FDR - Jean Edward Smith [102]
Eleanor emerged from the ordeal a different woman. “I knew more about the human heart.… I became a more tolerant person … but I think more determined to try for certain ultimate objectives.”106 Mrs. Roosevelt commenced the metamorphosis from a private to a public person. The marriage survived, but love and trust were gone. She forgave Franklin and they continued to live together, but their relationship had changed. Independent and increasingly self-confident and outspoken, Eleanor was now her own person. For her, the Lucy Mercer affair was a watershed. “I have the memory of an elephant,” she told a friend. “I can forgive, but I cannot forget.”107
Franklin, for his part, changed as well. He took care to protect his wife’s feelings and to preserve outward proprieties. He would never allow anyone to criticize Eleanor in his presence. He spent more time with the children, gave up golf on Sunday mornings, and did his utmost to rebuild the marriage, albeit at arm’s length. Like Eleanor, he matured and became more serious.
Historians and biographers attribute FDR’s political coming of age to the searing effect of polio. Many of Franklin’s friends believed his bitter disappointment in love had an earlier and equally profound effect. Corinne Robinson Alsop, Eleanor’s cousin, thought that before Lucy, Franklin was without depth. “He had a loveless quality, as if he were incapable of emotion. It is difficult to describe, but to me [the affair] seemed to release something in him.” Another who knew Franklin wrote that after losing Lucy he emerged “tougher and more resilient, wiser and more profound, even prior to his paralysis.”108
There was no scandal. Not until the 1960s was FDR linked publicly with Lucy Mercer.109 Harvard Professor Frank Freidel, writing the first multivolume biography of FDR in the early 1950s, dismissed the story in a footnote. Such rumors, wrote Freidel, “seem preposterous. They reflect more on the teller than FDR.”110 James MacGregor Burns, in his captivating Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, published in 1956, alluded to wartime rumors in Washington but refuted them in a paragraph.111 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Age of Roosevelt, mentions Lucy Mercer and FDR’s affection for her but resists going further.112 The first to attempt a full account of the romance was Jonathan Daniels, FDR’s presidential press aide and the son of Josephus Daniels, first in The End of Innocence, then in Washington Quadrille, published in 1968.113 Eleanor Roosevelt confirmed the story in her long series of interviews with Joseph Lash, summarized by Lash in 1972 in his loving portrait Eleanor and Franklin and embellished in Love, Eleanor ten years later.114
Franklin did not see Lucy again until 1941, although they never really lost contact. In 1920, Lucy married Winthrop Rutherfurd, one of the wealthiest and by all accounts one of the most respected members of East Coast society. A direct descendent of Peter Stuyvesant of New York and John Winthrop of Massachusetts, Winthrop (“Winty,” his friends called him) was an avid sportsman who divided his time between a country estate in Allamuchy, New Jersey, an elegant town house in New York, and Ridgeley Hall, his winter home in Aiken, South Carolina. In his youth, Rutherfurd was considered one of the most eligible bachelors in New York and had successfully courted and won the affection of Consuelo Vanderbilt, only to have Consuelo’s mother break off the engagement and compel her to marry the ninth Duke of Marlborough.115 Winthrop later married another considerable heiress, Alice Morton, a daughter of Vice President Levi Morton (and sister of Lucy’s friend Edith Eustis). Alice died in 1917,