FDR's "Office Wife"-- and the Many Loves of Eleanor

President Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor were a formidible leadership team but early in Franklin's career their relationship had become a marriage of convience. Each found imtimacy in relationships and friendships outside their marriage. Missy LeHand, FDR's personal secretary was at his side 24-7, swimming with him at Warm Springs and acting as a chief of staff. Eleanor's friendship, and perhaps love affair, with newswoman Lorena Hickock helped transform her into the First Lady of the World.

The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Partnership that Defined a Presidency by Kathryn Smith is the first biography of President Roosevelt's constant companion for twenty years in the office and out, the first female 'chief of staff' who could be found with her boss at night only wearing her nightgown.

With only a high school education Missy was hired as a personal secretary before FDR contracted polio. She rose with her boss to become his 'gatekeeper' and an influential and respected advisor in the White House.

Missy dedicated her life to her boss, She accompanied FDR as he pursued therapy, going on cruises and at Warm Springs (a place Eleanor disliked). Missy served as his hostess while Eleanor was following her own interests. Missy was given rooms in the governor's mansion and the White House and was intimate with Eleanor and the Roosevelt family.

Hobnobbing with the powerful and high society, including Joe Kennedy, Missy could pull off glamour and had flirtations and love affairs. Popular magazines ran articles about her. Her love letters to Bill Bullitt offer us glimpses of the woman.

Smith's biography covers FDR's life and career showing how Missy played her part. Much of this information I had already learned from other books about FDR, but this book offers deeper information on Missy's career, her health issues and death, her family, the articles and comments written about her by others, and especially her love letters where we finally hear Missy's voice.

I was glad to see a book about Missy.  I have read quite a few books on FDR, including James Tobin's The Man He Became , A First Class Temperament by Geoffrey Ward, and Doris Kearns Goodwin's marvelous No Ordinary Time, I sped read through much of the early parts of the book.

I received a free ebook from First to Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Gatekeeper
Kathryn Smith
Touchstone
Publication Sept. 6, 2016
$28 hard cover
ISBN:9781501114960

Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair that Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn shows us the personal life and independent career of Eleanor Roosevelt, and explores her friendships with women and men who enriched her life and whom she deeply loved. Lorena Hickcok (Hick) was an AP journalist covering the White House when Eleanor met her. Sharing a train car while campaigning started a relationship that helped Eleanor become a capable leader and broke Lorena's heart.

Discovering her husband's love affair with her personal secretary moved Eleanor to offer a divorce; Franklin's mother said it would ruin his political career. Eleanor never forgave Franklin and their marriage was never again emotionally or physically intimate.

Eleanor became involved with a series of friendships that offered her the love and companionship she needed. The deep love expressed in her letters to Lorena Hickcock, as well as to male friends Joe Lash and her doctor David Gurewitsch, show her deep capacity to love. If any of these relationships included sexual intimacy is uncertain and unknowable but Eleanor's letters to Hick express longing for physical contact and expressions of love.

Eleanor had a history of close relationships to women from her time away at school when she idolized a teacher, to her close friendships with lesbian couples. Eleanor also may have had problems with intimacy and closeness. Her involvement in causes and political work and role as First Lady meant Hick hardly ever had Eleanor all to herself. They took trips together, vacationed together, and spent special holidays together. But it was never enough for Hick.

Eleanor had a great heart and felt deeply, and fought courageously, for the underdog, the powerless, the marginal; she championed equality for all. This book also shows how Hick's reporting and WPA work brought to attention the grinding poverty and dangerous workplaces, the starvation and health crisis across the country during the Depression. Hick was also a competent leader for Democratic Women.

This book shows how these strong women, so disimilar in background and class, impacted FDR's policies and improved the lives of Americans.

I recieved a free ebook through First to Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair that Shaped a First Lady
Susan Quinn
$30 hardcover
Publication Date: Sept 16, 2016
ISBN: 9781594205408

The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency by James Tobin

"The guy never knows when he is licked." ~ Harry Hopkins on FDR

 "Because he had beaten his illness, Roosevelt thought that he could beat anything." ~ John Gunther

James Tobin's new book The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency covers Franklin D. Roosevelt's life between 1921 when he contracted infantile paralysis and 1932 when the Democratic party nominated him as their candidate for Governor of New York State. Tobin shows how polio brought out amazing strengths of character in FDR and ultimately prepared him to become a great leader.

At age 39 FDR was charming, handsome, rich, and determined to gain the presidency. He had served as Secretary of the Navy and on President Wilson's subcabinet.

Then he encountered the virus that left him crippled. Tobin's narrative accessibly explains the disease, how it is spread, how it attacks the human body, and how the medical doctors treated it. At a time when most children were naturally inoculated through exposure to the virus, FDR's privileged and sheltered life left him vulnerable. Overworked and tired, he arrived at the isolated family summer resort at Campabello and soon after became ill. By the time the doctors knew he had contracted polio, the damage was done.

FDR's mother assumed he would return to his childhood home and live out the rest of his life puttering with his stamp collection and watching the Hudson River flow by. But FDR was not a man to sit and watch life pass him by. He was determined to win the presidency, and he was going to walk to the podium to give his acceptance speech.

His recovery was not a straight or easy path. He did not follow doctor's orders and he avoided painful exercise. He hated the leg braces and crutches. FDR became his own physician, and took to exercising in warm water. So when he read about a polio victim who could walk after therapy at Warm Springs resort in Georgia FDR determined to experienced for himself the properties of the mineral springs. The resort was isolated and in bad repair. FDR was charmed. The warm mineral water enabled him to endure long hours of exercise without pain.

FDR needed a project. He liked to run things. He longed to own something of  his own. He needed a source of income. FDR determined to buy the run-down resort, an economical and practical decision that seemed foolish. He imagined a place where polio victims could only heal their bodies but also find acceptance and normality in a world that shunted cripples out of sight.

FDR's ability to walk again was truly due to physiotherapists Helena Mahoney and Alicia Plastridge who taught him how to use his good muscles to compensate for the lost ones. Working with Mahoney at Warm Springs in 1927 FDR was finally able to walk with two canes.

Tobin challenges commonly held beliefs about Franklin's hiding his infirmity. Although FDR did strive to keep the more undignified aspects of his infirmity out of sight, such as being carried up stairs, once he returned to public life he did not, could not, hide that he was handicapped. Republicans had a field day attacking FDR as a cripple, a 'poor man' of pity who was not up to the job.

"The role he must play was a paradox. Normally the actor puts on a mask and becomes someone else. FDR's role now was to play the man he actually was--a strong man capable of leadership in the highest seats of power. The trick was to remove the mask that his audience would otherwise force him to wear. He must persuade the audience to discard its ancient, inherited belief about a man who was crippled. He must persuade them that a crippled man could be strong."

FDR went on the campaign trail, traveling by auto caravan across New York state. He had to change the way society viewed 'cripples'. Two weeks before the election he faced four thousand people and openly spoke about polio. "Seven years ago, through an attack of infantile paralysis, I was completely put out of any useful activity." People in audience were heard crying. "By personal good fortune, I was able to get the best kind of medical care. The result is that today I am on my feet." And in admitting he was a cripple, FDR also declared himself to be a fighter and a man of action.

I think it was a shining moment in American history when a man's ability made voters forget his handicap, that we judged him by the 'content of his character' and not by his physical abilities or disabilities.

James Tobin's first book, Ernie Pyle's War, American's Eye-Witness to World War II won him the National Book Critic's Circle Award. He was able to leave his position with the Detroit News to write full time. He wrote a companion book to the PBS series Great Projects: The Epic Story of the Building of America, From the Taming of the Mississippi to the Invention of the Internet. It was followed by To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight. 

To me, each book has at its core the story of men willing to go to great lengths to achieve the goals they hold dearest. Tobin's books are inspiring and dramatic narratives. To learn more visit
http://authors.simonandschuster.com/James-Tobin/1910453

Note: Tobin used the word cripple purposefully. He explains in his Prologue, "To understand Roosevelt's situation--in his time, not ours--one needs to enter a realm in which the stigma of physical disability was like the presence of oxygen in the air: utterly taken for granted, and therefore terribly powerful."