The Lonely And Painful Presidency Of Franklin D Rooosevelt

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What may be less familiar, given his appearance, is the fact that the American President was, by some years, the youngest of the leaders. Even as Roosevelt gambled on an unprecedented fourth term as President, few Americans were aware that he could not walk unaided or that he'd been diagnosed with chronic heart disease. And in Roosevelt's complicated personal life, other skeletons lay hidden in the cupboard. His formidable yet fragile wife Eleanor had supported him through his long battle with disability. But their marriage was now coming under increasing strain, for Roosevelt was living with a dark secret. About an affair exposed and ended 25 years earlier, but now resurrected in wartime by a President isolated in the loneliness of power. In 1945, Roosevelt had been in office for over a decade. He was a man in a hurry to achieve his vision before his time ran out. To understand the endgame of World War II and the dawn of the Cold War, we must also understand the mind and the heart of this most enigmatic of leaders. How his complex personality influenced world affairs at a critical moment in history. September 1944. As the Red Army drove the Germans back in Romania and Bulgaria, Stalin tightened his grip on Eastern Europe. Roosevelt and Churchill were not of one mind on how to respond. In October 1944, Churchill flew to Moscow to cut a deal on spheres of influence in the Balkans. By conceding the fait accompli of Soviet dominance in countries like Romania and Bulgaria, he hoped to preserve Britain's interests in Greece and Yugoslavia. This was the now notorious Percentages Agreement. Roosevelt acquiesced for the moment, but for him, as for American public opinion, this sort of spheres of influence deal-making was yet another sign of the old world imperialism that had brought about two world wars. Biding his time, the president pressed Stalin for another summit at which they could confirm the shape of the new world order that he envisaged. At the same time, the Roosevelt administration mounted a massive PR campaign to sell the new United Nations to the American people, billing it as the country's second chance to realise Woodrow Wilson's goal. A new blockbuster movie about the Great War president hit the cinemas that autumn, portraying Wilson as a tragic hero, driven by a vision ahead of his time, who destroyed himself trying to achieve it. FDR saw a private viewing in the White House. When the film reached the point of Wilson's stroke, Roosevelt was visibly moved. Dr Bruin heard him mutter, by God, that's not going to happen to me. Afterwards, the president's blood pressure was 240 over 130, nearly double the healthy norm. Roosevelt wanted to achieve the new world order that Wilson had failed to create, and he was determined to stay around to run it. But he feared it might be a long time before victory was won, because this was truly a world war, not just a struggle in Europe. American troops were encountering ferocious Japanese resistance across the Pacific. Roosevelt had approved the development of a potentially devastating new weapon. But, despite the investment of $2 billion, no-one knew if the atomic bomb would work. So the US army had to prepare for a massive invasion of the Japanese home islands in 1945, 1946 or even later. Judging by the cost of reconquering Saipan, Leyte and other Pacific islands in 1944, this would be a brutal fight with heavy American losses. The horrors of war touched Roosevelt personally, prompting him to be more open about his own disability when he toured Hawaii in July 1944. Usually, Roosevelt was seen in public in one of two positions, either seated in an open car or standing with his leg braces locked to hold him upright. But when visiting the seriously wounded from Saipan, young men in their prime who'd lost limbs and would be disabled for the rest of their lives, Roosevelt deliberately stayed in his wheelchair. He told a secret serviceman to push him slowly through the wards, rubber legs and all, as he chatted solicitously to the patients. The message was clear, you didn't need legs to get to the top. Rarely did FDR display his infirmity in public, but now he was performing the power of vulnerability. I've told that story many times, but I still find it deeply moving. Here was a man who had to endure every day the countless petty humiliations of being a paraplegic, yet who could nevertheless, in public, radiate the confidence and good humour that inspired millions. But the courage and self-discipline he displayed relentlessly for more than 20 years had taken its toll. And now his medical regime was sucking the remaining fun from his life, food, drink, good company. The happy warrior of the world's political battlefield, wielded about as much power as anyone could crave. But as a human being, he was deeply unhappy. By 1944, I think, Franklin Roosevelt was almost hollowed out by loneliness. If one thinks of the other war leaders, their private lives were relatively simple. Churchill had a long-suffering wife who kept him going at the cost of her own emotional exhaustion. As for the dictators, the abstemious Hitler had a devoted mistress, while Stalin mourned his first wife, drove his second to suicide, and thereafter seems to have got his kicks from killing. Roosevelt's love life was more complex and typically devious. Yet the tangled story, I think, defies any simple moral judgment. Roosevelt's women were essential to his survival as a politician. And in 1945, love and politics were entangled as never before. To understand this, we need to dig way back into his emotional past. Despite FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918, Eleanor continued to care deeply for him, nursing him through the peak of his illness in 1921 and even learning to apply catheters and manage bedpans. But Eleanor's crusading mission made her more driven and harder to relax with. Franklin continued to enjoy a light-hearted female company, especially attractive young women who thought he was wonderful. Women like Marguerite Le Hand, known as Missy, his principal secretary for 20 years, who idolised the man whom she called FD and who made him laugh. And Daisy Sutley, FDR's Hyde Park spinster cousin, 10 years younger, whom he treated as a special confidante and quiet companion. In their own ways, these women gave him the love that was lacking in his own marriage. Eleanor, too, found love in other ways. Through the feminist movement in Manhattan, she flirted with lesbian relationships and established a furniture-making business with two of her special women friends, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, at Valkill, a property a few miles from Springwood. Privately, FDR called Nancy and Marion the she-males. But he liked them. While they said that Uncle Franklin was utterly charming. He encouraged the venture here at Valkill, which finally gave Eleanor a place of her own. And FDR, always fancying himself as an architect, even designed the cottage for them. FDR also needed his own hideaway and designed this simple house on the highest hill of the Roosevelt Estate, whose porch looked out westward across the Hudson River. At Top Cottage, FDR could keep some distance from Eleanor. Clearly, the Roosevelts were now very far from being a traditional couple. Each had an independent life involving intimate friendships with others. That suited Franklin, never keen to be dependent on any one person. Yet their marriage had also put down deep roots, toughened by the Lucy Mercer affair and also by his battle with polio. And they shared a commitment to progressive politics, to making America a better place. Everything Eleanor Roosevelt says and does becomes news. True to her prediction, her personal life is no longer her own. Instead, she's becoming an American institution. When Franklin moved into the White House, Eleanor became the eyes and ears of the wheelchair president, traveling the country, learning of human misery and reporting back to him and to the nation. In addition to being the first wife of a president ever to hold her own weekly press conference, she writes a daily syndicated newspaper column called My Day. My Day, which she started writing in 1935, quickly became one of the most popular columns in the American press. She saw her role in part as launching trial balloons for her husband, which he could then disown if they got shot down by critics. I was the agitator, Eleanor said. He was the politician. Theirs was a remarkable political partnership, utterly novel in American history. But when the New Deal president became the war president, things began to change. Eleanor hated the war and she was deeply depressed at the deaths, the maiming and the mourning. As the fighting dragged on, the two of them began to drift apart, no longer of one mind on the cause that mattered. As Eleanor tightened up, Franklin relied more and more on vivacious younger ladies to keep him company. She was very taken with Princess Martha, exiled wife of Prince Olaf of Norway, who moved her three children to America to escape the war. Eleanor was irked but shrugged her shoulders, telling a friend, there is always a Martha for relaxation and for the non-ending pleasure of having an admiring audience for every breath. It was the Roosevelt's daughter, Anna, a spirited, strong-minded woman in her late 30s, who came to fill the gap between her parents. She moved into the White House in 1944 and did whatever was asked, big or small, to make FDR's existence more comfortable. When Roosevelt became ill after the exertions of Tehran, Eleanor seemed oblivious to his physical state and it was Anna who prodded him into a proper medical check-up. This was a battle to help keep the president alive so he could achieve his vision for the world after the war. But the result was an odd and rather prickly ménage à trois. Eleanor, a teetotaler, hated FDR's cocktail hours before dinner, when there was a tacit agreement that no official business would be discussed. Anna indulged them at a modest level as one of his few pleasures. At the end of one cocktail hour, Eleanor marched in, armed with a sheaf of papers. Now, frankly, she said in her usual brisk manner, I need to talk to you about these. FDR simply lost it. He chucked the sheaf of papers across the room and said to a mortified Anna, you deal with those in the morning. Eleanor stood silent, lips pursed. Then she said, I'm sorry, and walked away. But fortunately for Eleanor, she didn't know just how far Anna was going in order to keep her father happy. On the 28th of April 1944, in deepest secrecy, she arranged for Mrs Winthrop Rutherford to have lunch with the president while he was recuperating in South Carolina. Anna set up the lunch at her father's behest. It was the prelude to more than a dozen intimate dinners that would follow over the next year, usually in the White House when Eleanor was away. Her absence was an essential condition because this tête-à-tête was not with another Martha. Franklin was seeing his former lover Lucy again. She was now a free woman recently widowed at the age of 52. Anna acted as go-between. Her father asked her to arrange the timings and special access to the White House. This put Anna in what she later admitted was a terrible position. As a girl, Anna had taken her mother's side about the affair. But now, as a divorcee who'd remarried, she realized that her father needed sympathetic and appreciative company rather than Eleanor's latest must-do hit list. And she could also see that Lucy remained special, allowing him to enjoy what Anna called a few hours of much-needed relaxation. Even so, it was a truly bizarre situation. Daughter abetting her father's liaison behind the back of her mother in what she felt were the interests of the nation. All these women mattered in different ways to Roosevelt as 1945 opened. The war was reaching its climax, yet when and how it would end remained in doubt. As the new year began, the Allies were recovering from heavy casualties after a desperate German counter-attack in the Battle of the Bulge. The American Navy weathered Japanese kamikaze attacks off the coast of Thailand. Roosevelt was briefed on the state of the Manhattan Project, America's race to build the atomic bomb. A test was likely within a matter of months, but whether it would work was still unclear. Yet Roosevelt did not inform his new vice president, Harry Truman, about progress on the bomb. Plucked from the Senate to be FDR's running mate, Truman was not part of Roosevelt's inner circle. Yet he was now, to use the cliché, a heartbeat away from the presidency. And looking into Roosevelt's grey, gaunt face, Truman could sense that the president's heart was failing. Truman, in his own words, felt troubled and worried. But Roosevelt simply kept his new vice president out of the loop, on the bomb and on policy in general. Given the state of his health, such secrecy was almost criminal. But Roosevelt was like a man in denial about his own mortality. Perhaps only in those fleeting moments with Lucy, conjuring up anew the vitality and love of his lost past, did Roosevelt voice his dark fears about the future. On the 22nd of January 1945, Roosevelt set out for a second meeting with Stalin. The Soviet leader was scared of flying and would not move far beyond his security net, so Roosevelt and Churchill had to go to him. Stalin's chosen venue was the old Tsarist summer palace at Yalta in the Crimea. Getting there and back by boat and plane, a 14,000 mile round trip, was another long and arduous journey for an ailing president. And when Roosevelt finally got there, this was no holiday resort. The Crimea had only recently been recaptured from the Germans and mod cons were in short supply, though bedbugs were abundant. Senior generals had to queue up to use the few bathrooms. The week-long conference would draw on all of FDR's reserves of strength. A huge amount was at stake for Roosevelt at Yalta. He wanted to get agreement on the new United Nations and on a strategy for defeating Japan. And on both these issues, Soviet cooperation was vital. But as at Tehran, he and Churchill didn't always see eye to eye on how to deal with And the Soviet leader kept unsettling them by his tactical ploys, playing hard to get. At dinner on the very first evening, he put them on the back foot by pretending to take offence at their nickname for him, Uncle Joe. Despite this, Roosevelt was convinced he could secure Soviet participation in the United Nations, to anchor them in the international community. To get Soviet agreement on the big architecture of a new world order, FDR deliberately stayed above what he saw as small details, particularly in Eastern Europe. So while Churchill and Stalin haggled once again over Poland, Roosevelt pushed the Soviets to sign up to the Declaration on Liberated Europe, a general commitment on the independence of all the countries freed from Nazi rule. FDR hoped that signing this would commit the Soviets to follow Wilsonian values, or at least to hold them to account if they didn't. He told sceptics, it's the best I can do for Poland at this time. Conscious that the Red Army already controlled Poland, Roosevelt did not push as Churchill. In his view, you couldn't make omelettes without breaking eggs, and it was just bad luck that so many of the eggshells would be Polish. His top priority, as always, was not to jeopardise relations with Stalin. And over Asia, Roosevelt's softly, softly approach appeared to pay off. He conceded Stalin's demands for territory in Japan and China. In return, Stalin confirmed that the Soviets would enter the Asian war within three months of victory in Europe. With the atomic bomb still untested, General George Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, was relieved to share the brutal endgame of the Japanese war with the Red Army. Asked when leaving Yalta whether he looked forward to civilised amenities again, Marshall said gravely, for what we've gained here, I would gladly have stayed a whole month. By the time he got back to Washington, Roosevelt was exhausted. He delivered his report of the summit to Congress, sitting down, making a rare reference to his disability. I hope that you will pardon me for an unusual posture of sitting down, but I know that you will realise that it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about 10 pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs, and also because of the fact that I have just completed a 14,000 mile trip. The speech was full of optimism about Stalin as a man of good faith, and about a new era in international politics. And I am confident that the Congress and the American people will accept the results of this conference as the beginnings of a permanent structure of peace, upon which we can begin to build, under God, that better world in which our children and grandchildren must live and can live. Roosevelt needed to sell Yalta to his own people, ahead of the founding conference of the new United Nations, which would be held in San Francisco in April. He didn't want any repeat of the tragedy of Wilson and the League. It wasn't just the Russians he needed to bring in from the cold, but the Americans. All through March 1945, Stalin tightened his grip on Poland. Churchill sent anguished messages to the White House, demanding a joint protest to the Kremlin about what he was already calling an iron curtain coming down across Eastern Europe. But FDR, more coldly realist, felt that the Poles were a lost cause, and did not wish friction over Eastern Europe to imperil the UN project. Yet by early April, Stalin was dragging his feet on this, threatening to send only a junior diplomat to San Francisco. That would leave Americans wondering whether the Soviets had really turned over a new leaf. Despite odd moments, FDR stuck to the end with his policy of enticing the Russians into the family of nations. He wrote to Churchill to play down the aggro with Moscow. I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible, because these problems in one form or another seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out. We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct. Was Roosevelt right that the West needed to soothe Russian insecurities? Would sticking with his strategy of drawing the Soviets in from the cold have averted, or at least eased, the Cold War? Or was Churchill right that the only message they understood was firmness? That has to remain a fascinating what-if of history, because Roosevelt died before the Cold War really began. But the Roosevelt-Churchill debate about conciliation versus toughness still perplexes statesmen today when dealing with Vladimir Putin's Russia. In early April, Roosevelt went down to Warm Springs, Georgia, for another break. Dr Bruin was in attendance. So too were Daisy and Lucy, in their own ways also part of his medical team. Eleanor remained in Washington, but she bombarded him with messages about wartime issues. On one occasion, they argued over the phone about aid to Yugoslavia for a full 45 minutes. After Roosevelt hung up, the veins on his forehead were bulging and his blood pressure had risen 50 points. Eleanor was still pushing him hard, mind and heart, just as she'd done ever since the dark days of polio. At Warm Springs, the president worked on his Jefferson Day radio speech, intended to sell the new United Nations to America as an essential part of an abiding peace. The draft recalled the words of his inaugural address in the depths of the depression, about the only thing to fear being fear itself. Roosevelt planned to close with these ringing words, the only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith. Though weary, the president seemed in good spirits. There was nothing to suggest what would happen the next day. On Thursday morning, the 12th of April, the president complained of a stiff neck and a slight headache, but he sat patiently for a portrait painter fiddling away at his papers. Suddenly, just before lunch, he looked up. I have a terrific pain at the back of my head, he murmured, and then slumped forward and lost consciousness. As AIDS lifted him onto his bed and Dr. Bruin worked desperately, a shot Lucy was ushered into a car and driven away. For a couple of hours, the president fought for life, his tortured, rasping breaths reminiscent of the dying Abraham Lincoln 80 years before, at the end of another great war. But at 3.35pm, Roosevelt's heart finally stopped. In Washington that afternoon, the vice president was on Capitol Hill while Eleanor was attending a charity concert. Summoned by phone to the White House, she took in the news, trying to stay calm. When Truman arrived at the White House, it was Eleanor who broke the news. Harry, the president, is dead. Stunned, he asked if there was anything he could do for her. She looked at him gently. Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now. Eleanor kept her composure all through that afternoon. She retained it when she got to Warm Springs late that night, even when she learned the guilty secret that Lucy had been there for the last three days, that she'd visited Franklin on many occasions over the previous few months, and that Anna had arranged it all. It was only later, when she confronted Anna, that Eleanor lost her cool, consumed with a burning. Betrayed long ago, but she had hoped once and for all. She now found herself betrayed again, this time with her own daughter as accomplice. It was a bitter, anguished encounter, leaving the two women estranged for many months. Next day, bottling up her emotions, she accompanied his body on the special train that chugged its way 800 miles north to the nation's capital. Eleanor, still bruised and angry, watched in growing awe at the thousands who lined the route, openly grieving for their lost president. After a service at the White House, the coffin was taken to Hyde Park to be buried next to Springwood, the house where he had been born. Eleanor was deeply moved, beginning to realise just how much her flawed husband had meant to his people. She had known him too well, yet in other fundamental ways, had failed to appreciate him. As America mourned, so did the free world, and even stopped. When Ambassador Harriman called on the Soviet leader the day after Roosevelt's death, Stalin's reaction seemed to vindicate FDR's policy of building trust. Harriman wrote, I noticed that he was obviously deeply distressed at the news. He greeted me in silence and stood holding my hand for about 30 seconds before asking me to sit down. Stalin asked Harriman lots of questions about Roosevelt's health and about the circumstances of his death. For a paranoid dictator obsessed about assassins and poisoners, it was hard to believe that the President of the United States had died merely from natural causes after botched medical care. With real emotion, Stalin declared, President Roosevelt is dead, but his cause must live on. We shall support President Truman with all our forces and all our will. Seizing his chance, Harriman suggested that the best way to help Truman and to reassure the American people about Soviet-American relations would be for Foreign Minister Molotov to go to see the new President and then attend the opening session of the UN in San Francisco. After a brief discussion with Molotov, Stalin agreed. In death, it seemed, Roosevelt had secured what was slipping through his fingers in the last weeks of his life. And so the Soviet Union joined the United Nations. It became a permanent member of the Security Council, just as Roosevelt had intended. But his hopes for an eventual alignment of Russia to social democratic values were utopian, or at least not something realised so far, despite the formal ending of the Cold War. The spirit of Yalta evaporated, in part because Stalin was determined to control his conquests in Eastern Europe and regarded any kind of open politics as a threat to security. But ironically, it was another of Roosevelt's legacies that poisoned the peace. Even if the Big Three had managed to sort out their differences in Germany and Eastern Europe, and that's a big if, the way that World War II ended in Asia made the Cold War almost inevitable. Roosevelt had thrown all America's industrial might into the race to build an atomic bomb. Nazi Germany capitulated before the first American atomic test. But Truman, fearful like Roosevelt of bloody battles to end the war in Asia, dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. As soon as he heard the news, Stalin made a Soviet bomb the regime's top priority. The Cold War arms race was born, that endless vying for superiority in ever more complex killer weapons. And so ironically, one of Roosevelt's projects, however necessary it might now seem for ending the war, helped undermine his vision for peace. The United Nations was poisoned by suspicion amongst the policemen who he hoped would keep peace and security. Yet the Cold War never hotted up into World War III. The bomb may have acted as a deterrent, but I think that the UN, founded in those vital transition weeks between war and peace, also played a part. It created the structure, however fragile, of an international community. In that basic sense, Roosevelt's hopes were realised. And Eleanor remained true to FDR's global vision. Overcoming, as in 1918, her grief and bitterness, she drew comfort from verses sent to her by a friend. They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind. In those whom they have blessed, they live a life again. In a strangely poignant way, it was as if America's outpouring of grief after Franklin's death made her belatedly aware of the greatness that lay behind his pettiness, secrecy and deceits. Daisy Sookley, in some ways FDR's closest companion, but never his lover or his wife, captured the Franklin-Eleanor relationship perfectly on the night of his death. She wrote in her diary, Poor E.R., I believe she loved him more deeply than she knows herself, and his feeling for her was deep and lasting. The fact that they could not relax together or play together is the tragedy of their joint lives. For I believe from everything that I have seen of them, that they had everything else in common. It was probably a matter of personalities, of a certain lack of humour on her part. I cannot blame either of them. They're both remarkable people, sky high above the average. For seven years after his death, Eleanor was a member of the American delegation to the UN, the only woman. It is my ruling, as chairman of the commission, that the point raised by the Soviet member is out of order. Her Machiavellian combination of charm and persistence, reminiscent of FDR himself, helped push through the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. She also kept her My Day column going until a few weeks before her death in 1962, championing liberal causes such as civil rights, equal pay for women, and a national health service through the McCarthy era. Even after FDR's death, and despite his double betrayal, Eleanor's partnership with Franklin remained in some ways indissoluble. Today, Franklin and Eleanor lie here in the Rose Garden at Hyde Park, under a simple gravestone. Their complex, often contrary marriage, scarred by FDR's betrayals, masked a deeper unity of purpose and values between two remarkable, if flawed, personalities, who shared a vision of a better future. And from the grave, one can look down the avenue to the Albany Post Road, the view that tantalised Roosevelt for the last quarter century of his life. The wheelchair president never made it to the main road, but the journey he did complete, with its successes and its failures, helped define our world into the 21st century.