WHATEVER EMOTIONAL TURBULENCE ER FELT DURING the heady months preceding the 1932 Democratic convention in Chicago, outwardly she maintained her composure, and seemed as always poised and correct. Few noticed her mood swings, and since she never “bothered” anyone about them, nobody needed to pause from the relentless demands of a political campaign to acknowledge her distress.
There was so much pressing business, so many deals to be made, and so many galling opponents—as well as surprising new enemies to deflect, most notably FDR’s former booster Al Smith.
Lorena Hickok was the first political reporter to focus on the bitter rivalry that had emerged between Al Smith and FDR. Smith, who would always believe he had created FDR, now sought to crush him, and portrayed FDR as a thoroughly ungrateful wretch who had betrayed him. Not only had he not reappointed Moses or Moskowitz, throughout Roosevelt’s gubernatorial years, Smith had been exiled to a meaningless land without power or patronage, a land without consultation or respect. Politics was Smith’s world, the center of all things meaningful and pleasurable. Hick recalled that during his years of exile in “big business” he became “a lonely, embittered old man. The warmth of his greeting, when any of us political reporters would drop in to see him, was almost pathetic.”
ER did not participate in the Smith-Roosevelt conflict, although she “must have been disillusioned and disappointed” when, just before the convention, following a long and apparently unfruitful conversation with FDR, Smith allied himself to the House of Morgan and other conservative political and financial interests. Years later, Hick showed ER “two dents” in the pavement on 65th Street, implanted by Hick’s “two feet, standing out there with the rest of the gang, waiting for Al Smith to come out and tell us what he and your husband had been talking about.” The press was told, “We were talking about our grandchildren.” But it was by then brutally clear that the legacy of FDR’s 1928 and 1930 New York victories was one of the most bitter political rivalries in Democratic Party history, culminating in the divided convention of 1932.
Before the convention, Louis Howe, hoping for a major human-interest story, arranged for Lorena Hickok to tour the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park. Intent on cultivating her support, the Howe publicity machine went all out: She was met at the Poughkeepsie station by a state trooper and driven to the Big House for tea. Hick recalled that during her first visit to Hyde Park she sat in front of an open fire listening to politics and family lore while ER sat on a couch knitting: “I don’t recall that she said much.”
After tea, FDR was carried by two state troopers to his specially equipped car, and he drove her down the steep hill behind the house, where he had coasted as a boy in winter. Proudly he pointed out the stand of virgin timber, the working farm, his Christmas-tree business, and the details of all eleven hundred acres of his and his mother’s estate—including Val-Kill, and the place atop the nearby hill where he later built his own hideaway cottage.
When he showed Hick Val-Kill, he said: “I built that for my Missis. I was my own contractor, and the design was mine, although I did have the help of an architect. It’s supposed to be a reproduction of a Dutch colonial cottage.” FDR seemed to Hick “immensely proud of the cottage,” and she noted that, “set in beautifully landscaped grounds, it really was lovely.” ER, with her friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, “awaited us there.” FDR asked ER to show Hick “through the place.” ER was “cordial and friendly—in an impersonal way—as she always was. We talked about furniture, but I don’t recall anything else she said.”
Indeed, in the four years Lorena Hickok had covered New York State politics for the Associated Press, ER had been far less concerned about the reporter’s presence than Louis Howe or FDR, who had both courted her. ER did once invite Hickok to tea at the 65th Street house when she was first assigned to interview the First Lady of the Empire State in 1928, which surprised Hick: “It was most unusual for a reporter calling for an interview with a woman in Mrs. Roosevelt’s position to be served tea! It had never happened to me before.” “I watched with fascination the graceful way she manipulated the tea things with her long, slender hands. She was wearing a lace-trimmed hostess gown, considerably more becoming than the things I had seen her wearing around headquarters. But the hairnet was still there….”
They talked more about dogs than about politics. Anna’s police dog, Chief, was much like Hick’s police dog, Prinz; and “curled up at Mrs. Roosevelt’s feet was a little black Scotty, named Meggie….” Regarding politics, ER “seemed much more distressed over Governor Smith’s defeat than elated over her husband’s victory….” But ER was “reticent” and her remarks were “guarded.” Hick “felt that she didn’t trust me, cordial as she was in her reception of me.” “I failed to get much news out of her, but I was so impressed with her graciousness and her charm that I ended my story with this sentence: ‘The new mistress of the Executive Mansion in Albany is a very great lady.’”
Still, Hick made no effort to interview ER again. Like most women journalists, who struggled to be taken seriously in the profession, Hick “had a strong aversion” to the “women’s page stuff.” And Hick was proud that, throughout FDR’s years as governor, she was part of his ever-present press entourage when he was in town. “Since I was always the only woman in the group of political writers, I came in for a good deal of good-natured ribbing from him.” Later, ER told her that she was the only woman reporter FDR or Louis Howe knew when Franklin became president. “Women just did not cover men in politics in those days.”
Nevertheless, Hick recalled, “I wanted very much to know Mrs. Roosevelt. But she always held me at arm’s length—and her arms were very long.”
ER did not seem actually to take much notice of Hick until the Chicago convention was under way. Representatives of FDR’s team—including Louis Howe; his campaign manager, Jim Farley; and three of the Roosevelt children, Anna, Franklin, Jr., and James—were in Chicago. FDR, ER, Missy LeHand, Earl Miller and Gus Gennerich, Sam Rosenman, Grace Tully, Elliott, and John waited in Albany. The situation was tense. Al Smith had gone to Chicago determined to stop FDR. With six serious contenders and several favorite sons, nothing was certain. The press corps in Albany had set up shop in the executive garage. Surrounded by typewriters and practically hidden by cigarette and cigar smoke, they were hooked up to Chicago by radio, telephone operators, and telegraph wires. The Roosevelts were cozy in FDR’s study, beside the radio. FDR smoked ceaselessly, and smiled for one and all, while ER knitted. At midnight, she sent out coffee and sandwiches to the press corps. The AP was represented by Hick and Elton Fay of the Albany bureau, who were the last to leave the garage in the morning, after the first deadlocked ballots threatened to destroy Roosevelt’s entire effort.
The Democrats’ two-thirds rule had destroyed the party’s most popular candidates before. Some held it responsible for the Republicans’ twelve-year triumph. Now, although FDR led the majority with 666 1/4 ballots, he needed 770. Al Smith was second with 201 3/4, and Jack Garner of Texas, the popular Speaker of the House, held on to the 90 critical votes of Texas and California. New York’s delegation was split, with 65 1/2 for Smith and 28 1/2 for FDR.
After the first ballot, as the long, grueling hours of 30 June melted into the bleary-eyed morning of 1 July, ER seemed actually to recognize Hick for the first time, and noticed that, after a long night’s work, she was hungry. Hick recalled that as she and Fay left the garage they saw ER “looking very clean and crisp in a light summer dress, getting ready for breakfast on a screened side porch.” As they approached, ER “hurried to the door” and invited them to join her and her young companion, Bobby Baker, Louis Howe’s grandson. “She gave us a good substantial meal—we were both famished.”
But Hick noticed something more:
Impressed as we were by her hospitality and grateful for it, Elton and I were both a little puzzled by her attitude. Not that she wasn’t cordial and solicitous for our comfort, but she seemed rather withdrawn—shut up inside herself. She showed little interest in the night’s proceedings, appeared unwilling to discuss the subject. That was perhaps natural. But there was something else—something I couldn’t define or understand.
“That woman is unhappy about something,” I told Elton as we drove away.
On the afternoon of 1 July, FDR held a press conference. He was “fresh, buoyant, confident, laughing and joking with us even more than usual.” That evening, during the fourth ballot, the reason for his mood became clear. To avoid a deadlocked convention and a successful stop-Roosevelt move, some very swift deals had been made. Jim Farley appealed to Garner’s campaign manager, Sam Rayburn. Joseph Kennedy, a Roosevelt supporter and well-known power broker, contacted William Randolph Hearst to report his impression: The convention choice would be either Newton D. Baker or Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Hearst hated Baker, the most outspoken Wilsonian internationalist. And FDR had at least fudged for years on the League of Nations and the World Court. Hearst had hoped he could get a more malleable compromise candidate, like Maryland’s more conservative Governor Albert Ritchie. But Kennedy insisted: FDR or Baker. Hearst could live with FDR, and Howe telephoned to negotiate the deal: Hearst wanted Texas’s favorite son, John Nance Garner, for vice-president, along with assurances that FDR would never support the League of Nations or the World Court. Howe called FDR with the terms of the deal, and FDR called Hearst. Whatever else ER may have felt that morning, she was certainly “unhappy” about that deal; she never accepted without a struggle FDR’s willingness to sacrifice principles for pragmatism.
That morning, Hearst’s Washington correspondent informed “Cactus Jack” Garner that “the Chief believes nothing can now save the country but for him to throw his votes to Governor Roosevelt.” The message reached Garner at 11:00 A.M., and Garner released his delegates. He would be vice-president; William Gibbs McAdoo would control California patronage and maintain a veto over the decision for secretaries of state and treasury. By 8:00 P.M., the deal was solidified, and the fourth ballot began.
William Gibbs McAdoo asked to speak from the platform—a significant request. The hall quieted as he strode down the long corridor. A hush fell as he boomed over the airwaves of America: “California came here to nominate a president of the United States.” California “did not come here to deadlock this convention, or to engage in another desolating contest like that of 1924…. And so, my friends, California casts forty-four votes for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
The storm broke. Pure pandemonium went on for what seemed like hours as the Democrats shouted themselves into a wild frenzy, to the tune of “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The other delegations fell into line in rapid procession. Except for Smith diehards, it was an enthusiastic landslide for Roosevelt. Against the greatest odds, and in less than twelve hours, the Roosevelt team had pulled out an amazing victory.
MUCH OF THE CREDIT FOR FDR’S VICTORY WOULD ALWAYS GO to Louis Howe. Perhaps his chief contribution in Chicago was his infallible good sense of what worked, what stirred people, what they wanted to hear, to see, to remember. FDR’s convention demonstrations had been lackluster. The mood was vague and unfocused; the speeches were uninspiring or positively dull. The most vigorous noises belonged to Al Smith’s boo-ers. Their hoots and jeers seemed to dominate all thirty thousand seats in the gallery. And they were dedicated to one purpose: anyone but Roosevelt.
Moreover, FDR’s preferred theme song fell flat. His own choice was “Anchors Aweigh.” It drove Howe mad. Throughout the convention, he listened as his radio blasted the doings into his tiny, steamy, crowded room (Room 702, better known as “operations central”). Over and over there was that familiar college-football fight song, “Anchors Aweigh.” Sweating, sick, gasping for breath, flat out on the floor, Howe wheezed into Ed Flynn’s ear: “For God’s sake, tell ‘em to play something else.” But the theme song was important—the banner, the metaphor—and FDR had chosen it. Howe insisted, and introduced the new theme: “Happy Days Are Here Again.” It worked to change the mood, the beat, and the metaphor.
Breaking with all tradition, FDR decided to accept the nomination in person in Chicago, the very next day. Customarily, the candidate had awaited formal notification of his nomination for two months, the amount of time personal travel might take by horse and wagon from a nineteenth-century convention site to the candidate’s country home. But FDR decided that, in the midst of America’s most grievous depression, he would acknowledge the facts of twentieth-century technology: instant communication through radio, telephone, telegraph; rapid transit by airplane. FDR became the first flying candidate.
The press had noticed a new three-motored plane waiting at the Albany airport, and asked him if that was his Chicago transport. The Associated Press reporters Hickok and Fay reported his answer:
“Now, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do…. I’m going to bicycle out to Chicago.
“I’m going to get one of those quinters—you know, five bicycles in a row.
“Father will ride in the first seat and manage the handlebars. Jim will ride the second, then Elliott, then Franklin, Jr. and then John.
“Sam (referring to speech writer and aide, New York’s Supreme Court Justice Samuel I. Rosenman) will follow—on a tricycle.”
If anybody noticed FDR’s omission of his wife’s pedaling position, nobody mentioned it. The entire Albany household flew into mighty headwinds for nine hours so that FDR might personally announce his determination to fight for a new future in the midst of America’s gloomiest malaise. He was greeted with a spontaneous outpouring of celebration, a standing ovation of hope.
Smiling and confident, FDR pledged a bold but balanced crusade against poverty and discontent: “Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.” “We will break foolish traditions and leave it to the Republican leadership, far more skilled in the art, to break promises.” While he warned against radicalism, he also warned against “those who squint at the future with their faces turned to the past.”
THERE WAS A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY. BERNARD Baruch—who originally supported Ritchie, and had even arranged an alliance luncheon between McAdoo and Smith—now pledged $50,000 to the Roosevelt campaign. Wall Street and workers were to greet the sunrise together. FDR’s charisma, and his personal triumph in the face of his own physical adversity, made it all work. His unprecedented flight and his dramatic thirty-minute speech were received with tumultuous enthusiasm. In conclusion, he outlined his political philosophy:
Never before in modern history have the essential differences between the two major parties stood out in such striking contrast as they do today. Republican leaders not only have failed in material things, they have failed in national vision, because in disaster they have held out no hope, they have pointed out no path for the people below to climb back to places of security and of safety in our American life.
Throughout the Nation, men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government of the last years, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.
On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.
I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.
For the American public, that speech signaled a new era. For Roosevelt’s inner circle, it also signaled the end of an old order. It was written by various members of his new advisory team, “the Brain Trust,” and Louis Howe hated it. He too had written a speech, but only the first page of it was used. Feelings about that speech ran so high that years later, ER sought to settle the matter in her memoirs: Columbia University professor “Raymond Moley has stated that he wrote the acceptance speech. I feel sure he was never aware of some of the things that happened in connection with it.” In fact, FDR and Sam Rosenman wrote and rewrote one draft of the team speech in Albany. Columbia professors Rexford G. Tugwell and Adolf A. Berle and FDR’s law partner, Basil (“Doc”) O’Connor, also worked on a version of the speech. Then Howe, contemptuous of all the team drafts, wrote an entirely new speech—confident that his version would be used. But FDR and Sam Rosenman spent most of the nine-hour flight from Albany to Chicago revising and rewriting the speech altogether.
And their revision was the one he read. He included Howe’s first page and some additional paragraphs from Howe’s version. But the “New Deal” was pure Sam Rosenman, written sometime after three in the morning, after the disappointing first ballot. Rosenman went into the kitchen to boil some frankfurters, for himself and the newspaper people in the garage. While off by himself in the small, informal dining room, munching on frankfurters, he wrote almost casually the words that would become the permanent symbol for FDR’s presidency: the call for “bold, persistent experimentation …I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”
Louis Howe, the man most responsible for FDR’s political career, the chief conductor of the preconvention orchestra, now shared his authority and influence with newcomers he neither liked nor respected. Although he personally had chosen Edward Flynn and James Farley, they were strategists—responsible for the votes, the tactics. He had had nothing to do with the formation of the new idea department called the Brain Trust. And that shop was entrusted to Sam Rosenman’s men—the professors, with whom Howe had little in common. They seemed to Howe progressive idealists who knew nothing and cared less about the game, the business, the very stuff of politics. And Howe astounded them with the allies he sought, the tactics he used. They were especially dismayed when he welcomed aboard financial and political conservatives such as Bernard Baruch and Virginia’s Governor Harry Byrd.
Ironically, the moment Howe had fought so hard for was, for him, bittersweet. The long struggle he had waged, the years of strategy and preparation for this presidential moment, was precisely the moment that he was eclipsed, by other needs and other advisers.
ER was also eclipsed. But she had known all along she would be. She had feared and hoped for this moment, and now felt profoundly ambivalent. FDR had never consulted her about his decision, had never even bothered to tell her when he decided to run for the presidency. It was not a secret, precisely. For two years, every speech, every activity had one aim: There had been only one purpose in the Roosevelt household for months. The organization, the speeches, the team were all carefully prepared. But there was no family discussion about the decision. Nor was ER consulted about any issue or subject relating to the campaign.
When FDR actually fulfilled his part of the Hearst-Garner deal and repudiated the League of Nations in a speech to the New York State Grange, and then went further to imply that he would disassociate himself from the World Court, which ER cared so fervently about, she was aghast. For the first time in years, she turned away from Franklin in that almost forgotten cold and silent Griselda mode.
FDR invited ER’s friend Agnes Brown Leach, a philanthropist and an activist they both respected, to lunch, in the hope that she would agree that politics required these pragmatic moments: “Eleanor is very fond of you and you can make peace between us. She hasn’t spoken to me for three days.” But Agnes Brown Leach, a longtime internationalist and peace advocate who had supported both the American Union Against Militarism and the Woman’s Peace Party during World War I, was also appalled: Yours “was a shabby statement,” she noted: “I just don’t feel like having lunch with you today.”
When ER heard of the exchange, she was delighted: “Agnes, you are a sweet, darling girl. I hear you upset Franklin very much. I didn’t know you had it in you.”
Whatever the dimensions of her personal anguish, ER was a team player. She not only rallied publicly, but sought to protect FDR from her deepest misgivings: “I did not want my husband to be president…. It was pure selfishness on my part, and I never mentioned my feelings on the subject to him.” What would she be able to do? How much of her life would she have to abandon? What of her teaching at Todhunter? What of her friends, her weekends, those private, quiet entertainments that meant so much to her? What of her own political work? The Statehouse was one thing. The White House quite another.
ER did not work directly in her husband’s campaign. Nevertheless, wherever she went and whenever she spoke, she made terrific copy. She was at all times and under all circumstances an asset. Whatever her own feelings or forebodings, she never refused to travel with the campaign party when asked, or to speak when called upon. Moreover, she spoke more eloquently than most other public figures regarding the needs and hopes of Americans as they faced the worst economic calamity in the history of the nation. Men as well as women from every walk of life and from every corner of the country responded to her integrity, her earnest commitment to improve the situation for each and every individual. Empathic, spontaneous, and warm, ER inspired a rare outpouring of affection and trust. She, as much as any member of FDR’s team, represented the purpose and the essence of the New Deal.
Eleanor Roosevelt was a new phenomenon in American politics. The AP’s most astute political reporter, Lorena Hickok, recognized that ER was different from other candidates’ wives and merited coverage of her own. In those days candidates’ wives “were supposed, like children, to be seen and not heard.” Hick persuaded the AP to assign a regular journalist to cover ER. She did not seek the job for herself, and actually ”did not want it.” She much preferred her old job, and had fully enjoyed all the perks and privileges that went with her assignment to FDR.
Hick was relieved when the assignment went to Katherine Beebe, the only other woman on the AP’s news staff in New York, and she was allowed to maintain her assignment on FDR’s campaign trail. But Hick soon noticed that Kay Beebe had disappeared from sight. Later, she was told that Beebe had resigned and moved to San Francisco. As a result, throughout most of the campaign Hick remained the only woman reporter. The AP simply assumed that, if an interesting story concerning ER emerged, Hick would report it, in addition to her other tasks.
During September, Hick traveled on FDR’s first whistle-stop campaign train through seventeen Western states, including stops in Chicago, Topeka, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. ER met the train in Arizona, as it headed home. At Prescott, the train pulled off to a siding while the Roosevelts took the day off to visit ER’s friend Isabella Selmes Ferguson Greenway.* The reporters were told it was a social affair: “There would be no news, and we were not invited.” But when the press corps discovered that one reporter had been invited, they were outraged.
Years later, and evidently still peeved, Hick wrote that the exception was “a young man considerably below the professional stature of most of the writers on the train, and he had become friendly with Anna and Jimmy.” He was the Chicago Tribune’s John R. Boettiger, with whom Anna had fallen in love. Boettiger and Anna R. Dall both divorced their respective spouses to marry each other within months of this trip. Hick and the other correspondents “cooling their heels on a railroad siding” considered the incident “probably the worst job in public relations ever inflicted on any candidate.” “I was so indignant that I sought out Mrs. Roosevelt …and told her about it.”
ER surprised Hick by being “more approachable than usual,” and by inviting her to join the expedition to one of the largest cattle ranches in the United States. “The story didn’t amount to much. I saw some cowboys roping steers and trying to stay on bucking broncos, and I ate some barbecued beef. But Mrs. Roosevelt came and sat with me for quite a long time in the car and told me about her girlhood friendship with Isabella Greenway.”
After that conversation, Hick returned to the train—where she was met by an indignant Marvin McIntyre, FDR’s public-relations man. He was as furious at her as she had been at Boettiger. But Hick decided that, since she was the only woman in the press corps, ER had a right to invite her. After all, “Mrs. Roosevelt was a Roosevelt, too, and she also had the right to invite someone if she chose to do so, and she had invited me.” The fact is that if there was a story to get Hick got it.
ER evidently spent that evening talking with Tommy about Hick, and also with Louis Howe. Since they both admired her political sense, ER decided during that trip she could trust Hick, and more regularly invited her company. As the train returned eastward through Colorado and Kansas and into Chicago, Hick’s stories for the AP frequently focused on ER. Mostly she wrote about ER’s stamina: “I recall puffing, panting, and perspiring as I followed her through a cornfield somewhere in Nebraska or Iowa. She moved swiftly, coolly and as easily as though she were accustomed to striding through a cornfield every day of her life. With despair I watched her glide nimbly through a barbed wire fence into an adjacent pasture. When I tried it I got tangled up in the wires, ruined a pair of silk stockings (nylons had not been invented in 1932) and had to be helped.”
ER’s vigor seemed to Hick matched only by her calm and her courage. In Chicago, during a vast torchlight procession around the Loop, highlighted by brass bands, flares, fireworks, and thousands of cheering citizens—who frequently broke through the police lines—a mounted policeman lost control of his horse. The horse reared, and it looked as if the front hoofs would come down in the open car carrying the Roosevelts. Hick, a short distance behind—in another open car, which was carrying several reporters—could see “through the smoke and the flashes of light …Mrs. Roosevelt, sitting perfectly erect, apparently unperturbed!”
The next morning, ER invited Hick to join her. Hick, still “surprised when she allowed me to accompany her those days,” asked ER if she hadn’t been frightened “when that horse reared over you last night?” ER replied that it had all happened so fast, there was no time “to get frightened,” and added: “If I had been frightened, I’d have been frightened for Franklin. I can move quickly, but he can’t.”
Hick’s growing admiration for ER was peppered with a certain amount of amusement. There were things in life that mattered to Hick that ER dismissed: baseball, for example. FDR’s Chicago campaign stop included one of the greatest World Series games in history. The entire family went to see the Yankees and the Chicago Cubs go at it. Not to attend would have been positively un-American. ER sat between her husband and son Jimmy. The place was packed, and “she could not have fallen over even if she had collapsed.” But Hick was amazed to see ER’s head drop ever so slightly forward. Later, Jimmy told Hick that ER had slept through the entire game, even though “Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig each hit two home runs!” Hick got more mileage out of that event than any of her other columns to date; and especially appreciated ER’s ability to laugh at herself and enjoy Hick’s story.
By October, it seemed clear that FDR was going to be elected. The AP then assigned Hick to cover ER on a regular basis. It had, after all, been her idea to begin with. After Hick returned from covering the Republican state convention in Buffalo, she was told by Bill Chapin, the AP’s city editor: “She’s all yours now, Hickok. Have fun!”
Hick felt “diffident” the day she went over to ER’s office to tell her of her new assignment. “It means that I shall have to follow you around all the time, everywhere,” she explained. ER was not thrilled. Hick assumed that Louis Howe and FDR had both prepared her for this eventuality and that they considered the publicity valuable. But ER preferred her privacy. She frowned and sighed, and looked generally disgruntled. Still, she was more resigned than rude to her new reporter-companion, and said: “I’m afraid that you won’t have much to write about. I’ll not be doing anything very interesting. I do realize that it’s your job, of course, and you may go with me whenever I do anything publicly.”
Coincidentally, this conversation occurred on 11 October 1932, ER’s forty-eighth birthday. Which, ER told Hick, partly added to her somewhat unsettled mood: ‘I’m a middle-aged woman. It’s good to be middle-aged. Things don’t matter so much. You don’t take it so hard when things happen to you that you don’t like.”
For weeks Hick kept ER in sight. She went everywhere with her, recorded her every word, noticed every nuance, observed every detail. Very often there was simply no story. Days on end would go by when ER said nothing of significance and lived her life privately, with Hick cooling her heels, waiting for a tidbit outside her office, or outside campaign headquarters, or occasionally in some office at Todhunter. She wondered if her assignment was worth the AP’s money. But her boss, Bill Chapin, was supportive, and when Hick despaired, he’d say, “Stay with it, kid,” and inquire: “How are you fixed for cash?” Running around with ER required loose change: mostly for taxis, trolley cars, buses, trains. Fortunately, ER never made poor copy. Even on dull days, Hick was impressed. On one day without any particular news, Hick wired the AP that there: was no story but, for the record, “THE DAME HAS ENORMOUS DIGNITY. SHE’S A PERSON.“
In her effort to remain herself, ER was confronted by mounting criticism. She traveled by public conveyances. She bought apples from men on street corners. Her clothes were too plain. Her hats looked as if “she had rushed in and bought them while her bus waited for the traffic light to change.” And, her critics explained, she did all of these ordinary things because she was really a publicity hound.
ER considered the wildest attacks against her positively funny. As their friendship developed, Hick was particularly impressed by ER’s sense of humor and her ability to face serious emergencies with the most extraordinary calm. One morning, at breakfast, their conversation was interrupted by ER’s cook, who rushed up from the kitchen in terror. FDR’s valet, Irvin McDuffie, had a drinking problem. Just then he was wildly drunk, and Reynolds, the butler, was “going after him with a carving knife!” Without saying a word, ER arose from the table and went down to the kitchen. When she returned, she sat down wordlessly and resumed her breakfast. Finally, Hick broke the silence:
Hick was equally fascinated by ER’s frugal eating habits. “Unless she is taking some one to lunch—and she likes to take people to lunch—she may usually be found eating her lunch at some drugstore counter.” The first time Hick was invited to ER’s home for a Sunday-night supper, she was surprised by the menu: scrambled eggs with little sausages, cold sliced chicken and cold meats, salad, and dessert. Since the Wilson years in Washington that Sunday-night supper was a tradition, and ER always scrambled the eggs herself, “at the table in a chafing dish.” It was the only cooking ER ever did. Hick considered it odd, and thought that perhaps FDR “liked to watch her do it.”
ER had other frugal habits. She wore formless “ten dollar dresses.” When she traveled alone, she always rode a day coach or, at night, simply a lower berth. “And all this is true,” Hick pointed out, despite the fact that ER really spent “a good deal of money and holds salaried jobs because she needs more than her private income.”
“’I don’t know where it goes, exactly,’ she says with a smile, ‘but I know I have a lot of fun doing things with money.’” Throughout her life, ER gave most of her money away. She spent as little as possible on herself, in order to spend as much as possible on others. ER “likes people, all sorts of people, and loves to have them around. She has intimate friends among people of all ages and all circumstances in life.” And, like her father, she gave every one of them the most thoughtful gifts on every conceivable occasion.
Also, ER liked to entertain. “Every afternoon in the executive mansion at Albany, at Hyde Park, or at the Roosevelt town house in New York, wherever she happens to be, tea is served—a good substantial tea, usually with chocolate cake. Whoever is about is invited in.” Reporters and family members, secretaries and staff, intimate friends, state troopers, distinguished guests, visiting royalty. No one was excluded.
Hick found ER interesting when she talked politics. And interesting when she refused to talk politics. But “the candidate’s wife who doesn’t talk politics” had an odd way of talking politics most of the time. In 1932, she worked for the state ticket, and campaigned arduously for Herbert Lehman’s race for governor. Wherever she spoke, ER took the opportunity to defend FDR’s record: Only the Democrats cared about the poor in this long moment of crisis.
At one campaign dinner in Syracuse, for example, ER assailed Lehman’s opponent, Colonel William J. Donovan.* Like all Republicans, she chided, he continually “grieved over extravagance” in government. But it was really they who were extravagant; their economies were foolhardy, useless, and cruel. They were willing to cut $21 million out of the Department of Public Works, 80 percent of which went to pay for labor. Economy, ER explained, “can be made to appear a very wonderful thing. And yet it can do a great deal of harm.” The Republicans were willing to fire “thousands of young engineers, draughtsmen, and laborers” employed in public works, and were then willing to appropriate “$126,774,000 for extras over and above the governor’s budget for running the state,” including many millions for additional public relief. ER asked: “Now which would have been better—to pay that money out in salaries for labor on public works, or to pay it in unemployment relief.” Their so-called economy, ER concluded, created “a situation far more serious than before, with people far more desperate than they have been up to now.” “If you and I were hungry, I doubt whether we’d be so patient as these people have been so far.”
On 27 October, on the way to Syracuse, ER took time off from the campaign to visit Earl Miller and his new wife, Ruth Taylor Bellinger, who was a cousin of his first wife’s. They were married at Hyde Park on 8 September 1932, amid a great deal of fanfare, with the Roosevelt children in attendance. Anna Roosevelt Dall was matron of honor; Elliott Roosevelt was best man. The Roosevelts gave them “a piece of land at Hyde Park.”
Earl Miller’s second marriage was almost immediately in trouble. Her parents arranged an annulment, in November 1933, on the grounds that Ruth “was under 17 when married and did not have their consent.”
ER was dismayed and wrote Nancy Cook:
Things have come to a head & Ruth has told him she is going out with another boy & having a good time & felt she gave up too much in marrying so she wants 1/2 of everything, an annulment! of her marriage & $50 a month for 3 years. Isn’t it strange to be so calmly mercenary? She asked him after having told him this, for her birthday present ahead of time as she wanted to buy a jewelled sorority pin & she took $25 from him! She also wishes to be friends & feel she can depend on him & retain all his friends!
Earl intended to set up his own household immediately, and ER asked Nancy Cook to “order the mattress & springs & 2 pillows for Earl,” and additional furniture from their Val-Kill factory: “He wants the simplest possible bookcase to go with his furniture 5 ft high 24 in. wide & 9 inches deep & has his desk & chair. I’ll give him those things for Xmas & birthday so send the bill to me!”
The Roosevelts’ adult children Anna and Elliott were also in the throes of marriage crises between 1932 and 1933. But discussions of divorce, however fiercely they swirled around the family table, were kept out of the press. To the extent that Lorena Hickok now had privileged information, she ignored it. Daily she let the scoops go, and emphasized instead ER’s political strengths, determined vision, and amazing stamina.
On 30 October, Hick reported on ER’s five-day journey into the center of New York. Hick was with her every mile of the way, and she counted “50 hours on trains since she left.” Hick’s report of one day during their New York State trip chronicled ER’s feats of endurance: She arose “at 5:45, put in the forenoon on a train between Binghamton and Albany and the afternoon on another train between Albany and Boston.” She “spent the evening with her husband’s secretary [Missy LeHand] whose mother had died that day.” She arrived “at the hotel after 11, gave an interview, posed for photographs, ate her dinner, sent off a dozen telegrams, talked on the telephone with the Governor in Albany, and finally got to bed well after 1 A.M.“
She is never hurried, apparently never harassed, and is seldom, her secretary says, even slightly irritable.
“She doesn’t ever really get cross,” the Secretary, Miss Malvina Thompson, who has been with her 10 years, said. “The only thing I notice is that sometimes if she’s bothered about something—or perhaps tired—she gets sort of remote. But she always has time to talk to people and listen to them.”
The next day, ER drove herself twenty miles through “a misty rain” in a borrowed roadster, having waved aside a “state trooper escort,” and took a “brisk walk through a cow pasture.” Hick reported that she drove up a little country road beside the Saint Lawrence River, stopped the car, and beckoned Hick: “‘Come along. I want to show you something.’ Striding swiftly down through a cow pasture—while the cows stared at her mistrustfully—she led the way to Little Sou Rapids, explaining that here was to be a part of the international water power project,” and a canal to connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes.
Hick’s effort to keep up with ER during one of her country excursions, whether for politics or pleasure, was to become a subtheme in their rapidly unfolding friendship—and in Hick’s stories about her. In another column, Hick reported:
Much of the time she walks with a long, swinging stride. She does most of her walking alone. Even when she is wearing high heels it is difficult to keep up with her. Her friends say that at Hyde Park, when she puts on a pair of golf shoes and starts off, it is practically impossible.
She likes to go plaices alone and hates being recognized. Very often she is not. While she was on the western campaign trip with the Governor a few weeks ago, she spent a whole morning going about Chicago accompanied only by a couple of friends, and not a soul recognized her, although the night before she had ridden in a car behind her husband in one of the biggest parades the loop ever saw.
She is, to use the expression of one of her friends, “a whirlwind.” She gets along perfectly on five or six hours’ sleep a night and apparently does not know the meaning of the word “fatigue.”
During the last weeks of the campaign, the relationship between ER and Hick was transformed from that of a journalist with her subject to an intimate friendship. The very first note from ER to Hick that has survived is dated 26 October 1932. Formally addressed to “Dear Miss Hickok,” it is an invitation to “drive down together” to New York. “Will you come up for breakfast at 8:30 anyway.” It was signed “Affectionately, Eleanor Roosevelt.”
On 30 October, when ER accompanied Missy LeHand to her mother’s funeral, Hick traveled with them. As she reported:
There was only one drawing room available on the train that night, and Mrs. Roosevelt gave that to Missy. She and I found two lower berths in the car outside. Early in the morning the train stopped at a station….
When I had finished dressing…, I found Mrs. Roosevelt seated, her berth made up for the day, and set out on Pullman towels on the seat opposite her were cardboard containers filled with coffee and orange juice and some rolls.
She had remembered that there was no diner on the train and had got up in time to get dressed and buy them at the station.
“I thought you’d like some breakfast,” she explained.
Hick did not go to the funeral. But ER “looked me up at the restaurant where I was having lunch. She had borrowed an automobile and asked if I’d like to go for a drive.” That was when ER took Hick to see the projected Saint Lawrence Seaway. ER commented that she did not “see so many Democratic posters around…. Franklin is going to be dreadfully disappointed if he loses this election. For awhile he won’t know what to do with himself.”
That night, a stormy, rainy night, there was only one drawing room available on their return home.
All the berths were filled. During the Depression, the railroads ran only as many cars as were needed, and they were usually filled.
To my embarrassment, Mrs. Roosevelt insisted on giving me the lower berth and taking for herself the long, narrow couch on the other side of the drawing room.
“I’m longer than you are,” she said when I protested.
“And,” she added with a smile, “not quite so broad!”
It was early, neither of us was sleepy, and so we started talking. It was then that she told me that I could thank Tommy for the fact that she had accepted me and permitted me to follow her about….
“It was hard for me at first. I was brought up by a very strict grandmother, who thought no lady should ever have stories written about her, except in the society columns.
“To be frank with you, I don’t like being interviewed. And that applied especially to you. For Franklin used to tease me about you. He’d say: ‘You’d better watch out for that Hickok woman. She’s smart.’ He wasn’t criticizing you in any way—he likes you. He was only teasing me.”
During that trip home, as heavy rains streamed across the window, ER told Hick her life story. She told of her “odd sort of childhood”; of her school days with Marie Souvestre, “my first taste of freedom. Not that I was at all rebellious…. But it did arouse my interest. I wanted to know people—all kinds of people.” She told of her work at the Rivington Street Settlement, the early years of her marriage, the nurse she had for all her children—who taught her so much about nursing. (“From her I learned what a lot of fun work could be.”) ER also detailed the first years in Albany, when the men would talk and smoke “under the nursery, until finally the smoke got up into the nursery, and I had to move the children. I used to sit and listen by the hour, fascinated. But it never occurred to me to enter into it.” She told of the years in Washington, when for four years ER did more entertaining and calling than any other woman in town. And then came the war—”my emancipations and my education.” When FDR went to Europe during the summer of 1918, ER sent the children to their grandmother in Hyde Park and lived alone in Washington with one servant. “After that—well, you can see what would happen, can’t you? When we first came back to New York in 1921 I was pretty restless….”
ER flew by the postwar years, ending with her entrance into women’s politics through the League of Women Voters, “and the rest—I think you know,” she concluded.
Then ER “smiled and picked up a book.” Rather firmly ending the conversation, she said: “I think I had better get to work on next Monday’s History. If the teacher is not well prepared, you know, the children very quickly catch on.”
Hick asked if she might use some of what ER told her; “she said softly, ‘If you like. I trust you.’”
More than a political interview, that evening on the train was the beginning of the most intimate friendship of their adult years. ER had by then shared her life story with a very select number of friends, each of whom was special to her and occupied a specific place in her heart. To tell of her childhood had become for ER an almost routine prelude to deep affection and friendship. Perhaps, in the telling of her early life, she freed herself to move beyond that constrained emotional place, and into a new relationship. Occasionally, as with Frances Perkins, she told her life story to somebody who for one or another reason did not become close. But until she wrote her autobiography, she never told it casually or to strangers. And those who became her intimate friends understood the trust and the tenderness expected in return. That had been the pattern with Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, Louis Howe, Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, with Earl Miller, and now with Lorena Hickok.
Shortly after their train ride to New York, Hick was given a major scoop by George Akerson, one of her good friends from the Minneapolis Tribune, who now handled publicity for the Republican National Committee: ER’s Aunt Edith, Uncle Theodore’s widow, was to introduce President Hoover that night. Hick was stunned. Edith Roosevelt had never before spoken at any political event. But she had been moved to action when she received congratulatory telegrams regarding the nomination “of her son Franklin.” Her appearance that evening “was a big secret,” recalled Hick. No other reporter had been told. An extraordinary murmur passed through the crowd as TR’s widow, dressed entirely in black, emerged out of more than a decade of seclusion and walked onto the rostrum at Madison Square Garden. “Unforgettably dramatic” as she “stood there before that wildly cheering audience, gesturing with her black-gloved hands,” she completely overshadowed President Hoover.
Hick left immediately after Edith Roosevelt’s speech to meet ER, who had arranged to pick her up in a taxi near the Garden and take her to a meeting. But Hick had to return to the AP office to write her story. As she got into the cab, she said:
“What do you suppose your Aunt Edith did tonight?”
Mrs. Roosevelt looked surprised and shook her head.
“I can’t imagine,” she said.
“Well,” I told her, “she introduced Herbert Hoover at Madison Square Garden!”
“How very interesting,” ER said quietly.
And that was all she said.
ER became more and more reliant on Hick’s presence in her life. She welcomed Hick’s shrewd advice, comforting directness, and sharp political insights. She was charmed by her pungent and often startling sense of humor, her quick and robust capacity for fun. Hick became a fixture in the Roosevelt family circle, and FDR simply took her presence for granted.
On the night before the election, ER accompanied FDR to a rally in Poughkeepsie that ended toward midnight. After his speech, ER announced that she intended to drive to New York to teach as usual the next morning. FDR objected. It was late, and rainy; the roads were wet and slippery. He was afraid that if she drove alone she might get drowsy, as she sometimes did down those winding and dangerous blacktop roads.
Finally, he agreed, on the condition that she “take Hick along to keep you awake.” Pleased to be alone with Hick, ER defended and preserved the moment: That night they became aware that other press syndicates had finally hired women to cover ER. As they approached the car, a reporter asked to go along. ER refused. Her blue convertible had room only for two. “‘Can’t I ride in the rumble seat,’” she persisted. ER shook her head no and quickly took off, “leaving the woman standing in the parking lot.”
Astounded by ER’s determined getaway, and her willingness even to seem rude, Hick told ER that she wasn’t “‘going to be able to do that sort of thing’” in the future. “‘That girl is furious, and I can’t say I blame her.’” ER retorted, “‘She’d only get soaked to the skin. I couldn’t crowd her in here with us. It’s not a very good night for driving, and I’ll need elbow room. And besides what makes you so sure Franklin is going to be elected?’”
ER RETURNED TO HYDE PARK AFTER HER MORNING CLASSES in time to vote; then everybody went back down to New York for the campaign party at the Biltmore Hotel, where the returns were monitored by special telegraph, telephone, and radio hookups connected to a big board in the grand ballroom. Before the party, ER hosted a buffet supper for relatives, friends, and several newspaper people at 65th Street.
ER, resplendent in a flowing white chiffon gown, greeted Hick at the door, “and when I came in, she kissed me and said softly: ‘It’s good to have you around tonight, Hick.’”
That night’s party was an ordeal for ER. Hick, who joined the other reporters in the jubilant crowd, occasionally caught a glimpse of ER. “She was smiling and gracious as she greeted people,” but whenever she was alone her expression became sober, thoughtful, “a little sad,” Hick thought. During her first press conference as the prospective First Lady, she held her head very high. It was a gesture Hick had already learned to suspect. “Through it all,” Hick reported, “she kept smiling, but once she looked directly at me. She shook her head, ever so slightly, and the expression in her eyes was miserable.” It was a mob scene, and Hick was “reminded of a fox, surrounded by a pack of baying hounds”—including Hick. “But she carried it off as best she could—and that was good enough.”
In any case, the election results overshadowed all other realities. A vast majority of the American electorate voted for the man who declared: “Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook.” On 8 November 1932, FDR carried forty-two states. Only Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Pennsylvania voted Republican. FDR’s unprecedented Democratic victory was enhanced by a congressional sweep. The Senate was now Democratic by 59 to 37, the House of Representatives by 312 to 123.
The day after the election, ER invited Hick to go with her to Todhunter, where she attended ER’s current-events class for senior girls. The discussion was informal and relaxed, although quite spirited on such issues as “What makes people commit suicide?” and the “Need for brains and ambition” when in pursuit of a career. The election was not mentioned until the class ended. One student said: “We think it’s grand to have the wife of the president for our teacher.” But ER protested: “You mustn’t think of me that way.”
ER was adamant: There was not going to be any “First Lady” after 4 March; there was “just going to be plain, ordinary Mrs. Roosevelt.” She refused secret-service protection, and sent all uniformed protectors away whenever they appeared to escort her: “Nobody is going to hurt me. I’m not important enough.” And she would not, under any circumstances, consent to “being trailed around that way.”
ER told Hick, for publication, that she hated the gossip that went about, stirred by people who claimed to know, that “my ambition for myself drove him on—even that I had some such idea in the back of my mind when I married him. I never wanted to be a President’s wife, and I don’t want it now. You don’t quite believe me, do you? Very likely no one would—except possibly some woman who had had the job.” ER was “sincerely glad” for FDR, but as for herself: “Now I shall start to work out my own salvation.” She understood the difficulties. “I know what Washington is like. I’ve lived there. I shall doubtless be criticized. But I can’t help it.”
Hick, of course, did believe ER’s protests. She also shared her misgivings about giving up her own work, work that she loved above all. ER would continue as the editor of a new magazine of advice for mothers called Babies—Just Babies, but she announced her intention to discontinue her work at Todhunter:
I wonder if you have any idea how I hate to do it. I’ve liked it more than anything else I’ve ever done. But it’s got to go.
For one thing, it might not be fair to the pupils…. I realize that my job in the White House will make heavier demands than my job in the Executive Mansion ever made.
I’m going to keep my interest in the school, though. I hope to get up here every two or three weeks and meet and talk with the parents, as I’ve always done. And perhaps occasionally some of the girls can come down to see me in Washington….*
Until the inauguration, Hick’s Associated Press columns on ER were syndicated throughout the United States on a regular basis. ER and Hick fully shared in the creation of ER’s new press image. Together they decided on the emphases and the public persona, and co-authored some of the myths that emerged during the campaign of 1932 and were to be repeated forever after. Inevitably, some of the emphases and press accounts were not ER’s or Hick’s.
Individual newspapers decided which of Hick’s columns to use, and which of her words to feature. Some newspapers, including The New York Times, chose to delete all the passages in Hick’s column on ER’s ancestry and childhood that described her wealthy and aristocratic forebears. Hick began with “her great-great-great grandfather, who administered the oath of office to George Washington …Chancellor Robert R. Livingston.” And then she went three generations back to “another Robert Livingston, founder of one of America’s first great families, who held by royal grant from George I of England 163,000 acres of land …along the Hudson river between Albany and Pough-keepsie and extending east to the Massachusetts and Connecticut boundaries.” And back again “among the Livingston kinsfolk,” “Mary Livingston, who went to France as lady-in-waiting to the beautiful young Mary Stuart….”
Instead, many newspapers emphasized only the poor-little-rich-girl aspect of ER’s heritage, “an orphan growing up in the home of her mother’s people;” and The New York Times headlined her “Girlhood Path at Tivoli…. Carrying Cane Under Arms to Keep Shoulders Straight.”
But, whatever individual newspapers did to Hick’s stories, together she and ER agreed on the presentation and created several specific images: the perfect wife, who did everything she did for her husband and children; a woman who was herself unconcerned about politics and whose interests were entirely circumscribed and dictated by her husband’s needs and interests. For example, Hick reported that ER “likes to do things for herself. She built a cottage near the furniture factory [at Val-Kill] in order that the children might learn to live without servants. ‘The little boys,’ she says, ‘used to fight Sunday mornings over who was going to make the cocoa.’”
ER was perfectly willing to craft a public image appropriate to the demands of her new position. She was prepared to give up some of the work that most satisfied her. But she was unwilling to be influenced by the kind of criticism that called upon her to dissolve entirely into the background of First-Ladyhood. In February 1933, she directly addressed the growing opposition to her public activities. After 4 March, she would “curtail somewhat her activities.” But not because of the criticism. “What some people do not seem to understand is that I am really not doing anything that I haven’t done for a long time. It’s only Franklin’s position that has brought them to the attention of people.” In addition to Todhunter, ER would give up her radio programs, which required her to endorse products—programs that were paid for by commercials. She also returned several writing contracts, and announced that she would in the future “make very few speeches.” Moreover, she would not lend her “name to anything that might be used for advertising promotion.” She supposed she had made some mistakes, “but saw no reason why I should make a fuss about it.” And she would continue to write, but not “about politics or Franklin’s position. I like to write, and I’ve done a good deal of it in the last few years,” she explained. “It may be true that Franklin’s name does help to sell my articles. It is also true that I wrote and sold magazine articles before that element entered in. I’ve had rejection slips in my day—and I expect to have more. I don’t mind them.”
WHATEVER COMPROMISES ER WAS WILLING TO MAKE REGARDing her public life, she was unwilling to give up her friends, and the privacy she needed in order to live the kind of life she had so carefully crafted. There would be no secret service, and no intrusive press detail. Almost immediately after the election, however, ER was made aware of the kind of struggle required if she was to live her life unobserved and unattended.
Within days after the election, ER made a date to dine with Hick at her apartment. She took an early train from Albany on Sunday evening, and to Hick’s surprise arrived late “and very much annoyed.” A young woman reporter, assigned to cover the First Lady-elect, had been trailing her everywhere: hanging out in front of the executive mansion, waiting for her in train stations, dogging ER’s every step. On this particular Sunday, she had waited for ER in the Albany station and followed her onto the train. But the train was crowded, so she waited until ER got off at Grand Central and then cornered her. According to Hick, the following conversation ensued:
Girl reporter: “Where are you going, Mrs. Roosevelt?”
Mrs. Roosevelt: “I’m dining with a friend.”
Girl reporter: “Who is your friend?”
Mrs. Roosevelt: “I’m sorry, but I cannot tell you. It’s a purely private and personal engagement.”
Girl reporter: “May I follow you and wait outside?”
Mrs. Roosevelt, emphatically: “You may not! I told you it’s a private, personal dinner engagement. There will be no story about it.”
Girl reporter: “But I have to follow you, Mrs. Roosevelt.”
Mrs. Roosevelt, beginning to get really annoyed: “I’m sorry, but you cannot follow me. If you insist, I shall spend the rest of the evening right here in the station. But I am not going to be followed—by you or anybody else.”
The reporter finally gave up. And ER taxied to Hick’s apartment. Hick wondered why ER did not simply confide in her: “It might have satisfied her, and she’d have left you alone.” ER took Hick’s advice, and reporters generally honored her confidences.
Still, both Hick and ER experienced several wild times when they tried to remain anonymous. The first time Hick met FDR’s Aunt Kassie was, for example, a positive ordeal. Invited to 65th Street for lunch, Hick was casually seated next to “an elderly woman” whom ER introduced only as Mrs. Collier, and who was much annoyed at the excessive publicity ER seemed to attract. Hick, “chief perpetrator of the crime,” did not confess her identity, but tried to explain that it was “very difficult” for one in ER’s position “to avoid publicity.”
“Nonsense!” Mrs. Collier exploded. “I have never talked to a newspaper reporter in my life!”
Hick “nearly choked” over her soup, and spent the rest of the lunch “in mortal terror lest, in the general conversation, it might come out that I was [the] reporter.”
FDR “roared with laughter” over the incident, and for weeks thereafter repeatedly asked Hick: “Have you seen my Aunt Kassie again? Has she found out about you?”
* Bob Ferguson had died in 1927, and Isabella married Jack Greenway—a family friend and also a former Rough Rider. See notes, page 560.
*During World War II, FDR appointed “Wild Bill” Donovan to head the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA.
* Subsequently, ER worked out a schedule that allowed her to continue teaching at Todhunter, and she retained a close connection with her school, at least until 1936.