Did You Know…The FDR Edition

Winston Churchill said, meeting Franklin Roosevelt for the first time, was like opening your first bottle of champagne.

He had a perennial twinkle in his eye, called the traitor to his class stepping up for those suffering when he could have easily retired to his family estate, though despite the protests of his domineering mother, Sara Delano, did not.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the 32nd President of the United States in 1932, serving for 16 years, took his oath of office suffering from the polio he contracted 11 years earlier at age 39 believed from drinking contaminated water at a Boys Scout camp in Alloway, New Jersey now named Camp Roosevelt.

When he died in 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia at 63, enduring it for 27 of those years, it was the first time America even alluded to it, the press protecting The Boss, as he was affectionately called, right to the end.

He was also the last U.S. President to serve four terms though the last cut short, the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution ratified in 1951, stating no person can be elected president more than twice.

Yet, despite all of Franklin’s trials, he still had that twinkle he seemed born with, especially towards women.

He was a strapping, handsome, flirty 6’2 upper crust gentleman, wed to a wonderful woman he may have married for all the wrong reasons, besotted with her uncle Ted, who happily gave the bride away, Franklin wanting nothing more than to follow in TR’s footsteps, which he more or less did.

The letter Eleanor wrote to Uncle Theodore asking him to walk her down the aisle, as well as his reply, can be read at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York.  

As for Eleanor, Franklin’s ticket to Teddy, she was quite plain and perhaps a little too chaste for his peppery taste.

She said, sex in a marriage was something to be endured not enjoyed…

enter Lucy Mercer, the Lovely Lucy, as FDR coined her, Eleanor’s social secretary.

She was pretty and vivacious, appreciating him in ways Eleanor just couldn’t, having not the sexual confidence that Lucy had. Wasn’t her fault, growing up in the alcoholic atmosphere that she did, losing both parents pretty young, passed along to relatives like an unwanted dinner guest.

No one really knows when Franklin’s affair with Lucy actually began, but we all know when its first round ended, after Eleanor found their letters in the bottom of a suitcase causing the marriage from then on, to be in name only, after offering him a divorce he refused when his mother firmly said, she’d cut him off financially if he dared leave his family, and that would have ended his political career since, aspiring leaders of the free world, didn’t leave their wives and children back then.

But his casual canoodling didn’t end there.

Franklin also had an ongoing affair with Marguerite ‘Missy’ Lehand, his private secretary of 21 years, Eleanor approved since, it didn’t have the same sting the Lucy affair had, while it also gave her the freedom to avoid First Lady duties that Missy happily took up.

Despite limitations, paralyzed from the waist down, Franklin’s lust was much in play, since he also swooned over his distant cousin, Margaret ‘Daisy’ Suckley that came to light after their letters were found under her mattress when she died in 1991 at age 91, which brings us to Fala, FDR’s beloved Scottish Terrier she gave him as a gift.

Fala’s Secret Service name was, The Informer, because if you spotted him, yes, Fala was a he, you knew The Boss was close by.

He also wore a collar that said…

I Belong To The President.

How Franklin loved that little dog who’s buried near him beneath the sundial in the Rose Garden, at Hyde Park.  

I could write and write about Franklin but will end here, looking at his heart that broke all those across America when it went silent from a stroke on April 12, 1945, the same day the American Civil War broke out in 1861, ironic since he was often called the greatest wartime President since Abraham Lincoln.

And guess who was there, all those years later, who had to run out like a thief before Eleanor arrived, but that lovely Lucy who never stopped loving him.

She died three years later of leukemia at the age of 57.

Maybe then they were finally together without reproach, loving each other for all eternity.

The romantic in me, hopes so anyway.

Recommended Reading

 A Traitor to his Class…H.W. Brands (2000), the full story only Brands could tell with such inspiring clarity.

Lucy…Ellen Feldman…(2004), well-written historical fiction weaving a romantic tale.

FDR’s Funeral Train…Robert Klara (2010), the end of an era, poignantly penned, FDR’s final ride.

Recommended Viewing

Hyde Park on the Hudson (2012), taken from Daisy’s letters, Bill Murray’s FDR, truly amazing.

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History…Ken Burns (2020), who never disappoints. 

SB