Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [83]
Today it is difficult, if not impossible, to ferret out the truth behind this astonishing document. It is peppered with inaccuracies, and other surviving documents fall short of establishing for sure whether or not Eleanor Roosevelt had an affair with Joe Lash. The file shows that the Army’s sleuths, who regularly opened Lash’s mail, discovered he was receiving a stream of letters from both Mrs Roosevelt and a fellow radical, Trude Pratt. Pratt, then still married to another man, was going through a complicated courtship with Lash, with intimate encouragement from the President’s wife.
Mrs Roosevelt’s many letters to Lash were filled with political chitchat and torrents of affection. ‘Joe dearest,’ began one letter written in February. ‘… I feel so excited about the thought of hearing your voice. What will I do when I actually see you?… I am glad you drink your milk and hope some day you get enough sleep … I am enclosing a letter that came with a valentine from Trud … I pray St Valentine too that he may bring us all together but that is because I need you very much … I must close so bless you dear and a world of love. E. R.’
Army Intelligence was watching on March 5, when Mrs Roosevelt had the first of two rendezvous with Lash in Illinois hotels. She checked into Room 332 of the Urbana-Lincoln Hotel in Urbana, accompanied by her aide, Malvina Thompson, told the desk she wanted no publicity and reserved an adjacent room, Number 330, for ‘a young friend.’ Joe Lash checked into his room that evening, and he and the First Lady stayed upstairs, except for one visit to the dining room, until they left the hotel thirty-six hours later.
Mrs Roosevelt wrote another ‘Joe dearest’ letter on the train that bore her away. ‘Separation between people who love each other,’ she wrote, ‘makes the reunion always like a new discovery … Bless you dear. Thanks for such a happy time. All my love E. R.’ Mrs Roosevelt wished Lash well for his meeting with Trude Pratt the next weekend.
The Army’s secret agents were there in strength a week later, when Lash and his wife-to-be had a tryst at the same hotel. This time the bedroom was bugged, and the microphones picked up the sounds of frequent lovemaking. They also picked up a call from the couple to Mrs Roosevelt at the White House.
Within days, a senior officer in Army Intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Boyer, was writing an astonishing letter to a superior in Washington. The letters between Lash, Trude Pratt and Mrs Roosevelt, Boyer said, were evidence of a ‘gigantic conspiracy.’ In fact there is nothing conspiratorial in the letters. The Colonel, however, intended to wait for another opportunity, then burst in on Lash having intercourse with Mrs Pratt and arrest him on a morals charge.
Before the couple could meet again, Lash had another rendezvous with the President’s wife. It was in a bedroom at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, according to the report in Edgar’s file, that hidden microphones overheard Lash and Mrs Roosevelt having sex.
After that rendezvous, the pair again exchanged breathless letters. ‘I can’t tell you,’ wrote the First Lady, ‘how I hated to say goodbye. I loved just sitting near you while you slept …’ ‘I’m sorry,’ Lash wrote when he got back to base, ‘I was such a drowsy soul after dinner, but it was nicer drowsing in the darkness with you stroking my head than playing gin rummy …’ Lash also wrote to Trude Pratt, telling her that Mrs Roosevelt had taken him shopping and insisted he buy some ‘garish underwear.’
According to Lash, Eleanor was tipped off about the bugging by the management of the Blackstone Hotel. Furious, she raised the matter at the White House when she got back to Washington – with dire consequences for the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. When Lash was posted to the Pacific, the President