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By Root 1632 0

figure in Roosevelt’s life was his mother, Sara. As an only child, Franklin grew to maturity in the warmth and security of single-minded maternal devotion. Sara shaped him, supported him, and transmitted to him the unshakable confidence that characterized his presidential leadership. Seven of Sara’s ancestors landed with the Mayflower. Unlike the cautious Hudson River Roosevelts, the Delanos were swashbuckling sea captains, global traders, and risk takers. Her father, Warren Delano, made a fortune in China in the 1840s exporting tea, then a much larger one in the 1860s in the opium trade. Sara lived two years in China, was educated in France and Germany, and as a young woman was courted assiduously by New York’s most eligible bachelors, including the irrepressible Stanford White. As a friend remarked, “she had a gift for saying the right thing at the right time, and she could say it in several languages.” Sara gloried in her Delano heritage and molded FDR in that tradition. “My son Franklin is a Delano,” she often said. “He is not a Roosevelt at all.”

Sara held the purse strings. She supported Franklin generously, bestowed on him and Eleanor an elegant New York town house (which she staffed and furnished), remodeled and enlarged the Hyde Park residence to accommodate her son’s political ambitions, and, when Franklin thought of leaving Eleanor for Lucy in 1918, intervened decisively to keep the couple together. Sara’s wealth freed Franklin from earning a living and allowed him the luxury of pursuing a political career unencumbered by financial worry. “Nothing,” said Eleanor, “ever seemed to disturb the deep, underlying affection they had for each other.”*

Like Sara, Lucy Mercer has not been given her due. “Every man who ever knew her fell in love with her,” wrote Jonathan Daniels, a keen observer of the Washington scene. Lucy was everything Eleanor was not. Beautiful, warm, affectionate, she gave Franklin the attention he craved. Her voice had “the quality of dark velvet” and her impeccable manners made her a most agreeable listener. Lucy’s mother was once described by the Washington Mirror as “easily the most beautiful woman in Washington society,” and her father, a founder of the Chevy Chase Country Club, was descended from Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The family had fallen on hard times, and Lucy was working as Eleanor’s social secretary when Franklin met her in 1914. Their relationship blossomed slowly. By the summer of 1917, with Eleanor at Campobello, the two had become an item of Washington gossip. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the tart-tongued daughter of TR (and Eleanor’s cousin), encouraged the romance and sometimes invited the pair for dinner. “Franklin deserved a good time,” she was quoted as saying. “He was married to Eleanor.”

The affair broke off in 1918, but Lucy and Franklin remained close throughout the president’s life. She surreptitiously attended each of his inaugurals in a closed White House limousine provided by the Secret Service, met with FDR often in the 1940s, and was with him when he died at Warm Springs.

Missy (Marguerite) LeHand, a quietly competent, attractive young woman of twenty-three, joined FDR’s team during his vice presidential campaign in 1920 and remained at his side until she suffered a debilitating stroke in June 1941. She was not only Roosevelt’s personal secretary (“F.D.” as she and only she addressed him) but his constant companion and attendant—a surrogate for both Eleanor and Lucy. When Roosevelt cruised off the Florida coast for months at a time in the 1920s in an attempt to regain his health, it was Missy who accompanied him. It was Missy, not Eleanor, who went with him to Warm Springs; it was Missy who presided over his office; and it was Missy who served as hostess when FDR entertained. Neither Eleanor nor Sara objected to the arrangement, and Roosevelt’s friends took it in stride. Missy was deeply in love with FDR, and the president, if not in love, certainly preferred her company to all others’. She died without knowing that