At dinner, if Eleanor was away, Missy presided as the president’s hostess. “She always did it the right way,” the president’s cousin Margaret Suckley recalled. “She had great tact. She knew when to escort people in, how to seat a table, and how to keep the conversation going with charm and ease. She was very gracious in handling people.” She could get along with anybody, her friend Barbara Curtis remarked, from the king and queen to the butlers and the maids. “Without making a point of it, she had absorbed certain upper-class mannerisms over time.”
Though Missy would often have only minutes to change from her secretarial attire to her evening clothes, she took great pride in her appearance. Her closet was filled with elegant clothes, including, one of her relatives recalled, a few fabulous nightgowns which she liked to wear as evening gowns. “Missy could be the most glamorous woman in the room,” Lillian Parks observed, “her chandelier earrings swaying.”
But to list all the things Missy did, numerous as they were, is to circumscribe her value in the White House. “Missy was an operator,” journalist Eliot Janeway observed. “She was on terms of absolute equality with all the figures she dealt with—[press secretary] Steve Early, [appointments secretary] Marvin Mclntyre, [adviser] Sam Rosenman, [speechwriter] Robert Sherwood.” Because her judgment of people was so “instinctively sound,” the president valued her reactions on everything. Her shrewd observation that a sarcastic passage in a letter “didn’t sound like him” smoothed many a ruffled temper. “She was one of the few people who could say ‘No’ to the President and say it in a way he could take,” Rosenman said.
During the 1936 campaign, a turgid speech on finance had been prepared for the president to deliver at Forbes Field. With the speechwriters present, the president started reading the draft aloud. Before he reached the end of the second page, Missy stood up and announced: “By this time the bleachers are empty and the folks are beginning to walk out of the grandstand.” As she walked out of the room, everyone burst into laughter. The draft was discarded.
Over the years, Eleanor had come to terms with Missy’s primacy in Franklin’s working life. “For some reason,” Anna’s son Curtis Roosevelt mused, “perhaps because Missy came from a lower social class, Eleanor was not threatened by her the way she was with Lucy Mercer.”
At the same time, Eleanor knew that, without Missy to attend to Franklin’s personal needs, the independent life she had labored to create for herself would be impossible to maintain. “Missy alleviated Mother’s guilt,” Elliott Roosevelt observed; “knowing Missy was always there allowed Mother to come and go as she pleased without worrying about Father or feeling she was neglecting her wifely duties.”
For her part, Missy was ever mindful of the importance of staying close to Eleanor. “This is where Missy was a very, very astute little gal,” Eleanor’s daughter, Anna, later said. “Dearest ER,” Missy wrote Eleanor one Christmas in the mid-1930s, “I have had such a happy year and I hope you know how very much I appreciate being with you—not because of the White House—but because I’m with you. I love you so much. I never can tell you how very much.”
Still, there were moments of annoyance and resentment on both sides of this tangled relationship. Nor could it have been otherwise, since both women loved the same man. When Doris Fleeson wrote a long and flattering piece on Missy for The Saturday Evening Post which revealed the centrality of Missy’s position in the White House, Eleanor resolutely refused to acknowledge that Missy had the slightest influence on the president politically. Only if Eleanor could tell herself that Missy simply did unquestioningly what the president asked her to do, could she accept Missy’s role without feeling it intruded on her own role as the president’s number-one adviser.
The question whether Missy’s love for the president was a physical one has been the subject of many conversations within the circle of Roosevelt’s family and friends, and opinion varies widely.
Though physicians examining Roosevelt after his polio attack specifically noted that he had not been rendered impotent by the disease, his son Jimmy believed that “it would have been difficult for him to function sexually after he became crippled,” since the sensation in his lower body was “extremely limited.” Further, Jimmy argued, he would have been “too embarrassed” to have sex, too vulnerable to humiliation.
Elliott disagreed with his brother’s assessment. In a co-authored book written long after both his parents were dead, he alleged that Missy and his father had been lovers. “Everyone in the closely knit inner circle of father’s friends accepted it as a matter of course. I remember being only mildly stirred to see him with Missy on his lap as he sat in a wicker chair in the main stateroom [of the Larooco] holding her in his sun-browned arms, whose clasp we children knew so well . . . . He made no attempt to conceal his feelings about Missy.” From that point on, Elliott claimed, “it was no great shock to discover that Missy shared a familiar life in all its aspects with father.”
“I suppose father had a romance of sorts with Missy,” Jimmy countered in his own book five years later, “and I suppose you could say they came to love one another but it was not a physical love . . . . Elliott makes a lot of Missy being seen entering or leaving father’s room in her nightclothes but was she supposed to dress to the teeth every time she was summoned at midnight? This had become her home, too and . . . none of us thought anything about it at the time. Besides,” Jimmy added, “if it had been a physical love, I believe mother would have known—she was very intuitive, you know—and had she thought it was, she would never have accepted the situation as fully as she did. The whole thing was pretty confusing and pretty complex.”
Beneath the complexity, however, it is absolutely clear that Franklin was the love of Missy’s life, and that he adored her and depended on her for affection and support as well as for work. In Missy’s White House papers at the FDR Library, there is preserved a sweet note that captures the warmth and pleasure in their relationship. “From FDR to MAL: ‘Can I dine with you? Or will you dine with me?’”
Despite these good times, Missy was ready for a change after eight years in Washington. “I think by 1940 Missy was tired of sharing the president with so many people,” a friend observed. At Hyde Park, an ideal existence stretched before her, closer in kind to the happy days on the Larooco. Only a few months earlier, it had all seemed possible, but now everything seemed to be pointing to another term in the White House.
The presidential party returned to the White House late Sunday afternoon. The convention was scheduled to open the following day, but the heat in Washington that evening was so oppressive that it was impossible to work. Even the president, who rarely seemed to mind the heat, was so uncomfortable that he decided to watch a movie and retire early, postponing the final editing of his convention statement until morning.
• • •
While her husband sweltered in the heat of the capital, Eleanor was spending the week at Val-Kill, the fieldstone cottage Franklin had built for her on the grounds of the Hyde Park estate, enjoying “the most delightful July weather” she could ever remember, “warm enough in the sun to enjoy drying off after a swim, but cool enough so that even a good walk is not too exhausting.”
It was a week Eleanor would long remember, for it marked the beginning of her intimate friendship with Joe Lash, a friendship that would endure until the end of her life, “as close a relationship as I ever knew Mother to have,” Eleanor’s daughter, Anna, observed. Though they had known each other for six months, the happy days they spent together that week in July, sitting for hours by the pool with their legs dangling in the water, walking through the woods in the late afternoons, and talking on the porch until long past midnight, put their friendship in a new light. From that moment on, the thirty-year-old Lash, young enough to be her son, became part of every plan Eleanor made for the future.
An intense, moody intellectual with brown eyes and black hair, Lash had been swept up by the revolutionary fervor of the 1930s. While still at
City College, he had joined the Socialist Party. After receiving a graduate degree in English at Columbia, he had served as national secretary of the American Student Union, a militant popular-front organization committed to radical change in the economic and social order.
Eleanor first met the young student leader in November 1939, when he was called upon to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “It was a confusing time for Joe,” his college friend Lewis Feuer recalled. On the one hand, he was still committed to the radical program of change which united liberals, socialists, and communists in the popular front. But with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, which gave Hitler a green light to invade Poland, he had lost his fervor for the popular front and had become increasingly disenchanted with his communist colleagues in the American Student Union, who were, he believed, mindlessly following the Soviet line in calling for an isolationist policy at home. The conflict in loyalties and the ideological crosscurrents revealed in his statement to the committee struck a responsive chord in Eleanor, who sat through the entire proceedings to assure the young people of her moral support. When the testimony was completed, she invited Lash and five of his friends back to the White House for dinner.
“It is funny how quickly one knows about people,” Eleanor wrote Lash the following November. “I think I knew we were going to be friends . . . when I looked across the table at you about a year ago!” In the months that followed the hearing, Eleanor kept in touch with Lash, who resigned his position at the American Student Union in early 1940 and was trying unsuccessfully to find another job. “Joe was pretty vulnerable at that point in his life,” Feuer recalled. “For ten years he had been a leader in the student movement and now, even though he believed he had done the right thing, he was isolated from his friends and colleagues.”
Drifting aimlessly during the spring of 1940, Lash had trouble understanding why someone as powerful and strong as Eleanor would claim a special kinship with him. He recognized they were both fighting for the same goals, for a better order of things to emerge after the war. He shared the belief that the struggle for freedom must be carried on at home as well as abroad, but he could not imagine, in his depressed state, why she enjoyed having him around so much.
But as Eleanor opened up her heart to him that July week at Val-Kill, and shared with him the story of her own private melancholy and the deep convictions of inadequacy she had lived with all her life, Lash came to understand that it was precisely because he was having difficulty that she was drawn to him. “Perhaps . . . my miseries reminded her of her own when she was young. Insecurity, shyness, lack of social grace, she had had to conquer them all and helping someone she cared about do the same filled a deep unquenchable longing to feel needed and useful. Her children had grown up and moved away. The President was immersed in public affairs. She had a compelling need to have people who were close, who in a sense were hers and upon whom she could lavish help, attention, tenderness. Without such friends, she feared she would dry up and die.”
There was a simplicity to the days at Val-Kill that Lash found delightful. When he arrived on Sunday, Eleanor met him at the train station in her riding habit. The management of the household was much less formal than the regime at the Big House. “There wasn’t a lampshade that wasn’t askew,” one guest remembered, “and nobody cared if the cups and plates matched.” What mattered was the cheerful atmosphere that pervaded every room of the only real home Eleanor had ever known. In the living room by the fire, she finally had a chair of her own, surrounded by a sofa, a set of easy chairs, a piano, and little tables covered with family photographs.
After an informal lunch served family-style, as all meals in the cottage were served, Eleanor led Joe outside for an afternoon swim in the big pool that stood to the left of the cottage, flanked by flowers and surrounded by lawn. At poolside they were joined by Eleanor’s friend and former bodyguard from the Albany days, the handsome state trooper Earl Miller, and his fiancée, Simone von Haven.
After dinner, Eleanor and Joe sat together on the porch in the gathering dark and talked till midnight. Had Joe been close to his father? Eleanor wanted to know. The answer was no. His parents were Russian Jews who had ended up in New York City, in a small grocery store in Morningside Heights which kept them so busy that there was little time for family life. Joe was only nine when his father died. She talked with him about philosophy and his plans for the future. She gave him advice. Here was a perceptive and intelligent young man with whom it was easy and pleasant to talk, a sympathetic soul.
In the early days of her marriage, Eleanor had come to understand how absolutely Franklin guarded his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Sensing this, she had gradually retreated from intimacy. With Lash, however, she felt free to expose her own vulnerabilities. Indeed, it seemed, at times, as if Eleanor were driven to tell her new friend the entire list of her inadequacies, describing in embarrassing detail the stories of her anguished past, sharing with him the terrors of the year she came out into society and had to attend all the balls, admitting that she had never felt comfortable in the Big House and that Mrs. James still did not approve of her public activities, on the grounds that she was not doing for Franklin what a wife ought to be doing.
Clearly, the young intellectual filled an emotional need in Eleanor’s life. “She was entranced by discussing ideas without worrying about political consequences,” Lewis Feuer suggested. “Joe Lash had a strong streak of idealism and a kind of romantic melancholy which she adored. I believe she sort of fell in love with him that summer and began to feel like a young woman again.” In a letter written to Joe not long after convention week, Eleanor said: “I’d like you to feel you had a right to my love & interest & that my home was always yours when you needed it or anything else which I have . . . .”
For his part, Lash loved Eleanor, needed her, and idealized her as mentor, friend, and soul mate. “She personifies my belief and faith in the possibility of the social democratic way instead of the communist,” he wrote in his diary. “At times there is a haunting beauty about her expression and profile,” he observed. “Very much like the picture of her mother that adorns the hall.” During one conversation, Lash hazarded that a hundred years from then her personal imprint on the nation would be as great as the president’s. “Nonsense,” Eleanor replied laughingly, “the function of women is to ease things along; smooth them over.”
• • •
So it was that the president and his wife were hundreds of miles apart as the delegates assembled in Chicago’s sprawling stadium on Monday, July 15. At the White House that evening, Missy played hostess in Eleanor’s absence as the president and a small group of guests gathered in the upstairs study to listen to the live radio broadcast of Speaker Bankhead’s opening address. At Val-Kill, Eleanor was similarly occupied in her own study, huddled by her radio with Tommy and Joe Lash by her side.
The mood at the convention, commentators noticed, was “strangely subdued.” The delegates, so lively and expansive only four years before, had become irritable at the president’s refusal to declare himself. They were worried about the popularity of the Republican presidential nominee, liberal businessman Wendell Willkie. They were worried about breaking the tradition of the third term. But there was no one else they could trust to steer the Democrats to victory.
Still, they muttered, if the president wanted a third term, why couldn’t he simply come out and say so? “The President could have had anything on God’s earth he wanted if he had the guts to ask for it in the open,” a group of liberal newspapermen observed. “The people trust him and the people want to follow him; nobody, no matter how whole-souled, can follow a man who will not lead, who will not stand up and be counted, who will not say openly what we all know he thinks privately.”
The ugly mood on the floor sent startled convention leaders back to their smoke-filled rooms to figure out what to do. From his private suite, Harry Hopkins placed a series of frantic calls to the president, advising h
im to drop his coy routine and to tear up the statement he had prepared insisting he did not want to be a candidate. “This convention is bleeding to death,” Harold Ickes wired the president, “and your reputation and prestige may bleed to death with it.” The only solution, Ickes counseled, with nine hundred “leaderless delegates milling around like worried sheep,” was “a personal appearance” by the president.
The president flatly rejected both Ickes’ and Hopkins’ advice, insistent on “acting out his curious role to the last scene,” determined, for the sake of the general election and for the historical record, to make it clear he was not actively seeking an unprecedented third term, demanding that the convention come to him of its own free will. “I have never seen the President more stubborn,” Sam Rosenman recalled, “although stubbornness was one of his well-known characteristics.”
The president’s statement was given to Senator Alben Barkley to read, at the end of the keynote address, on Tuesday night. Barkley was originally scheduled to speak in the early evening, but the proceedings ran so late that it was nearly midnight in Washington before the senator from Kentucky approached the podium. When the president received final confirmation that Barkley was about to speak, he called Eleanor at Val-Kill. Could she listen to the statement and let him know what she thought? Taken by surprise at the whole idea of a statement, Eleanor roused Joe Lash from his bedroom to join her on the porch, where they set up her portable radio.
Alben Barkley was an orator of the old Southern school. He flailed his arms and his face grew red as he worked himself into an oratorical frenzy recapitulating the great achievements of the New Deal. Finally, he came to the climactic moment. “And now, my friends, I have an additional statement to make on behalf of the President of the United States.” The president, Barkley said, wished to make clear to the convention that he had “no wish to be a candidate again” and that “all the delegates to this convention are free to vote for any candidate.”