Alone Together

During the summer of 1939, the American public was increasingly occupied with a looming question: Would Franklin Delano Roosevelt break a tradition that had started with George Washington and run for an unprecedented third term? The president himself repeatedly refused to provide an answer, prompting the press to nickname him “the Sphinx,” that mythical creature—half man, half lion—who spoke slyly through riddles. With his serene countenance, FDR betrayed nothing to outsiders. And he seemed to delight in playing this guessing game, telling Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, “You know I am a juggler. And I never let my right hand know what my left hand does.”

Roosevelt’s evasion was not just due to his guile and cunning; he himself wasn’t really sure. For years now, FDR fantasized about retiring to Top Cottage, his private home on Dutchess Hill in Hyde Park, a few miles from his family’s Hudson Valley estate. He had already begun planning for his retirement there (he actually drew the preliminary designs for the cottage as an armchair architect) and considering Democratic successors—signs that he was thinking seriously about finally exiting politics.

And yet it was at this dreamed-about retirement retreat that FDR staged his next bold political move, revealing his mindset as the specter of a second world war loomed.

On June 11, 1939, he welcomed King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England for some “rest and relaxation” at Hyde Park. He claimed that this would be an opportunity for the dignified royals to bask in some “very simple country life.”

But the meeting was not merely a pleasant vacation for the king and queen. As Hitler’s aggression in Europe intensified, US-British relations had grown strained; some Americans still blamed Britain for dragging the United States into its long and painful involvement in World War I. Now, with Hitler’s Third Reich expanding its control over Europe, FDR realized that the time had come to mend Anglo-American ties in case the worst happened.

In a display of his diplomatic savvy, FDR decided that he would throw an old-fashioned picnic at Top Cottage. He planned it down to every last, painstaking detail, from the seating chart to the menu. To win over the American public, Roosevelt believed, the royals needed to seem like “regular people”—the kind of people who dined informally outside on a bright summer day, surrounded by no fewer than 150 fawning guests.

In keeping with FDR’s secretive nature, reporters and photographers were barred from the picnic. And yet the New York Times found a leak; the next morning’s front page blared the shocking headline: KING TRIES HOT DOG AND ASKS FOR MORE. Controversy ensued. Had our patrician president lost his sense of etiquette? How did he have the nerve to offer hot dogs (and beer) to royalty—leaving the queen with no option but to eat hers with a knife and fork? Was he acting too casually, threatening the dignity of our country? And most important, was this a sign that he planned to run for a third term, possibly leading America into a looming war against fascism?

The New York Times dug as deeply as it could for the scantest details: what the king and queen wore, what was eaten besides hot dogs, how the royals shook hands with Roosevelt’s servants. The article obsessively listed the most honorable guests—those sitting at the first seven tables—then ended by naming the ten women of the White House executive staff singled out by Roosevelt for special introductions.

But one key person was missing from that long list of exalted names: Margaret “Daisy” Suckley. She was sitting only two tables away from the king and queen, close enough to witness the waiters serve them two measly hot dogs on a silver tray. No official report of the picnic ever mentioned Daisy. Yet it was Daisy who knew the answers to many of FDR’s riddles. And it was Daisy, at Top Cottage and elsewhere, whom FDR turned to so frequently as a source of solace and support during his darkest hours.

Fifty years later, it was also Daisy—one of only two guests from the original picnic still living—who described that celebrated afternoon to the New York Times. In 1939, Daisy had been an invisible presence. But on the picnic’s fiftieth anniversary, the New York Times took special note of her attendance as a rare link to the past. For while FDR might have been a Sphinx to most people, to Daisy he revealed a side of himself that few had ever seen.

Daisy Suckley (rhymes with “book-ly”) was a devoted diarist and prolific letter writer, but nobody knew that until her passing in 1991, just before her one-hundredth birthday. In a well-worn suitcase under her bed, there were thousands of pages of her diary entries and dozens of letters to FDR, along with thirty-eight letters back from him, many of them running for several pages. Four years later, the noted historian Geoffrey Ward would assemble these documents into his definitive book on their friendship. Taken together, Daisy’s collection amounted to a profoundly personal—and unequaled—glimpse into Roosevelt’s life in the White House during a time of world-changing events. But they also convey a friendship unlike any others in this book and perhaps even in the history of the American presidency.

Different from other presidential First Friends, Daisy didn’t officially advise the president. Nor did she speak hard truths to him or play a role in shaping a consequential decision. They weren’t equals in power or prestige; indeed, their relationship often revolved almost exclusively on the axis of Roosevelt’s needs, interests, and predilections. All of this seeming one-sidedness has led some historians to disparage Daisy’s interactions with the president as “worshipful” and “undemanding,” as if Daisy lacked the agency to shape the friendship herself. But if being in “the room where it happens” is an important measure of primacy or relevance, Margaret Daisy Suckley was in the room—at the request of the president himself—more than anyone else.

After the passing of seventy-five years, there is no one alive to clarify why a distant cousin with no obvious portfolio would grow to command such intense interest and affection from the most powerful man on the planet. All we have left to judge comes from Daisy’s diary entries and their correspondence. And what these documents seem to suggest is this: Theirs was a deep and loyal friendship that filled an emptiness in the life of a man who, as Daisy observed in her diary, “has no real ‘home life’ in which to relax, & ‘recoup’ his strength & peace of mind.” As incidental as she might have appeared to outsiders, to FDR she proved essential. She possessed the exact qualities he most desired and often needed as president: intelligent, perceptive, loyal, discreet, thoughtful, poetic, conscientious, and caring. She was his confidante, cheerleader, companion, and later archivist. As he wrote to Daisy in 1938, he could tell her things that would sound “cuckoo” to others but that only she understood. At the same time, she intuited things about him that no one else could.

Most vitally, she balanced FDR’s life, which switched constantly between either intense scrutiny or solitary independence. As Roosevelt once remarked to Daisy after a particularly grueling day fulfilling the duties of the presidency, “I’m either Exhibit A, or left completely alone.” Many presidents have commented on this paradox of their position—at once surrounded by endless streams of people and activity, yet uniquely alone in bearing its awesome responsibility. Daisy provided an antidote to that loneliness. She did not merely serve as an outlet for FDR’s ever-shifting moods. She also actively shaped a parallel private world that buttressed FDR’s ability to shepherd the nation through depression and world war.

“He was wired for this relationship,” historian Jonathan Alter says. “His emotional landscape required that he have Daisy in it. He would have been a more unsettled and less natural president had he not had Daisy with him.”

Daisy was the fifth child and first daughter of Robert Bowne Suckley and Elizabeth Phillips Montgomery. Like FDR, she was born into the landed gentry of the Hudson Valley. Her family’s estate—Wilderstein—was perched majestically on the east bank of the Hudson River outside the village of Rhinebeck, just ten miles north of Roosevelt’s in Hyde Park. As a young girl, she became known to most people as Daisy, a common nickname for Margaret. Ten years younger than her cousin Franklin, Daisy was eighteen when she first caught sight of him at a New Year’s gala at a neighboring estate. She watched with wonder as the strikingly handsome, six-foot, two-inch Roosevelt commanded the dance floor with an array of partners, the very image of grace and verve.

Even beyond the dance floor, Roosevelt was a man most at home in the company of women. Throughout his life, he would surround himself with powerful women who provided him with emotional and intellectual ballast at crucial moments. His wife, Eleanor, would garner the most attention for the groundbreaking contributions she made to the country during his life and to the world after his death. But there would be many others: Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a Cabinet position (secretary of labor) and who became the architect of many of the most important back-to-work New Deal programs; Missy LeHand, the first woman to serve as secretary to the president, a dominant voice in FDR’s professional and personal matters (so dominant that she graced the cover of Time in 1934 and FDR later named a frigate after her), who may or may not have been his mistress for a time; and Grace Tully, who succeeded LeHand as his secretary and delighted the president with her loyalty.

Roosevelt’s preference for the company of women can be traced to his childhood. Roosevelt’s father, James, was fifty-four when Franklin was born, and he already had a twenty-eight-year-old son from a previous marriage. As Franklin entered his teens, James became increasingly distracted by his failing health. So Franklin’s care and upbringing was left mostly to his mother, Sara, a powerful personality whom Franklin adored but who could frustrate him at times by aggressively inserting herself into his affairs. He basked in her attention, seeking her approval—qualities he also drew upon from Daisy. Daisy came to recognize FDR’s near-total dependence on his mother shortly after Sara’s death in 1942, writing in her diary that to Sara, Franklin “was always ‘my boy’ and he seemed to me often rather pathetic, and hungry for just that kind of thing.”

Dismissed later as a “feather-duster” by Alice Roosevelt, Franklin’s cousin and Teddy Roosevelt’s acerbic daughter, Roosevelt was never “one of the boys,” observed Michael Reilly, chief of his Secret Service detail. More specifically, FDR had never been an athlete, never had a gang of male friends, and, most punishingly for the status-conscious young man, never got into Porcellian, the elite, all-male Harvard social club to which his father, Teddy Roosevelt, and Teddy’s sons all belonged. FDR later described the rejection from his male classmates as “the biggest disappointment of my life.” Women, however, took a more adoring view of the up-and-coming aristocrat with a winning smile and rugged good looks. If FDR didn’t have a crew of men with whom to relax or recreate, he was always surrounded by women who delighted in his conversation and company.

When Franklin started courting his distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt, his mother strenuously objected—so much so that she forced the couple to keep their engagement a secret for a full year. Her protests and distractions failed to pry the two apart; Eleanor and Franklin finally wed in 1905. They had six children together (five of whom survived to adulthood), but after thirteen years of marriage, their relationship had become transactional, much more of a calculated partnership than a loving marriage, a deftly cultivated façade of civility to conceal the increasing emotional and physical distance between them.

It had been like this from the moment Eleanor learned of Franklin’s long-running romance with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s part-time social secretary since 1913. The affair began in the summer of 1916 and continued as America entered World War I in 1917. In the fall of 1918, Franklin, then the assistant secretary of the Navy, had taken a long trip to Europe to assess the state of the US Navy for himself. On his return trip aboard the USS Leviathan, Roosevelt and scores of others on board were stricken with the Spanish flu, an epidemic that would kill more than twenty million worldwide. Roosevelt fell seriously ill, fighting not just the virus but also double pneumonia. He was terribly weakened but managed to pull through. When the ship docked in New York, FDR was carried to an ambulance and taken to the family town house on East Sixty-Fifth Street in Manhattan.

Unpacking his suitcase, Eleanor discovered a bundle of love letters from Mercer. “The bottom dropped out of my world,” Eleanor later wrote. “I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”

Though Roosevelt was deeply in love with Mercer, he and Eleanor remained married—reinforced by Sara’s threat to disinherit her son if they divorced—allowing them to maintain the appearance of propriety, spare the children from a public scandal, and protect FDR’s political future.

Over the summer of 1921, FDR contracted polio, forcing him into a wheelchair at the age of thirty-nine. Just a year before, he had been nominated as the Democratic candidate for vice president. Although the Democrats lost the race, Franklin acquitted himself well, and to most observers his future seemed boundless. Now, hearing the news that his chances of ever walking again were minimal at best, he became distraught. For a man who had always enjoyed ascendance, albeit with a few minor setbacks, he felt his future, as James Tobin writes, “being stolen—the everyday pleasures of sailing and golf… of riding horses with his children, the plans for new campaigns, the glowing hope of the presidency. It was all in the gravest doubt.” A man used to shaping his own fate was now at the mercy of a disease that “threaten[ed] to rob him of that pleasure.”

At one point during his rigorous rehabilitation in Hyde Park in the summer of 1922, Eleanor returned to Manhattan to be with their five young children. Under the care of his domineering mother, FDR yearned for company that would bring him “good cheer,” as he put it to her.

Sara Delano heeded her son’s wish by picking up the phone and calling Daisy Suckley, inviting her to join them at Springwood, the Roosevelt estate. Although they hadn’t seen each other much in the twelve years since Daisy first spotted Franklin on the dance floor, Sara sensed Daisy would offer good company for her recovering son. They shared the same privileged background, a love for the Hudson Valley, and could gossip about local matters. Sara also knew that the unmarried Daisy had some time to spare; if they clicked, as Sara hoped, Daisy could become a kind of stand-in for the now-departed Eleanor.

Daisy accepted Sara’s invitation and became a frequent visitor that summer, spending afternoons with Franklin as he rebuilt his body and spirit. As they sat on the verdant Springwood lawns, Roosevelt would exercise his upper body with a bar erected over his chair. “I’m not going to be conquered by a childish disease,” Franklin told her, even though the most quotidian physical tasks now presented a challenge.

Daisy proved to be the perfect companion. Refined and witty yet reticent, she was mature beyond her years, with a social ease among older people more than her own peers. She and Franklin established a playful repartee. They related easily to each other, with Daisy displaying “a sharp mind and wicked wit,” especially when the topic turned to local gossip, as it often did. They became so comfortable together that FDR even recited a tall tale he loved to share with intimates: how he had been subjected to blackmail eighteen years earlier by a woman claiming to be a baroness who lured him and a friend into a compromising situation. The more times he told the story, the more colorful it grew. Nevertheless, Daisy loved the intrigue of the outlandish story, so alien to her own cloistered life at Wilderstein. FDR opened up a new world to her while she entertained him through tedious and dark hours.

She had her own dark hours. When Daisy was five, her father fell into financial ruin and took the family to Switzerland to flee the shame. For ten years there, her only companions were her siblings; by the time she returned home in her mid-teens fluent in three languages, she had no American friends at all, and that remained largely true into her late twenties. She pleaded to attend college but ran into resistance from her mother, who wanted her home instead to help care for the mass of relatives who regularly descended on their vast estate. They managed to reach a compromise: Daisy would study at Bryn Mawr but return home after only two years. Discouraged by her parents from marrying, she rejected every one of her many suitors. Of her five siblings, only one—her younger sister—would ever marry.

Tragedy also likely compounded Daisy’s loneliness and sense of limitation. In 1917, her oldest brother, Henry, was killed in Greece by a German bomb that hit the Red Cross ambulance he was driving. Four years later, her father died suddenly, leaving her, as she confided to her diary, an “inadequate creature.” The time she spent with Franklin may have distracted and strengthened her at a time of great personal loss.

Daisy was just one of many people to experience the power of Roosevelt’s innate ability to transmit his “internal strength to others”—a jaunty optimism that would become the hallmark of his presidency. Frances Perkins once described leaving an interview with the president feeling better, not because the president solved her problems but because he had given her greater strength and good cheer. One can thus imagine the uplifting effect he had on Daisy as he worked tirelessly to regain his strength. And as for Franklin—whose spirit would later inspire a nation in the ashes of the Depression—he drew sustenance from the quiet simplicity of his friendship with Daisy during a harrowing time in his own life.

The cousins stayed in regular touch through the rest of the 1920s and into the start of the next decade when FDR, encouraged by his wife, reentered the political arena to become governor of New York and then president of the United States. They exchanged scores of letters during this period, with each one of hers signed “your affectionate cousin.” Their correspondence, as historian Joseph Persico writes, “indicated both her understanding of him and his need for someone to whom he could unburden himself.” While Roosevelt resurrected his career, however, Daisy continued to flounder, receding into a world of books and fantasy. “I live,” she told a friend, “mostly in dreams.” But with FDR’s ascension to the presidency in 1933, Daisy’s fears of “falling away into a gray world of castles in the air” were instantly extinguished. She stood on the cusp of a new life, one filled with the bright colors of the most consequential figures and events of the twentieth century.

It began with an invitation: FDR asked Daisy to attend his inauguration in 1933, bestowing her with a seat of honor at the parade. Her tickets didn’t arrive at her hotel in time, so she listened spellbound to his iconic address on the radio, as FDR invigorated a nation wearied by three years of economic depression: “The only thing we have to fear is… fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Later that afternoon, Daisy sat behind FDR as he watched the parade, then attended a White House reception while FDR, wasting no time, convened his first Cabinet meeting. Within a year, she would become a fixture in the president’s new life, part of his innermost circle both in Washington and Hyde Park, as well as the keeper of some of his most closely-guarded secrets.

After winning the 1932 election in a landslide against Herbert Hoover, FDR faced a nation crippled by the Great Depression—an economic crisis without precedent in the country’s history. Between 1929 and 1932, ten million people had lost their jobs and breadlines had become a ubiquitous feature of the national landscape. The stock market had plunged nearly 90 percent, mirrored by a precipitous drop in national morale. For many Americans then, FDR’s election felt like sorely needed relief, a challenge to the orthodoxies that had led the country to this dismal state.

Roosevelt wasted no time in attempting to steady the nation through decisive federal action or, in his words, “bold, persistent experimentation.” At his request, an emergency session of Congress began on March 9, only five days after his inauguration. Thus ensued FDR’s First Hundred Days, a period of swift lawmaking aimed at rebuilding the banking system; providing unemployment relief; and transforming the nation’s approach to agricultural policy, industrial recovery, and mortgage financing. By the end, fifteen groundbreaking bills had been passed, designed to reactivate the ailing economy.

In the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., this flurry of activity brought about “a presidential barrage of ideals and programs unlike anything known to American history.” Soon enough, critics began attacking the New Deal for being either dangerously radical or heartlessly insufficient. But few could disagree that in little more than three months, the Roosevelt administration had laid the groundwork for the American welfare state.

After the First Hundred Days had passed, FDR needed a brief summer respite. Some five months into his presidency, in August 1933, he returned home to Springwood and Daisy came for tea at Eleanor’s invitation. Before Daisy returned home, and without Eleanor’s knowledge, the president asked her to visit again a few days later and go for a drive with him. FDR loved driving his roadster, which was equipped with hand-powered controls for him to operate the gas and brakes.

Daisy arrived back at Springwood and they were soon off, motoring through the leafy roads tailed by four detectives in a state-trooper cruiser. It must have been exhilarating for a man with paralyzed legs to experience such independence—riding through the countryside, seemingly free of his disability. They ended up spending most of the day together, with Franklin sharing his favorite books and illustrations and including her in a picnic with his family and the press. That night, an elated Daisy wrote in her diary, “The President is a man—mentally, physically & spiritually. What more can I say?” She soon became his favorite driving companion, ultimately spending more time with him in his roadster than anyone else.

As wrapped up as he was in bringing the New Deal to fruition, FDR still kept Daisy on his mind. In October 1933, after she had complimented one of his “fireside chats” on the radio, he wrote saying how much he missed her company and asking her to visit again:

Dear Daisy—

That was dear of you to write me about the Sunday night talk & I’m glad you liked it because that means so much more from a very understanding person like you… I count on that visit soon—Affectionately yours, FDR

He didn’t have to wait long. Three months later, in January 1934, Daisy came to Washington to celebrate the president’s fifty-second birthday. She visited the city for five days, much of it spent at the White House. At one point, she noted that “Mrs. R was evidently surprised” to see Daisy with her husband. For the next month FDR, ever on guard after the Mercer affair, never acknowledged to his wife the growing intensity of his friendship with Daisy.

What followed was a week of dinner parties, receptions, and late-night conversations in the upstairs Oval Room. In a rare moment of immodesty, Daisy confided to her diary, “I begin to feel that I am quite important at the White House!” Roosevelt welcomed her fully into his world and openly confessed to her that he “does get mentally tired and that is terrifying to realize.” He then carefully added that he would admit this “to very few, and that it was not for quotation!” as she recalled in her diary.

FDR’s comfort with showing Daisy his vulnerable side allowed them to share a playful rapport during these times together. Once, as he made his halting way past her during a formal diplomatic reception in the White House Blue Room, Daisy recalled, “Franklin looked at me, winked & laughed. I smiled circumspectly! In the afternoon before, he said he was sure I would laugh at him as he went by in the procession, and I said I would try to behave properly. I did!”

But Daisy had more to offer than frivolity; her sensitive nature made her an astute observer of Washington goings-on, which she both shared in her diary and often with FDR when alone. For example, she sensed (correctly) that Alice Roosevelt’s omnipresence at the White House had more to do with intelligence gathering for her beloved Republican Party than affection for her cousin the president. And after listening to the president describe a conversation he had with a prominent Japanese man who laid out his country’s expansionist plans, she offered her own commentary: “It is a plan looking a century ahead, a thing we Anglo-Saxons can’t do, and in considering what has happened so far, since 1900, they seem to be carrying out this plan.” Then, almost as an aside, she added presciently: “We must watch coming events!” Witness to numerous dinners and meetings throughout his presidency, she could also be piercingly perceptive and biting about those who underwhelmed her. At one dinner with FDR, Harry Hopkins, and his wife, Louise, she noted how Louise “isn’t interesting enough or amusing enough to warrant all that talking she does to F, and he can’t help looking a little tired at making the extra effort.”

They shared a special, unspoken bond when together, but when apart, their correspondence was also tinged with warmth and tenderness. In one letter to Daisy in October 1934, Roosevelt informed her of his plans to travel to Hyde Park in time for election day. “I hope to have a real four days without political thoughts—isn’t that a grand idea for the period immediately preceding an important election? Come & tell me about chips and cabbages & Kings—the mythological kind—but not about sealing wax—that would be too much like the State Department—it will be nice.”

After a drive in his roadster during that trip, FDR acknowledged the effect she was having on him: “I think you added several years to my life & much to my happiness.” During another outing in June 1935, FDR thanked her for “that bestest of afternoons—I told you there were a million things I wanted to talk about and I think I only talked about a dozen—so if you will work out 12/1,000,000 you see how often you will have to come again.”

Later that summer in Hyde Park, they took a succession of driving trips that suggest the progression of their relationship. On the first, they took shelter beneath a tree on what the two friends began to refer to as “Our Hill”—the future site of Top Cottage, where Roosevelt dreamed of a quiet life post-presidency. In a letter she wrote later to FDR, Daisy sounded like a woman falling in love: “I am afraid I am getting myself in very deep! Almost like an intrigue and it’s so completely foreign to my nature!”

Then, on the afternoon of September 22, 1935, something happened that Franklin, three years later, described as the beginning of “a voyage.” The president and Daisy were again driving in the countryside, and again stopping at “Our Hill.” No letters or diary entries reveal what intimacies were exchanged on the hill that day, but their correspondence immediately afterward suggests that something meaningful did occur. In a note to FDR later that night, Daisy exclaimed how “OUR HILL” is “without exception” the “nicest Hill” before assuming a more serious tone: “You remember that little verse by Maria Mulock on Friendship? On the blessing of being able to talk freely to one’s friend? Shouldn’t there be another verse, on the silent moments, where often more is said—without words than with them?”

During that outing, the president had also implored Daisy to join him on a long train trip west on which he would depart that very night. Daisy declined, writing to FDR after his departure: “Do you realize the amount of will-power that was necessary to refuse a certain invitation…? A slightly righteous feeling, I find, gives no satisfaction whatsoever—only irritation!” For the next month, Roosevelt adopted a distinctly affectionate tone in his letters to her, regretting that she had decided not to accompany him. Writing from his train as it hurtled west, he opened up to her: “Do you know that you alone have known that I was a bit ‘cast down’ these past weeks. I couldn’t have let anyone else know it—but somehow I seem to tell you all those things and what I don’t happen to tell you, you seem to know anyway.” Nearly a week later, after dedicating the Boulder Dam, he was even more blunt: “[T]here is no reason why I should not tell you that I miss you very much—it was a week ago yesterday.” He continued to mark the time since they had last seen each other on September 22. One month after their trip to the hill, still in planning mode for Top Cottage, FDR wrote: “I think a one-story fieldstone two-room house… one with very thick walls to protect us… Do you mind—then—if I tell you fairy stories till it gets very late?”

It remains unclear what to make of this string of uniquely intimate letters exchanged during a small slice of time in 1935. But one other clue shows how deeply their care for one another had grown by then. FDR frequently addressed his letters to “MM,” or My Margaret. Daisy signed her letters “YM.” Whatever the level of their intimacy, there seems little question that by the third year of his presidency, Roosevelt held MM closer to his heart than most anyone.

Whether the two shared a physical or just deeply emotional relationship has long been a matter of debate. In 2012, the movie Hyde Park on Hudson was released, starring Bill Murray as FDR and Laura Linney as Daisy. The movie leaves little to the imagination: FDR is on the famous car ride to Top Cottage, stops the car, releases his security detail, and then, as the camera pulls back from the car, begins to seduce an eager Daisy. The movie was panned for its thin story line and for taking liberties with historical fact. But those who know Roosevelt only through their history textbooks (and know nothing of his seventh cousin) are left believing they were lovers.

Historians have been more circumspect in their conclusions. Geoffrey Ward says today: “I don’t believe there was ever a physical relationship between them. Theirs was a flirtation, not an affair. Their mutual delight in it intensified, I think, by the fact that it could never actually be consummated.”

Daisy herself carefully defined the non-sexual nature of their relationship after what may or may not have been that hilltop kiss.

Do you mind if I do a little thinking aloud—on paper? The subject is Friendships, and the way they start and grow—An introduction, a shake of the hand, a few casual words to begin—and then, by various stages, sometimes slowly and sometimes remarkably quickly, the friendship is established—That’s the usual way, and the friendship is tested in its different stages, and usually finds very definite limits not so far from the surface.

On rare occasions, however, it seems to start in the deepest depths, where the important elements are—and in these rare cases, the superficial elements are completely unimportant. They can be however, a source of interest and amusement—a never-ending voyage of discovery to strange and distant lands—with never a feeling of fear, because of the safe & solid ship one knows is underfoot—

Daisy claimed not to be bothered by gossip about her and the president: “I have argued to myself & with members of the family as to whether whatever gossip about us there may be, is justified,” she noted in her diary. “Since there is nothing but good in my desire to help him, & since he seems to feel I do help him, I have long since made up my mind that that is the important thing. Only those who wish to find evil in our friendship, will do so—and I, for one will not have my life ruled by that sort of person.”

Ward goes even further, saying he believes Daisy never had a physically intimate relationship with anyone during her lifetime, let alone the president, and would have been mortified at the suggestion she had.

With millions finally back to work in New Deal programs and a growing sense that the worst days of the Depression were over, Roosevelt knew by early 1936 that his chances of re-election were promising. Still, he felt a gnawing sense of uncertainty for several reasons. He was facing a wave of labor unrest not seen since 1919. And though his Republican opponent, the millionaire Kansas governor Alf Landon, posed little competition, there were other leaders of formidable movements who blasted FDR with undisguised contempt, including “radio priest” Charles Coughlin and Louisiana senator Huey Long. Even worse, a mounting fascist threat seemed to be sweeping across Europe: Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, civil war in Spain.

Amid such challenges and pressures, FDR’s enthusiasm for the job could waver, especially after the death of his close friend and advisor Louis Howe in April 1936. In unusually frank language, he vented to Daisy: “Why did I come back—why this endless task—why run again—why see the endless streams of people—why the damned old basket of mail which is either full & hanging over my head or just emptied & ready to be filled.” Daisy responded with calm encouragement, reminding him that what he was doing through “the medium of that mail basket & those endless conferences is so wonderful.”

In 1936, Roosevelt easily won reelection in a romp over Landon, capturing a record 98 percent of the Electoral College vote and the highest share of the popular vote since the uncontested election of James Monroe in 1820. Meanwhile, the cousins continued their elaborate planning for Top Cottage, right down to selecting books for what they called “OL”—Our Library on “Our Hill,” as Daisy began referring to it. The president was just as enthusiastic. Such projects with Daisy proved to be a delightful distraction for the president, who was nursing ever-growing concerns about Hitler’s designs on Europe and his threat to the Western world.

One way that FDR dealt with these crushing burdens was to convene what he called “the Children’s Hour,” a gathering at the end of the day in a second-floor study of the White House where he could unwind with close friends and associates. The cardinal rule of the Children’s Hour, which often lasted well into a second hour, was that no important work be transacted while FDR mixed martinis, which he served and refilled. Whenever Daisy visited Washington, which was often, she was an integral part of this gathering. Writing about one such “hour” later in his presidency, Daisy observed, “[It was] when the P. seems to relax. He casts off his heavy responsibilities talks nonsense, teases etc. as he mixes cocktails.” One person who did not attend was Eleanor, who wasn’t wired for small talk and couldn’t refrain from using whatever time she had with her husband to press the issues important to her. “The P.,” Daisy noted, whenever “Mrs. R. is here… gets tense & concentrated again.”

Even when Daisy wasn’t at Children’s Hour or in his presence, she remained privy to some of the most intimate moments of FDR’s life. In late summer 1938, Roosevelt’s son James needed emergency surgery to remove gastric ulcers. Both Eleanor and Franklin traveled to Minnesota for the surgery. While tending to his son, Roosevelt wrote Daisy on September 14: “Oh! I wish so that C.P. were here.” By then, the two had developed their own parlance to describe their relationship, “C.P.” standing for “Certain Person.”

That exceptional closeness was also made clear by the front-row seat Daisy occupied at the most famous “picnic” in American history, when the king and queen visited Hyde Park in June 1939. After the weekend’s festivities, “F” related to Daisy some of his insights on the royal couple, including that the king was “grand” with an almost “American sense of humor,” while the queen was humorless. He also recounted four separate episodes after Daisy departed during which his jittery servants committed faux pas directly in front of the royals, including dropping trays full of glasses and breaking brand new china ordered especially for them.

In colorful, fast prose that could have doubled as a script for an I Love Lucy episode, Daisy recorded in exquisite detail each of the four episodes FDR joyfully recounted to her. “Later in the evening, a butler carried a tray with 6 ginger-ale bottles & a few tall glasses. He caught his heel on the top of the steps leading to the library, lost his balance & the whole tray went flying into the room, with him after it. The King remarked: ‘That’s number 2, what will be the next?’” Her observations capture both the banal and memorable moments of the weekend, even including whimsical drawings of the main characters at the picnic and a diagram of where they sat.

Most surprising to FDR, the queen had “not the slightest idea” he couldn’t walk, he told Daisy. The royals apparently thought he used a cane. Their ignorance reflects just how well FDR had succeeded in keeping his infirmity an international secret. He had an unwritten understanding with the media and others that no one would ever capture an image of him in his wheelchair, not even the ubiquitous cameramen who covered his public appearances. As of five years ago, of the four known photographs that survive of him sitting in his wheelchair, two were taken by Daisy Suckley.

Despite FDR and Daisy’s apparent delight in daydreaming about a post-presidential life at Top Cottage, the idea that he would soon retire to Hyde Park after his second term and spend sweet, unhurried afternoons with “MM” appeared increasingly unlikely as the world inched closer to war. Daisy’s letter to FDR on September 1, 1939—the day Germany invaded Poland—reveals a significant shift in the conversation, from plans for “us” to a future for “you.”

This change in focus reflected the daunting moment that Roosevelt faced, no doubt with some measure of trepidation. In his fireside chat after Hitler’s invasion, Roosevelt implicitly acknowledged that the Great War had been a cautionary tale, a tragic mistake that had failed to secure stable peace and democracy. Now, with another world war looming, he vowed to maintain American neutrality. But he sent a mixed message, expressing his belief that the country must still confront the grim task of mobilization.

With FDR now the leader of a country that would likely be pulled into overseas hostilities, the tenor of their letters changed. “What an excellent idea for you to have a ‘Retreat’ on the top of your wooded hill,” Daisy wrote. Nevertheless, Daisy would remain a constant presence in Roosevelt’s life, both through her unwavering friendship and the gift of a beloved pet—a welcome diversion that added some levity to the bleak moment. In the summer of 1940, Daisy presented Roosevelt with a four-month-old Scottish terrier, whom he named Murray the Outlaw of Falahill, in honor of a Scotch ancestor. “Fala” would become perhaps the most famous canine in American history (and a favorite four-letter answer for crossword-puzzle writers). Daisy trained Fala herself, teaching him to sit, roll over, and jump.

FDR loved him.

Less than a year later, Scribner’s offered Daisy a contract to write a children’s book on the make-believe life of Fala. With FDR’s approval, she dove into it, “getting all worked up about my Story of Fala!” In a letter to FDR she proposed a working title:

“The True Story of Fala”

By [Daisy] and underneath

“This is the True Story of Fala”

F.D.R.

Speculation over whether FDR would run for a third term and buck a 143-year tradition reached a feverish pitch by the summer of 1940. As noncommittal as he was at the Hot Dog Picnic a year earlier, he was just as coy now, in part because he was still unsure of his plans. Most assumed, given the war in Europe, that he would break with the two-term norm, but the decision was far from inevitable. By 1940, FDR had already made specific plans to retire to Hyde Park, where construction had begun on his presidential library and work on Top Cottage was complete. On every trip back to Hyde Park that spring and summer, he brought with him material that would be housed in the library. But anyone who knew Roosevelt wasn’t counting him out quite yet, no matter how elaborate his retirement planning.

It turns out neither Roosevelt nor his legions of supporters were ready for him to retire to Top Cottage, especially with tensions flaring in Europe and party sentiment that America could ill-afford a change in commander in chief at this perilous moment. The president was overwhelmingly nominated for a third term at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in July of 1940, after crafty operatives sparked a spontaneous “draft Roosevelt” campaign among the delegates—aided by the fact there were no other viable candidates in sight. Hitler’s blitzkrieg across Europe in the spring and summer finally resolved the matter. The so-called “phony war” had definitively ended, and World War II began in earnest. Even though a Gallup poll revealed that 93 percent of Americans still viewed the war as a European problem, Roosevelt knew that he could not abandon the nation at this pivotal stage, just as it began to boost its defenses and to reinitiate the national draft.

Running a cautious campaign against the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, a New York corporate executive, Roosevelt won 54.8 percent of the popular vote, his smallest-yet margin of victory, but took thirty-eight states in an Electoral College landslide. He had shattered precedent—all with the future of the United States and the world in the balance. As one historian dramatically put it, Roosevelt’s pursuit of a third term was “one of the most consequential presidential decisions of the twentieth century.”

During that time, Daisy remained a crucial witness to the most pivotal—and covert—moments in history. In early August 1941, as he set out for a clandestine summit with British prime minister Winston Churchill off Newfoundland, the president told neither Secretary of State Cordell Hull nor Secretary of War Henry Stimson—nor even Eleanor—where he was going. Pretending to be off on a ten-day fishing trip along the New England coast, FDR went to great lengths to deceive the press and hoodwink the German U-boats that patrolled the North Atlantic. The president departed from New London, Connecticut, on the USS Potomac, a presidential yacht. From there, Roosevelt stealthily transferred onto the battleship Augusta. As the Potomac continued through the Cape Cod Canal, hundreds of well-wishers waved to the “president,” being played by a Secret Service agent, who waved back.

One of the few people who was clued in to FDR’s whereabouts was Daisy. Throughout the secret trip, Roosevelt sent her a steady stream of letters from the day he transferred onto the Potomac on August 5 until he arrived home on August 15. “Even at my ripe old age I feel a thrill in making a get-away—especially from the American press,” he wrote. After his first day of meetings with Churchill on August 9, Roosevelt described him as “a tremendously vital person & in many ways is an English Mayor [Fiorello] LaGuardia! Don’t say I said so! I like him—& lunching alone broke the ice both ways.” His meetings with Churchill produced what would become the Atlantic Charter—setting out the joint US-UK goals for the postwar world—in which the leaders pledged that “all men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and from want.” Though the country was not yet at war, FDR was doing everything he could short of committing troops to provide morale and material support to its ally.

The imminent war was Roosevelt’s chief preoccupation that summer and fall, but it wasn’t his only concern. As he returned to American soil, he learned of Daisy’s increasingly dire financial straits. For years, Daisy had earned a meager income by taking care of an elderly aunt. She had been forced to work after her family had squandered their fortune in trade and shipping through bad investments and even worse luck. By the beginning of the Depression, Daisy didn’t even have enough money to maintain the wardrobe she felt defined her. Still, as she confessed to her diary, she liked to call herself the “prim spinster,” a joke that Roosevelt laughed about with her. Now, though, her fortunes had worsened, and she desperately needed a new source of income.

The timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous. FDR just happened to be seeking an archivist for his newly opened Presidential Library in Hyde Park. At tea at her house a month after returning from his trip, he offered her the job. She accepted—no longer just a witness to history, but an active recorder of it.

The idea to open a presidential library was a novel idea. While other presidents, beginning with George Washington, had gathered their papers (usually to bring home with them), no president had ever attempted to centralize all the papers from his presidency in a single library—what is today a common practice. A collector since his youth, Roosevelt had been carefully planning his library since first taking office. He raised the money, consulted historians for advice, and pushed Congress to pass legislation to make it happen. Now, two months after its opening, Roosevelt needed someone to help with the assemblage and organization of the millions of documents that were accumulating, and Daisy was the obvious choice given her intimate knowledge of FDR’s world and the mountainous pile of newspaper clippings she had already amassed.

The day after Daisy’s job was formalized, FDR’s mother, Sara, died, at the age of eighty-six. Just two months earlier, his de facto chief of staff, Missy LeHand, suffered a stroke from which she would never recover, ultimately dying in 1944. In quick succession, two of the women closest to Roosevelt had been stripped from his life. Daisy remained. For the rest of the war, she would split her time between the library (where FDR kept an office) and Washington, and play an increasingly greater role in his life, which would soon get more complicated.

At 1:30 p.m. on December 7, 1941, Roosevelt was in his study on the second floor of the White House talking with advisor Harry Hopkins when Navy Secretary Frank Knox called with stunning news: Japan had just launched an attack on the US naval installation at Pearl Harbor. Eventually, 2,403 naval and military personnel would die in the surprise raid. A few hours later, FDR kept his calm as he methodically began dictating what would become the preamble to his famous “Day of Infamy” speech the next day in Congress: “Yesterday… December 7th… 1941… a day which will live in world history… the United States was simultaneously and deliberately attacked.…” He agonized over every word of the speech, intent on ensuring that it conveyed the urgency of the moment. Minutes before delivering the speech the next day, he crossed out “world history” and inserted “infamy,” immortalizing the word forever. The subsequent vote was almost unanimous—388 to 1—and shortly after noon on December 8, the United States had officially entered World War II.

Two weeks later, Roosevelt summoned his military commanders to the White House and issued a dire command: The United States must now start planning a massive bombing raid on Japan. Later that night, as his generals pored over maps next door at the War Department and drew up bombing routes, Roosevelt took a break to honor Daisy with an intimate White House dinner for two to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. Afterward, in the president’s study, they took pictures of each other: he in his evening clothes and she sitting on a lion-skin rug gifted to FDR by Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie.

As the strains of the war multiplied, Daisy’s regular presence continued to provide a much-needed source of comfort for the president. White House aide and son-in-law John Boettiger would later tell Daisy that of all the people in the White House during Roosevelt’s twelve years there, she “contributed probably more than anyone, in allowing him to relax, and think of completely different things.” She was a careful listener as well as an inquisitive questioner, and FDR often brought up his most pressing issues while they worked or relaxed together. Over Thanksgiving weekend of 1942, Roosevelt revealed that he had been “thinking ahead to the shape of the world” after the war and asked Daisy to go with him to Top Cottage for a picnic to discuss his thoughts. “Our conversation was momentous,” Daisy said, recalling the president’s description of a postwar world in which just four nations—the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China—would dominate global politics.

Daisy was also a witness to FDR in his most unguarded, raw moments when the pressures of his office manifested themselves in unusual ways. One night while staying over at the White House, she was awakened by “blood curdling sounds” emanating from Roosevelt’s bedroom. The president was “calling out for help.” At breakfast the next morning, FDR told her, “I thought a man was coming through the transom and was going to kill me.” When Daisy asked why the Secret Service hadn’t rushed in at the sounds of his cries, he confessed that they had already grown “quite accustomed to such nightmares.”

Luckily, though, the nightmare of war began to give way to brighter news. In January 1943, in the midst of Germany’s first major defeat at the gates of Stalingrad, FDR secretly set out to Casablanca, first by train and then by plane, to meet with Churchill and their respective military planners. Before leaving, as Daisy recounted in her diary, the president shared his “mixed feelings” about the physical dangers posed by the trip. But his fears would not deter him from accomplishing a crucial objective: to discuss with Churchill the next phase of the war and how to leverage Russia’s unexpected victory.

Roosevelt kept an almost daily diary of his activities that he then shared in letters sent back home to Daisy. Over the course of five hectic days of travel and midnight meetings, FDR recounted for Daisy how Churchill tried to bring French general Henri Giraud and future French leader Charles de Gaulle together but failed because of de Gaulle’s hatred for Giraud. While de Gaulle, then in exile in London, expected to lead the Free French Forces in Africa, Giraud was FDR’s choice to do so. When FDR asked Churchill who paid de Gaulle’s salary, “W.S.C. beamed—good idea—no come—no pay!” De Gaulle came. Daisy learned not just about these consequential calculations, but also about more trivial details. Throughout the trip, de Gaulle became a favorite object of FDR’s derision, and he described the Frenchman to Daisy as a “headache” who “yesterday [said] he was Jeanne d’Arc & today that he is Georges Clemenceau!” He also joked about how his correspondence had been delayed due to “the Winston hours”—a reference to Churchill’s propensity for late nights of talking and drinking that robbed Roosevelt of much-needed sleep.

Throughout that spring of 1943, as the war continued to favor the Allies and speculation began to build over whether he would seek a fourth term, Franklin confided in Daisy about his hopes for a future “peace organization” that ideally he would chair instead of continuing on as president. He mused that the project could be done “simply,” with no big building and just a small staff of two assistants, housed on an island like Horta in the Azores. He would have a place on the island, “not very large,” where he would live and work. Another small group of houses would be occupied by the staffs of the other member nations. “It’s all very exciting, & perhaps it will happen,” Daisy replied. “If the P. keeps his health & strength.”

Daisy’s diary entries for the final three years of Roosevelt’s life reveal that he wrote, called, or saw her in person every few days. And despite the demands on his attention, Daisy seemed never far from his mind. One afternoon, as Daisy rested in the Lincoln bedroom, she heard a knock on the door: The president wanted to see her in the doctor’s office downstairs. FDR apparently worried that Daisy’s eyesight wasn’t what it should be. She was given a visual exam as the president looked on (her prescription was right). They also frequently shared lunches and dinners together, took their regular motor drives, and reviewed materials for the library at both the White House and Hyde Park, where FDR maintained an office at the new library. And Daisy was often invited when the president had to entertain foreign dignitaries, Churchill being her favorite.

When the prime minister had made his first visit to Hyde Park back in June 1942, Daisy had joined the small group invited to dine with him and the president. “Both seemed a little tired and absent-minded though this might not have been noticed by anyone who doesn’t know the P. as well as I do,” she wrote. Thereafter, whenever “WSC” (whether alone or with his family) would visit the United States, FDR would always include Daisy. After each visit, she would insightfully record her observations of the two leaders and their entourages: “The P.M. recognizes in P. a man with a greater soul & a broader outlook than his own—It is very evident to a person who has had such wonderful opportunities to see them as I have.”

She considered Churchill a “great man,” but as she explained in her sometimes cryptic style, one who “has not yet achieved the spiritual freedom of F.D.R.” On another “memorable day—but how casually I take it,” Daisy described how Roosevelt drove his roadster up to her house and, with Churchill in the passenger seat, had her and Fala squeeze in for a drive through the woods to a pool party, where they donned swimsuits and spent the day relaxing on the lawn. She also acted as tour guide to Churchill’s daughter, Mary (a woman of “American blood and easy manner”), and his wife, Clementine (“very English and reserved”), and she became so much a part of the two first families that after one visit, Churchill asked her to “come along” with them as FDR himself drove them to their train. As the train departed, the prime minister’s last words were: “Goodbye, Miss Suckley, and thank you so much.”

Toward the end of 1943, with the tide of the war turning decidedly in the Allies’ favor, the plan for its end kicked into high gear. On November 8, “the P.’s worst day,” FDR had twenty-two separate meetings, culminating in dinner with just Daisy. They sipped sherry and dined on ptarmigan from Iceland while they discussed his upcoming trip to Cairo, Basra, and Tehran, where the president would meet in succession with Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek of China, and, for the first time, Soviet premier Josef Stalin. Daisy noted in her diary: “It is certainly not in the simple & natural course of the life of a Suckley to be seeing, at first hand, the very core & hub of world history—It is fantastic—But here I am.”

The meetings proved a major success, culminating in the Tehran summit and the fateful decision to launch a cross-Channel invasion of northern France—Operation Overlord—to engage the German forces on a second front. The day Roosevelt returned, one of his first calls was to Daisy. It was the week of her fifty-second birthday, and each day he presented her with a new gift from his travels, including a Persian prayer rug and a painted piece of ivory.

FDR was so consumed traveling the world and managing the war that he scarcely had time to tend to his own affairs, especially his health. If he was ignoring it, Daisy most certainly was not; by early 1944, she was gradually coming to the realization that FDR was in rapid physical decline. Many of her diary entries expressed worry over the fragile state of his health: “The flu has left him rather miserable” or “The P is feverish & generally miserable.” Roosevelt often sought to calm her. “I thought you might read in the paper that I am sick and I had better tell you, first,” he assured her one day.

FDR’s daughter Anna—who had grown close to Daisy—was equally alarmed by her father’s declining health, and she pressed his team of doctors to conduct what would become his first thorough physical examination in years. It was fortunate that she did; a new cardiologist brought in for the examination found he was suffering from congestive heart failure, with an enlarged heart, shortness of breath, and extreme hypertension. His blood pressure was an astonishing 218 over 120.

Given how sick he was yet how vital he needed to appear as the nation’s wartime commander in chief, the physicians hesitated to tell him the severity of his condition. Their reluctance was coupled with FDR’s own lack of curiosity after the examination: He never asked a single question during the afternoon of testing. Within weeks, however, FDR had figured out the reality for himself and confided it to Daisy while they were spending time at financier Bernard Baruch’s plantation in South Carolina: “He found out that they were not telling him the whole truth & that he was evidently more sick than they said! It is foolish of them to attempt to put anything over on him!” Now that FDR realized his dire condition, his doctors put him on a low-calorie diet and instructed him to cut back on his smoking and drinking, as well as on the constant influx of visitors and dinner guests. Roosevelt mostly complied, but the diet in particular made him miserable. Eating well was one of his great pleasures.

Daisy made it easier for him to bear the new restrictions on his life and to continue plowing forward with as much normalcy as possible. In mid-May of 1944, they were sitting at Top Cottage when FDR confided in her a secret few in Washington knew: the coming invasion of Normandy—D-Day. In her diary entry that night, without any trace of irony, Daisy mentioned one of the most consequential military operations as casually as the scenery and foliage: “We put a couple of chairs in the sun, north of the porch, & just talked, quietly, about the view, the dogwood, a little about the coming invasion in Europe.”

FDR’s confidences went beyond military secrets to include political musings as well. Later that month—only two months before the Democratic convention of 1944—he and Daisy retreated to their hill, where they sipped tea and toasted some of FDR’s favorite bread. Daisy asked if he had chosen a running mate yet. “I haven’t even decided if I will run myself,” he replied. Unlike how he had approached the question in 1936 or 1940, Roosevelt now framed his answer in terms of his health, not politics: “… If I know I am not going to be able to carry on for another four years, it wouldn’t be fair to the American people to run for another term.” Daisy pressed: “But who else is there?” Roosevelt then confided another secret: “I have a candidate—but don’t breathe it to a soul—there is a man, not a politician, who, I think, I could persuade the country to elect. There would be such a gasp when his name was suggested, that I believe he would have a good chance if he were ‘sold’ to the country in the right way!”

FDR was referring to Henry J. Kaiser, the private-sector shipbuilder whose leadership in building Liberty ships had caught his eye back in 1942. Daisy pressed again: “How would he get on with the Churchills, Stalins etc.” The president responded: “He’s more like them than I am.” Daisy leaned in once more: “But your strength lies in the fact that those men look up to you. Just another man like themselves, will bring the whole International problem down a peg, to the usual materialism.” Roosevelt didn’t answer at the moment, but he later assured her that if Kaiser were elected he would seek FDR’s “teaching guidance,” a prediction that finally seemed to satisfy Daisy, ever protective of the president.

Only a few days later, on the night of June 5, they were together again in the White House residence when Roosevelt announced that Rome had fallen to Allied forces. Daisy kept the radio on as she prepared for bed, knowing the D-Day invasion in Normandy was imminent. The initial bulletins that crackled over her radio at 12:49 a.m. were from Germany. More news followed all night long. At 9 a.m. Daisy entered the president’s bedroom and delivered what she thought were the first reports to him on the success of an invasion that would hasten the end of the war. “I told him all that I had heard over the radio, & for once, knew the details before he did!” she noted. “It was a novel experience for him.” Whether the president was actually surprised or just feigning ignorance is unclear, though it’s impossible to imagine FDR sleeping through the night without at some point learning of the invasion’s progress.

That evening, Roosevelt delivered a prayer for the soldiers who had stormed the beaches in what he called “a mighty endeavor.” It came with unfathomable cost, but in its wake, the war began steadily turning in the Allies’ favor, a shift that persuaded Roosevelt that he should run for an astounding fourth term. However weak his health, he concluded that the country needed him to oversee the war’s end and the world’s crucial transition to peacetime.

Roosevelt spent election day in Hyde Park, a ritual that had begun with his first victory in 1932. That afternoon, he drove his roadster to the library, where he picked up Daisy and took her and a group of other people to Top Cottage for tea. They then settled in at the Big House for cocktails, dinner, and the long night of election returns. When Republican candidate Thomas Dewey conceded at 3:45 a.m. on November 8, the only three-term president in the history of the United States now became the first president elected to a fourth term. Daisy was one of only six people who sat at the long table with FDR when he heard Dewey’s early-morning concession call.

Following the election, the president headed to his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, where for twenty years he had sought the curative powers of its hot pools. Daisy, of course, belonged to the traveling party. They were joined there by Lucy Mercer Rutherford, FDR’s lover from a quarter century earlier, who was now recently widowed. The instant and completely frank friendship Daisy formed with Lucy should further cast doubt on the suggestion Daisy and FDR were romantic partners.

After Eleanor had discovered their affair in 1918, she had forbidden Franklin from ever seeing Lucy again. Yet through the intervening years, FDR defied her, maintaining their relationship through secretly arranged liaisons. Unbeknownst to Eleanor, Lucy had attended FDR’s first inauguration, picked up by a White House car and stationed a safe distance from the proceedings. Twice in 1941, White House logs suggest she arrived under a pseudonym to see her former lover. After Lucy’s husband died in 1944, Roosevelt asked his daughter Anna, who was then managing social affairs at the White House, to help arrange another visit, again without Eleanor’s knowledge. From then on, Lucy and Franklin would see each other often at the White House when Eleanor was away. On his way from Washington to Hyde Park for a September 1, 1944, meeting with Churchill, FDR and Daisy made a secret detour to Lucy’s late husband’s estate in New Jersey for a sit-down lunch. As Daisy perceptively recorded in her diary after the lunch, “The whole thing was out of a book… with all the characters at that lunch table, if one counts”—she mischievously added—“the absent husbands and wives.”

Together now in Warm Springs, Lucy and Daisy, the two women closest to the president, shared their emotions and concerns for him. Lucy told Daisy she “felt for years that he has been terribly lonely.” Daisy recalled in her diary that the two women wept on each other’s shoulders and acknowledged how grateful they were to have one another to support him. But Daisy was by no means resigning herself to his death, at least not yet. She had arranged to have a massage therapist, Lenny Setaro, work on FDR’s body three times a week. He claimed to possess a “gift” from God and Daisy, desperate for any solution, enlisted him. Some close advisors to the president deeply resented Daisy’s intervention as unnecessary quackery, but she remained undeterred. After one session with Setaro, the president reported movement in a big toe for the first time in years, and later said he felt “tingling sensations in his hips and legs.” But the progress was ephemeral.

Roosevelt kept his fourth inauguration celebration on January 20, 1945, understated—held on the South Portico of the White House instead of the usual setting on the Capitol steps. Those closest to him, including his doctors, suspected his days were numbered, and not in years or even necessarily months. Roosevelt himself seemed to acknowledge his looming mortality when he asked that each of his thirteen grandchildren be present for his swearing-in. His fourth inaugural address marked the last time he stood before the American people. His strong voice belied the weakness of his body. Woodrow Wilson’s widow, Edith, attended the ceremony and noted, “He looked exactly as my husband looked when he went into his decline.” Bowing to his infirmity, Roosevelt kept his remarks to only five minutes—537 words—the second shortest inaugural address in US history (second to George Washington’s 135-word speech in 1793).

As the ailing president began his final term, the war was moving to a swift end. The Allies continued to squeeze the teetering Axis forces: After liberating France and Belgium, the troops headed into Germany for one final assault. As the prospect of peace finally arose, Roosevelt celebrated his sixty-third (and final) birthday before heading to the Yalta Conference in Crimea, where he, Churchill, and Stalin hashed out the postwar plan for Germany and the world.

The most devastating war in the annals of humankind was nearly finished—a reason for great celebration. Yet anyone who saw FDR at Yalta or afterward knew how very sick he was, and it soon became harder to camouflage. An unidentified senior administration official sent an order to the Secret Service asking it to beef up its security of FDR’s new vice president, Harry Truman. For some, the question was no longer whether Truman would succeed FDR, but how soon.

A restless FDR dove back into the presidential business that had piled up during his absence overseas. But he looked—and felt—completely worn out, and he knew that he needed another getaway to his “Little White House” in Warm Springs. On March 30, he arrived there with a small circle of companions, including Daisy and his eccentric cousin Polly Delano. He attended Easter service in a small Presbyterian chapel and then went for a car ride, seemingly regaining a bit of strength. But Daisy was still concerned enough to have regular talks with the president’s cardiologist, Dr. Howard Bruenn, who was also at the Warm Springs compound. On the night of April 6, FDR complained of being cold, even under blankets. Daisy nursed him, pulling up the covers and feeding the president spoonsful of porridge. Roosevelt “put on his little act of helplessness! It amuses him to be fed, and I love to feed him,” Daisy recorded affectionately in her diary, as if trying to convince herself to remain hopeful. “On paper it sounds too silly for words and it is silly—but he’s very funny and laughs at himself with us.” When they were finished, she kissed him goodnight and left him “relaxed and laughing.”

The next day, Lucy Mercer Rutherford arrived, bringing with her an artist friend, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, whom she had commissioned to paint a portrait of FDR. Daisy, along with Lucy and Polly, went for a two-hour ride in the country with the president, an outing that delighted him; car rides remained his favorite pastime. Noticing that Roosevelt was shivering, Lucy draped her sweater around his legs. Daisy admonished him, “You need to lead as dull a life as possible until you get your strength back.” It had become her refrain. FDR didn’t disagree, even acknowledging to Daisy that he was considering retiring from office in 1946 after getting “the peace organization well started.”

FDR awoke to a beautiful spring day on Thursday, April 12, but he didn’t feel well, with a headache and stiff neck. Dr. Bruenn rubbed his neck and ordered a hot water bottle to further loosen it up. Early in the afternoon, Roosevelt was posing for his official portrait with Shoumatoff. Daisy remained nearby on a sofa crocheting, until a few minutes before one o’clock. She looked up and saw the president’s head pitch forward, his hands fumbling and his face contorted in pain. She rushed to his side and looked anxiously into his face, “Have you dropped your cigarette?”

His forehead taut and furrowed, he looked at Daisy and said, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.” Daisy grabbed the phone and summoned Dr. Bruenn. Meanwhile, Daisy held his right hand, while Lucy tried to revive him. “I had a distinct feeling that this was the beginning of the end,” she later wrote. Two hours passed; the doctors cleared the room. Dr. Bruenn was on the phone with FDR’s doctor in Washington when the president took his last breath. Daisy looked at her watch. It was 3:35 p.m.

That night, Daisy wrote in her diary: “What this means to me, and to all who knew him personally, is impossible to put into words. What it means to the world, only the future can tell.”

Within an hour of his collapse, Lucy had fled the house: Eleanor was on her way. “We must pack and go,” Lucy yelled at Shoumatoff, appreciating immediately how embarrassing her presence would be if later discovered by Eleanor or the press. She only learned of her lover’s death later when they stopped at a hotel and were told by an operator as they tried to place a call back to Warm Springs. Hearing the news, Lucy “sat motionless and remained utterly silent.”

Adding a final diary entry that night, Daisy mused on the paradoxes of the Roosevelt marriage: “Poor E.R.—I believe she loved him more deeply than she knows herself, and his feeling for her was deep & lasting. The fact that they could not relax together, or play together, is the tragedy of their joint lives.”

Just like the train which carried Lincoln’s casket eighty years earlier, the train returning FDR’s body to Washington was slowed by millions of mourners lining the tracks. Daisy and Polly sat with the casket throughout the ride. Walking into the White House one last time later that night, Daisy mourned, “Every item speaks of him & when the thought crosses one’s mind that he has permanently left them in other hands, it is almost unbearable.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was laid to rest at Springwood, his family home in Hyde Park, on April 15, 1945.

Not too long after that, his daughter Anna happened upon a stack of envelopes tucked into FDR’s stamp box. Inside those envelopes were all his letters from Daisy. Anna asked if Daisy would like to have them back. Daisy thanked her and said yes, adding with her vintage self-effacement that FDR no doubt found it easier to “toss them into the stamp box rather than bother to tear them up & drop them into the waste-paper basket!”

What Daisy probably appreciated more than anyone was how precious the stamp box was to FDR: Wherever he went during his presidency, he brought along the stamp box so he could “work over [his stamp collection] during the evenings.”

Devastated as she was, Daisy resolved to soldier on at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, honoring the memory of the president she revered and the man she adored. She continued to work as the library’s photo archivist for another eighteen years, until she retired in 1963. Archivists and librarians today hold her in high regard for her groundbreaking work on the nation’s first presidential library.

For the next twenty-eight years after her retirement, Daisy lived alone at ramshackle Wilderstein, its original paint still dating all the way back to 1910. She eventually allowed the public to tour the home, even narrating a video to accompany them. When historians came knocking to look for fresh material on the Roosevelt presidency, she dismissed her role as nothing more than his “dog walker.” Asked if she ever kept a diary, she countered with characteristic modesty: “What makes you think I would keep a diary?”

She maintained that ruse until her hundredth year, when she died at home on June 29, 1991.

By keeping her trunkful of letters and diaries stowed away safely beneath her bed, Daisy must have known that some day after her passing, that trove of material would be discovered. She could have destroyed it all as her days dwindled. But—archivist that she was—thankfully she did not.

Perhaps imagining that one day historians would pore through her papers and struggle to understand their friendship, she described it herself in the final entry of her diary—in candid words that must be respected on their own terms:

My friendship with FDR was one of those very rare relationships (outside of marriage), which is so simple, so completely clean and straightforward, that only a person who has experienced it can believe it and understand it. I never felt any self-consciousness or embarrassment, or any inhibitions, when with him. I could say or think what I wanted—He never needed to worry about hurting my feelings—He answered, or did not answer, my questions without my insisting on an answer or without my feelings hurt when he didn’t answer. He knew that I knew there were many things he could not answer.

In the end, it may all be as simple as that: FDR—a lonely man shouldering the burdens of his office at a critical juncture in history—drew solace and strength from Daisy’s steady devotion, loyalty, and discretion. For Daisy, FDR opened the door to his world and made her feel cherished within it.

On May 1, 1945, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley returned by herself to Top Cottage. It was no longer “Our Cottage” on “Our Hill.” Daisy thought of all the hours she had spent there with her beloved “F.” The pain of her loss was enormous, but she found comfort in walking over to Franklin’s grave. It was covered in ivy, fresh roses, pansies, and forget-me-nots, which Daisy had planted herself.

“I think he loves it as it is now, because it has been fixed by the hands that love him.”