously kept up her spurring and goading—“agitating,” as she called it. Even when their marriage had been stunted by decades of drought and dysfunction, and her political contributions happened not to be timely or welcome, she had never stopped trying to be useful—therefore, loving. “I was one of those,” she said, tracing an edge, but with no regret, “who served his purposes.”111
In April, Franklin decided to go down to Warm Springs, where he had always rebounded before. Eleanor was relieved that Cousin Daisy and Laura “Aunt Polly” Delano would go along and see that he got his rest. “I knew that they would not bother him as I should by discussing questions of state.” She kissed Franklin good-bye, sent him on his way,112 and at the other end Warm Springs welcomed him with open arms. The stationmaster, who had witnessed almost a quarter century of Roosevelt homecomings, observed that the President now being lifted as “absolutely dead weight” from coach to car was “the worst-looking man I ever saw who was still alive. Just like a sitting-up dead man.”113
FDR’s doctors still hoped that complete rest and weight gain would bring him back. Lieutenant Commander Howard G. Bruenn, the diligent navy cardiologist assigned by Rear Admiral Ross T. McIntire to monitor the case daily in the Little White House, argued that the President could be saved “if measures were adopted to rescue him from certain mental strains and emotional influences.” He meant freeing FDR from the stress of his wife’s daily prodding to take action on whichever crisis seemed that morning to matter most.114
For Eleanor not to call, however, would have been to permit the world to know that the man upon whom the world was depending for strength and hope was failing. Which was exactly what the President’s secretary William Hassett was seeing at Warm Springs: “He is slipping away from us and no earthly power can keep him here.”115
Eleanor went on phoning, interrupting, intruding from Washington. On one call she urged Franklin to send arms to a needy band of freedom fighters in Yugoslavia. Bruenn clocked that discussion at forty-five minutes and afterward recorded a rise in his patient’s blood pressure of fifty points.
IN WASHINGTON ON THE MORNING of April 12, 1945, Eleanor announced to reporters at her weekly press conference that she planned to accompany her husband to San Francisco for the founding of the United Nations later that month. Nothing since the start of the New Deal had given her so much excitement.
She had a busy few days ahead: dinner with the American Friends Service Committee, a tea for New York Democrats, a visit to a handicapped children’s clinic. She spent the rest of the morning at the White House with Charles Taussig, an adviser to the UN delegation, and despite Aunt Polly calling from Warm Springs to say that Franklin had fainted, Eleanor followed Rear Admiral McIntire’s advice and went on to her afternoon speaking engagement to minimize suspicion.
In Warm Springs, signing official documents at his worktable in the living room, Franklin had just turned back to Lucy Rutherfurd and Daisy and the business of sitting for a portrait by Lucy’s friend from Locust Valley, the exiled Russian painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff. Lunch was about to be served, at 2 p.m. Franklin, fumbling with age-freckled hands, seemed to be looking for something. He tried to smile. His massive forehead furrowed. A quivering hand came to his temple. “I have a terrific pain,” he said, “in the back of my head.”116
IT WAS AFTER THREE AT the Sulgrave Club when Eleanor gave a quick start.117 She was wanted on the telephone. Steve Early, audibly upset, asked her to come home at once. Eleanor did not ask why: “I knew down in my heart that something dreadful had happened.”118
Upstairs at the White House, Early and Admiral McIntire came to her sitting room and told her the President had slipped away.119 Cause of death: extensive and acute cerebral hemorrhage. His doctors had applied continual resuscitative measures. He died at 3:35 p.m. Central War Time.
Eleanor’s first thought was of Vice President Truman and then of her children.120 She sent a cable message to the Pentagon for transmittal to her sons overseas: “Pa slept [sic] away this afternoon. He did his job to the end as he would want you to do.” She signed it, “all our love.”121
Twenty-five minutes later, Eleanor stepped forward when Harry Truman was shown into her sitting room. She put her hand on the new president’s shoulder, and said, “Harry, the President is dead.”
Truman, ashen-faced, replied, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Eleanor’s answer passed immediately into legend: “Is there anything we can do for you?” she returned, “For you’re the one in trouble now.”122
THEN SHE WAS ALOFT, FLYING to Georgia. Upon reaching Warm Springs before midnight, she learned that Lucy Mercer had been with her husband at the moment of his death; indeed, had been his houseguest the last three days of Franklin’s life.
Her effort to control her shock and anger was visible to Aunt Polly and Daisy as Eleanor rose, walked to the bedroom where Franklin’s body lay, and closed the door behind her. Five minutes later, she emerged, dry-eyed.
The next day—the first Friday the 13th that Franklin had not had to fear—was the one that Eleanor remembered as being “long and heartbreaking.”
Two words filled front pages: ROOSEVELT DEAD!
Everywhere she looked, people were stopped in their tracks, blank, bewildered, speechless, openly weeping, as if a parent had just died. The country hardly knew how to carry on. For many, the President’s death would be the greatest personal blow of the war. That the fighting continued without the President—the payoff battle for Berlin in the offing—left many feeling abandoned, panicky, afraid.123
Eleanor kept her feelings to herself. She had been shaken to learn that Anna had served as her father’s hostess for innumerable secret visits with Lucy over the final years at the White House. There had been additional rendezvous at Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina estate and at Warm Springs at Thanksgiving 1944. Each time, the elaborate security net around the wartime president had to be lifted like a curtain, then dropped back into place after Lucy had driven over.
It wasn’t Anna’s fault, and Eleanor knew it. Still, it hurt that Franklin had so easily drawn their daughter away from her. Franklin could always take people away from her, spreading among his inner circle a fog of airy, careless tricks and ruses. At his dying moment, he did just that.
THE DARK GREEN FUNERAL TRAIN bearing the president’s mortal remains swayed out of Warm Springs on Friday, rolling north. In every station and depot, a guard of honor stood at attention, as for the next twelve hours, all along the line, people came to the tracks in ones and twos and throngs of thousands; some singing hymns, others looking on, haggard and drained, faces glazed with tears. Their grief surprised her: Eleanor had not envisaged that the nation would be inconsolable. “I never realized,” she said later, “the full scope of the devotion to him until he died.”124
When the Ferdinand Magellan pulled into Washington’s Union Station Saturday morning, President Truman with Henry Wallace and Harry Hopkins, the entire cabinet and Supreme Court, all boarded the funeral train and stood solemnly waiting to pay their respects. General George Marshall, impeccable, unstinting, had arranged for the President’s flag-draped coffin to be carried on a black army caisson drawn by six white horses, flanked by riderless mount and two-column motorcycle escort, leading a massive military procession to the White House.125 Marshall’s helmeted troops presented fixed bayonets six feet apart along the entire route of the cortege.
FDR had raised the American presidency to its highest powers. Two of the most selfless and tolerant leaders in American history—General George Marshall and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—would now ensure that, although FDR had died within grasp of the unconditional surrender he had fatefully demanded at Casablanca, his state funeral at the White House and burial in Hyde Park would honor every American fighting on to “total victory.” Just as crucially, the fallen commander in chief “now personifies, as no one else could,” wrote E. B. White, “all the American dead—those whose absence we shall soon attempt to justify.”126
It was a beautiful April day. Gunfire still sounded across Europe, the South Pacific boiled in blood, and a stillness like no other spread over the bright marble and Quonset-hutted capital city that FDR had built during an unmatched four terms as president. As many as half a million people pressed in shoulder-to-shoulder under the giant trees on broad Constitution Avenue.127 Among these hushed and hatless throngs, a whispered exchange or chirping bird overhead made the only sound until the creaking of the caisson was heard. Then quiet sobs broke out here and there as the big oaken wheels rolled past.
Eleanor, outwardly composed, rode with Elliott and Anna in the car immediately following the casket, appearing in bereavement “almost impersonal,” she reflected, “perhaps because much further back I had had to face certain difficulties until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is… and you cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be.”128
MORNING AT HYDE PARK ON April 15 dawned cloudless and cold. Apple blossoms had begun to bleach the riverfront. Twenty-five years before, on a hot clear July day, Franklin had started his career in national politics by telling his neighbors from the front steps, “Anything I have ever done has come from the soil here.”129 Now the world’s neighbor was going back to it.130
The burial service jammed hundreds inside the tall hemlock hedge surrounding the quarter-acre rose garden. A few minutes before ten, a lone gun in a nearby field fired the first round of a twenty-one-gun presidential salute. Muffled drums, prayers, hymns, a bomber flying overhead—forty-five minutes later, a detail fell out from among six hundred scarlet-caped West Point cadets and fired the final three-volley tribute to their supreme commander. Then, taps sounded on the still air, and eight enlisted men from all branches of the armed forces bore the bared casket to the grave.
After the flag was folded and presented to Eleanor, and the mourners had begun to file out, Elliott glanced at his mother as she went to the side of Franklin’s elderly Aunt Betty. When everyone but the gardener and work crew had gone, the strain that Katherine Marshall, in Washington, and Elliott, here in Hyde Park, had seen etched into Eleanor’s face smoothed out.131
Head bowed, smoky black veil pushed back, she watched over the grave as it filled. Franklin had chosen a spot at the center of his mother’s rose beds and left detailed instructions for the plain white marble bier that would bear his name and dates—and Eleanor’s. It was his wish, she now understood from the blank spaces of the stone itself, that their resting place was to be the same.
If Franklin left more specific plans for entombment, as family lore said he did, Eleanor did not confront until later her husband’s curious, perhaps fanciful request to be buried in a cut-lid coffin with the head-section left open to the warm brown earth. The notion baffled and appalled her, in part because she herself felt something close to revulsion at the thought. From oldest childhood terrors, she retained a visceral dread of fresh-dug soil, whole clumps of earth embedded with stones, the sound-smothering weight imprisoning her.132 FDR welcomed the sanctity of soil. He liked, as he once told her, “to be where things are growing.”133 Only later would Eleanor come to accept a friend’s more biodiverse view that Franklin “wanted to get back into circulation as quickly as possible, and what better way than for his molecules to be incorporated immediately into his own rose garden?”134
Until the last shovelful of earth had been smoothed down, she stood straight and dry-eyed, her gaze fixed on the soil. A reporter could not help glimpsing that she wore at her throat the small fleur-de-lis—her young husband’s wedding gift.135
WITHIN AN HOUR, SHE RECEIVED the mourners, thanking each, then boarded the Trumans’ special train to Washington. She intended to waste no time packing up the White House. “I never did like to be where I no longer belonged,” she remarked to Joe Lash.136 She insisted that President and Mrs. Truman and their grown daughter, Margaret, encamped in Blair House, have full run of the Mansion as quickly as possible.137
On the 16th, she briefed Bess Truman on the workings of the President’s house (“I liked her,” she told Hick138) and invited the Missourians to lunch, taking up her seating duties one last time.
“Mr. President, you let me sit on your right,” she began.
Then, in a gesture that brought a wash of quickly handkerchiefed tears to Marine Colonel Jimmy Roosevelt’s eyes, she installed her successor in the place that for twelve years had been hers.
Weary, she could not rest. The tasks—the mail bags—calling for her attention numbered in the hundreds and thousands. For the first time in a decade of meeting her daily deadline, she went five days without filing so much as a semicolon to United Feature Syndicate. Nor did she read any of the scores of black-bordered editorials paying tribute to the glory of FDR and, on the whole, misjudging his replacement.
H. L. Mencken, Bad Boy of Baltimore, could take a bitter pride in having had a President Roosevelt to growl at for almost half the forty-six years of his newspaper career. Harry Truman seemed a “third-rate Middle Western politician on the order of Harding” by comparison to FDR. As for Eleanor, “It was she, not he, who really invented the New Deal.” Nor could Mencken resist using “the most influential female ever recorded in American history” to re-size her husband and to consign ER to a widow’s weedy oblivion: “She is alarmingly homely, she has lost her job, and she is growing old.… Tomorrow she will begin to fade, and by this time next year she may be wholly out of the picture.”139
Catching her breath long enough to sketch her plans to the members of the News Conference Association, she poured them tea in the state dining room and remarked that from now on she would be seeking interviews rather than granting them. She discussed using the Washington Square apartment as her headquarters as she carried out Franklin’s wishes. Then, thanking each of the newspeople as they filed out, she shook their hands and later sent each a personal note of sympathy or congratulations or remembrance, as if it were they who must be consoled upon losing a partner and the house they had lived in for twelve years.140
By Thursday night, April 19, the second floor stood barren of personal belongings. The next morning, army quartermaster’s trucks loaded with barrels and crates would rumble off the grounds, bearing Franklin’s Tut-like collections to the presidential library he had established just to the east of the Rose Garden at Hyde Park.
When Eleanor gathered for the last time with family and intimates at the west end of the long corridor, they had to send for an ashtray from the state rooms. “The eyes of John and Anna, Jimmy and Romelle, Elliott and Fay, and Anne, John’s wife, were like burnt holes in a blanket,” observed Belle Willard Roosevelt. Kermit’s widow was struck by the “gift all Roosevelts I have ever known share—the ability to maintain a light touch in sorrow. It’s a very moving approach to death: keeps those we love with us from the moment they die.”141
Into the dining room, Eleanor said without thinking, “Belle, sit on Franklin’s right…” Heads swiveled, and she cried out: “Children, do you think I’ll ever learn not to say that?”142
After supper, they used Eleanor’s barren sitting room to hear a tribute to ER on the radio. On the gallows-like floor, they listened to the newspaperwomen’s memories, which of course were all in the past tense. Surprisingly quickly it became impossible to hear yet another paean beginning “Mrs. Roosevelt was…”
The children hung on in grim fascination until finally Anna rose and approached her mother, solemnly intoning, “Darling, if you will stretch out on the bed, I will look for a lily. This is beautiful, but it is the end—there is nothing else left but to bury you, which obviously should be done promptly.…”
TO HICK, OF COURSE, ELEANOR wrote her valedictory: “Nearly all that I can do is done. The upstairs looks desolate & I will be glad to leave tomorrow. It is empty & without purpose to be here now.”143
Out her sitting room window the 1826 John Quincy Adams elm still held the Washington Monument in its vase-like branches. The obelisk flashed its red snake-eyed warning lights, and the view to the south stood open to frame Jefferson’s new temple on the Tidal Basin.
Night after night she had poured herself out from this spot, penning and sending to points across the globe literally scores of thousands of notes, cables, cards, and letters answering some particular need or trouble, however small or large, beginning with her own locked heart and the first turning of its key: Hick my dearest, I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you…
She who had opened the gates to many never before welcome in official Washington had made a point never to slam a door in the Mansion.144 Now, whole slabs of national history fell in behind Franklin’s death, shutting away “those of us who laid in his shadow.” And now, she reminded Hick, it was up to them “to start again under our own momentum & wonder what we can achieve.”145