FDR - Jean Edward Smith [70]
Back in Washington, Franklin found the city hot and humid. Congress and the Supreme Court were adjourned, but in the executive branch it was business as usual. “The Secretary and I worked like niggers all day,” he wrote Eleanor in late July. Daniels was preparing to go on vacation for two weeks and would leave FDR in charge. “He has given me carte blanche and says he will abide by my decisions.”44
“I think it is quite big of him to be willing to let you decide,” Eleanor replied. “It shows great confidence.”45
Roosevelt could not have been happier. “I now find my vocation combined with my avocation in a delightful way,” he wrote an old Harvard chum, Charlie Munn.46 Socially, FDR had also arrived. Years later he liked to joke that Washington society provided three diversions: “the saloon, the salon, and the Salome.” The “saloon” was a house where drinks flowed freely; the “salon” a house where artists and intellectuals congregated; the “Salome” was Roosevelt’s term for “a mansion where the music was soft, so were the sofas, and the ladies were very pretty.” Franklin was welcome at all three.47
As a member of Wilson’s subcabinet and as a Roosevelt, Franklin was readily accepted by Washington’s cave-dwelling social establishment. His good looks, natural friendliness, and buoyant optimism made him a much-sought-after dinner companion. Bainbridge Colby, later secretary of state, thought him “the handsomest and most attractive man in Washington.”48 British diplomat Nigel Law found him “the most attractive man whom it was my good fortune to meet during my four years in America.”49 Yale football coach Walter Camp called him “a beautifully built man, with the long muscles of an athlete.”50
Franklin was a frequent guest at the home of Cousin Alice and Nicholas Longworth, fashionable leaders of Republican society in exile. Longworth had been given a two-year sabbatical from Congress by the voters of Cincinnati, but that did little to dampen his hospitality or stanch the flow of booze and gossip for which he and Alice were famous.51 TR’s old friends such as the British and French ambassadors, Sir Cecil “Springy” Spring-Rice and Jules Jusserand, made a point of seeking Franklin out, as did Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge.* Harvard friends seemed to appear from nowhere; FDR entertained many of them cruising down the Potomac on the Sylph, the smaller of two yachts the Navy maintained for the president. Weekends were sometimes spent at Doughoregan Manor, the baronial Maryland estate leased by his old Harvard roommate, Lathrop Brown, who had just been elected to Congress as a Democrat from New York’s silk-stocking First District on the Upper East Side.
For lunch, FDR usually dined at either the Metropolitan Club or the Army-Navy Club, both of which were within easy walking distance. Several times a week, and most weekends, he would hoist his golf bag over his shoulder and clamber aboard the Connecticut Avenue streetcar for the long ride to Chevy Chase. “Yesterday P.M. I golfed and went to the Department in the evening,” he wrote Eleanor. “Today I have played 45 holes and am nearly dead!”52 Roosevelt was a natural long-ball hitter and, according to the author Don Van Natta, Jr., one of the best presidential golfers to play the game.53 Sometimes FDR would join a congressional foursome at Chevy Chase, and in later years he was often paired with the junior senator from Ohio, Warren G. Harding, who was as easygoing and likable as Roosevelt himself.54
In the autumn of 1913 Eleanor and the children joined Franklin in Washington. They moved into the handsome four-story brick town house owned by TR’s sister Bamie (Eleanor’s aunt and FDR’s cousin) at 1733 N Street, N.W., six short blocks up Seventeenth Street