Franklin and Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life by Joseph E. Persico

Author:Joseph E. Persico [Persico, Joseph E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-04-28T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

“CLOSE TO BEING A WIFE”

THERE WAS NEVER A COMPLETE BREAK between Franklin and Lucy. Given distance and long separations, the signal might become faint at times, but never ceased entirely. During the first hectic months of his presidency, when it seemed FDR would have time for nothing but matters of state, he made time for her. He was unleashing a hail of legislation that history would record as “The First 100 Days” of the New Deal. His financial reforms following the bank holiday enabled three quarters of the banks to reopen. TERA, the agency that Governor Roosevelt created to bring Depression relief to New Yorkers, became FERA, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, doing the same for all America. Over 300,000 formerly unemployed youths were carrying out flood control, reforestation, and building parks and beaches. Bonus Marchers who had been driven from the capital under Hoover came back under Roosevelt and were given food, shelter, and a meeting with the president during which he led the ex-doughboys in singing the haunting wartime favorite, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.” For the first time in over a dozen years, as Prohibition ended, a grown-up American could order a glass of beer without breaking the law. And FDR had found his medium for shaking a benumbed country out of its torpor, simultaneously educating and inspiring Americans through his fireside chats. “People edged their chairs to the radio,” the novelist John Dos Passos remembered of the experience. “There is a man leaning across his desk, speaking clearly and cordially so that you and me will completely understand.”

In the midst of trying to save the country, he had to contend with a mother who still regarded him as her obedient little boy. “When Father first became President,” his son Elliott recalled, “Sara would call to tell Franklin, ‘I’m sending so-and-so down…’ who were her social friends, and said they wanted to see Father. She’d call down and make an appointment, and Father would say, ‘I can’t see them. I’ve got a cabinet meeting.’ It made no difference, she’d have them down there at the time that she said, and Father would have to change the other appointment.”

Even as the Oval Office witnessed an endless parade of congressional leaders, cabinet secretaries, businessmen, labor officials, governors, and mayors, one ordinary citizen could break through. FDR always took phone calls from a Mrs. Paul Johnson (sometimes identified as Johnston). She called a half dozen times during the First 100 Days and made ten more calls over the next feverish months. White House switchboard operators had instructions to put Mrs. Johnson through, though telephone logs reveal that no other calls were accepted except from prominent figures or family members. Mrs. Paul Johnson, it would subsequently be revealed by Secret Service agents, was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Most of Lucy’s calls were placed from Augusta, Georgia, fifteen miles from her estate in Aiken, South Carolina, or from New York City where the Rutherfurds had a townhouse. None was placed from her homes in Aiken or Allamuchy.

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