Authors: Gore Vidal
Eleanor also saw to it that Franklin would never have a decent meal in the White House:
The P. [President] & all the men came back about 7.45; all enthusiastic about their supper. The P. told them at supper that in W. H. he never had such good beef stew, carrots, macaroni, home baked bread, butter, & coffee! Poor Mrs. [Henrietta] Nesbitt, the W. H. housekeeper!
Ward comments:
Mrs. Nesbitt was a Hyde Park caterer whom Eleanor Roosevelt had hired to manage the White House kitchens. FDR disliked her and detested her pallid cooking, but was unable to get rid of her. She was evidently as imperious as she was inept; when the President sent her a memorandum detailing his dislike of broccoli, she ordered the chefs to serve it to him, anyway. “It’s good for him,” she said. “He
should
like it.”
Daisy concedes, “His wife is a wonderful person, but she lacks the ability to give him the things his mother gave him. She is away so much, and when she is here she has so many people around—the splendid people who are trying to do good and improve the world, ‘uplifters’ the P. calls them—that he cannot relax and really rest.” But then, confronted with the disastrous news of his first thorough medical checkup in the spring of 1944—enlarged heart, congestive heart failure, hypertension—Eleanor said that she was not “interested in physiology.” Like Mary Baker Eddy, she felt such things were weaknesses of the mind.
The Beekman cousins began their close relationship when he invited her to his first inauguration as president. Daisy was enthralled and wrote her cousin; thus, the long correspondence began; later, they would travel together. Daisy was what used to be called, without opprobrium, a spinster. Of the two boys and four girls at Wilderstein only one girl was to marry. Their mother, still alive in the Thirties, loathed sex and, as Ward puts it, “invariably wept at weddings at the thought of the awful things awaiting the bride.” Daisy showed no interest in marriage and, presumably, none in sex. By 1933 the Suckley fortunes were at a low ebb; the eldest brother had invested badly but then matters stabilized and she had her small income and could still live at home. In due course, she was put in charge of the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park. She was intelligent but not clever; drawn to quack doctors, numerologists, astrologists; she also
knew
that the ghost of Abraham Lincoln was constantly aprowl in the White
House.
Daisy’s first “date” with Franklin was in September 1934. He took her for a drive to Eleanor’s getaway cottage, Val-Kill. There is rather a lot in her diaries of
little
me and the President
himself
at the wheel.
By November Franklin is writing, “You added several years to my life & much to my happiness.” By early 1935, when the New Deal is in crisis with Huey Long, the Supreme Court, Dr. Townsend, Franklin writes her, “I need either to swear at somebody or to have a long suffering ear like yours to tell it to quietly!”
For the remaining ten years of Franklin’s life, Daisy provided that ear. The letters to her have not all survived but hers to him are complete as well as her diary. She came to know many secrets. She was on hand when Churchill came to Hyde Park. Daisy was not quite temperance but Churchill’s constant whisky drinking awed her. When they visited Franklin’s blue-haired cousin, Laura Delano, something of a card, the Prime Minister asked for his usual whisky while the willful Laura, a devotee of complex sugary drinks, gave him a daiquiri to drink. Not noticing what was in the glass, Churchill took a sip and then, to Laura’s horror, spat it out at her feet. Even in my day, a decade later, Laura would look very stern at the mention of Churchill’s name. Interestingly, for those clan-minded River families, so like the American South, Daisy was closer to Eleanor in blood than to Franklin—fourth cousin to her, sixth to him.
If anything “happened,” it would have begun during August 1933 when they took shelter from a storm on what they called Our Hill. The spinster and the sickly polio victim seem unlikely as lovers, though, a year earlier at Warm Springs, Elliot Roosevelt assured my father that the President was very active sexually, particularly with his secretary Missy LeHand. But that Franklin and Daisy were in love is in no doubt and that, of course, is the point. They were already discussing a cottage atop Our Hill for after the presidency, or even before, if possible. It should be noted that Missy LeHand’s family thought that the house on Our Hill was to be for Missy and Franklin and I suspect that he might even have mentioned it as a getaway to his last love, Crown Princess Martha of Norway, who came to stay during the war, causing Missy to retire (and promptly die) and Daisy to note with benign malice, “The Crown Princess hasn’t much to say, but as the P. talks all the time anyway it didn’t
make much difference. It is strange, however, that a person in her position, & with so much natural charm, has no
manner
! Even in her own home . . . she leaves the guests to take care of themselves. . . .”
Daisy reads Beverly Nichols for hints on how to do up the house-to-be. Franklin thinks his own tastes are too simple for “B. Nichols” (how thrilled that silly-billy would have been to know that he was read and reread by the Leader of the Free World). Meanwhile, history kept moving. Reelection in 1936. Again in 1940. The Allied armies are finally beginning to win, and the President’s body is gradually shutting down. It is poignant to observe Daisy observing her friend in his decline. She tries to feed him minerals from one of her cranks. (Analysts found nothing harmful in them, and nothing beneficial either.) She puts a masseur on to him who tells him he’ll soon be walking. So eager is Franklin for good news that he claims to have been able to move a little toe.
Daisy never forgets that she is River, not Village. But Franklin the politician must speak for Village, too. She applauds his efforts at educating the national Village folk “because so many people in our class still object to more than the minimum of education for the mass of the people” as “they lose the sense of subservience to—shall I say?—us.” It is plain that neither Beekman cousin ever had much direct experience with Villagers.
Daisy records a very odd conversation with the President’s eldest son, James, on January 26, 1944 (the war is ending):
At lunch, Jimmy talked about the young, uneducated boys who are learning that you kill or get killed, etc., etc., and may prove to be a real menace if, at the end of the war, they are suddenly given a bonus, and let loose on the country—He thinks they should be kept in the army, or in C.C.C. camps or something like that, until jobs are found for them, or unless they are put back to school—He says many are almost illiterate.
Fear of class war is never far from the River mind. Happily, Franklin was ready with the GI Bill of Rights, which sent many Villagers to school, while his heir, Harry Truman, compassionately put the country on a permanent wartime footing, thus avoiding great unemployment. Curiously, River’s fear of Village was to come true after Vietnam when the Village boys came home to find that they had been well and royally screwed by a Village, not a River, government. The rest is—today.
At the time of the 1944 election, the infamous fourth term (decried by many Roosevelt supporters), Franklin was dying. But he pulled himself together for one last hurrah; submitting to heavy makeup, he drove in the rain in triumph through Manhattan. He was now sleeping much of the day. Harry Hopkins, his closest man friend, was also dying and so, in effect, the war was running itself to conclusion. It was Daisy’s view that Franklin wanted to stay in office long enough to set up some sort of League of Nations and then resign and go home to the River. Incidentally, in all the correspondence and diaries there is not one reference to Vice-President Truman.
Daisy’s last entries are sad, and often sharp, particularly about Eleanor’s abandonment of her husband. After some logistic confusion at the White House, she writes, “Mrs. R. should be here to attend to all this sort of thing. The P. shouldn’t have to—and it has to be done.”
Apparently, Franklin was always prone to nightmares. (Like Lincoln in a similar context?) One night he called for help with “blood curdling sounds.” He thought a man was coming “through the transom,” and was going to kill him. He asked to see a screening of
Wilson
, a fairly good film of obvious interest to Franklin as Woodrow Wilson’s heir and fellow Caesar; by the picture’s end, and Wilson’s physical crack-up, the President’s blood pressure was perilously high; and there were no beta blockers then.
The Yalta meeting wore him out and both Churchill and Stalin noted that their colleague was not long for this world. But he knew what he was doing at the meeting. Eleanor told me that when he got home—they met briefly before he went to Warm Springs—she chided him for making no fuss over leaving Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in Russia’s hands. The
Realpolitik
member of the firm told her that Stalin would not give them up without a war. “Do you think the American people, after all they’ve gone through, would fight for those small countries?” Eleanor sighed, “I had to agree that he was right again.”
The deviousness of Franklin, the politician, was a necessity, increased no doubt by whatever psychic effect his immobility had on him. One of the reasons he tossed his head this way and that was not only for emphasis but to command attention—after all, he could never get up and walk out of a room—and his constant chattering was also a means to disguise what he was up to while holding everyone’s attention. Of the two, Eleanor was more apt to be brutal. It was a disagreeable surprise to me, an Eleanorite, to read:
Mrs. R. brought up the subject of the American fliers who came down in Arabia, & were mutilated & left to die in the desert. She insisted that we should bomb all Arabia, to stop such things. The P. said it was an impossible thing to do, in the first place, as the tribes are nomadic, & hide in secret places etc. Also, Arabia is a huge desert etc. Besides, it would be acting like the Japanese, to go & bomb a lot of people, who don’t know any better. . . . I put in one word, to the effect that we have lynching in this country still, but we don’t go & bomb the town where the lynching occurs—Harry Hopkins joined Mrs. R.—but their point seemed to me so completely illogical that I restrained myself, & kept silent!
One is struck by what such awesome power does to people and how it is the “compassionate” Eleanor who wants to kill at random and the Artful Dodger President who does not.
Finally, Franklin’s obsessive stamp collecting pays off. He knows his geography. Unlike subsequent presidents, he knows where all the countries are and who lives in them. He is also aware that the war with Japan is essentially a race war. Who will dominate the Pacific and Asia, the white or the yellow race? As of June 1944, race hatred was the fuel to our war against Japan, as I witnessed firsthand in the Pacific. Yet Franklin, Daisy reports, is already looking ahead:
In regard to the Far East in general which means the yellow race, which is far more numerous than the white, it will be to the advantage of the white race to be friends with them & work in cooperation with them, rather than make enemies of them & have them eventually use all the machines of western civilization to overrun & conquer the white race.
Today, such a statement would be denounced as racist if not, indeed, an invocation of the Yellow Peril.
Last speech to Congress to report on Yalta. I saw the newsreel at an army hospital in Alaska. The President spoke, seated; apologized for not standing but he said the weight of his metal braces was now too much. Never before had he publicly referred to his paralysis. The voice was thick, somewhat slurred. It was plain that he had had a stroke of some sort. Then Franklin and Daisy were off to Warm Springs, where they were joined by Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd and a painter friend. Laura Delano was also on hand. The River was rallying around him. Then, while being painted, he slumped and said, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.” As he was carried into the bedroom, Laura alone heard him say, “Be careful.” After fire, he most feared being dropped. Eleanor came and history resumed its course, and Mr. Truman does get a mention, when he is sworn in as president.
Toward the end Daisy was always there—closest companion—to feed him and watch him as he dozed off, to talk of the River and, doubtless, of Our Hill, though it had been plain for some time that he would never live there. I should note she signed her letters to him “M” for Margaret, her real name, or simply “YM,” “Your Margaret.” He signed his letters “F.” All in all, an unexpectedly sweet story in a terrible time, when, along with wars and depressions and dust bowls, Villages became cities and the River polluted and one Beekman cousin petrified into history while the other, Daisy, simply faded, smiling, away. Ward has made FDR’s story something no one else has managed to do, poignant, sad.
The New York Review of Books
11 May 1995
*
W
IRETAPPING THE
O
VAL
O
FFICE
It all began in the heat of the summer of 1940. Hitler was at his peak in Europe. France had been defeated. Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain, would be launched once the aerial bombardment of England had, presumably, broken the spirit of the island’s residents. Although Franklin Delano Roosevelt, twice elected President of the United States, was doing his best to aid the British, who were flat broke, 88 percent of the American people wanted no part of a war in Europe, while the isolationists in Congress were uncommonly eloquent. But Roosevelt was a sly and devious man (and I mean those adjectives, as Nixon once said when applying them to Eisenhower, “in the best sense of those words”). Some time that summer, probably in June, FDR decided to run for a third term, something no President had done before. But slyness and deviousness were very much the order of the day, particularly when, after a closed session with Congressional leaders, FDR was promptly quoted as having said that the border
of the United States was the Rhine River; this was a dangerous misquotation. What to do?