His chest was so broad, his neck so thick, that when seated he appeared larger than he was. Only when he was moved from his chair would the eye be drawn to the withered legs, paralyzed by polio almost two decades earlier. At a. Bombs had begun to fall on Brussels, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying thousands of homes.
In dozens of old European neighborhoods, fires illuminated the night sky. Stunned Belgians stood in their nightclothes in the streets of Brussels, watching bursts of anti-aircraft fire as military cars and motorcycles dashed through the streets. His body would later be carried to his school for a memorial service with his classmates. On every radio station throughout Belgium, broadcasts summoned all soldiers to join their units at once. In Amsterdam the roads leading out of the city were crowded with people and automobiles as residents fled in fear of the bombing.
The initial reports were confusing—border clashes had begun, parachute troops were being dropped to seize Dutch and Belgian airports, the government of Luxembourg had already fled to France, and there was some reason to believe the Germans were also landing troops by sea. After speaking again to Ambassador Cudahy and scanning the incoming news reports, Roosevelt called his secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr.
In a belligerent tone, von Ribbentrop said the time had come for settling the final account with the French and British leaders. After shifting his body to his armless wheel chair, he rolled through a door near his desk into his bedroom. McDuffie, a Southern Negro, born the same year as his boss, had been a barber by trade when Roosevelt met him in Warm Springs, Georgia, in Roosevelt quickly developed a liking for the talkative man and offered him the job of valet.
Now he and his wife lived in a room on the third floor of the White House. McDuffie was at his post in the early hours of May 10 when the president called for help. Beside the bed was a white-painted table; on its top, a jumble of pencils, notepaper, a glass of water, a package of cigarettes, a couple of phones, a bottle of nose drops. On the floor beside the table stood a small basket—the Eleanor basket—in which the first lady regularly left memoranda, communications, and reports for the president to read—a sort of private post office between husband and wife.
On the marble mantelpiece above the fireplace was an assortment of family photos and a collection of miniature pigs. The fear seems to have been rooted in his childhood, when, as a small boy, he had seen his young aunt, Laura, race down the stairs, screaming, her body and clothes aflame from an accident with an alcohol lamp. Her life was ended at nineteen. The fear grew when he became a paraplegic, to the point where, for hours at a time, he would practice dropping from his bed or chair to the floor and then crawling to the door so that he could escape from a fire on his own.
In , Roosevelt had been president of the United States for seven years, but he had been paralyzed from the waist down for nearly three times that long. Before he was stricken at thirty-nine, Roosevelt was a man who flourished on activity.
He loved to swim and to sail, to play tennis and golf; to run in the woods and ride horseback in the fields. The morning after his swim, his temperature was degrees and he had trouble moving his left leg.
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By afternoon, the power to move his right leg was also gone, and soon he was paralyzed from the waist down. The paralysis had set in so swiftly that no one understood at first that it was polio. But once the diagnosis was made, the battle was joined. For years he fought to walk on his own power, practicing for hours at a time, drenched with sweat, as he tried unsuccessfully to move one leg in front of the other without the aid of a pair of crutches or a helping hand.
That consuming and futile effort had to be abandoned once he became governor of New York in and then president in He was permanently crippled. Yet the paralysis that crippled his body expanded his mind and his sensibilities. He returned from his ordeal with greater powers of concentration and greater self-knowledge. No longer belonging to his old world in the same way, he came to empathize with the poor and underprivileged, with people to whom fate had dealt a difficult hand.
The journalist Eliot Janeway remembers being behind Roosevelt once when he was in his chair in the Oval Office. His face and hand muscles were totally relaxed. But then, when he had to stand up, his jaws went absolutely rigid.
The effort of getting what was left of his body up was so great his face changed dramatically. It was as if he braced his body for a bullet. Despite the tumult of the night before, which had kept him up until nearly 3 a. Pivoting to the edge of the bed, he pressed the button for his valet, who helped him into the bathroom. Then, as he had done every morning for the past seven years, he threw his old blue cape over his pajamas and started his day with breakfast in bed—orange juice, eggs, coffee, and buttered toast—and the morning papers: The New York Times and the Herald Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post and the Washington Herald.
Headlines recounted the grim events he had heard at 11 p. From Paris, Ambassador William Bullitt confirmed that the Germans had launched violent attacks on a half-dozen French military bases. Bombs had also fallen on the main railway connections between Paris and the border in an attempt to stop troop movements.
He instructed them to convene an emergency meeting at ten-thirty with the chiefs of the army and the navy, the secretaries of state and Treasury, and the attorney general. In addition, Roosevelt was scheduled to meet the press in the morning and the Cabinet in the afternoon, as he had done every Friday morning and afternoon for seven years. Later that night, he was supposed to deliver a keynote address at the Pan American Scientific Congress.
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After asking Early to delay the press conference an hour and to have the State Department draft a new speech, Roosevelt called his valet to help him dress. The Village apartment on East 11th Street, five blocks north of Washington Square, provided Eleanor with a welcome escape from the demands of the White House, a secret refuge whenever her crowded calendar brought her to New York.
For decades, the Village, with its winding streets, modest brick houses, bookshops, tearooms, little theaters, and cheap rents, had been home to political, artistic, and literary rebels, giving it a colorful Old World character. Along the way, she had sandwiched in a banquet for the National League of Women Voters, a meeting for the fund for Polish relief, a visit to her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, a radio broadcast, lunch with her friend the young student activist Joe Lash, and dinner with Democratic leader Edward Flynn and his wife.
The week before, at the Astor Hotel, Eleanor had been honored by The Nation magazine for her work in behalf of civil rights and poverty. She goes around America, looking at America, thinking about America. We should constantly be reminded of what we owe in return for what we have. Roosevelt even higher than her husband, with 67 percent of those interviewed well disposed toward her activities.
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But even men betray relatively small masculine impatience with the work and opinions of a very articulate lady. The rich, who generally disapprove of Mrs. Even among those extremely anti-Roosevelt citizens who would regard a third term as a national disaster there is a generous minority. Roosevelt to remain in the public eye.
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After a period of suspicion, she realized that her husband, who was then assistant secretary of the navy, had fallen in love with another woman, Lucy Page Mercer. For months, perhaps even years, Franklin kept his romance a secret from Eleanor.
Her shattering discovery took place in September Franklin had just returned from a visit to the European front. Unpacking his suitcase, she discovered a packet of love letters from Lucy. But this was not what he wanted, or at least not what he was able to put himself through, particularly when his mother, Sara, was said to have threatened him with disinheritance if he left his marriage. If her son insisted on leaving his wife and five children for another woman, visiting scandal upon the Roosevelt name, she could not stop him.
But he should know that she would not give him another dollar and he could no longer expect to inherit the family estate at Hyde Park.
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But for Eleanor, a path had opened, a possibility of standing apart from Franklin. No longer did she need to define herself solely in terms of his wants and his needs. To explore her independent needs, to journey outside her home for happiness, was perceived as dangerous and wrong. With the discovery of the affair, however, she was free to define a new and different partnership with her husband, free to seek new avenues of fulfillment. It was a gradual process, a gradual casting away, a gradual gaining of confidence—and it was by no means complete—but the fifty-six-year-old woman who was being feted in New York was a different person from the shy, betrayed wife of A tall, handsome woman of forty-one with large blue eyes and prematurely gray, once luxuriant black hair fastened by hairpins to the nape of her neck, Missy was in love with her boss and regarded herself as his other wife.
Nor was she alone in her imaginings. We knew that FDR would always back up Missy. Her father was an alcoholic who lived apart from the family.