FDR - Jean Edward Smith [309]
It was about this time in the spring of 1941 that Missy’s health began to fail. She was forty-three. For twenty years she had been at FDR’s side—his secretary, companion, and confidante—but the strain of long hours with little respite had taken its toll. “The president would work night after night, and she was always there working with him,” her friend Barbara Curtis remembered. “He could take it, but I think her strength just didn’t hold out.”59
After dinner with the president, Hopkins, Grace Tully, and Pa Watson on June 4, Missy collapsed and fell to the floor unconscious. White House physicians initially diagnosed it as a slight heart attack brought on by overwork. In fact, it was a small stroke, a precursor of a massive stroke two weeks later that paralyzed her right side and rendered her unable to speak coherently. Missy was transferred from the White House to Doctors Hospital in Georgetown, where Franklin and Eleanor visited her frequently. As Doris Kearns Goodwin reports, the visits were unbearable for FDR. “All his life, he had steeled himself to ignore illness and unpleasantness of any kind.” For Eleanor the visits were easier to handle. More accustomed to vulnerability and loss, she kept up a steady flow of flowers, fruit, presents, and letters.60
Grace Tully assumed Missy’s secretarial duties, but she was not a companion for FDR. That void was never filled. And in his own way, quietly and with no outward emotion, Roosevelt grieved for Missy. While she was in the hospital he ordered round-the-clock nursing care, paid every expense, and wrote each of her doctors personal notes expressing his gratitude. Aware that Missy might never recover, FDR worried what would happen if he should die and there was no one to pay for her care. Five months after her stroke he changed his will, directing that half of the income from his estate (which was eventually probated at more than $3 million) be left to Eleanor and the remaining half “for the account of my friend Marguerite LeHand” to cover all expenses for “medical care and treatment during her lifetime.” Upon Missy’s death, the income would go to Eleanor, with the principal eventually divided equally among his five children.61 “I owed her that much,” Franklin told his son James. “She served me so well for so long and asked for so little in return.”62*
On June 22, 1941, the war took a decisive turn. Without warning Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, an invasion of his recent ally, the Soviet Union. At 0330 hours German forces poured across the Russian frontier from the Baltic to the Black Sea. One hundred and eighty divisions, 3.8 million men, supported by thousands of planes, tanks, and artillery pieces surged forward in three parallel thrusts. In the north, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb pressed toward Leningrad; in the center, Marshal von Bock drove on Smolensk and Moscow; in the south, von Rundstedt barreled through the Ukraine toward Kiev. Russian resistance crumbled. In four days German panzers were 200 miles deep in Soviet territory. Two Russian armies had been destroyed and three badly mauled, and 600,000 prisoners were in German captivity. In the air, the Russians lost 1,800 aircraft on the first day of fighting, 800 on the second, 557 on the third, and 351 on the fourth.63
Churchill responded with immediate support for the Soviet Union. “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years,” he told a British radio audience the evening of June 22. “I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.… Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.”64*
Roosevelt followed Churchill’s lead, gingerly at first,