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By Root 1860 0

were invited for the day, but none was permitted to stay overnight. The young, well-bred Whitney sisters were invited several times. Many years later, when both sisters had grown old, their parents died within weeks of each other, subjecting them to a double inheritance tax. The sisters had long since lost touch with their former playmate, but Isabel, the older, a stouthearted Republican, swallowed her pride and wrote to FDR in the White House, asking for an appointment. The president, who relished meeting old acquaintances, agreed to see her and listened patiently to her grievance. Roosevelt said he was terribly sorry, but it was a New York law and even the president could not change it. Isabel rose angrily and shook her cane. “You were always a nasty little boy, and now you are a nasty old man.”20

The birth of a son did not deflect the Roosevelts from their annual journey to Europe. On Easter morning 1885 the family, including three-year-old Franklin, were returning from England on their favorite White Star liner, the Germanic. Suddenly a violent storm arose, plunging the ship into total darkness. As wave after wave broke over the bow, the vessel began to founder. In their cabin on the main deck, the Roosevelts feared the worst.

“We seem to be going down,” said Sara.

“It does look like it,” James replied.

When the water in their cabin became ankle-deep, they prepared to abandon ship. “I never get frightened and I was not then,” Sara remembered. She took her fur coat from its hook and wrapped it around Franklin. “Poor little boy,” she told James. “If he must go down, he is going down warm.” Miraculously, Germanic remained afloat. The water never reached its boilers, the storm subsided, and the ship limped back to Liverpool for repairs.21

Travel was an integral part of FDR’s childhood. In 1887, when he was five, his parents spent the winter in Washington, D.C. James was heavily invested in a syndicate to construct a sea-level canal across Nicaragua linking the Atlantic and Pacific, in direct competition with the French effort of Ferdinand de Lesseps in Panama. The purpose of the trip was to enlist the support of Congress and the Cleveland administration in negotiations with Nicaragua. The Roosevelts rented the fashionable town house of the Belgian minister at 1211 K Street N.W. and entered the Washington scene with gusto. “Every one is charming to us,” wrote Sara. “Even Franklin knows everybody.”22

Several times the Roosevelts visited the Clevelands in the White House. James had contributed generously to Cleveland’s gubernatorial campaign in New York and even more lavishly to his 1884 presidential run. The president pressed James to accept a diplomatic post, preferably as minister to Holland, but James declined. He did, however, secure for Rosy an appointment as first secretary to the American legation in Vienna. Rosy too was a loyal Democrat, had given handsomely to the Cleveland campaign, and could pay most embassy expenses from his wife’s fortune. James objected to Rosy’s frivolous lifestyle in New York and convinced Cleveland that an appointment overseas would be beneficial.

Before leaving Washington in the spring, James and five-year-old Franklin called on the president to say good-bye. James found Cleveland more careworn than ever. At the close of the interview the massive Cleveland, a great walrus of a man, put his hand on FDR’s tiny head: “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States.”23

Many years later Sara was asked if she had thought her son would ever become president. “Never,” she answered. “The highest ideal I could hold up before our boy [was] to grow to be like his father: straight and honorable, just and kind.”24

In addition to their annual sojourns in Europe, the Roosevelts spent almost every summer on Campobello, a slender, rockbound island in Canadian waters off the coast of Maine. James and Sara were so taken with the invigorating sea air and the congenial social life that in 1883, a year and a half after Franklin was born, they