FDR - Jean Edward Smith [432]
Also see John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 73 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). Gunther cites Mrs. Clapper and also does not name Lucy Mercer.
110. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 320n. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).
111. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 67–68 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956). Rexford Tugwell in The Democratic Roosevelt, published the next year, makes no mention of the rumor or of Lucy Mercer. (New York: Doubleday, 1957).
In 2001, James MacGregor Burns provided an excellent summary account of the romance in The Three Roosevelts 155–156, with Susan Dunn (New York: Grove Press, 2001).
112. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 354–355 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). Writing in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1966, Professor Schlesinger thought the story of FDR and Lucy had been exaggerated in the Washington rumor mill but conceded that they had been “emotionally involved.” “No doubt Franklin began to show a delight in Lucy; no doubt this worried Eleanor, as it would any wife.” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1966.
113. Jonathan Daniels, The End of Innocence (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954); Washington Quadrille: The Dance Beside the Documents (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
114. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends (New York: Doubleday, 1982). More recently the story has been treated effectively by Geoffrey Ward in his perceptive A First-Class Temperament 361–374, 411–417. Another fine account is provided by Blanche Wiesen Cook in volume one of her biography of Mrs. Roosevelt, pages 216–232.
115. Consuelo’s front-page marriage to the duke, which cost the Vanderbilts an estimated $10 million to arrange, ended in separation in 1908 and annulment in 1926. At the hearings before the Rota in the Vatican, Ava Vanderbilt Belmont (Consuelo’s mother) testified, “I have always had absolute power over my daughter.… I ordered her to marry the Duke.”
At the time of Consuelo’s marriage, a New York society writer chirped, “Winty was outclassed. Six feet two in his golf stockings, he was no match for five feet six in a coronet.” Elizabeth Eliot, Heiresses and Coronets 188 (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959); Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society? 233–234 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).
116. Elizabeth Shoumatoff, FDR’s Unfinished Portrait 76–77 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).
117. Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 250–251.
118. The president’s official schedule for April 5, 1941, indicates that FDR returned from the Oval Office to his White House study “accompanied by Mrs. Johnson.” The time given is 1555–1740. Cited in Ellen Feldman, “FDR and His Women,” American Heritage 53, 55 (February–March 2003).
119. Interview, Geoffrey Ward with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., cited in Ward, First-Class Temperament 777n.
120. Quoted Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 591–592.
121. Feldman, “FDR and His Women” 59.
122. “Thank you so much,” wrote Lucy. “You must know it will be treasured always. I have wanted to write you for a long time to tell you that I had seen Franklin and of his great kindness to my husband when he was desperately ill in Washington.… I think of your sorrow—you—whom I have always felt to be the most blessed and privileged of women must now feel immeasurable grief and pain and they must be almost unbearable.” Lucy Rutherfurd to Eleanor Roosevelt, May 2, 1945, FDRL.
123. Lucy Rutherfurd to Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, May 9, 1945, FDRL. Franklin’s early letters to Lucy have not been located. Lucy claimed to have burned them, but writers such as Ellen Feldman doubt that is the case.
124. John R. Boettiger, Jr., A Love in Shadow