FDR - Jean Edward Smith [214]
Blanche Wiesen Cook called it Eleanor’s revenge. Mrs. Nesbitt, who had never been gainfully employed and had no supervisory experience, assumed the direction of a White House staff of twenty-six, including cooks, butlers, maids, pantry help, and waiters. “The housekeeper was one expression of her passive-aggressive behavior in a marriage of remarkable and labyrinthine complexity.”12 Mrs. Nesbitt believed in plain food, plainly prepared.13 “Some of the dishes I served regularly were corned-beef hash, poached eggs, and creamed chipped beef. Sometimes, if the food was too simple, the President made wisecracks, and I’d have to stir myself and think up something fancy.”14 James Roosevelt called her “the worst cook I’ve ever encountered.”15 Actually, Mrs. Nesbitt did little cooking. But as one firsthand observer noted, “she stood over the cooks, making sure that each dish was overcooked or undercooked or ruined in one way or another.”16 Mrs. Nesbitt was devoted to ER. She displayed contempt for the president’s desires. When FDR complained of being served liver and beans three days in a row, Mrs. Nesbitt dismissed it. “Well, he was supposed to have them!”17 If he ordered something special, she ignored it.18 When the King and Queen of England wanted coffee, Mrs. Nesbitt sent iced tea. “It was better for them.”19*
Roosevelt partially remedied the situation in 1941, after Sara died, when he brought her excellent cook, Mary Campbell, down from Hyde Park and installed her in the family kitchen on the third floor.20 During the presidential campaign in 1944, FDR confided to his daughter, Anna, and Grace Tully, not entirely in jest, that the real reason he wanted to be elected to a fourth term was “so I can fire Mrs. Nesbitt.”21 That privilege fell to President Harry Truman shortly after he assumed office. Mrs. Truman had been asked to bring a stick of butter for the potluck luncheon of the Senate wives’ bridge club. When Mrs. Nesbitt refused to give her one—the White House was rationed, she said—President Truman sent her packing that afternoon.22
FDR’s immediate staff was totally devoted to him and militantly nonideological. Their loyalty was personal. They avoided policy debates and would have followed the president in whatever direction he chose. Howe, Missy, and Grace Tully had been with him throughout the Albany years. Early, McIntyre, and Pa Watson were old Washington hands. All three were southerners: Early, the grandson of Confederate general Jubal Early, was from Virginia, McIntyre from Kentucky, and Watson from Alabama. Early and McIntyre, both former newsmen, handled the foibles of the press and members of Congress with unflappable aplomb. Watson, a much-decorated Army officer, had been an aide to Woodrow Wilson at Versailles and was a man with an eternally sunny outlook. “I have never known anyone just like him,” Ickes wrote. “He simply bubbles with good humor. He was great fun fishing and he was equally great fun playing poker. He could be relied upon to keep us all in a mellow humor, and this without any effort on his part, but simply by being himself.”23
Poker and fishing were two of FDR’s diversions in the White House. Missy arranged the poker sessions, often at Harold Ickes’s suburban Maryland estate, where the food was certain to be good and the company congenial. In addition to Watson, Early, and McIntyre, the group usually included Harry Hopkins and Henry Morgenthau. Later, the lawyers William Douglas, Tommy Corcoran, and Robert H. Jackson joined the round—Corcoran with his accordion and Irish charm. Like the “children’s hour,” Roosevelt relished the convivial aspects of poker and played for penny-ante stakes. Vice President Garner, who took his poker as seriously as his bourbon, dismissed FDR’s sessions as “just for conversation.”24
In the evening after