fdr and missy lehand relationship
Franklin D. Roosevelt (c. 1919) and Eleanor Roosevelt (1933), Marriage and continued contact with Roosevelt, Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough, his first memorable presidential inauguration, "Franklin Roosevelt Was Not Diplomatic as Wife", "FDR's Secret Love: How Roosevelt's lifelong affair might have changed the course of a century", "Paid Notice: Deaths KNOWLES, BARBARA RUTHERFURD", "MISS RUTHERFURD BECOMES FIANCEE; BETROTHED | Member of Noted Family WIll Be Wed to Robert Winthrop Knowles, Jr. of Boston", "MISS RUTHERFURD MARRIED IN AIKEN; Fermata School Graduate the Bride of Robert W. Knowles Jr., Former Service Man", "February 2011: FDR Letters to Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd", "Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Boettiger Halsted (1906-1975)", "New light on the revelations of Franklin Roosevelt's 30-year affection for Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd", Military history of the United States during World War II, Springwood birthplace, home, and gravesite, Little White House, Warm Springs, Georgia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lucy_Mercer_Rutherfurd&oldid=1152540330, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2022, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 30 April 2023, at 21:24. WebWidely considered the first female presidential chief of staff, Marguerite "Missy" LeHand was the right-hand woman to Franklin Delano Roosevelt - both personally and professionally - FDR was not the sexual rake certain historians have made him out to be, but he did subscribe to the philosophy of the E. Y. Harburg song that would appear the year after his death, When Im not near the girl I love, I love the girl Im near. Missy once said he was really incapable of a personal friendship with anyone. Some found him almost sadistic. Many cabinet secretaries, congressmen, senators and ambassadors courted favor with Missy in an attempt to gain access to the president. She expected her husband to do well. Whatever his reasons, Franklin chose to reconcile with his wife and promise to stop seeing Mercer. FDR was the most convivial of men. On June 4th, at a party in the White House, Missy collapsed, probably from a combination of a stroke and a heart attack. Historian/author Persico speculates that these letters may have been the cause of the 1927 nervous breakdown of Roosevelt's long-time unmarried first secretary Marguerite "Missy" LeHand (18981944), as LeHand was also reputedly in love with Roosevelt and no medical cause for her breakdown was found. [28] The wife of his aide Edwin ("Pa") Watson called him the loneliest man in the world. In 1943 FDR told his distant cousin and close companion Margaret Suckley, Im either Exhibit A or left completely alone.. Eleanor Roosevelt might have been a saint, but she was a saint with a faddish bent and a powerful peasant breath. Lucy Page Mercer was born on April 26, 1891, in Washington, D.C., to Carroll Mercer (18571917), a member of Theodore Roosevelt's "Rough Riders" cavalry military unit in the campaigns in Cuba, on the south shore of the island near Santiago during the brief SpanishAmerican War in 1898, and Minna Leigh (Minnie) Tunis (18631947), an independent woman of "Bohemian" exotic, free-spirited tastes. Missy later told an interviewer that Albany was the hardest work I ever did (The Gatekeeper). She remained in the White House, and it was there she received the sad word of her husband's passing. But whitewashing the weaknesses of the great is a disservice to them as well as history. Perhaps FDRs charm did mask an emotional iciness, and ERs high-mindedness did make her almost as hard on others as she was on herself, and Lucys ability to live a gilded life while one-third of the nation was ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished was unconscionable. The letters of Lorena Hickok, the AP reporter who became a government worker when her closeness to the White House compromised her professional objectivity, reveal a burning, and for a while reciprocated, passion for ER. One morning over breakfast she asked if a letter had arrived. He was so engrossed in his work and campaigns that he hadn't the time to spare, and he believed not unusually for his time that it was the job of the mother to raise the children, or at least to hire a nanny to handle them. In A First Class Temperament, Geoffrey C. Ward recounts a telling conversation between the young FDR and his wife. After Missy LeHand suffered a stroke in 1941, Grace became FDR's primary personal secretary. After discovering the relationship, she offered her husband a divorce. They provided FDR with an important escape from the pressures of the White House, and their personal bonds allowed them to speak truth, sometimes uncomfortable truths, to the Boss. Mercer's friendship with Franklin Roosevelt was portrayed in the well-regarded TV mini-series Eleanor and Franklin, with Mercer portrayed by actress Linda Kelsey in the 1976 telecast, based on the best-selling biography of the same name by Eleanor's personal friend Joseph P. Lash, published in 1971. My study of the presidential chronology disclosed a meeting on June 5 of the same year. The Bank Holiday excitement is a bit too much for some! Marguerite Missy LeHand (18981944) was born to an Irish family in Potsdam, New York. WebThe Role: Missy LeHand served as private secretary to President Roosevelt, and according to biographer Kathryn Smith, eventually served as Chief of Staff in all ways but in name. Eleanor Roosevelt was 13 years into her marriage in 1918. Hers was the ONLY office with such a door. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that she wasn't privy to the courtship between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, begun in 1902. Three days a week he also came home to her social secretary, who laughed at his jokes and responded to his teasing and saw no reason to question his version of the way things had happened. His removal from friends and peers was made up for by the love and support of his family, particularly his mother. FDR expressed a longing for white asparagus. target: "#hbspt-form-1682997151000-4739201604", But it wasn't only joyous choruses of "Wearing of the Green" that drew attention away from the bride and groom. LeHand dropped unconscious at the end of a late dinner with White House staff. Yet a strong partnership in political matters, shared membership in the storied Roosevelt dynasty, and six children did not make Franklin and Eleanor's a happy marriage. They speak of her need to make surroundings beautiful, and days bright, and loved ones glad to be alive. The year 1924 also introduced FDR to Warm Spring Georgia, where he would focus his efforts on findingan effective cure for polio and provide a world class rehabilitation clinic for its victims. To license content, please contact licenses [at] americanheritage.com. Rutherfurd continued to meet more frequently with Roosevelt in the months that followed. In a short period of time she became the most famous secretary in America. [citation needed], Following Roosevelt's death, his administration concealed from the press the fact that Rutherfurd had been present during his death, fearing the scandal that would ensue. STill, if FDR could not save his wife, he did not have to betray her. Surely the monumental demands ER made on her husband were proof of her belief in his ability to rise to them. Du Bois supported it. One Roosevelt son called her a lady to her fingertips. FDRs mother wrote to her daughter-in-law, Miss Mercer is here, she is so sweet and attractive and adores you, Eleanor. I could not believe FDR had sacrificed the complicated, redoubtable, and, in her youth, lovely ER for this saccharine Victorian clich. }). Adoring crowds made the president the center of attention, both at the wedding and the reception. When FDR and Lucy, who was by then Mrs. Winthrop Rutherfurd, began to meet again in 1941, while ER was importuning FDR not to sacrifice social progress to military imperatives, Lucy was referring to him as the Source I Do Not Question. Even more moving than the words she wrote about FDR to others is a letter she sent to him that was until now locked away among the classified documents in the FDR Library. During the same time period, Roosevelt was said to be involved with Dorothy Schiff, a former publisher of the New York Post. [30] When her husband later suffered a stroke, she contacted Roosevelt to arrange for him to be cared for at well-regarded Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.[31] Historian/author Doris Kearns Goodwin speculated that an entry in the White House ushers diary for August 1, 1941 included a code name for Lucy Rutherfurd, suggesting that she attended a private dinner with the president then. [11] Eleanor subsequently offered her husband a divorce. Rumors of their affair spread like wildfire, as she always conveniently visited the White House and Hyde Park when Eleanor was out of town. hbspt.enqueueForm({ A soldier-historian looks at how the world has changed in the past decade and finds that America is both hostage to history and likely to be saved by it. Missy LeHand, FDR, Dutchess County neighbor Maunsell Crosby, and Frances de Rham, 1924 The year 1924 also introduced FDR to Warm Spring Georgia, where he FDR was convinced he had found a new form of therapy. Roles of Tully and LeHand were by this time well defined and accepted. She made other people happy. . During their engagement she wrote to her future husband, Sometimes I think that a womans moods are sent her just as a mans temptations are.. It was not only that Eleanor, with her public achievements, personal tragedies, and flair for emotional undressing in public that would have warmed the heart of a latter-day talk-show host, could not help upstaging her; it was also that Lucy had a passion for privacy. Nonetheless, FDR had his standards of conduct. FACT: Though not as depicted in Atlantic Crossing. It takes place during the June 1939 weekend that the British king and queen visited Roosevelt at his upstate New York cottage in Hyde Park, where FDR was said to take a number of mistresses. Warnings around that unlucky number proved apt on this occasion; this was the year, according to Biography, that Eleanor first discovered her husband's infidelity. I envied Lucy. The young FDR did not take socially unsanctioned sex lightly. The correspondent most frequently focused on the romance angle was Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune. In Trohans memoir Political Animals, he describes receiving a tip in the fall of 1941 that the Crown Princess was visiting [the Presidents country home] Hyde Park every weekend without being on the guest list. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously did his very best to control his public image. In their united efforts against Sara Roosevelt's resistance to her son's marriage, they demonstrated early on their skill as a goal-oriented partnership. [36] The two women, Mercer and Shoumatoff, immediately packed and left the cottage. While Lucy Mercer, now Mrs. Winthrop Rutherfurd, was having tea with the President in the oval study, Marguerite ("Missy") LeHand, his personal secretary, lay in her small room on the third floor sedated but uncalm. The affair lasted two years, with one of his friends posing as Mercer's escort. In "Roosevelt in Retrospect," John Gunther claimsthat Franklin was often unaware when Eleanor was in the White House, and that he did not see the New York apartments his wife maintained until late in 1944. "No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Lucy Mercer had a talent, though it is not one held in high regard today. The Virginia Quarterly Reviewdescribes her as feeling rejected by her mother Anna Hall Roosevelt, who once told her that she must be good, as she was too plain to be anything else. Thus was born a truly remarkable partnership. On the rare occasions when she was less than that, ER owned up to her failings scrupulously. From Nazi saboteurs washing up near Marthas vacation home, to secretary Missy LeHands collapse and the press implying the President and Princess were an item, theres a ton of drama in Episode 6 of Atlantic Crossing. Both branches of the Roosevelt family enjoyed wealth and privilege, yet the future first family were raised in markedly different circumstances. This eventually became the March of Dimes Foundation which funded the research that led to a polio vaccine in 1954.
