Franklin Delano Roosevelt

by Gerald W. Johnson

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On My Husband

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SOURCE: "On My Husband," in It Seems to Me, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1954, pp. 164-72.

[In the following excerpt from It Seems to Me, a collection of questions and answers from letters addressed to Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt discusses some of the personal qualities of her husband.]

Do you think your husband had any premonition that he might not live to complete his last term in the White House ?

No, I do not think my husband had any premonition that he would not live to finish his term in the White House. Four years previously I think he had a feeling that any man well might not live through a third term. But, having lived through the third term, he believed, I think, that if it was right for him to run he would be able to win and he would live as long as he was needed to do his work.

Would you tell me what books and authors your illustrious husband most frequently mentioned as having influenced his vision and action?

I am afraid he never mentioned books in this connection. He always talked of Mahan's Naval History as having been one of the books which he found most illuminating when he read it. He liked historical biographies primarily, and read very widely.

He had a very catholic interest in many subjects, and of course read a great deal of history, though I do not remember hearing him say at any time that particular writings or particular books had influenced his point of view.

I should say that Woodrow Wilson had a great influence upon him, and Theodore Roosevelt, partly in their writings and much as individuals. My husband frequently talked about them, but not as inspirations.

I have just read F.D.R.: His Personal Letters. In one or two letters he refers to his engagement to you but says nothing about how or when you became engaged. If this isn't too intimate a subject, I'd like to know a little more about how and where this happened.

I became engaged to my husband on a weekend which we spent at Groton School, where we were visiting my young brother. I imagine, since my husband was writing personal letters, he thought that anyone concerned would probably know when we became engaged.

You remarked in your column recently that the "work as usual" way Governor Dewey spent his birthday didn't seem a very happy way of celebrating the occasion. I thought your husband was a "work as usual" man on his birthday too. Am I wrong?

My husband always had to work during the day on his birthday because he was always engaged in work that could not be laid aside, but his birthday was a day of much celebration. There was family celebration in the morning before going to work, and every year we had a particular group of friends who celebrated with him at dinner and in the evening.

Was your husband a regular churchgoer?

My husband was senior warden in our church at Hyde Park when he died. He went to church as often as it was possible for him to do so. It was extremely difficult for him to do this regularly in the last years of his life, and therefore I could not say that he was a regular churchgoer, but he performed his duties as senior warden and was extremely interested always in the church.

Is it true that your husband, the late President Roosevelt, never wrote his own speeches?

No. My husband wrote a great many speeches in his own hand. When he became President, however, he developed a regular routine. First of all he decided on the subject with which he was going to deal, then he called in the Government officials charged with the responsibility for the work on this particular subject: for instance, if it was to be a fiscal speech, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board were consulted; if agriculture, the Department of Agriculture and allied agencies, and so on.

After he had all the facts, he usually sat down with two or three people and explained his ideas of what he wished said. They made a first draft and brought it back to him. He then went over it, and sometimes there were as many as six or eight or ten drafts of the same speech. One member of this small group was usually someone adept at phrasing, another was good at cutting, because in any speech which is made over the radio one is apt to put a great deal too much into it to fit the time. In between each rewriting my husband went over it again, and if you ever go to the library at Hyde Park you will see the collection of speeches with corrections on the various copies in my husband's own handwriting.

When a speech was finally written, my husband always practically knew every word that was in it by heart, as he had gone over it so often. It was the final expression of his original thoughts. I have, however, seen my husband take a speech which his advisers thought was completely finished, tear it up and dictate an entirely new speech because he felt it was not simple and clear enough. He retained the facts, but he was particularly adept at putting thoughts into simple and clear enough words so that even I, who might not know anything on the subject, found I could comprehend what he was talking about.

They say that many great men 's wives have a feeling of intuition, before the men become well known, that their husbands are marked for greatness. Did you have any feeling like that about your husband when you were first married?

No, but I am not given to going much beyond the things that have to be done each day. I have always been so busy that, if I thought I had adequately met the demands day by day, what was going to happen in the future never received a great deal of thought.

It is a mystery to me how a man from a conservative, wealthy home like Mr. Roosevelt ever became such a great liberal. What do you think influenced him most in this direction?

Very often a social conscience is more easily awakened in one who has not been hardened by having to battle for every advantage in life. My husband's parents brought him up with a sense of obligation to other people. He had a chance to travel and make contact in a simple way with people in other parts of the world. His mind was open and intelligent, and as his contacts broadened his sense of justice deepened. He was a liberal because he believed in social justice.

What people besides President Roosevelt's parents and yourself had the most important personal influence on his life?

I think Louis Howe had a great influence on my husband's life, and also his two uncles, Mr. Warren Delano and Mr. Frederic Delano—and my uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, made a deep impression on him as a young man, as he did on so many other young men of that generation.

What did President Roosevelt plan to do when he retired from the Presidency to private life again?

My husband had planned when he retired to write regularly for one magazine and to devote himself to putting his papers in order and to enlarging and making more interesting the library at Hyde Park.

Your husband never wrote pointed personal letters, as President Truman does, but he certainly must have needed to let off steam at times. What kind of safety valve did he have in periods of terrible tension and pressure?

My husband disliked writing longhand letters, except for brief business or personal memos. Temperaments differ. He was very slow to anger, but when he was angry it shook him to the bottom of his soul and he was more apt to take his anger out in cold and never-to-be-forgotten words than in any impulsive way.

To the ordinary criticism affecting him and his family he rarely paid any attention. He taught us all to believe that it was better to ignore criticism. He lost respect for some writers and critics and then rarely read what they said, so, of course, they bothered him little. He also advised us to look with care for any constructive criticism, but if it became particularly carping to ignore it and never answer it.

His illness had given him extraordinary self-control in personal matters. When matters affecting affairs of the country were at stake, and in periods of tension and pressure, he practiced this same self-control. He suffered when things went wrong with the family, though those personal things were quickly swallowed up in the much more important things that touched the country as a whole.

Did your husband ever describe his personal impressions of Stalin? I seem to have heard that they got on very well, exchanged jokes, etc.

Yes. When my husband came home he always talked over his trip. When he came home from his first meeting with Mr. Stalin in Tehran, he told us he sensed a great suspicion on the part of the Marshal but formal relations were always polite. He felt no warmth of understanding or of normal intercourse. My husband determined to bend every effort to breaking these suspicions down, and decided that the way to do it was to live up to every promise made by both the United States and Great Britain, which both of us were able to do before the Yalta meeting.

At Yalta my husband felt the atmosphere had somewhat cleared, and he did say he was able to get a smile from Stalin.

I understand that President Roosevelt used to have a couple of cocktails before dinner. What did he drink?

I do not think that my husband often had a couple of cocktails before dinner. Sometimes he did, but not always, and many times he had none. When he made cocktails, he liked a Martini, a rum cocktail or an Old-Fashioned. It was more a question with him of a time to relax and have a few friendly minutes with people than of caring very much what he drank or even whether he had a drink. The doctors approved of it because they thought it helped his circulation.

We would like to serve your husband's favorite menu at a dinner to open the polio drive and commemorate his birthday on January 30. Could you tell us some of his favorite dishes?

My husband was very fond of curried chicken. He also liked scrambled eggs, corned-beef hash or roast-beef hash, any kind of game and especially terrapin, Maryland style. Waffles with maple syrup was a favorite dessert.

Which of the books about your husband do you feel gives the most accurate picture of him, and which the least accurate?

If you are interested in my husband's labor record, Miss Frances Perkins' book, The Roosevelt I Knew, is excellent. Roosevelt and Hopkins, by Mr. Robert Sherwood, gives an extraordinarily good picture of the general times. Perhaps my husband's own letters, edited by my son Elliott, would give you a more intimate picture of his personality than anything else. The book I like least, and which is the least accurate, is John T. Flynn's; but, of course, there are many books about my husband which I have not had time to read.

In This I Remember you stated that our late President was advised to eliminate the famous "stab in the back" from his speech after Mussolini attacked France, and that he refused to do so. Miss Grace Tully said that it was not in the President's script and that he ad libbed it. Which of you is right?

Miss Tully is quite right. The phrase "stab in the back" was not in the President's script. It had been discussed beforehand, and his advisers urged him not to put it in. He put it in on his own initiative when he was making his speech. He did this sort of thing quite often, so there is nothing contradictory between what Miss Tully said and what I said.

I wish to know if the quotation "We have nothing to fear but fear itself is an original saying of the late President. If not, from whom did he quote?

It was an original saying, if there is anything really original!

Do you feel that your opinions ever changed your husband's political decisions?

Never.

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