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Description
When Franklin Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, returned from an inspection of the battlefront in WWI, Eleanor discovered a beribboned collection of letters in his suitcase. They were from Lucy Mercer, who had been Eleanor's private secretary.Thus begins the story of a tumultuous marriage and an affair that lasted to the very day that Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia.
Joseph Persico has told this emotional, intimate story with mesmerizing skill, as he reveals it year by year, finally throwing into clear relief the lives of the two most remarkable people ever to occupy the White House; and of the admirable woman who came between them.
Roosevelt surrounded himself with women, from his loving daughter Anna, who sometimes help arranged the meetings between her father and Lucy, Missy Lehand, Roosevelt's utterly devoted, longtime secretary, "Daisy" Suckley, a distant cousin who finally exposed the last betrayal to Eleanor, and then there were the dalliances, including Dorothy Shift, publisher of the New York Post. Eleanor's story is an emotional rollercoaster all on its own, with over 2,000 letters written to a mannish female reporter, and an obsession with a New York State trooper, as she struggled successfully to find her place in the world.
FRANKLIN AND LUCY is a unique story which portrays more clearly than ever before the lives and personalities of its subjects.
Excerpts
From the book
...SCARLET LETTERS
He belonged in uniform. His country was at war. He was thirty-six years old and bursting with vitality. Before going to work in the morning at the Navy Department he often played a round of golf. On weekends, he rarely got in less than thirty-six holes. During the week he worked out with Walter Camp, the football coach and fitness enthusiast. Lathrop Brown, his Harvard roommate, was serving in the new tank corps. Harry Hooker, his former law partner, was now Major Hooker, on the staff of the 53rd Division American Expeditionary Forces. Another law partner and Harvard pal, Langdon Marvin, was driving an ambulance in France with the Red Cross. His four distant cousins, Archibald, Kermit, Theodore Jr., and Quentin, sons of Franklin's idol, former President Theodore Roosevelt, had all enlisted. The exploits of TR's boys filled the newspapers, arousing in Franklin competing emotions of pride and envy. Even his nearsighted brother-in-law, Hall Roosevelt, had volunteered.
On the very day that war had been declared, April 6, 1917, the Roosevelt clan gathered at the home of TR's married daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. There the former commander-in-chief seized Franklin by the shoulders, fixed him with his myopic gaze, and pleaded with him to resign as assistant secretary of the navy. "You must get into uniform at once," TR urged. "You must get in."
Franklin was all too willing. Patriotism was the main reason, but politics intruded as well. In 1898, when America had gone to war against Spain over Cuba, TR had resigned from the very Navy post Franklin now held. He had formed his own regiment, the Rough Riders. He had worn the uniform, known war, and subsequently reached the political pinnacle. TR's trajectory was not lost on his ambitious young relative. Franklin's chief, Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels, easily detected the parallels. "Theodore left the position of assistant secretary to become a Rough Rider, later Governor of New York and then President, and both had served in the legislature of New York," Daniels noted. "Franklin actually thought fighting in the War was the necessary step toward reaching the White House." Franklin's mother, Sara, had recently written her son, "The papers say buttons and pictures of you are being prepared to run for Governor." But Franklin preferred to take TR's route, military service first.
Theodore Roosevelt, now fifty-nine, blind in one eye, partially deaf, his body racked by punishing expeditions into the disease-infested Brazilian jungle, was itching to answer his country's call again. He hoped to raise a volunteer division just as he had raised a regiment in the earlier war. He pleaded with Franklin to get him an appointment with President Woodrow Wilson. This request could prove ticklish. Ever since TR, as a third-party candidate, had been beaten by Wilson five years before in the 1912 presidential election, he had been lambasting the winner for everything from woolly-headedness to cowardice for not getting America into the European war sooner. Nevertheless, the day after the Roosevelt gathering at cousin Alice's house, Franklin did go to the secretary of war, Newton Baker, and persuade him to intervene with Wilson on TR's behalf. The president would later say of meeting with his old foe, "I was charmed by his personality . . . you can't resist the man." Evidently he was able to resist, since he told Baker afterward, "I really think the best way to treat Mr. Roosevelt is to take no notice of him." TR was baffled by Wilson's failure to seize upon his heartfelt offer. As he left the White House with Wilson's confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, he complained, "I don't understand. After...
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